Eradicating the "Little Satan" -Ze'ev Maghen
Chanting "Death to America! Death to Israel!" has been the way Iranians applaud for over a quarter-century. When the soccer team from Isfahan scores a goal against the soccer team from Shiraz, its fans cheer wildly: "Death to America! Death to Israel!" Like the daily "Two-Minutes Hate" in George Orwell's 1984, this venom-spewing is the mantra upon which an entire generation of Iranians has been raised.
By casting an entire people as a parasitic infestation, by demonizing, delegitimizing, and dehumanizing them at home, in school, in the mosque, and in the media, the quarter-century-old routine of Israel-hatred, added to 1,400 years of traditional Islamic anti-Semitism, has prepared in the minds of Iranians and their neighboring coreligionists the moral ground for the eradication of the State of Israel.
More and more Iranian Islamists today - together with their zealous coreligionists in other Muslim countries - believe that the erasure of the Jewish state from the map is a dream that can be realized in the here and now, whether in one fell swoop or through a relentless process of attrition and erosion.
(Commentary)
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Chanting "Death to America! Death to Israel!" has been the way Iranians applaud for over a quarter-century. When the soccer team from Isfahan scores a goal against the soccer team from Shiraz, its fans cheer wildly: "Death to America! Death to Israel!" Like the daily "Two-Minutes Hate" in George Orwell's 1984, this venom-spewing is the mantra upon which an entire generation of Iranians has been raised.
By casting an entire people as a parasitic infestation, by demonizing, delegitimizing, and dehumanizing them at home, in school, in the mosque, and in the media, the quarter-century-old routine of Israel-hatred, added to 1,400 years of traditional Islamic anti-Semitism, has prepared in the minds of Iranians and their neighboring coreligionists the moral ground for the eradication of the State of Israel.
More and more Iranian Islamists today - together with their zealous coreligionists in other Muslim countries - believe that the erasure of the Jewish state from the map is a dream that can be realized in the here and now, whether in one fell swoop or through a relentless process of attrition and erosion.
(Commentary)
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