A Threat to Nuke Tehran

When the largest donor to Republican political organizations urges the U.S. military to detonate a nuclear bomb in an Iranian desert with the explicit warning that "the next one is in the middle of Tehran," you might expect that major American political figures and large U.S. media outlets would strongly denounce such genocidal blackmail.

After all, Tehran has a population of more than eight million people with millions more living in the suburbs. So, this threat to exterminate Tehran's inhabitants from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson would be comparable to someone nuking an empty space in the United States as a warning that if Americans didn't capitulate to some demand, a nuclear bomb would be dropped on New York City, the site of Adelson's ugly threat.

Indeed, HuffingtonPost published a vociferous defense of Adelson's comments by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who organized the event at Yeshiva University where Adelson spoke. Boteach, who has been hailed as the "most famous Rabbi in America," treated Adelson's nuke threat as innocent hyperbole only underscoring how aggressively the world should treat Iran. The fact that the scattered outrage over Adelson's remarks on Oct. 22 was mostly limited to the Internet and included no denunciations from prominent U.S. politicians, including leading Republicans who have benefited from Adelson's largesse, suggests that many Muslims and especially Iranians are right to suspect that they are the object of obscene prejudice in some American power circles.

Instead of apologizing for letting Adelson go unchallenged as he mused about murdering millions of Iranians, Boteach expressed outrage over the few expressions of outrage about Adelson's plan.

"I found the reaction to his statement illuminating as to the double standards that are often employed on matters relating to Israel," wrote Boteach, who then reprised the infamous false translation of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad supposedly saying "that Israel must be wiped off the map."

Boteach then added to the false quote the assumption that if Israel ceased to exist as a Jewish state, that would require "the murder of the six million Jews who live there [as] the precondition of such erasure." However, there is the other possibility that Israel/Palestine could become like the United States, a country that has no official religion but that respects all religions.

To lay out only the two extremes -- that Israel must be officially a Jewish state (with non-Jews made second-class citizens or stateless people) as one option and the other that all the Jews must be murdered -- invites either apartheid or genocide.

Boteach also misrepresented recent comments by Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei about destroying Tel Aviv and Haifa. The rabbi left out the context of Khamenei's remark: the threat was predicated on Israel having first militarily attacked Iran. In other words, Khamenei was saying that if Israel destroyed Iranian cities, Iran had the right to retaliate against Israeli cities.

Israel's Rogue Nuke Arsenal

But one thing that Iran has never threatened to do is to drop a nuclear bomb on Israel. First, Iran doesn't have a nuclear bomb; has foresworn any interest in building one; has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allowing in inspectors; and has offered to accept even more intrusive inspections in exchange for removal of economic sanctions.

By contrast, Israel possesses one of the world's most sophisticated nuclear arsenals, albeit one that is undeclared and existing outside international inspections since Israel has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. I've also been told that Israel's military contingency plan for possibly attacking Iran's hardened nuclear sites includes use of low-yield nuclear weapons.

So, loose talk from a prominent American Zionist about the value of the United States launching a ballistic nuclear strike from Nebraska targeting an Iranian desert with the explicit follow-up threat that the next nuke would obliterate Iran's capital could be read by the Iranians as a real possibility, especially considering Adelson's close ties to prominent Republicans.

The fact that such a discussion was held in New York City with no meaningful repercussions for Adelson could be read further as a message to Iran that it might well need a nuclear deterrence to protect itself from such terroristic blackmail.

Boteach's HuffingtonPost commentary also focused only on the part of Adelson's remark about dropping a nuclear bomb in an unpopulated area of Iran, where only "a couple of rattlesnakes, and scorpions, or whatever" would be killed.

Treating the idea like some kind of humanitarian gesture, not a genocidal extortion threat, Boteach wrote, "Sheldon's glib comments about nuking rattle snakes seemed to rattle many of the bloggers who were at our event even more than Ahmadinejad's threats."

But what made Adelson's remark even more stunning than his idea of a demonstration nuclear attack in the desert was the follow-up warning: "Then you say, "See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business. You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and continue with your nuclear development."