Levitt Letter Extra News

By Christine Williams
www.FrontPageMagazine.com

Support for Israel has never ranked high on the United Nations’ agenda. And the upcoming World Conference Against Racism, scheduled for early 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland, presents a valid case. Many observers are concerned that the UN-sponsored event will simply serve as yet another a platform to launch attacks against Israel — as the previous world anti-racism conference did in Durban, South Africa, seven years ago.

Even by the standards of the organization’s traditional antagonism toward the Jewish State, the U.N.’s 2001 Durban gathering marked a low point. To the extent that “racism” was discussed, it was only to condemn Israeli policies. Little wonder that the conference, known as “Durban I,” is largely remembered as a U.N.-backed assault on Israel.

Now it’s back. And if early evidence is any guide, Durban II, as the Geneva event is already being called, will be a replay of its predecessor. Consider that the chair of the conference’s planning committee is Libya, whose longtime leader, Muammar Kadhafi, claimed during the recent presidential campaign that the Israeli Mossad aimed to assassinate Barack Obama. The vice chair of the conference, meanwhile, is communist Cuba. And the fact that Iran’s president has notoriously called for Israel’s destruction has not, expectedly, prevented it from playing a key leadership role in the upcoming conference.

Nor does it bode well for Durban II that its agenda will be set by the 56-member Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC). In particular, the conference will consider responses to “Islamophobia.” In this connection, the OIC’s members will consider what they regard as the problematic Western right to free speech. Referring to the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published in Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten and to Fitna, Dutch politician Geert Wilders’s documentary about Islam, OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu recently promised to send “a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed.” He went on to warn Western countries to “look seriously into the question of freedom of expression.”

For their part, Western countries should make clear that they will not allow the OIC to dictate what can and cannot be said about Islam. Instead, they should shift the focus onto the OIC. Instead of concerning themselves with alleged Western prejudices, Islamic states would do well to ponder the rampant racism in the Muslim World. Darfur, where an estimated 300,000 Muslims have been killed by their fellow Muslims, prompting the United Nations to call it the worst human rights disaster in the world, would be a logical starting point. From there, the OIC might consider the continued bloodshed between Shiites and Sunnis, and the fanatical suicide bombers who have claimed the lives of thousands of their co-religionists. One need hardly look to the West to find “Islamophobia” in action.

As for “racism,” the conference’s nominal subject, it is worth bearing in mind that slavery — the most racist of practices — endures in the Islamic world even as it has been abolished in the West. In OIC member states like Sudan and Mauritania, Arabs still keep black African slaves. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, who was indicted by the World Court for human rights abuses in Darfur, is reputed to have black slaves in his own house. According to NGO reports (non-governmental organizations associated with the United Nations), some 200,000 southern Sudanese have been enslaved during Bashir’s reign, a practice that the UN has charged is “deeply rooted in Arab and Muslim supremacism.” (Such grim statistics did not deter the Sudanese Minister of Justice from demanding, in a stunning act of hypocrisy, reparations for historical slavery during Durban I.) And while Mauritania legally abolished slavery in 1980, it is still practiced secretly. Even Muslims in the West have not accepted its ban on slavery. For example, four Arab princesses were found in July living in Brussels with 17 slaves.

The persistence of slavery in the Muslim world is not, of course, surprising. In August 1990, the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights was affirmed by the 57 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). It stated that Islamic sharia law is the sole source of the Islamic perspective on human rights. And slavery is codified in sharia law. It is doubtful, naturally, that this detail will be much discussed during Durban II.

In light of recent history, it makes sense that Israel has decided to boycott next year’s conference. Canada has also decided to boycott Durban II, and other Western countries should consider following the Canadian example. It’s the height of absurdity for free nations to have to endure lectures on human rights from its preeminent abusers. In 2001, they could have claimed to be unaware of the conference’s sinister agenda. Seven years later, ignorance is no longer an excuse or an option.

By Matti Friedman Associated Press

JERUSALEM (AP) — A quest is under way on four continents to find the missing pages of one of the world’s most important holy texts, the 1,000-year-old Hebrew Bible known as the Crown of Aleppo.

Crusaders held it for ransom, fire almost destroyed it, and it was reputedly smuggled across Mideast borders hidden in a washing machine. But in 1958, when it finally reached Israel, 196 pages were missing — about 40 percent of the total — and for some Old Testament scholars they have become a kind of holy grail.

