Rouhani’s Rosh Hashanah

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“May our shared Abrahamic roots deepen respect & bring peace & mutual understanding. L’Shanah Tovah. #RoshHashanah” is the greeting the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, tweeted in respect of the Days of Awe. It is being answered with the Internet version of a Bronx cheer. “Does this mean Iran will stop blocking Holocaust education web sites?” Yair Rosenberg of Tablet Magazine is quoted by the Daily Algemeiner as tweeting. “I hope you face justice one day for your role in the chain murders of reformers in the 1990s,” wrote Eli Lake, ex-of-the-Sun and now of Bloomberg. “When you stop hanging men for being gay and women for being raped you can dare to pronounce the name of Abraham,” tweeted Louise Mensch, a novelist and Conservative ex-member of Parliament.

We take Mr. Rouhani’s Rosh Hashanah greetings to be part of a regime effort to advance one of its biggest lies — that there is a geopolitical distinction to be made between Israel and the Jews. We can understand how that impression could get around, given the vivacity with which Jews in Israel and the diaspora debate the issues. Iran’s leaders respond by seeking to convey the impression that its own Jews are free, even while it calls for the destruction of Israel, prepares its proxies on Israel’s borders for an attack, seeks a nucular weapon. It makes a show of meeting with the anti-Zionist rabbis of the Nuturei Karta. The truth, though, is that there is no distinction to be drawn. The Jews would not survive the destruction of Israel, which is precisely why Iran is against it.

There are not ten Jews on the planet who fail to grasp this point, though Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch reckons, as he put it in a tweet, that it is “good to see Iran Pres Rouhani countering the hatred of supreme leader,” a reference to Ayatollah Khamenei. That hope is mocked by the Iranian revolutionary constitution under which both President Rouhani and Ayatollah Khamenei serve and which calls for jihad. The big danger is that the illusion the Khamenei-Rouhani tag team seeks to promulgate is forming the basis of the appeasement that is now the policy of the Obama administration. It has, after all, precipitated a rift between the White House and the government in Jerusalem that hasn’t been seen in at least — just to pick a number — 5776 years.


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