By Dr. Michael Spektor, , Bellevue
The Islamic Republic of Iran is a despotic fundamentalist military dictatorship whose goal is hegemony in the Middle East. Iran’s ability to acquire nuclear missile technology is a threat to Israel, its Arab neighbors, Europe and America and would set off an arms race in the Middle East. Richard Silverstein in his Special to JTNews “Misunderstanding the Iranian threat” (Oct. 16) would have you believe that the diplomacy that hasn’t worked for the past 30 years with Iran is the sensible way to proceed and all who disagree with him are “partisan and hard-line.” He, on the other hand, is even-handed and moderate. Nothing could be further from reality.
Mr. Silverstein, who is more comfortable with the likes of Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, has assembled a disgruntled former AIPAC employee, the head of the National Iranian Council of America (no partisanship there), and a political scientist from the University of Pennsylvania to be on a panel to discuss the true path in dealing with Iran.
Mr. Silverstein gets many of his facts a bit skewed as well. In a recent Washington Post/ABC poll, 78 percent of Americans favor strong sanctions against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. That number approaches 90 percent among Jews. He states that 1/3 of Jews don’t favor an attack on Iran. What is more telling is that 2/3 would favor such action even though none of the organizations that support sanctions against Iran favor an attack unless it is an absolute last resort. He makes a point of saying that unless you visit Iran one cannot comment on its “history and political landscape.”
Tell that to all the journalists and academics who have been silenced, imprisoned or worse for commenting on this landscape. Mr. Silverstein’s description of the brutal, repressive, terror-supporting, Holocaust-denying and murderous Iranian regime as an “unsavory lot” says much about how he views this threat.
Mr. Silverstein is certainly entitled to air his views on Iran, but he should be careful when he labels people who disagree with him as right-wing warmongers. Iran is a danger to the free world and preventing them from developing a nuclear weapon by placing strong sanctions as an incentive is recognized by all serious Iran analysts as well as our European allies as the way to proceed. We are hardly right-wing warmongers.