Researchers representing the manuscript’s custodian in Jerusalem now say they have leads on some of the missing pages and are nearer their goal of making the manuscript whole again.

The Crown, known in English as the Aleppo Codex, may not be as famous as the Dead Sea Scrolls; but to many scholars it is even more important, because it is considered the definitive edition of the Bible for Jewry worldwide.

The key to finding the pages is thought to lie with the insular Diaspora of Jews originating in Aleppo, Syria, where the manuscript resided in a synagogue’s iron chest for centuries.

A turning point in its history came three days after the U.N. passed the 1947 resolution to grant Israel statehood, provoking a Syrian mob to burn down the synagogue. Aleppo’s Jews rescued the Codex, but in the ensuing years the 10,000-strong community was uprooted and scattered around the world.

Scholars believe that Aleppo Jews still hold many of the missing pages, while others have fallen into the hands of antiquities dealers. Two fragments have already surfaced: a full page in 1982, and a smaller piece last year that had been carried for decades by a Brooklyn man, Sam Sabbagh, as a good-luck charm. Persistent rumors tell of more waiting to be found.

When the Codex reached Israel 50 years ago it was presented to Izhak Ben-Zvi, the country’s president and a scholar of Jewish communities in the Islamic world. Although the manuscript is housed at the Israel Museum with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Ben-Zvi Institute founded by the late president remains its legal custodian and is behind the new search.

Past efforts, including some by Israeli diplomats and Mossad secret service agents, came up against a wall of silence in the Aleppo community. The new search has recruited a small group of Aleppo Jews, better able to win the community’s trust, and has yielded information on the whereabouts of specific pieces and on the people who are holding them, said Zvi Zameret, the Ben-Zvi Institute’s director.

“Only someone who believes that this manuscript is one of the foundation stones of the people of Israel, someone whose goal is not to get rich — only such a person can make progress,” he said.

He divulged few details lest he compromise the effort. He would say only that the search is being carried out in North, South, and Central America; Israel, and England and that success appeared within reach.

“If there is a possibility, as the rumors say, that there are not only small fragments but also entire sections, that is extremely exciting,” said Adolfo Roitman, the Israel Museum curator in charge of the manuscript. “We’re missing entire books — most of the five Books of Moses, except for a few pages, and we have no Book of Esther, no Book of Daniel.”

He, like most other scholars involved, has met people who know of people who supposedly have pages. But the leads invariably end with people who refuse to talk.

Each page is priceless, but money wouldn’t be an issue for most Aleppo Jews because anyone trafficking in such holy relics could be banished by the community, Roitman said. Some of the Crown’s pages bear an inscription warning that it “may not be sold.”

Some people might be superstitious about the fragments they hold, or believe they are rightfully the property of Aleppo Jews, not of scholars. Others might simply have no idea of the value of what they own.

The Codex, on 491 parchment pages about 12 inches by 10 inches, was transcribed sometime around 930 A.D. by Shlomo Ben Boya’a, a scribe in Tiberias on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. It was edited by a renowned scholar of the time, Aaron Ben-Asher. Its completion marked the end of a centuries-long process that created the final text of the Hebrew Bible.

It belonged to a Jewish community in Jerusalem until it was seized by the Crusaders who captured and sacked the city in 1099. Ransomed, it made its way to Cairo, where it was used by the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who declared it the most accurate copy of the Old Testament.

The manuscript doesn’t contain passages missing from other versions. Instead, its accuracy is a matter of details like vowel signs and single letters that would only slightly alter pronunciation. But Judaism sanctifies each tiny calligraphic flourish in the Bible as a way of ensuring that communities around the world use precisely the same version of the divine book. That’s why the Codex is considered by some to be the most important Jewish text in existence, and why the missing pieces are so coveted.

“The bottom line is that the whole process of putting together the text of the Bible ended with the Codex,” said Rafael Zer of the Hebrew University Bible Project in Jerusalem, which is using the Codex to create what is meant to be the authoritative text of the Old Testament but can’t properly complete it without the missing pages.

Not enough has been done to find them, laments Hayim Tawil of New York’s Yeshiva University, the author of a forthcoming book on the Crown. “For Jews and for Western civilization this manuscript is equivalent to the Magna Carta,” he said.

How the Codex reached Aleppo in northern Syria is unclear. Some scholars believe it was brought by a descendant of Maimonides in the late 1300s.

