Iran is not the Arabs' enemy, Israel is

By Khalid Amayreh

        There is little doubt that American and Zionist circles stand behind the anti-Iran propaganda campaign now permeating through several Arab capitals. In recent years, Zionist circles have made laborious efforts to convince Arab states and Arab  people that their  real enemy is not Israel, which occupies Palestine, torments Palestinians on a daily basis, and seeks the destruction of the Aqsa Mosque, but Iran  which is making some efforts to check Israeli regional hegemony and aggression.

To be sure, Iran is not a platonic republic  run  by the likes of Ali ibn Abi Taleb or Omar ibn al-Khattab (may God be pleased with them."  Indeed, there are no other states under the sun that even remotely meet the standards of Islamic idealism where justice reigns supremely  and social harmony prevails.  However, the Iranian state is by no shred of imagination the nefarious entity some Arab media  outlets would want us to believe.

Yes, the largely-Sunni  Arabs have every right to get angry with some of the blasphemous utterances made  in London recently about  Aa'isha, the Mother of Believers by a certain Kuwaiti  renegade. However, it is unfair and unwise to blame the entire Shiite community for the sin of  a single  evil individual, especially after  nearly all Shiite leaders from  Qum  to  Southern Beirut condemned the blasphemous remarks in the strongest terms.

Having said that,  it  is imperative not to blow an incident, however serious and injurious to Muslim sensibilities, out of proportion. . Doesn't Allah teach us that ". O you who believe! Stand out firmly for Allah and be just witnesses and let not the enmity and hatred of others make you avoid justice. Be just: that is nearer to piety, and fear Allah. Verily, Allah is Well-Acquainted with what you do." (Al-Maeda-v:8)

In fact, the Yasser  el Khabeeth's  incident  is only a small part of the  anti-Iranian  campaign. The recently-announced 60-billion-dollar  arms-sale deal between the US and Saudi  Arabia has been portrayed by much of the Arab media as directed against Iran. Such vicious and vacuous thinking is aimed at making Iran replace Israel  as the main strategic threat to the peoples of the region.

In living memory, Iran never attacked or invaded an Arab country. I think the opposite is true. Moreover, Iran has always been and will continue to be an integral part of the human, religious, and geopolitical  fabric of the region. The Iranians have been our neighbors from eternity, and they are not going to vanish into non-existence just because the Zionized rulers of America and their Arab slaves hate the regime in Tehran.

Arab states in the Gulf region and beyond have every right to defend their interests, but they have no right to pursue hostile policies against the Iranian republic just to appease Washington and obtain a certificate of good conduct from international Zionism. In the final analysis, Israel, that cancerous entity which seeks to destroy Islam in coordination and in collusion with western imperialistic forces, is our enemy. It has always been, and it will always be.

It is probably futile to try to remind those Arabs  who have a fixation on Iran that their focus is misplaced  and that they are engaging an imaginary enemy. After all, these people don't have a mind of their own; they just follow blindly whatever Washington tells them to do.

Washington tells them to purchase tens of billions of dollars' worth of arms. Then a few years later, these weapons will fall into disrepair and require replacement, and so on and so forth.

Interestingly, every time the US intends to sell arms to certain countries, meticulous efforts are made to ensure that these arms don't undermine the "qualitative edge" Israel has over the entire Arab world combined.

Moreover, the pro-Israeli lobbies, which effectively rule Washington, make it absolutely sure that arms sold to Arab states, and  paid for in cash, don't  include the same sophisticated systems sold to Israel, e.g. the F-35 fighters.

In short, Washington's Arab allies are actually slaves and puppets not true allies.  Otherwise, why would the successive US administrations consistently refuse to arm these regimes with arms advanced enough to confront or at least repulse possible aggression by Israel?

More to the point, how long will these decadent regimes continue to pay billions of dollars for huge arms deals that don't contribute  to serving the true interests of the peoples of these states?

There is  a conflict between international Zionism and Iran, which stems mainly for Israel's frantic efforts to prevent Iran from challenging Israel's strategic hegemony. Israel simply wants to retain its military supremacy and maintain a state of belligerency where by Jewish nuclear warheads and bombs keep terrorizing hundreds of millions of Muslims from Casablanca  to Tehran. Israel thinks, rightly or wrongly, that Iranian efforts to obtain a nuclear capability would end the Israeli nuclear monopoly in the region.

Feeling quite impotent, America's puppet Arab regimes, are trying to justify their impotence by telling Washington that they, too, would seek nuclear weapons, if Iran was allowed to possess nuclear weapons.

Well, how about Israel?

The disgraceful regimes that allow a small country of a few millions immigrants to impose its supremacy on the entire Arab world are too bankrupt and too subservient to Washington to pursue independent  policies  of their own, policies that would serve the paramount interests of their own peoples.

Hence, the Iranian distraction is  used as a red herring to hide their impotence and subjugation in the face Israel and its guardian ally, the United States. 

We certainly don't  demand  that these regimes  confront the US. They are too submissive to embark on  such a task.  But we do demand that that they carry out the task of safeguarding their people's vital interests.

This can be done by forming a collective Arab military force to protect the Arab world from encroaching Israeli Nazism, especially in light of the ascendancy to power  in  Israel by right-wing,  fascist-minded leaders who  say openly that they want to build a Jewish Third Reich at the expense of the Palestinians and other Muslims peoples in the region.

Meanwhile,  stop being  too preoccupied  by Iran. Don't  do Israel's bidding.