Israeli claims about an Iran 'threat' were always a lie. Now we have proof

It is not Tehran led by unhinged, genocidal megalomaniacs threatening the security of the region and the world. It is Tel Aviv and Washington

[First published by Middle East Eye]

Could it be that Israel’s 30-year narrative about Iran – one that persuaded US President Donald Trump to wage a criminal and disastrous war of aggression – was always a fiction, an invention cooked up in Tel Aviv?

Far from Tehran posing an existential danger to Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed for decades, might Israel’s real fear be that a stronger Iran would undermine its unique leverage over Washington, threatening its status as the region’s sole – and unmonitored – nuclear power?

Might large parts of the globe be facing economic meltdown simply so that Israel can remain the Middle East’s top dog – an unaccountable apartheid state committing genocide against the Palestinian people and ethnically cleansing southern Lebanon?

We got a definitive answer last week, care of the New York Times. It is an uncompromising yes to all of these questions.

The newspaper reported that Netanyahu not only mis-sold Trump on the idea of quick regime change in Iran following a short “shock and awe” bombing campaign. He also identified to the White House who was going to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme religious leader.

Extraordinarily, according to the Times, Netanyahu named the man for the job as former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The aim at the start of the air campaign was for Israel to kill Khamenei, then liberate Ahmadinejad from house arrest by striking the guards who were confining him.

Presumably, Ahmadinejad was then supposed to storm the citadel and seize the keys to the palace. But only Khamenei’s assassination went according to plan.

Ahmadinejad, who had reportedly been consulted on the scheme beforehand, is believed to have been injured in the Israeli strike near his home. He got cold feet, possibly suspecting he was being set up for assassination too, and went into hiding. His current whereabouts and medical condition are unknown.

Ultimate bogeyman

Neither US nor Israeli officials would comment to the Times on the alleged regime-change plot, a scheme that the newspaper called “audacious”. That is the understatement of all understatements.

The idea that Ahmadinejad had the popular support, let alone the religious authority and military muscle behind him, to take on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s crack military force responsible for protecting the clerical regime, is for the birds.

That anyone in the White House took this plan seriously, let alone acted on it, is a genuinely staggering notion. But the proposition that Ahmadinejad could retake the reins of power in Iran is possibly the least preposterous part of the scheme.

While younger readers may not recognise Ahmadinejad’s name, everyone else should. He made headlines on an almost weekly basis during much of his eight-year presidency, starting in 2005. Why? Because Israel turned him into the ultimate bogeyman.

After neighbouring Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was toppled and executed in 2006, following an illegal invasion by the US and Britain, Ahmadinejad was hyped as the new implacable threat to regional peace.

Claims about Ahmadinejad first breathed an illusory substance into Israel’s now-unchallenged script that a supposedly fanatical, deranged Iran would leave no stone unturned in seeking to destroy Israel. Ahmadinejad, we were told time and again, was seeking to pursue a nuclear bomb – even after Khamenei had issued a religious edict in 2003 strictly banning its development.

In 2006, Ehud Olmert, then the Israeli prime minister, warned the world that Ahmadinejad was a “psychopath of the worst kind”, adding: “He speaks as Hitler did in his time of the extermination of the entire Jewish nation.”

Olmert was echoing a panic-inducing campaign led by Netanyahu, then Israel’s opposition leader, that Iran needed to be attacked immediately to save Israel and the world.

“It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany,” Netanyahu told a meeting of American Jewish leaders that same year. “And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs.” Of Ahmadinejad, he said: “Believe him and stop him … He is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state.”

Under Ahmadinejad, Iran was supposedly hellbent on destroying Israel, turning it into a giant Auschwitz. Also in 2006, Netanyahu told Israeli Army Radio: “Israel would certainly be the first stop on Iran’s tour of destruction.”

Ahmadinejad was so unhinged, Netanyahu said, that he would not stop at Israel’s eradication: “Iran is developing ballistic missiles that would reach America, and now they prepare missiles with an adequate range to cover the whole of Europe.”

‘Genocidal intent’

A short time later, Israel’s fear-mongering operation reached a crescendo in London.

Netanyahu told members of the British parliament that Ahmadinejad had to be urgently brought before the International Criminal Court – the war crimes court in the Hague – for his “messianic apocalyptic view of the world”.

Irony of ironies, Netanyahu – who 20 years later is a fugitive from that same court, accused of crimes against humanity for starving the people of Gaza – emphasised Ahmadinejad’s supposed genocidal intent towards Israel.

“In the 1930s, too, no one believed that Hitler was capable of taking action because he didn’t explicitly talk about wiping out the Jewish people,” Netanyahu told British MPs. “In contrast, the Iranian president publicly announces his intentions and no one is trying to stop him.”

Michael Gove, a former Conservative cabinet minister who chaired the meeting, enthusiastically agreed, ignoring a confounding fact: that thousands of Jews have lived in Iran for centuries.

Gove told the meeting that Ahmadinejad’s “rhetoric is more than worrying, but tantamount to an incitement of genocide”.

Gove’s concern about genocide has not subsequently extended to Gaza. He has repeatedly denounced anyone, including legal experts and Holocaust scholars, who has noted Israel’s genocide there.

