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“Always two there are,” explains Jedi Yoda at the end of the first episode of “Star Wars,” “the master and the apprentice.” A few hours and a few thousand kilometers away, the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Secretary-General of Hezbollah last Friday delivered the same speech: that of denying Israel. In his address at the University of Tehran, on the occasion of “Al Quds Day” celebrated on the last Friday of the month of Ramadan to commemorate the “struggle of the Palestinians,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once again cast doubt on “the existence of the Holocaust,” which he termed a “false pretext for the creation” of the Hebrew state. He especially denied the principle of Israel, stating that “the very existence of this regime is an insult to the dignity of peoples,” further specifying that “its days are numbered.” A probably unconscious projection of his own uncertainties and anxieties about the longevity of the mullahs’ regime. “Confronting the Zionist regime is a national and religious duty,” he finally declared in a final provocation intended to raise the stakes before the United Nations General Assembly and the more specific meeting on October 1 concerning Iran’s nuclear program.
Later that day, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Shiite militia in Lebanon, echoed the same refrain about the “malicious and illegal” nature of Israel’s regime, quoting Imam Khomeini’s phrase that the Hebrew state “is a cancerous tumor.” According to the Shiite leader, Hezbollah “will never recognize Israel, and any attempt at agreement and normalization with this entity is forbidden by religion.” If these words were not fundamentally hateful and, consequently, highly contemptible, they would almost lend themselves to laughter as they reveal the childishness of their authors: refusing, against all odds, to accept a living reality and taking refuge in the incantation of magical thinking—the religious prohibition and ideological language—to try to make reality conform to their imaginary vision. Curiously, the main Western countries firmly condemned the Iranian expressions but refrained from criticizing those coming from Lebanon. Is it enough to blame the “master” to render the “apprentice” harmless?
To the point of wondering if this “childishness” is not also shared by the West, whose obsession with a “dialogue at all costs with Iran,” legitimate if it had even begun to produce results, is puzzling. United States and, to a lesser extent, Europeans, fixated on the principle of discussion as if they feared the consequences of a more confrontational stance, ultimately contribute—the psychological mechanism is well-established—to the exacerbation of Iranian provocations and the one-upmanship of those who support them, Russia and China, to name them. From this perspective, the manifest formality of “Western condemnations” is inoperative. It further reveals a fantastic manipulation: making the other bear the guilt of forbidden and shameful words. Tehran insults. Scandalized, Paris, London, and Berlin apologize. Israel is certainly not without blemish, but the Hebrew state has never wished to “wipe another state off the map of the world.” In Lebanon, the systematic disruptions by militias during the Baalbek music festival in the Bekaa, the artistic bans targeting Maurice Béjart, Gad Elmaleh, or the recurring troubles of a Miss Lebanon standing next to a Miss Israel in a photo, replay endlessly the same scenario: to radical intransigence responds the good will for “appeasement.” Bad memory.
As speculations multiply about Israeli intentions—despite reassuring statements from Russian President Medvedev, the daily “Novaya Gazeta” and the radio “Echo of Moscow” suggest that Russia has been invited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “withdraw its scientists from Iranian nuclear facilities”—what might be the outcome of the meeting on October 1 between Iran and the “5+1” group countries? A meeting intended, according to an Iranian official, to “calm Western concerns.” A very bad memory, indeed.
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