Given all the sabre-rattling over Iran and the repetition of the idea that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the latest in the long line of new Hitlers, Jonathan Cook wonders about Iran's population of 25,000 Jews. If Iran is seeking nuclear weapons to enable an attack on Israel, to "wipe [it] off the map" (so goes the widely disseminated mistranslation of a Ahmadinejad speech), for the purpose of exterminating Jews--how is it that Iran's Jewish population is generally uninterested in leaving?
Also, Left I on the News wonders why those who are "so threatened by Islamic fundamentalism, and think that the hold of this religion is so powerful", ignore Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's August 2005 fatwa that said "that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons." Could it be, he suggests, that these people "know they can't talk about the power of Islamic fundamentalism in one breath, and then deny its power (in the form of a Fatwa issued by the 'Supreme Leader') in the next"?