http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2008/02/ahmadinejad_israel_mass_killings/

Editor’s note: The following is a comment to an article by Stephen Rosen posted to MESH.

I, too, agree with Stephen Rosen that Ahmadinejad’s recent words reducing Israel and its people to the status of a disease should serve as a wake-up call, but I don’t see this as representing a particularly noteworthy rhetorical escalation. Iranian leaders and Islamists in general have been speaking this way about Israel for a long time: Khomeini himself was particularly volatile and vulgar on the subject, and many of the “reformists” who still claim to follow his “line” are not so easily outdone in this area themselves. The wake-up call, in other words, has been shouted from the rooftops for a long time now, but if the specific usage of “microbes” does the trick-as opposed to “devils,” “pigs,” “a cancer,” “murderers,” “pharaohs,” “baby butchers,” “perpetrators of genocide,” “killers of the prophets,” “enemies of God,” etc.-then so be it.

The premier difference between previous governments and the present one in this connection is not one of intent or aspiration, but one of perceived ability to prevail. A variety of regional developments have contributed to the genuinely held outlook among members of Ahmadinejad’s administration, and in the mind of the President himself, that Israel has deteriorated from a potent nemesis to a Potemkin village, to a “hollow tree” that the “combined breath of the world’s fasting Muslims [during Ramadan] can easily topple.”

Few motifs have been as ubiquitous in the media of the Islamic Republic over the last several years than what is described as the implosion of the “Zionist entity”: every ill plaguing Israeli society, from drugs and violence in the schools to difficulty in absorbing Russian immigrants to (believe it or not) the decline in Sabbath observance is reported with relish as an indication of the increasing demoralization of the eternal foe. If Iranian words lead to Iranian actions in the near future where they did not do so in the past, this is not so much a function of a shift in terminology as it is a result of the expanding belief among Iranian leaders that they can threaten Israel and chip away at its security with relative impunity. This perception must be changed by transforming the reality that led to it-that is, by restoring to full throttle Israel’s deterrent power. This, in turn, will bring about a softening of the rhetoric, which is a reflection of the reality and not vice versa.

While I agree with Mehdi Khalaji that Khamenei can sometimes serve as a counterweight to Ahmadinejad, the rhetoric of the Supreme Leader on the subject of Israel (and America) is hardly less fierce than that of the chief executive: the Supreme Leader has quite the mouth on him when the mood strikes. As for the remainder of the government and populace, I believe that we should stop deluding ourselves that one has to be a doctrinaire Islamist ideologue in order to see the annihilation of Israel as a desideratum. Most Iranians have imbibed cum lacte, and throughout their lives, the notion-the “absolute truth”-that Zionism is a (is the) source of profound evil, and although for many this idea was long ago reduced to a mere mantra, a meaningless slogan, it should never be forgotten that such mantras and slogans, when they cloy in the conscious mind, burrow ever deeper into the recesses of the psyche, and are installed down underneath the level of meaning, in the place where basic instincts, automatic assumptions and ontological verities reside. When the time is ripe-and it will be soon-the decades of propaganda pounded into the brains of Iranians and other Muslims will be reactivated in order to create an atmosphere conducive to the eradication of an entire population.

Here in Tel Aviv, we haven’t slept well for a while now.

Ze’ev Maghen is professor of Persian language and Islamic history and chair of the department of Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.