israel

Israel’s and the World’s Nuclear Menace

By Chris Mitchell
Middle East Bureau Chief

CBN.com – JERUSALEM, Israel - It was a shocking statement heard around the world -- the president of Iran calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

Many people dismissed it as an empty threat, but a leading Israeli analyst says that history proves that it should be taken seriously by Israel and the world.

For Israel, the implications are daunting - a nuclear-armed Iran dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

Israel's Chief of Staff General Dan Halutz declared, "No doubt from the Israeli viewpoint, such a situation is a kind of unacceptable situation, that the Iranians would hold nuclear capability."

Yet the clock is ticking on a nuclear Iran. Experts believe Iran is getting closer to the capability of building one or more nuclear weapons. Some experts here in Israel think it might be just months away. But regardless of the timetable, the question today is, how should the world respond?

Even Israelis disagree on the right course of action. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recommends "bold and courageous" action, the kind Menachem Begin took when he attacked Iraq's nuclear facility in 1981.

But Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Israel should pursue diplomacy to stop Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Regardless of the course of action, one Israeli intellectual, Uri Dromi, a director at the Israel Democracy Institute, said the world should heed history's recent lesson.

"The lesson from history and especially the history of the Second World War, is that tyrants and dictators should be taken seriously,” Dromi said.

Dromi said World War II provides a powerful lesson. The year was 1939. Hitler - nearing the peak of his power - addressed the German parliament on January 30, 1939, and uttered this astonishing statement, "Today, I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"

Dromi points out that became known as "the Fuhrer's prophecy." Now Hitler's aides did not need specific orders to murder Jews; they knew Hitler's will and did their best to carry it out.

History and the Holocaust recorded their deadly success.

Dromi thinks that history's lesson of tyrants from 1939 should be applied to the current crisis with the dictators of 2005.

"Sometimes they mean what they say and sometimes they even carry out the threats,” Dromi said. “Therefore, when the President of a country like Iran makes statements, we should look back at history and say, look what happened when people ignored or dismissed the alarms that were just there."

So Dromi believes Israel and the world should take the Iranian president's threat to wipe Israel out seriously. Dromi knows sometimes that Israelis are accused of crying wolf, but he said they have learned history's lesson the hard way.

"I'd rather call wolf now and not be taken by surprise years later,” Dromi asserted, “when suddenly the world will wake up to see Iran with nuclear capabilities threatening Israel, threatening the West, threatening America."

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