Thank God For Fools

because without them we wouldn't have excellent arguments like that provided by Joel Pollak, who has had his article, "Kasrils and South Africa: apologists for Iran" published in the Mail & Guardian. Pollack responds to Kasril's shrill denunciation of Israel on September 1, titled "Rage of the Elephant"

Pollack chastised Kasrils for his stupid catagorization of Israelis as "Nazis."

Kasrils is right to invoke the Nazi era; however, he has got the labels the wrong way round. Like Hitler’s Germany, Iran is bent on regional domination at any cost, and is imprisoned by an official ideology of anti-Semitic hatred. (The very name "Iran" means "Aryan" and was bestowed on the country in 1935 by Reza Shah Pahlavi, an ardent admirer of Hitler and his racial theories.)

Today, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is determined to pick up where Hitler left off. Not only does he wish to destroy Israel, he also yearns for the collapse of what he calls "liberalism and Western-style democracy." Israel is playing the role of Czechoslovakia, circa 1938: a lone, vulnerable democracy encircled by hostile, totalitarian powers. Like Czechoslovakia, Israel is at risk of being abandoned by fellow democracies, such as South Africa, for short-sighted reasons.

And what are those reasons?

Lately, South Africa has become the chief apologist for Iran in the democratic world. During the war, Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad attempted to deny the fact that Iran has been funding and supplying Hizbullah. Worse, our government has tried to shield Iran’s nuclear programme from action by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Security Council.The minister’s contribution is to paint "the axis of Hizbullah, Hamas, Syria and Iran" as benign forces, merely seeking to restore a regional balance of power.

These are the primary sources of violent instability in the Middle East today, which have long sponsored terror in the region and across the globe. In Africa, for example, Hizbullah has been blamed for fuelling bloody civil wars in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Kasrils, predictably, condemns Israel’s response to Hizbullah. We should not, however, indulge the self-righteousness of a man whose human rights record is indelibly stained by association with Quatro and the Bisho massacre. Last year Kasrils signed an intelligence and defence pact with Zimbabwe in the wake of Operation Murambatsvina, which saw about 700 000 Zimbabweans forcibly removed from their homes by their own government. That is roughly the same number of Palestinians who became refugees during the 1948 war, but Kasrils has nothing to say about the tragedy on South Africa’s doorstep. And while Kasrils professes sympathy for the displaced Palestinians, he fails to mention that Lebanon imprisons these refugees and their descendants in Apartheid-style separation from the rest of Lebanese society. [my emphases]

Sounds like a combination of guilt and ambition sans moral scruples. Please read the whole thing here.