There it was guarded as the Jews’ most prized possession and talisman. But on Dec. 2, 1947, the mob burned the synagogue. In the ensuing years, Aleppo Jews would describe rushing to snatch pages from the flames. The missing ones have not been seen since, with two exceptions.

One page from the Book of Chronicles survived in the New York apartment of an Aleppo woman and was handed over by her relatives in 1982. Another fragment recounting the Exodus story of the 10 plagues survived in the wallet of Sabbagh, another Aleppo exile in New York, who laminated it and kept it as a good luck charm. Last year, following Sabbagh’s death, his family brought the fragment to join the rest of the manuscript in Jerusalem.

One of the men who rescued pages from the synagogue was Mourad Faham, who sneaked into the building disguised as a Bedouin and found the bulk of the manuscript on the floor, according to his grandson, Jack Dweck.

A decade later he strapped the manuscript under his robe and crossed the border into Turkey, Dweck said. From there it was wrapped in towels and, according to most versions of the story, bundled into a washing machine to be shipped to Israel.

Dweck, a businessman who lives in New York, home to one of the biggest communities of Aleppo Jews, says he has heard the rumors among his fellow Jews and believes the missing parts exist.

“My guess is that there’s a bigger piece somewhere else, waiting to be found,” he said.

By Jamie Glazov www.FrontPageMagazine.com

Frontpage interviewed Ilshat Alsayef, one of the founding members of Muslims Against sharia. He was born in one of the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. A military officer for most of his adult life, Mr. Alsayef started his military career as a Second Lieutenant during the Soviet-Afghan war and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel after the First Chechen War.

FP: Tell us about the state of radicalization of Muslims in Russia and other ex-Soviet republics.

Alsayef: There were two waves of radicalization of the ex-Soviet Muslims. The first wave started after the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. After the fall of Communism, former Soviet Asian republics, now independent countries (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) as well as autonomous regions of Russia (Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia), experienced a resurgence of religious freedom.

Not having been able to freely practice their religion for a few generations, some of the local Muslims went overboard. Salafi groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and later al-Qaeda, became popular among newly-minted religious zealots. While the conflicts in Asian countries were mostly religious vs. secular, the Chechen conflict also had the independence element.

The second wave of radicalization started at the turn of the century. Some people claim that it was a result of the American War on Terror, which many Muslims interpret as the American War on Islam, but in reality the reason is skyrocketing oil revenues of Wahhabi states.

Centuries-old local mosques are being replaced by modern, Wahhabi-built mosques. Old imams who survived the communists are being replaced by Wahhabi clerics. This is not only true for predominantly Muslim countries like Tajikistan, but also for autonomous regions inside of Russia like Bashkiria and Tatarstan, where most people consider themselves more Russian than Muslim. You can see similar developments in former Yugoslavia, where moderate imams with little financial backing are being replaced by radicals with virtually unlimited financing.

If current demographic trends hold, Muslims in Russia may become a majority by the mid-century. And if current radicalization trends hold, Russia may become a war theatre comparable to Chechnya or Lebanon, but on a much larger scale.

FP: Expand for us a bit please on the demographic trends in Russia. Muslims may be the majority in Russia by mid-century? What will this mean?

Alsayef: The native Russian population is on the decline. About a year ago, the government started to provide a special subsidy for a second child; 250,000 rubles, which is about two average yearly salaries. Attracted by the economic opportunities, there is a steady stream of Muslims from the former Soviet republics and predominantly Muslim parts of the Russian Caucasus. Those Muslims tend to have much larger families than native Russian Muslims. Small Muslim communities of Moscow and St. Petersburg that made up less than 1% of the population 20 years ago have increased more than ten-fold.

The new generation of Muslims is more religious. Unfortunately, since most of the mosques are either completely or partially funded by the Wahhabis, the new generation is also more radical. 20 years ago, Russian Muslims were completely assimilated, both culturally and linguistically. The new generation tends to create its own communities. Those “enclaves” are easier radicalized.

If the trends of isolation and radicalization continue along with current demographic trends and rising oil prices, it is quite possible that by mid-century Russia will become a radical Muslim superpower.

FP: How can the current radicalization trend be stopped? The key is to stop skyrocketing oil revenues for Wahhabi states, yes? But how?

Alsayef: I could never understand why America spends a quarter of a trillion dollars a year on Persian Gulf oil while not using its own oil resources. Especially when some of this money goes to finance radical Islam worldwide (including in America itself) and the American economy suffers from high fuels prices.

