Mere Rhetoric: Now The Israeli Left Is Just Getting Stupid - Israel Is Excluding Itself From Asia And Iran Isn't A Threat Edition

Uri Avnery needs a reality check. He wrote an article about how Israelis need to start thinking of themselves as Asian rather than European. How dumb is this article? Here's the lede:

A few weeks ago, the 15th Asian games, the "Asiad", was held in Qatar. The Israeli media treated the event with a mixture of derision and pity. Some kind of picturesque Asian circus. Our television showed an exotic horseman with a keffiyeh at the opening ceremony, riding his noble Arab steed up a steep staircase to light the Olympic flame. And that was that.

And here's what Wikipedia has to say about the Asiad:

In the succeeding games, Taiwan (Republic of China) was readmitted but OCA decided to follow the standards of the IOC for Taiwan to use the name Chinese Taipei. The OCA also agreed to permanently exclude Israel as its member and requested the country to join into European competitions.

So Avnery opened up an article complaining that Israelis don't feel like part of Asia with a regional Asian sports competition that Israel wasn't invited to, held in a country that Israelis can't enter. We wonder why Israelis don't feel welcome. It might also have something to do with Israel repeatedly petitioning to be allowed into the Asia Regional Group in the UN, and the Arab and Muslim countries consistently refusing. The consequence, of course, is that Israel remains the only country on the planet that in principle can never sit on the UNSC. Again, we wonder why Israelis don't feel like part of the community of Asian nations.

And that wasn't the dumbest part of the article.

Lately it has become fashionable for politicians and commentators in Israel to speak about the danger of annihilation that hovers, or so they claim, over Israel. It is hardly believable: the State of Israel is a regional superpower, its economy is robust and developing, its technological level is one of the most advanced in the world, its army is stronger than all the Arab armies combined, it has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons. Even if the Iranians were to obtain a bomb of their own, they would be mad to use it, for fear of Israeli retaliation.

So where does this fear of annihilation come from in the 59th year of the state? A part of it surely emanates from the memory of the Holocaust, which is deeply imprinted in the national mentality. But another part comes from the feeling of not belonging, of temporariness, of the lack of roots.

We were going to find some really obnoxious and outrageous statement from Ahmadinejad and juxtapose it with Avnery's stupid "the Iranians would have to be crazy to use a nuke". Or maybe that comment by Rafsanjani that the Iranians will nuke Israel as soon as they can because the retaliation would only take out a small part of the Muslim ummah. But we lost heart somewhere in the middle.

The reason that there's "this fear of annihilation... in the 59th year of the state" is because Iran is trying to get a nuclear weapon in order to wipe out the Jewish State. That's obvious to anyone not totally blinded by blame-Israel ideology. Let's stop pretending otherwise.

Previously: Iran Anti-Holocaust Conference - Pervasiveness as Legitimation, OneJerusalem.org Conference Call with Senator Rick Santorum, Memo To Diplomatic Sophisticates: Ahmadinejad Did Not Get The Part Where You Meeting With Him and Being Nice To Him Was A 'Criticism'