Members of the China Philharmonic Orchestra play during a rehearsal in Tehran, Iran, on Aug. 12, 2015. The visiting China Philharmonic Orchestra will jointly perform with Tehran Symphony Orchestra.
(Xinhua, August 13, 2015)
This is China using soft power to supplant the United States as the preferred superpower patron throughout the developing world. By contrast, Russia is using hard power to fortify rogue states like Iran — as much to spook and spite the United States as to forge new military alliances. Israel be damned.
Iran will sign a contract with Russia next week to buy four S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, the Iranian defense minister said on Tuesday, bringing Tehran closer to acquiring an advanced air defense capability…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the most vocal critics of last month’s final nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, has expressed Israel’s ‘dismay’ at Russia’s decision to supply the S-300s to Tehran.
[Iran is] also negotiating with Russia to buy fighter jets, in a likely attempt to upgrade its aging fleet of mostly U.S.-made jets for which it cannot obtain spare parts or upgrades due to long-standing hostility between the two countries.
(Reuters, August 18, 2015)
Meanwhile, crusading evangelical Christians and their useful idiots in Congress would be perfectly happy if the United States were the only country sanctioning Iran … until kingdom. In this, they are much like delusional Miami Cubans and their useful idiots in Congress who have been perfectly happy with the United States being the only country embargoing Cuba.
Israel has become as sacred a cow in American politics as Mom, apple pie … and guns. On the one hand, evangelical Christians consider its security key to their salvation; on the other hand, politicians of every stripe consider pandering about its security key to their (re)election.
(“Americans More Jewish than Jews in Israel,” The iPINIONS Journal, February 7, 2013)
Accordingly, Republican politicians and evangelical preachers are making a pharisaic show of vowing – as an article of political and religious faith, respectively – to oppose the nuclear deal with Iran … for Israel’s sake.
Schmuck!
But consider this:
Rebuffing a campaign among Jewish organizations to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal, 340 rabbis sent a letter to Congress Monday (Aug. 17) supporting the agreement and rejecting the notion that most American Jews oppose it…
The rabbis who sent the letter Monday argue that, while they have reason to distrust Iran’s leaders, the deal is the best available strategy to confront the specter of a nuclear Iran. And they want to challenge assumptions that Jews who oppose the deal represent American Jews as a whole.
(Huffington Post, August 17, 2015)
In a similar vein, you’ve probably seen Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on TV preaching his Chicken-Little message (complete with his A-men chorus of American sycophants) about Iranian Mullahs lying in wait to execute a second Holocaust. He invariably casts aspersions on Obama as a naïve man whose dogged pursuit of a legacy initiative blinds him to the existential danger Iran poses to Israel. Never mind that Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East.
Alas, Netanyahu’s political arrogance blinds him to the wanton insult his message poses to the other world leaders, most notably Merkel of Germany and Putin of Russia, who partnered with Obama to negotiate this deal.
The chutzpah!
But consider this:
Many Israeli ex-generals and former security chiefs have signed a petition urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept the nuclear deal between world powers and Iran, which he strongly opposes.
(Agence France-Presse, August 3, 2015)
This means that, to believe Netanyahu, you’d have to believe that all of these Israeli generals and security chiefs are as naïve and politically motivated as he claims Obama is.
Not to mention the disqualifying fact that this is the same putatively wise and seasoned statesman who was all over American TV in 2002, agitating for military action against Iraq. Back then, he was preaching, with just as much religious conviction, that Iraq posed the same kind of existential danger to the United States and Israel that he claims Iran poses today:
There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons – no question whatsoever…
Today the United States must destroy the same regime because a nuclear-armed Saddam will place the security of our entire world at risk. And make no mistake about it — if and once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror networks will have nuclear weapons.
(C-SPAN, September 12, 2002)
Sound familiar…? As George W. Bush himself might attempt to say: fool us once, shame on Netanyahu; fool us twice, shame on us. Hell, when it comes to preaching his Holocaust gospel, Netanyahu is such a brazen televangelist, he makes those who preach their newfangled prosperity gospel seem, well, monastic.
Ironically, he has probably terrorized Israelis more over the past 25 years, with his rhetoric about impending doom, than Iranian Mullahs, with theirs about wiping Israel off the map.
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