“Don’t Look Up”

Masters of our own misfortune, the imminent new Iran nuclear deal is a threat to mankind

By David E. Kaplan

The 2021 Oscar nominated American apocalyptic  movie, “Don’t Look Up” tells the story of two astronomers attempting to warn humanity about an approaching comet that will destroy human civilization.

While there are lots of laughs in this black comedy, there are more reasons for tears with the tragic realisation that despite the threat being from outer space, the real threat preventing Armageddon, lies here on earth – human greed, indifference and self-interest.

Are these not the failings prevailing today having us all wondering what kind of a world we are bequeathing to future generations?

We don’t need imagined threats from ‘out of this world’ to end humanity, we are quite capable of doing it ourselves.

We only have to look at Putin threatening to use his nuclear arsenal and genocidal Iran on a rapid track to acquire them while threatening to obliterate Israel for no rational reason. Iran has less incentive to attack Israel than Will Smith had to get up and belt Chris Rock at the Oscars! Israel does not share a border with Iran and has no designs on its territory in the same way that Russia has with Ukraine! What Iran has, is a fanatical irrational obsession to expunge the Jewish state from the map. Is this a country that should be facilitated – by some crazily convoluted and deeply-flawed agreement – to acquire weapons of mass destruction, despite the constant promises from the Biden administration that “Iran will never acquire a nuclear weapon”?

Really?

Why do most the countries in the Middle East disagree besides the beneficiary – Iran – which is licking its proverbial lips like the hungry wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. The Mullah leadership understands that the new watered-down deal is not an obstruction but an accelerated path to achieving its nefarious aim.

While all kudos to Joe Biden who brought much of the world into a global coalition to impose the most rigorous sanction regime against Russia that is reminiscent of his predecessors – the two Bushes; who masterminded ‘collisions of the willing’ against Iraq – why then a weak, inexplicable cop-out when it comes to Iran?

With Iran on the ropes economically, should not the strategy be to further weaken instead of to resuscitate and then to strengthen?

Why feed the crocodile that will one day eat you!

However here is the conundrum. Why for the Biden administration are sanctions considered an effective strategy against Russia reducing the ruble to rubble – and soliciting support from countries around the world to support it – and yet against genocidal Iran, it proclaims sanctions are ineffective and advocates its removal?

Go figure!

It gets worse and even less compressible.

Over the last two weeks, a fired up President Biden has ramped up his rhetoric against Putin, calling him a “war criminal”, a “murderous dictator”, a “pure thug” and his most recent “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”.

By his choice of words, the American president expresses his clear understanding of “evil” and vents his abhorrence of the Russian leader. By bravely taking on Putin in this side-war of words, why is Biden ready to whitewash Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) delisting it  as a foreign terrorist group?

Perplexed at Biden’s position on this issue as Washington shifts ever closer to reviving the nuclear agreement with Tehran, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid issued a joint statement, in which they urged the US not to delist Iran’s feared IRGC as a terror organization. They were hardly telling the Americans anything which they did not already know with these following words:

“The Revolutionary Guards are a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of people, including Americans. We have a hard time believing that the United States will remove it from the definition of a terrorist organization.”

In the same way as the resistance again Putin’s war in Ukraine was a global concern, Bennett and Lapid reminded the American president that the fight against terror was a global mission:

“We believe that the United States will not abandon its closest allies in exchange for empty promises from terrorists.”

If promises from Putin can so easily be dismissed as “worthless”, why not exercise the same suspicion with regard to Iran?

Continuing in their hard hitting language, Bennett and Lapid reminded the Americans:

 “The Revolutionary Guards took part in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians, they destroyed Lebanon, they are engaged in the murderous repression of Iranian civilians. They kill Jews because they are Jews, Christians because they are Christians, and Muslims because they do not surrender to them.

…… Their hands are stained with the blood of thousands of Iranians and the trampling of the soul of Iranian society.”

Their case made; the two Israeli leaders conclude:

 “The attempt to abolish the definition of the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization is an insult to the victims and the erasure of a documented reality, with unequivocal evidence.”

With the IRCG considered one,  if not the most dangerous terrorist group in the world obstructing for decades peace in the Middle East, why reward this terrorist regime with any sort of legitimacy from the U.S. government? If labeling Putin as a “war criminal” and “thug”, why treat the Mullahs in Tehran differently and even rewarding them?

Worst of all, if the world fears a confrontation with Putin because he could unleash his nuclear weaponry, imagine the danger to humanity – never mind Israel – if the fanatically crazed leadership in Tehran were in possession of nuclear weapons.

As I began; we do not have to look up for imminent danger – we need to look down and within.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).