Quebec member of parliament Irwin Cotler spoke at the Beth Zion Synagogue in Cote St. Luc on 27 February. His purpose was to push the Canadian government to take action against Iran.
“We needed to sound the alarm in what I call the critical mass of threat in Iran: the nuclear threat, the threat of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide, the terrorist threat and the threat of massive domestic assaults,” said Cotler.
The threat of “state sanctioned genocide”? Israel has been doing precisely this against the Palestinian people for the past 60+ years. What “terrorist threat” is Cotler rabbiting on about? The main “terrorists” in Iran that are a “threat” are the Mossad agents. And “massive domestic assaults”? Like the ones being carried out in Israel and the Occuppied Territories by the police/IDF against the Palestinian people?
How can a Zionist ideologue utter such words when they patently ring true of the Jewish state of Israel? Israel is a nuclear weapons state; hence it is – by Cotler’s words – a nuclear threat. Unlike nuclear-armed Israel, Iran is only accused of pursuing nuclear weapons. And as the lawyer Cotler should be aware, there is a presumption of innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Ergo, Iran is charged with wanting to become the threat that Israel already is. No mention was made that all Middle East nations — except Israel — wish the Middle East to be a nuclear weapons-free zone.
Besides, why can Iran not have nuclear weapons? If Israel can have them, why should no one else have them? If an enemy possess weapons superiority,is not the rational decision to at least acquire that level of weapon’s technology?
Cotler used the occasion to gather signatures for a petition that would enable him to speak to the threat of Iran in the Canadian House of Commons.
Cotler pointed to the recent sending two Iranian navy ships through the Suez Canal as a provocation of the so-called international community.
The international community recently – and over the decades has passed numerous resolutions in the United Nations about the scofflaw actions of Israel. Cotler made no mention of Israeli provocation by sending a navy ship through the Suez Canal last year – to the anger of opposition forces in Egypt.
“Iran is … in continuous defiance of the international community,” said Cotler. “In my view, Iran has emerged as the leading threat to international peace and security, to regional and Middle East stability, to Israel and the Jewish people and increasingly and alarmingly so to its own citizens. Putting the warships through the Suez Canal is just one of many instances of threats, provocations and tragically actual actions themselves.”
All this is blatter to anyone who has an iota of knowledge about the Middle East and its history. Iran has in modern history (aside from self-defense against a US-sanctioned attack from Iraq) been a peaceful country, whose people are indigenous to Iran or who have become naturalized citizens of Iran. The Jews of Israel, who Cotler claims are threatened, are on the other hand a violent European invasion force, and are indeed a threat to the indigenous Palestinians – what many state unequivocally to be an ongoing genocide, to which the Gaza massacre in 2008-2009 attests.
“I think Iran is such an international mischief maker whose tentacles reach across the globe,” Cotler stated.
Now if one were to term Israel “an international mischief maker” — whose own tentacles extend across the globe to commit terrorism and assassinations ((Israel has its own Wikipedia page devoted to its assassinations.)) – it would be nauseatingly euphemistic. Cotler’s memory is either too short or too selective. It was only last year that Mossad botched an assassination in Dubai, to add to its other historical bungles in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere. Jewish terrorism even went so far as to attempt to scare the purportedly contented Jewish community in Iran to the Jewish state.
While Palestinians – including children and the aged — languish and suffer at Israeli checkpoints, jails, gulags; while Palestinians endure dispossession, home demolitions, military terrorism committed by the apparatchiks of the Israeli state, Cotler had the chutzpah to criticize Iran on human rights. Certainly it appears that Iran leaves itself open to deserved criticism on some human rights issues. However, there is a well known axiom whereby those who commit equally egregious acts or worse should temper criticism of others for the similar acts.
Cotler preached his anti-Iran rhetoric in a Jewish holy house where Jewish supremacists would be enticed by such warmongering. His tirade was is in Canada, a state – so similarly to Israel – that was established through dispossession and genocide against the Original Peoples. Is it any wonder then that the Canadian government and its political parties support colonialism and its violence elsewhere?
If a state is to be morally legitimate, it must exist at the will of its millennial inhabitants; it must exist as a state of all peoples, not exclusively or primarily for a privileged class or race that exploits others. Until a state meets these basic conditions, then all remonstrations against other world states is mere oratorical flatulence.