Sanitizing Arafat made Ahmadinejad possible
by The Perescope
On October 26, the president of the soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while addressing a "conference" ominously called "The World Without Zionism," promised that the Palestinians would eventually "wipe Israel off the map."
No need to worry. Ahmadinejad was quickly condemned by Shimon Peres. "It is inconceivable that the head of a nation that is a member at the UN would call for genocide," our Vice Prime Minister declared. "His call stands against the UN charter and constitutes a crime against humanity."
Ahmadinejad must be shaking in his boots.
This is, after all, the same Shimon Peres who cavalierly brushed aside Yasser Arafat's oft-repeated genocidal vows to wipe Israel off the map when he recognized Arafat as a negotiating partner at Oslo in 1993.
"Peace for us means the destruction of Israel," Arafat once stated in a typical moment of candor. "We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations."
Or this quote, from an interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci: "The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle, and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation. We don't want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else."
At Oslo, Peres sanitized Arafat, the godfather of international terrorism, and, in so doing, legitimized anyone and everyone else who calls for Israel's destruction. So having seen Israel capitulate to Arafat at Oslo, why should Ahmadinejad shirk from making similar Arafatesque demands for Israel's destruction today? Peres says that Iran should be suspended from the United Nations for advocating genocide, a crime against humanity. He’s right. The destruction of Israel would indeed be genocide against the Jewish people, and that ought to be considered a crime against humanity. So why did he reward Arafat at Oslo?
It is instructive that the first foreign leader who rushed to Teheran following the Ayatollah Khomeini’s establishment of an Islamic state in 1979 was none other than Yasser Arafat. This only underscores the enormity – and obscenity – of Peres’s Oslo miscalculation. Now, twelve years after Oslo, Shimon Peres's chickens have come home to roost in a soon-to-be-nuclear Iranian chicken coop.
