If there’s anything “disproportionate” about violence in the Middle East these days, it’s the extent to which Iran’s regime stirs up big trouble and not only gets away with it, but casts itself as an aggrieved party. We saw it when Iranian-backed Hezbollah launched a war out of Lebanon against Israel in 2006 — and Iran blamed the conflict on Israel. We’ve seen it in recent years with Iranian-backed terrorism in Iraq — where Iran blamed America.
We’re seeing it again right now, in the fighting between Israel and Gaza. Iran abets the Hamas terrorists who rule Gaza, and who have been firing rockets by the thousands into Israel. Now that Israel is defending itself by fighting back against Hamas, Iran’s Fars News Agency reports that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants Israeli leaders hauled before the International Criminal Court. According to the Fars article, “leading Iranian lawyers” are to be enlisted in this effort, and “a special message” is to be sent to heads of “other countries” (presumably other countries inclined to cater to Iran’s mullocracy, such as Venezuela — currently one of the 18 members of the International Criminal Court bureau “elected” by the ICC’s assembly of member states).
Where did Ahmadinejad get the idea that such a stunt, proposed by his rogue, terrorist-sponsoring regime, might pay off?
Maybe he got it from the UN (progenitor of the ICC), where Iran is in violation of five Security Council resolutions meant to stop its nuclear bomb program, but is nonetheless allowed to sit on the governing boards of a slew of major UN agencies including the WFP, the FAO, UNEP, UNICEF and the flagship UN Development Program (more on this in my Forbes.com column earlier this month on “Iran’s Power at the United Nations“). Maybe Ahmadinejad was encouraged in his notions by the dingbat utterances of Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, who on matters such as Gaza and Israel is promoting a global order in which terrorist enclaves deserve more rights than their democratic prey. Such are the realms of genuine “disproportion.”
Last week, we saw Ahmadinejad popping up on British TV with an “alternative Christmas message” to the Queen’s. Now we have Ahmadinejad as the ambulance-chasing international legal eagle for the terrorists of Hamas. When do we see the Iranian regime held to account for its leading role in the murderous realities behind the stage sets?
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