Luckily, Russia does not have oil dependency. The long-term solution to stop the flow of petro-dollars to the Wahhabis is to create a non-petroleum energy solution. It will probably not happen in our lifetime, but it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be worked on today. The short-term solution is to combat radical Islam inside every democratic country. One part is to enact legislation to criminalize the spread of radical Islam. It is not an easy task, especially in America where Freedom of Speech is the cornerstone of the Constitution. However, some of the speech could be criminalized, i.e., a death threat to an individual. Advocating Sharia is a death threat to Democratic society. If you can protect an individual, you should be able to protect the society as a whole.

The other needed step is to empower moderate Muslims to combat Islamism in the public square. Unfortunately, neither the Russian nor the American government seems to distinguish between moderate Muslims and ’soft’ Jihadis. In fact, Putin went so far as to condemn the publication of Prophet Mohammed cartoons.

While Russia is empowering Iran, America is empowering Saudi Arabia, which is even worse. On top of that, America is legitimizing ’soft’ Jihadis and advance of Sharia by putting them in charge of government and academic programs and inviting them to major political events.

FP: Where exactly does Russia stand in the War on Terror? There is, for instance, much evidence that the Putin regime is in league with Islamists on many levels. (Click here to see Pavel Stroilov interview.)

Alsayef: I wouldn’t call this evidence. When someone portrays that “FSB [Federal Security Service – successor to the KGB] blew up four apartment blocks in Russia, and then were caught red-handed attempting to blow-up the fifth” as a fact, the rest of his “facts” must be taken with a grain of salt.

Did the FSB have the ability to blow up four buildings in Moscow? Absolutely. Would the FSB blow up those buildings? I find it highly improbable. Could the FSB get caught red-handed attempting to blow-up the fifth building? Absolutely not. Who would they get caught by? The cops? The cops can’t touch them. By the FSB itself? Not bloody likely.

The “fact” that the FSB blew up those buildings is as much of a fact as the “fact” that the CIA blew up the Twin Towers. It is nothing more than a conspiracy theory, and Mr. Stroilov should know better than present it as a fact. The claim that “The Putin-Medvedev regime is doomed” shows that Mr. Stroilov seems to prefer wishful thinking to reality. Barring an act of God, Putin will rule Russia for a long time, no matter what title he comes up with, president, prime minister, or Tzar.

FP: Well, the connection between the FSB and the blow up of four buildings in Moscow appears to me to be pretty solid in terms of what I have studied, and the Twin Towers conspiracy theory analogy doesn’t match in anyway. But we’ll leave this for another forum. Pavel Stroilov is welcome to contribute to our pages on this issue if he wishes.

Let’s get to Putin and the tie to Islamists.

Alsayef: In terms of the tie between Putin to the Islamists, first, and pretty much the only one, is Bushehr [nuclear reactor in Iran]. Everybody knows that the Iranian nuclear program, euphemistically speaking, goes beyond energy. The Russians know that. The Americans know that. Even the IAEA knows that. What the Russians don’t seem to understand, or maybe simply don’t care about, is that an Iranian-made nuke could be detonated in Moscow just as easily as it could be detonated in Washington.

Since I’m not privy to the Russian-Iranian nuclear deal, I might not be aware of some safeguards. For example, the Russians might control the weaponized nuclear material production and would be able to match the bomb signature to the reactor. However it is unlikely for Iranians to use a nuclear weapon without plausible deniability, therefore it probably will be given to a third party. This third party most likely would be a radical Islamic group that might ignore the wishes of its masters and detonate the bomb anywhere.

Second is Syria. Syria is a Muslim country and it has a fascist regime, but it is secular. However, Syria-Iranian proxy Hezbollah is an Islamist group and weapons sold to Syria have been known to turn up in Hezbollah’s arsenal.

Third is Venezuela. Again, Venezuela’s government is hardly Islamist, but Chavez offered Venezuelan passports to radical Muslims who want to go to the United States. As for al-Zawahiri being the FSB secret agent, that’s just another unsubstantiated and highly improbable rumor.

FP: Russia’s stance on the War on Terror?

