Telltale Metaphors

The Nazis introduced the metaphors which reduced Jewish human value to that of rats and insects. The resonable consequence of such widely used tropes was that like rats and insects, Jews needed to be exterminated.

These metaphors have not passed from this world in 1945. They merely transmigrated into the Muslim lands, where Hitler was always seen with affection if not outright admiration.

The employment of "filthy bacteria" by Iran's Ahmadinejad can be compared not only to the imagery, with murderous consequences, of the Nazis, but to the standard Arab metaphor for Israel. It is a "cancer." Now one does not merely shrink the size of a cancer, but allow it to remain. One excises it, removes it, altogether --sometimes by first shrinking it, and then removing what fails to disappear entirely, sometimes by simply cutting the whole thing out.

By their metaphors shall ye know them. And that "cancer" metaphor for Israel (like Ahmadinejad's Der-Stuermer- like "filthy bacteria") is telling. An Infidel nation-state interrupts the smooth flow of the Dar al-Islam. If Arab Muslims actually had the slightest bit of real "tolerance" in the Western sense, they would first come to understand that in the vast areas of the Middle East and North Africa, others besides themselves -- both non-Muslims such as the Jews now in-gathered into their historic homeland which they managed to rebuild with no natural resources and, until the last few decades, almost no aid save what co-religionists sent, but also Christians (the Copts who are the descendants of the original inhabitants of Egypt who managed to reject islamization), the Maronites in the Lebanon, the Chaldo-Assyrians, and smaller groups), and non-Arab Muslims (the Kurds, the Berbers). They have a chance to redeem themselves from the charge that Islam treats non-Muslims only as inferiors, allowed to avoid the other alternatives (death or conversion) only by submitting to the status of dhimmi, by accepting the Infidel nation-state of Israel, and not with treacherous intent, not trying merely to win its trust so as to inveigle it, and its Western supporters, to get it to be diminished even further in size, with no control over invasion routes, or aquifers, and then to renew the pressure until daily life in Israel becomes so intolerable, so perilous, that there will be an out-migration and a weakening within, and the Arabs can go in for the kill ... (Read the rest, here)

Here is what Ahmadinejad said:

"The world powers established this filthy bacteria, the Zionist regime, which is lashing out at the nations in the region like a wild beast," the Iranian president told supporters at a rally in southern Iran.

"[Israel] won support [from the other nations] which created it as a scarecrow, so as to keep the people of this area under control," Ahmadinejad said.

Israel's Submitted complaint to the UNSC, is a joke.

Let me just remind you that Iran is one of the countries Obama plans to talk to, no pre-conditions.