Teymoor Nabili is awesome in this Talk with Al Jazeera interview with Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor in Jerusalem last week. Meridor is also Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy with a background in Iran issues. Hence, the interview is focused on Iran.
Nabili noticed something unusual and writes about it on Al Jazeera’s blog:
Was it a momentary lapse of concentration or an honest admission? ……It’s when I challenged him on the biggest talking point of all, Iran’s supposed determination to “wipe Israel off the face of the map,” that Meridor seemed to stumble outside the lines of the agreed narrative.
Meridor: [Iran’s leaders] all come basically ideologically, religiously with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say ‘we’ll wipe it out’, you are right, but [that] it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor, it should be removed;
Nabili: Well, I am glad you acknowledged they didn’t say they will wipe it out, because certainly Israeli politicians…
Meridor: … they say it will be removed, needs to be removed …
The minister spent much of the ensuing conversation arguing that for Iran to simply question Israel’s long term future amounts to an existential threat; there are many who agree with him.
But it’s his acknowledgement that there’s nuance in Iran’s position that’s so significant, and so rare.
(Hat Tip Mondoweiss commenter PeaceThroughJustice)
Don’t worry. Hoppy will be by soon to tell us how Dan Meridor didn’t say what he said, or didn’t mean what he meant or otherwise try to spin up into down and black into white.
Let’s face it: no cancer wants to be removed, taken out, even slowed in its growth. Unconstrained growth is what cancers do. How do you know if your duck is a cancer? If your duck grows as if unconstrained in spite of all. If it appears worried about being removed even by wannabe surgeons who don’t know how to remove it and anyhow cannot remove it. Cancers worry a lot about being removed. That’s another thing that cancer ducks do.
Do I need to find three things that cancer ducks do?
Should a cancer duck be removed? Only if you think the body will die of something other than the cancer, and sooner.
Imagine what Israel would become if all the Palestinians were dead or transferred? What would be left for the horribles to do? Would they sit back and take up mah jong? Or attack distant states that they talk themselves into believing are “existential threats”? Maybe just take over southern Lebanon for the water and some of Jordan, as the revisionists talked about.
FWIW I picked up a tidbit on the Iranian government. Whatever was said, it was said by president Ahmadinejad. In Iran the President has no authority of any kind over the military. Therefore anyone claiming he made a threat that he could implement is either ignorant of the situation or is lying. One does expect Netanyahu to know this.
Seems to me from that quote that what he was saying was that Iranian leaders didn’t say the actual words “wipe it out”, but that their actual words were the equivalent. That they said it should be removed, with the implication being that it should be removed by Iran and that is what Iran would do. His spending the rest of the interview trying to correct the host’s misunderstanding of what he was saying suggests that that is exactly what happened.
Fredblogs: they said it should be removed, with the implication being that it should be removed by Iran and that is what Iran would do. No, it was never their implication, it was the willfully misleading inference you and others chose to draw. Ahmadinejad has said repeatedly that he wishes to see Israel the Jewish State disappear like the Soviet Union and South Africa apartheid. He has never threatened to use Iran’s military against Israel. Many people openly and vocally wished for the end of the Soviet empire, or right-wing dictatorships all over the world, without actually threatening to use military power to do so. Meridor seems to have been temporarily afflicted with truth serum, poor guy. Let’s see if he pays a price for his temporary insanity — a rare moment of honesty.
If you’re keeping score, the tally of actual military threats is a follows:
Israel against Iran 12,475,390 Iran against Israel 0. The tally of actual military attacks on other countries is maybe dozens to 0. And Israel whines about Gunter Grass!