Alsayef: If the terror is within Russian borders, Russia is very forcefully against it. The famous Putin’s phrase about the terrorists is “budem mochit’ v sortire” which roughly translates into “we’ll whack them in the toilet.” But if the terror is outside Russia and it ties up American resources, then we have a different story. After all, Putin still sees America as Russia’s main rival; the fact that the feelings are not mutual, is somewhat of an insult to him. Russia doesn’t mind that much. However, the biggest threat to Russia is not America; it is the radicalizing Muslim population within its own borders as well as in Russia’s former satellites. Putin is focusing on America while overlooking a growing Islamist threat at home. As the last decades show, radicalization of Muslims always translates into bloodshed, but Putin’s government seems to think that it is immune.

FP: Ilshat Alsayef, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Alsayef: Thank you Jamie.

By Michael Ledeen www.JewishWorldReview.com

To: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President
Islamic Republic of Iran
Tehran

Dear Mr. President,

I’m writing to you about death, one of your favorite themes. Your adult life has revolved around it. You’re from the Revolutionary Guards, the military organization that was created in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon in the 1970s. The then-incipient Revolutionary Guards were trained there by the expert terrorists of al Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s gang of killers (Sunnis, by the way, as you well know). One day, the camp was bombed by the Israelis, and a considerable number of your men were killed. Later on, the graduates entered Iran, and killed members of the shah’s security forces. Today, Revolutionary Guardsmen crush Iranian dissent at home, and they are on the prowl all over the world, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. So you’ve been around death for 30 years or more. Training for it, training others for it, and participating in it.

You glorify it. You think it’s beautiful. “Art reaches perfection when it portrays the best life and best death,” you’ve said. After all, art tells you how to live. That is the essence of art. Is there art that is more beautiful, more divine, and more eternal than the art of martyrdom? A nation with martyrdom knows no captivity. Those who wish to undermine this principle undermine the foundations of our independence and national security. They undermine the foundation of our eternity.

Interestingly, you talk about “independence” and “national security,” rather than the interests of Islam, or the Muslim community, or even the Shiites, your sect. I’ll come back to this odd language shortly.

You’re a veteran of one of the bloodiest wars of recent times, the Iran-Iraq conflict that probably cost your country more than a million dead and maimed. You extol that sacrifice, as any patriotic Persian would; Iran was invaded by Saddam Hussein’s armies, and the Iranian people defended their country, bravely and desperately.

But your praise of Iranian fighters isn’t limited to men shot down on the battlefield in that bloody war; you celebrate cases of what you call — and extol — “martyrdom.” I call it the deliberate, criminal slaughter of many tens of thousands of young children. Some of those kids were only 12 years old. They were sent across the battlefields into Iraqi territory, as human mine-detectors. They walked across the minefields, and got blown up. The Iraqi soldiers were so horrified that they shouted at the children to stop, to go back. But they didn’t; you’d indoctrinated or hypnotized them, and you wanted them to die. Indeed, you were so certain they would be killed, that these little children were provided with plastic keys that were said to open the gates to paradise.

That’s not martyrdom; that’s mass murder of your own people. You indoctrinated those kids and sent them to their doom. And it didn’t stop with the war. Afterwards, you sent other children to walk across areas you suspected were mined, and many of them were sacrificed in the same way.

This barbarous campaign, of which you are so proud, and which you acclaim as a work of art, produced some particularly gruesome technical problems: according to one of your leading newspapers, many of those children were vaporized by the land mines, while others were blown to pieces, their body parts scattered over the earth. Your religious leaders insisted that everything be done to keep the bodies intact, and so at a certain point the children were sent to the mine fields wrapped tightly in blankets. Instead of charging bravely to eternity, they rolled across the ground. That way, their cadavers were more likely to hold together, and their families could be given the remains, wrapped in a bloody blanket, for burial.

Sending fighters into battles in which their leaders know many, or even most of them, are going to die is hardly new. The Russians did it in the First World War, for example, when the second ranks were not armed, but were told that there would be plenty of weapons available; they could just pry them from the hands of their dead comrades. But your massacre of the innocents is something uniquely dreadful.

Ironically, the notion that Muslims love death, thereby gaining an advantage against their life-loving adversaries, was first directed against your very own country, Iran itself, during the famous battle at Qadisiyya in 636, between the Muslim armies of Caliph Abu Bakr and the Persians. The Caliph sent a message to the Persians, calling upon them to conver t to Islam or pay onerous taxes and accept Muslim rule. Otherwise, he said, “you should know that I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life.” (The Muslims won the battle, which marked the end of the Sassanid dynasty in Persia).

