Eerie, appalling echo

For the last decade-and-a-half, at least, when writing about threats to Israel and to Jews, this newspaper has refrained in its editorials from invoking comparisons to Adolf Hitler and his horrific, racist, genocidal ideology.

 In the history of nations and of political movements, the ghoulish, murderous obsession of the Nazis and Nazism stands alone. To compare others to Nazis is, in effect, to diminish the singular evil of Nazism.

Nazi pathology, we know, was laden with perverse beliefs about Jews. The Encyclopedia Judaica notes that among his many vile views, Hitler “identified the Jews with microbial infection. He believed that the Jews were ‘propagators of infection,’ that they ‘spread the plague’.” Thus he desired to exterminate the propagators of infection and mobilized his entire military-industrial effort, not to mention virtually an entire society, to that disturbed end.

Hitler’s lurid language was the flame by which he first lit the fiery inferno of his genocidal plans. He dehumanized and delegitimized the Jews as human beings. For Hitler and his henchmen, killing Jews was decidedly not about killing human beings, because they considered Jews to be sub-human.

Thus, it is reluctantly, but, nevertheless, with a sense of rising urgency that we point out the appalling echoes of Hitler’s fevered voice in the words spoken more calmly last week by the leaders of Iran.

In a televised speech to the nation, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a “filthy germ” and a “savage beast.” Just days before, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Muhammad Ali Jafari, referred to Israel as “cancerous germ” and promised that it would “soon be destroyed by the hands of Hezbollah.” That same day, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that even after 60 years, Israel still has “no legitimacy” in the region.

We are not unused to the vilification of Israel, though it remains an offence to conscience and decency. It is, alas, part of the ongoing assault on the right of the Jews to their own sovereign state in the Middle East. As many scholars have pointed out, it is the modern discourse of the anti-Semite, for whom Israel is the surrogate, the Jew among nations.

But the latest verbal salvo against Israel by the Iranians leaders is of a different order of offence. They are repeating the rhetoric of the leaders who ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945. Like the Nazis, they have expressed the desire to wipe the Jews – as embodied in the Jewish state – off the map. And, also like the Nazis, they are developing the weapons by which to try to achieve their desire.

The Supreme Court of Canada has observed that the Holocaust began with words. These latest hateful words of the Iranian leaders must awaken the world to Iran’s true intentions regarding Israel and to the vast danger the Iranian regime poses to international peace.

We call on the United Nations to censure Iran and to intervene with every necessary measure to prevent Ahmadinejad from acquiring the weapons he so fervently seeks to implement his Hitlerian scheme.