In his effort to lay such claim, Cohen adds that Iran and various militant groups "fervently wish for Israel's destruction." Israel is thus the victim while its opponents are monsters which threaten its very existence. This is a dramatic departure from reality. First, even if were as Cohen says, the fact that some "wish for Israel's destruction" doesn't mean they are capable of destroying Israel.
Israel's existence has never been threatened, as history has demonstrated repeatedly, the most outstanding example of which was the June 1967 war.
Again, at that time, there was speak of a genocidal threat to Israel, a threat to the very existence of the state. Yet the outcome of the war was never in doubt, only how long it would take Israel to win a decisive victory. U.S. intelligence estimates were very near the mark and it took only six days for Israel to achieve its aim.
Second, the truth of this characterization is questionable. In one prominent contemporary example, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been widely quoted as having said that Israel "must be wiped off the map".[18] This translation uses the English idiom meaning "to obliterate totally",[19] and the quote has often been cited as proof that Iran harbors the intent to commit violence and wishes "for Israel's destruction", a veritable call for genocide.
The only catch is that Ahmadinejad never said any such thing.[20] He quoted Ayatollah Khomeini as saying, "This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history." The context of his speech was concerning oppressive and illegitimate regimes, of which Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Shah's Iran were also included.[21] Even The New York Times, while incredibly defending their use of "wiped off the map" and suggesting
Ahmadinejad may have been calling for war, acknowledges that Ahmadinejad never said "Israel", but "occupying regime of Jerusalem", and that he actually used a metaphorical expression with an approximate meaning of "pages of time or history" and not literally "map".[22]
His conclusion, based on the assertion that Israel's enemies "fervently wish for Israel's destruction", is that the U.S. must not "trample on its own moral values", but must rather, even though "the settlements are an abomination", continue to support Israel because "its existence is right."
The pen of the propagandist thus makes it a moral obligation for the U.S. to continue to support Israel's ongoing wiping of any viable future Palestinian state from the map because its enemies harbor similar intentions towards Israel. Why the U.S. shouldn't support Palestinian aspirations for a state against Israel's ongoing policy of wiping any potential Palestine from the map because its existence would be right and consistent with our moral obligations is left unexplained.
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