Avi Benlolo: Iran's hatred of Israel must end — and so must the tyranny behind it

National Post

4 hours ago

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No other country on Earth has endured the same relentless combination of verbal abuse, threats of annihilation, and actual terrorism that Israel has faced at the hands of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Since 1979, the Iranian regime — led by its Ayatollahs — has pursued an obsessive, violent campaign against the Jewish state, not only with words but with actions. There is no land disagreement between the two nations. This is hatred — pure, genocidal, and unapologetic.
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From the moment Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in the Islamic Revolution, Israel became a target not just of criticism, but of declared extermination. And while the world often dismisses rhetoric as just that — rhetoric — what followed proved otherwise: embassy and community centre bombings in Argentina, Hezbollah's reign of terror in Lebanon, suicide attacks in Bulgaria and beyond, the funding, arming and training of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, drone and missile barrages, and most recently, the horrific massacre of over 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023.
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Behind it all, directing and enabling the violence: Tehran.
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In April 2024, Iran made history by launching over 300 drones and missiles directly at Israel — a historic and unprecedented escalation. It marked the first time the regime attacked Israel directly from its own territory. That wasn't just a strategic military move. It was a message of hatred from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose decades of speeches have called Israel a 'cancer,' a 'tumour,' and a 'rabid dog' that must be 'uprooted.'
Who can forget former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threat to 'wipe Israel off the face of the map.' In any other context, these words would be disqualifying for a world leader. But in the world of international diplomacy, Iran has been coddled, empowered, and allowed to spread its hate at the United Nations and across Europe, where this antisemitic terrorism has been tolerated and sometimes endorsed.
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But Iran's campaign goes even deeper — it's not only aimed at Israel's destruction, but at the erasure of Jewish memory itself. In 2006 and again in 2016, the Iranian regime sponsored global Holocaust cartoon contests, inviting participants to mock the systematic murder of six million Jews. This grotesque state-sanctioned denial of history reveals the depth of Iran's antisemitism: it is not enough for the regime to threaten Israel's future — it seeks to defile the Jewish past.
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Let us be clear: the only other time in recent history when the Jewish people were threatened with total extermination was under Adolf Hitler. Like Hitler, Ali Khameinei cloaks his genocidal aspirations in ideology — this time not in racial purity but in extreme religious fanaticism. And like Hitler, he and his predecessor has used Jews and Israel as a convenient scapegoat to validate his existence, distract from his domestic failures, and rally radicals to his cause.