Relax my fellow Tritons, this is a hypothetical. This was never said by ASUCSD, nor will they ever come to say something that echoes calls for genocide so closely. But I do bring this to your attention because Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said something very similar. He has described Israel as a “cancerous tumor” and he looks forward to its utter “disappearance.” You think I took that out of context? “The Iranian nation is standing for its cause [and] that is the full annihilation of Israel,” Iranian Chief of Staff Major General Seyed Hassan Firouzabadi said this past May. Now just for the sake of throwing in a third opinion, Iranian vice president Mohammed Reza Rahimi blamed Zionists for killing black babies and running the global drug trade. These statements are inflammatory to say the least and incitement to genocide in truth. Yet, as Americans, what do we care? Iran is just another religion-based “democracy” in a region where that seems to be the norm.
Wrong. Iran is not the norm, and is in fact far from being normal in how it conducts its foreign policy. Accompanying Iran’s threats to destroy Israel are Iran’s threats to the rest of the world. The American security establishment understands that Iran and its proxies don’t just threaten the very existence of the Jewish state, but also recognizes that they are just as dangerous to the United States and the West. Kevin L. Perkins, the associate deputy director of the FBI said recently that Hezbollah, Iran’s terror proxy, is “a significant source of concern for us.” Yes, that means that the highest echelons of the American intelligence communities see Iran as a threat to our very own national security. A quick glance back at the past few years shows Iran’s activity in aiding anti-American militias in Iraq and planning an attack on the Saudi ambassador to America in a Washington D.C. restaurant. This is just the beginning of the long list of Iran’s collision course with American foreign policy. Despite the serious nature of the aforementioned, the most frightening part about Iran is their pursuit of nuclear weapons. While the Iranian leadership claims that they intend to develop nuclear power, the Western world asks why Iran decided to bury a nuclear power facility hundreds of feet into a mountain, effectively hiding it from the rest of the world. As icing on the cake, the United Nations General Assembly is allowing President Ahmadinejad to speak before the international body. Are you willing to stand idly by as a man who incites genocide speaks before one of the most respectable organizations in the world? I certainly am not.
—Steven Perlin Senior, Revelle College