Such language during war is, so to speak, normal, but your deliberate mass sacrifice of your young, along with your ode to martyrdom, is different. It’s what the great Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called “necrophilous” thinking, a pathological love of death.

Unamuno used that word in a face-to-face confrontation at the University of Salamanca, where he was the rector, with the famous Spanish general Millan Astray. The Spanish Civil War had just begun, and the general was celebrated in nationalistic circles for his motto, viva la muerte, Long Live Death. The general was a cripple, and Unamuno noted that the great Spanish writer, Cervantes, was also handicapped, and then he continued, “it pains me to think that General Milan Astray should dictate the pattern of mass psychology. A cripple who lacks the spiritual greatness of a Cervantes is wont to seek ominous relief in causing mutilation around him.” Unamuno denounced “Long Live Death” as a “necrophilous and senseless cry.”

Today, you are in the same position as General Milan Astray. Although you have not been wounded, your celebration of death is as necrophilous as the general’s. This is not a philosophical matter, despite your efforts to elevate it to the stature of aesthetics. It’s a disease, with well-known symptoms and consequences. People like you, who are fascinated by death are terribly destructive, of others and of themselves. You’re a textbook case.

Necrophilia is defined as:

The passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction… It is the passion to tear apart living structures.
That is the language you use, especially about the Jews, the Israelis, and the Americans. It’s all about the rot of death, and the stink of death, as when you said that Israel is a “rotten and stinking corpse” that is destined to disappear, and you went on to proclaim that Israel “has reached the end like a dead rat.”

As I say, you’re a textbook case of mental illness. And we’re very well acquainted with the political consequences of your diseased mind. It’s all about fascism.

Fascists like you have always loved death. Hitler’s SS had a death skull on their insignia, and celebrated a brave death. As you say you do. And, like Hitler, you don’t just love death because of its aesthetics. You think that martyrs — suicide bombers, of whom you claim to have recruited some forty thousand, for example — have geopolitical significance. You say that “all independent nations are indebted to martyrs,” and your website modestly claims that the oppressed peoples of the world all love Iran’s leaders, particularly you and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. (That doesn’t sound right at all, by the way. Have you polled the Burmese and the Chinese, or the North Koreans? I haven’t heard them singing your praises, frankly).

But there’s a big difference between you and the Nazi leaders. You, and your fellow Iranian leaders, don’t actually fight. With the exception of your Revolutionary Guards forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, very few Iranians put themselves on the line (and even your foreign legions rarely fight, and when they are captured, they often give us the information we need to defeat you, as we have in Iraq and soon will in Afghanistan). You lure others to die, but you’re not willing to put your own lives on the line. You talk a lot about the “culture of martyrdom,” but in practice it’s not Iranians who blow themselves up. I don’t know of a single case of an Iranian suicide bomber in Iraq or Afghanistan. They’re all Arabs: Saudis, north Africans, and the odd Syrian tossed in for ethnic balance. But not Iranians. All of which tells me that your big talk about martyrdom is phony. Martyrdom is for others — in the current campaign, others you and most other Iranians despise, like the Arabs — but you’re not about to blow yourself up, or send your comrades to blow yourselves up.

You’ve won the status of the world’s leading anti-Semite, which is not easy, and you’ve lied about it a lot. Indeed, you have denied — on CBS television — hating any religion, which is manifestly false; you’ve been seen on Iranian TV spouting venom against all non-Muslims, with special contempt for Christians and Jews. But, when you are talking to the infidels, you pretend to be tolerant. For a guy who has distinctly medieval convictions — your very literal belief in the imminent return of the Shiite messiah, your beloved Twelfth Imam, and the onset of the End of Days, for example — you’ve certainly mastered some of the nuances of contemporary Western politics. You never chant “death to the Jews!” It’s always “death to Israel!” Or “death to the Zionists!” Or “death to America!”

That’s entirely in keeping with the “new” anti-Semitism. It’s always about Zionists, or the Israel lobby, or the lackeys of Sharon. But every now and then you just can’t resist, and out it comes. Instead of remembering to say that you respect all monotheistic religions, you tell your followers “We are in the process of a historical war between the World of Arrogance and the Islamic world, and this war has been going on for hundreds of years.” Zionists haven’t been around that long. And your followers aren’t nearly as careful with their language as you are. The Iranian creation, Hezbollah, told us in 1992 that they were engaged in “ an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.” And ten years later, the leader of the “Party of God,” Lebanese Sheikh Nasrallah, was quoted by the Lebanon Daily Star, encouraging all the Jews to move to Israel, the better to annihilate them in one blow. “If they all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

Your senior adviser, Mohammad Ali Ramin (said to be the man behind your infamous Holocaust Denial Conference), says the Jews have been accused of spreading deadly plagues throughout history because “they are very filthy people.” And, almost in the same breath, he added, “So long as Israel exists in the region there will never be peace and security in the Middle East…so the resolution of the Holocaust issue will end in the destruction of Israel.”

