by Giulio Meotti
I don’t have the gift of prophecy, but back in 2011 I wrote a little ebook called “Countdown. Preventive history of Israel’s strike against Iran’s atomic bomb”.
Here we are.
In a series of impressive precision strikes, Israel overnight targeted key figures of the Islamic regime, ballistic systems, and the Natanz nuclear facility. Tehran had produced enough enriched uranium to build 15 nuclear bombs and was approaching the “point of no return.”
For the Iranians, as for the Pakistanis, it is not just an atomic bomb, like those of India, Russia, China or North Korea (and some say Israel): they call it an “Islamic bomb.”
This is the Middle East: one sign of weakness and they dance on your graves. Or are we going to call Greta Thunberg and have her ride into Tehran on a camel?
A functioning Iranian nuclear program is a threat to global security and to the West they hate, and despite the inevitable public condemnation of Israel by world leaders, most know this to be true.
In the assessment of Israeli security officials (and even the useless UN), Iran’s nuclear weapons program had advanced to the point of posing an existential threat.
A nuclear-armed Iran would be the supreme ruler of West Asia. Radical Islam would win a historic victory. Iran, in fact, continues to provide a billion dollars a year to terrorists.
Only a European imbecile would think that a nuclearized Iran would be just another nuclear state with which to move from containment to dialogue.
Israel remembers well what Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani said:
“The use of even a single atomic bomb against Israel would completely destroy the country, while if Israel used the atomic bomb it would only succeed in wounding the Islamic world”.
This is why Elie Wiesel said before he died: “Iran must not become a nuclear power”. The writer who escaped the gas chambers of Auschwitz knew it better than all our annoying little writers: “The twentieth century was marked by two totalitarian ideologies: political fanaticism in Moscow and racist fanaticism in Berlin. Now we are faced with a third fanaticism, religious fanaticism.” Nice and neat.
As Israel knows, Iran has missiles capable of reaching any point in the country, as well as all of Europe.
Nihilistic irrationality guides the choices of theocratic regimes and surprises our Western predictions of tired hedonists.
Woe betide anyone who does not take an Islamic fanatic seriously. Double woe betide anyone who does not take an Islamic fanatic with nuclear weapons seriously.
After spending ten days in Iraq and Syria with the Islamic State, Jürgen Todenhöfer, a journalist from Germany, gave a summary of the ideology that inspired them.
“One day we will conquer Europe, the question is not if we will do it, but when, for us, it is obvious,” a German jihadist who spoke on behalf of the ISIS command told him. “Our expansion will be perpetual and the Europeans must know that when we come, it will not be nice, it will be with our weapons, and those who do not convert to Islam or who do not pay the Islamic tax will be killed,” said the fighter.
And if they refuse to convert, Todenhöfer asks? “150 million, 200 million or 500 million, it does not matter. We will kill them all,” replies the jihadist, who then justifies the enslavement of non-Muslims.
“They are preparing for the greatest religious cleansing in history,” concludes the German journalist.
We did not take ISIS seriously and we saw how that ended.
And let’s think of North Korea: a communist statelet outside of history governed by a clown heir to the dictatorship, but which, thanks to the atomic bomb, enjoys immunity.
Sunni or Shiite, the Islamic apocalypse is a serious thing and should be taken as such. Instead, we Westerners think we live in a candy-pink world.
In 2017, a digital clock was unveiled in a square in Tehran, appropriately renamed “Palestine”. It does not indicate the time. Instead, it counts the days until the destruction of Israel.
In 2020, Khamenei shared a poster on his website: it shows people celebrating in the Temple Mount complex in Jerusalem after Israel captured it and then a Palestinian Arab flag rising on the al Aqsa Mosque. “Final Solution,” the text says.
And we would be wrong to think that it concerns only Israel: the Iranian ayatollahs repeat that they want to “destroy Western civilization”.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, said it in 1979, when he was betrayed by the West and put on a plane:
“If I leave, Iran will fall into ruin; if Iran falls, the Middle East will follow, and if the Middle East is in ruins, a great terror will reign in the world…”.
And yet, we children of the West are educated in a privileged and protected condition, immature and optimistic peoples, childish and bold, who in the face of Islamic fundamentalism find ourselves as vulnerable as a puppy.
And by a sort of autoimmune disease, we identify the enemy in the few among us who have retained the ability to smell danger and raise the alarm, in this case Israel.
We are the beautiful souls that fortune has deprived of the survival instinct since 1945.
Now we have two choices.
We can raise the white flag on what remains of the Judeo-Christian culture and our freedoms born from Rome-Athens-Jerusalem, we can rely on woke relativism that waves all the flags of scoundrels, on the soft multicultural underbelly and on the “cures” of the UN, we climb aboard Greta Thunberg’s ship, we abandon Israel, we face a massive reaction made of attacks and blackmail, we prepare for the Iranian atomic bomb and then that of the others.
It will be the great dance of the defeated. Or we hold on, knowing that, no matter how much we feed the crocodile, it will eventually eat us too.
In the meantime, let’s reopen an old book in which Saul Bellow wondered if for us Europeans “civilization is just another export product like wine and cheese, perfume and armaments” and “In this troubled hour, the civilized world seems tired of its own civilization. It no longer wants to hear about survival. In their concern for the decay of civilization and in their pride, the Israelis have something to teach the world.”
Israel needs our solidarity. The day will come when we will need theirs.