Leading Hawk Warns Of Hysteria Over Iran

Is JINSA trying to dissociate itself from it's own plans to strike Iran, as a prelude to nuclear war?
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	(02/09/2007) Leading Hawk Warns Of Hysteria Over Iran Suggestion that war is only option misguided, JINSA official says. James D. Besser - Washington Correspondent Abstract

A leading hawk this week cautioned Jewish leaders to temper their rhetoric about Iran, and particularly language that seems to suggest that war is the only option for dealing with the nuclear threat. Jewish leaders are "thinking Osirak," said Shoshana Bryen, special projects director for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), referring to the successful 1981 Israeli raid against a nuclear reactor in Iraq. "That's facile, simplistic thinking." Bryen argued that the war option should "remain on the table," but warned that successfully targeting Iran's nuclear facilities would be difficult, while the danger of retaliation against U.S. and Israeli interests is "very high." She said "we should have learned from the problems we've had in Iraq that it's not so easy," she said.

But that may be exactly what is happening as Jewish organizations here and many Israeli officials – fearing that the world's resolve to stop Iran's nuclear program is ebbing and that a U.S. administration battered by the continuing war in Iraq may be wavering – raise the rhetorical ante.

The shift in rhetoric includes frequent comparisons of Iran to Nazi Germany and the current crisis to 1938 by leading Israeli political figures such as former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It also includes a mounting tide of apocalyptic projections of what might happen when Iran gets the bomb – a "second Holocaust," in the words of leading Israeli historian Benny Morris. Leading Jewish groups here, including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and The Israel Project, have pumped out a continuous stream of warnings portraying the Iranian threat as immediate and likening the response of the Europeans to the appeasers of the 1930s.

An Iran "press kit" distributed by The Israel Project includes materials depicting Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic religious views and arguing that he "believes that it is his destiny to trigger a period of chaos, war and bloodshed in order for Islam to dominate the world." The Israel Project, too, used Nazi-era comparisons. "If we do not act, we run the risk of placating an extremist and making the same mistake we made with Hitler, which led to World War II and the deaths of millions," according to items in the press kit. Although no major Jewish group is calling for military attacks on Iran, that kind of talk may create the impression in the minds of the public and policymakers in Washington that the Jewish community favors another war, some fear.

"Once you say that Iran is like Nazi Germany and that it is willing to use its nuclear weapons to destroy Israel regardless of the destruction it would bring to their own country, you are really arguing that there is no alternative but for Israel and the United States to attack first," said M.J. Rosenberg, director of policy analysis for the Israel Policy Forum. Rosenberg said the net result might be that U.S. decision makers believe the Jewish community favors the war option. The apocalyptic rhetoric coming from Jewish groups "really is an argument for the United States or Israel to attack first," he said.«

"There are several Jewish groups that have done major lobbying days lately that have covered such issues as Darfur and the minimum wage but have not asked their elected officials to deal with the threat of Iran," she said. "Not surprisingly, non-Jewish elected officials who hear from Jews about Darfur and economic issues but not about Iran wrongly assume that there may be nothing to worry about regarding Iran."