That you are engaged in a global campaign to destroy the Jews is evident from your actions as well as your words; Hezbollah and the Iranian regime were joint partners in the bombing of the Jewish Social Center in Buenos Aires in 1994.

There’s obviously a big difference for you between dead Muslims and dead Jews; it’s only your dead that count; ours don’t count as martyrs. This is the point of your infamous diatribes against the very idea of the Holocaust. “ (The Zionists and their agents) have concocted a myth of deprivation and innocence for the Jews of Europe,” you’ve said. “They use this pretext of the innocence of Jews and the suffering of some Jews during the Second World War…” We know all about that line, “the pretext of innocence.” It’s been the trademark of anti-Semites for centuries.

In short, you’re not what you say you are. You’re a poseur, a fraud, a vulgar chauvinist pretending to be an inspired religious leader. You’ve proclaimed Iran “the most powerful and independent country in the world.” The implication of that silly claim is that the weaker and dependent nations — that is, everyone else in the world — must bend to your will. You’ve said this more than once and in somewhat different ways, as when you said that the Iranian people must prepare themselves to rule the world.

Those statements are very surprising, coming from one of the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Those words put you in direct conflict with the founder, Ayatollah Rohallah Khomeini. On the Air France plane carrying him to Tehran, Khomeini famously proclaimed that nationalism was paganism, that he didn’t give a hoot about Iran, and that his revolution was for all of Islam, not for one country. Indeed, if Iran perished in order to advance the global triumph of Islam, it would be fine with him.

So what’s up with your pagan statement about the glory of Iran? You constantly claim to be the heir to Khomeini, a true believer in the imminent return of the 12th Imam, but as a matter of fact you embrace a heretical doctrine. The 12th Imam is supposed to bring about the global triumph of the Muslim peoples, as Khomeini said. Not Iran. And another thing: you often talk as if global chaos and conflagration were welcome, because it would hasten the Mahdi’s arrival. But Khomeini did not say that, nor did he act as if he believed it. Quite the contrary, in fact: When an Iranian passenger plane was accidentally shot down by an American missile, he didn’t welcome it at all; he surrendered. That American missile ended the Iran-Iraq war.

You’d do well to study the history of your own country, which so far as I know is the only one to have had a Jewish queen — Esther, of the Purim story. The Book of Esther recounts the life and death of one of your direct predecessors, the evil politician Haman, who convinced his ruler, Ahasverous, to order the massacre of the Jews of the Persian Empire. The Book of Esther nicely summarizes what happens to those, like you, who attempt to destroy the Jewish people. Haman and his sons were hanged; then, a few days later, in the fighting he had authorized, some 75,000 Persians were killed by their would-be Jewish victims, and Esther reigned.

It’s your destiny, too.

I don’t know exactly how you will be destroyed. There are many possible scenarios, most of which you’ve undoubtedly contemplated in your reflections on the beauty of death. My own favorite is to turn your own hate upon yourself and your regime, and fulfill your dream of a world without Jews. You don’t want to be contaminated by us, right? Very well, then we’ll seal you off from everyone and everything Jewish. The ultimate embargo: You’ll have no Jewish doctors or lawyers, no access to Jewish hospitals, you’ll be isolated from music or art by Jews, and everything invented by Jews. It’s quite a long list, including chemotherapy, the cure for syphilis, the polio vaccine, blue jeans, oral contraceptives, azathioprine (the first immuno suppressant used in organ transplants), septicemia (treatment for bacterial infections), the Barbie doll, hand-held video cameras, various antibiotics including streptomycin and penicillin, the push-up bra, and, of course, most everything nuclear (sorry about that) including the fission reactor (as you must know, the American atomic bomb began with a letter to President Roosevelt from two Jewish physicists, and the Manhattan Project involved numerous others).

Poetic justice, don’t you think? You’ll be throttled by your own bile.