‘”Yes, Castel,” he replied. “It’s hardly credible. But everything points to its being plague.”
Castel got up and began walking towards the door.
“You know,” the old doctor said, “what they’re going to tell us? That it vanished from temperate countries long ago.”‘
– Albert Camus, The Plague
Camus’ great novel is set in the ‘smug, placid air’ of Oran. The ‘banality of the town’s appearance and of life in it’ means that its citizens ‘go completely to sleep there’. So when a plague strikes the town – Camus’ symbol for totalitarianism – its dreamy citizens refuse to believe it. The Oranians are, after all, humanists who think of themselves as living in a reasonable world in which everything is up for negotiation. So they opt for denial.
Jean Bethke Elshtain draws out Camus’ point. ‘There are no rats in Oran’ Why? ‘Because there cannot be.’
‘Camus’ “humanists” are unwilling or unable to peer into the heart of darkness. They have banished the word evil from their vocabularies. Evil refers to something so unreasonable, after all! Therefore, it cannot really exist. Confronted by people who mean to kill them and to destroy their society, these well-meaning persons deny the enormity of what is going on.’
Have some commentators responded to the Iranian regime’s threat to the state of Israel as Oranians? The question is raised in a new study by Joshua Teitelbaum, an academic who uncovers just what the Iranian president and other Iranian leaders have been saying about doing away with Israel.
Juan Cole of the University of Michigan has claimed that Ahmadinejad did not say Israel ‘must be wiped off the map’ but merely that ‘he hoped its regime … would collapse’. Teitelbaum shows that Ahmadinejad not only punctuates his speeches with ‘Death to Israel’ (marg bar Esraiil) but on Iranian TV on June 2, 2008, he said ‘Thanks to God, your wish will soon be realised, and this germ of corruption will be wiped off the face of the earth.’
The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele has argued that Ahmadinejad ‘was not making a military threat’ against Israel, but only ‘calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future’. Teitelbaum cites Ahmadinejad speaking in Gorgan in Northern Iran: ‘Israel’s days are numbered … the peoples of the region would not miss the narrowest opportunity to annihilate this false regime.’
Stephen Walt says, breezily, (his style) ‘I don’t think [Ahmadinejad] is inciting to genocide’. To a military parade on April 17 2008 Ahmadinejad said ‘The region and the world are prepared for great changes and for being cleansed of Satanic enemies’.
Teitelbaum collects a host of similar genocidal taunts used routinely by the politico-theocratic class in Iran. He quotes the opinion of Michael Axworthy, a former Head of the Iran section of Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, that the dispute over Ahmadinejad’s words is ‘bogus’. When the slogan ‘Israel must be wiped off the map’ appeared ‘draped over missiles in military parades, that meaning was pretty clear’ says Axworthy.
Teitelbaum shows photographs of the slogan ‘Israel should be wiped out of the face of the world’, in English, on banners at military rallies, draped across Shahab 3 missiles. He quotes the speaker of the Iranian ‘Parliament’ Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel, speaking in Tehran University’s mosque, saying, ‘The countdown has begun for the destruction of the Zionist regime’. And we hear the Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, general Mohammad Ali-Jafari, wrote ‘In the near future, we will witness the destruction of the cancerous microbe Israel’.
Martin Woollacott (Guardian, June 10) is another who seems to think the plague vanished from temperate countries long ago. He writes, preposterously, that Iran will cut a deal ‘after a long and reassuring period, free from the threats that have helped to create the present crisis’.
This argument is faulty on two grounds. First, Israel does not ‘threaten’ Iran. Israel seeks to defend itself against Iran, which threatens Israel with annihilation. The present crisis is not the result of any ‘threats against Iran’ but of a dash for a nuclear capability by a regime that says Israel is a ‘black and filthy microbe’, a ‘cancerous tumor’, a ‘disgraceful stain’, and a ‘stinking corpse’ that is ‘heading towards annihilation’. Second, the regime in Tehran is not a normal regime that responds to the reassurances of the international community (which, by the way, have been issued by the bucketload for years now).
It is a revolutionary theocracy that seeks regional hegemony and which exports eliminationist anti-semitism throughout the region. It organises Holocaust denial conferences and grotesque ‘cartoon competitions’ that feature the rape of Anne Frank by Adolf Hitler. (‘Put that in your diary’ says Hitler) It funds and trains terrorist organisations. And it has demolished a large part of its capital city to build a boulevard for the expected return of the twelfth imam on the other side of an imminent cataclysmic conflict.
Yes, it’s hardly credible. But everything really does point to it being plague. This does not mean a military strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities would be a wise policy. But it does mean that we must wake up and say, with Camus, that wisdom begins in ‘refusing to bow down to pestilences’.
Alan Johnson