In the midst of the mass slaughter in Gaza, Gove even called for the Israeli military to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Smoke and mirrors

Two decades ago, the message from Netanyahu was clear: Ahmadinejad was so rabidly antisemitic that he deserved to be compared to Hitler.

Ahmadinejad was so eager to pursue a nuclear weapons programme that he was prepared to defy the country’s supreme religious leader. He was so mentally unstable that he was ready to use those weapons to exterminate Israel, even though such a move would ensure a retaliatory nuclear counter-strike on his own country.

Lest we forget, Ahmadinejad had a reputation for such ruthless crackdowns on political opponents that Amnesty International noted in 2014 that his rule had “sounded the death knell for academic freedom in Iran”.

Yet, fast forward two decades, and Netanyahu reportedly now thinks Ahmadinejad is the best person to lead Iran; the person for whom it was worth killing Khamenei, Iran’s most influential opponent of nuclear weapons.

The New York Times reports that in recent years, there were strong suspicions inside Iran that Israel, Britain and the US were cultivating ties with Ahmadinejad and those around him – suspicions that now seem to be confirmed by Israel’s regime-change plan.

The newspaper further reports that Ahmadinejad had recently travelled to both Guatemala and Hungary, countries with very close ties to Israel.

Does any of this make sense? And yet for western media, the fact that Netanyahu was championing Ahmadinejad as Iran’s saviour, and that the US administration wholeheartedly bought into this idea, is little more than “surprising”.

In truth, it wrecks Israel’s entire narrative about Iran. It is a telling reminder of the yawning gap between what we have been told about Iran for decades, and what has actually been going on.

Image and reality bear almost no resemblance to each other. This has all been smoke and mirrors.

‘Wiped off the map’

In my 2008 book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, I pointed out that nothing Israel was telling us about its Middle Eastern rival could be accepted at face value – least of all Israel’s assertion that Ahmadinejad was a Jew-hating “new Hitler”.

Many of the claims promoted 20 years ago by Israel about Ahmadinejad’s genocidal intent stemmed from a mistranslation of a speech in which the Iranian leader had quoted the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

According to western politicians and media, Ahmadinejad had called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” – widely portrayed as an ambition to launch a nuclear strike on Israel.

In fact, Ahmadinejad had been repeating Khomeini’s observation that Israel could not survive indefinitely in the form of an illegitimate Jewish supremacist state oppressing another people. He was pointing out that Israel’s days as a racist state were numbered, just as apartheid South Africa’s had been.

The sentiment behind Khomeini’s statement should be much clearer in the present circumstances, when it is Israel, not Iran, that has been busy wiping people off the map – in Gaza and southern Lebanon.

Similarly, Israel and its western allies made a great deal of noise in 2006 when Ahmadinejad called what was widely misrepresented as a “Holocaust denial” conference in Tehran. In fact, Ahmadinejad had organised what was intended to be a provocative – and to some, offensive – stunt to challenge western taboos about Israel and underscore the West’s hypocrisy towards Muslims.

Ahmadinejad’s point was twofold: firstly, if Muslims are not entitled to have their beliefs and sensitivities respected by westerners – as evidenced by the 2005 “Danish cartoon affair” and the “free speech” defence for presenting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad – why should westerners expect their own sensitivities about Israel and the Holocaust to be exempt from challenge?

He also wanted to dissect the western belief that someone else, the Palestinian people, should pay a heavy price, including decades of dispossession and abuse, for the West’s crimes against Europe’s Jews.

Horror show

The disinformation about Iran should have been all too glaring back in 2006, had any of it been reported properly – just as it should be now, two decades later, were western journalists doing their job rather than acting as stenographers for Israel and the White House.

The lies, now as then, serve the same end: to justify crushing Iran – then through sanctions, later through the addition of illegal bombing – so that Israel’s right to trample over the lives of people across the region without consequence can be protected.

Iran, now refusing to release its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz and the global supply of oil, is demanding that the price include an end to US backing for the Israeli-directed horror show in the Middle East.

Like a spoiled toddler, Trump is thrashing around – while cashing in on the volatility of the oil markets – trying to impose the old rules, when the terms of the confrontation are no longer under his exclusive control.

His latest tantrum – one cooked up in Tel Aviv as much as Washington – is that most Arab states, including Iran’s neighbours in the Gulf, be forced to sign the so-called Abraham Accords with Israel. This is being presented as the framework for a regional “peace deal” involving Iran. In truth, it is the very opposite.

The accords are designed to cement Israel’s status as the Middle East’s top dog, subordinating Arab states’ interests to Israel’s, and thereby isolating Iran in the region and leaving the Palestinian people and Lebanon to a genocidal Israel’s mercy.

This is another swindle, like Trump’s “Board of Peace”, which dresses up US and Israeli criminal aggression and genocide as peacemaking.

What the past 20 years of lies and misdirections have sought to hide is a simple fact: it is not Tehran that is led by unhinged, genocidal megalomaniacs threatening the security of the region and the world. It is Tel Aviv and Washington.

Since the pair launched their criminal war of aggression against Iran three months ago, Tehran has shown restraint, acted with caution, and displayed a willingness to negotiate in good faith. Too bad there are no responsible adults on the other side with whom it can make a deal.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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