Long touted as an Iranian leadership voice of pragmatism, and even “moderation,” former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, now head of the country’s Expediency Discernment Council, is an enduring friend of current “moderate” President Rouhani. Yesterday, (Monday, July 6, 2015), Mr. Rafsanjani gave a revealing interview insisting rather immoderately that Israel’s very existence was parlous, indeed, reiterating one of Iran’s boilerplate metaphors for the Jewish State’s destruction, better known to have been uttered by the “hardline” former President Ahmadinejad:
Eventually one day this alien forged existence that has been forced into the body of an ancient nation and an historical region will be wiped off the map.
Rafsanjani also opined to his interviewer that,
…even Tel Aviv knows well that Iran is not after acquiring nuclear weapons…the Zionists wish to keep Iran engaged in problems permanently, knowing that the Islamic Republic’s political, economic, cultural and propagation status will all improve after such an agreement.
The late intrepid Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman was killed this past January, 2015 because of his tireless investigations of Iran’s culpability for the 1992 and 1994 Buenos Aires bombings, which targeted the Israeli embassy, and Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), respectively, murdering 114 people between the two attacks. According to a 2006 indictment by the Investigations Unit of the Office of then Attorney General of Argentina, Nisman, the ultimate decision to bomb the AMIA center was not only made by Iran’s “Supreme-Leader”, Theocrat Ayatollah Khamenei, and but also Iran’s “moderate” President at the time, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Moreover, Nisman argued that the “determining factor” which motivated these attacks, was
the Argentine government’s unilateral decision to terminate the nuclear materials and technology supply agreements that had been concluded some years previously between Argentina and Iran…[A]t this period the Iranian government felt that it was crucial for Iran to develop its nuclear capacities.
Nisman’s 2006 report averred there was “no doubt” that
Rafsanjani fully supported the ideological principles that were promulgated beginning in 1979, including the endorsement of the use of terrorist methods as an alternative and valid adjunct to classic diplomacy as a foreign policy tool.
Eyewitness testimony from Iranian dissidents elucidated how Iran’s expansionist Shiite jihadism remained Rafsanjani’s unwavering goal, to be achieved by jihad terror, and “martyrdom operations” directed at Israel, and the U.S.
The focus of the Rafsanjani administration’s foreign policy may differ from that of the Khomeini regime, but the objective remains the same: “expansion of the regime of the Islamic Republic.”…If you listen to the Friday prayers of the clerics and Rafsanjani’s speeches (…) there is no doubt that every single one of them is an incitement to carry out terrorist attacks against Israel and the U.S. and to assassinate people….The clearest evidence of the nature of the Iranian regime (…) is its extensive and vigorous campaign aimed at assassinating its foreign opponents. If you look at the list of assassination victims during the early years of Rafsanjani’s administration, you see that despite his reputation as a ‘moderate,’ the number of defectors executed by Teheran’s terrorist squadrons exceeds the number that were killed during the Khomeini regime.
Finally, Nisman’s 2006 indictment also includes a report from Argentina’s Secretariat of Intelligence reproducing extracts from a Rafsanjani sermon during which the former President provided this “rational” nuclear annihilationist jihad martyrdom calculus:
The Jews (that migrate to Israel) should expect the ‘exodus in reverse’ to occur, since one day the tumor will be cut out of the body of the Islamic world and then millions of Jews that have migrated to Israel will once again be stateless. And when will this happen? On a very special day, a day when, without fail, the Islamic world will be equipped with the weapons that Israel now has at its disposal. The imperialist strategy will be stopped dead in its tracks because the use of just one atomic bomb inside Israel will wipe it from the face of the earth; but (such a bomb) would do harm to the Islamic world only. It is not irrational to consider this possibility… The people that have no other option but to sacrifice themselves will not be intimidated by (Israeli) violence.”
Thus spake—and speaks—the “moderate voice” of Iran’s jihadism, and annihilationist Shiite Islamic Jew-hatred, representative of a regime, and sadly a broader Shiite Iranian society, whose nuclear weapons aspirations have been abetted by the cowardice and sheer fecklessness of both the Bush 2, and Obama Administrations.
