North Star Writers Group

With the above, his 1,453,796th threat to annihilate Israel, Iranian strongman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad officially passed the sound of fingernails scratching on a chalkboard on the List of Really Annoying Things We'd Just As Soon Never Hear Again. He's coming up on the outside of Al Gore's endless predictions that farmers in Kansas better have hip waders by July and still has a ways to go to catch Michael Moore's truly ignorant praising of communist Cuban health care.

Look, I know it's easy to have fun at the expense of someone who dresses in ’70s leisure suits. And it's hard to take seriously someone who's seemingly so disconnected from reality. But the sad fact is that this is a very dangerous man, and not just because he's trying to put nuclear warheads on top of North Korean Taepo Dong missiles. The line above demonstrates very clearly that Ahmadinejad has no qualms whatsoever about wiping out a nation and a people in Israel that has never done anything to him. Someone that detached from morality is always a threat, one to be taken gravely even if the only weapon he possesses is a collection of rocks to throw.

Ahmadinejad has blinded himself to the fact that Israel was acting entirely in self-defense last summer, moving into Lebanon only after missiles were being lobbed into it from there by Hezbollah, which has long been a puppet of both Iran and Syria. Israel had previously left southern Lebanon – after occupying it for years for this exact same reason – in hopes that without having those grounds for complaint, some progress towards peace might be made. Israel was given acclaim by the world at that time, as she always is when she retreats and gives things up in exchange for nothing. But what did the pullback accomplish? Nothing aside from allowing Hezbollah rockets to reach as much further into Israel as the buffer zone had been wide. And did the world acknowledge this and blame the appropriate parties (i.e. not Israel)? Of course not. The usual silence followed, as it typically does when the conventional wisdom is proven wrong yet again.

The only mistake Israel made in Lebanon was not finishing off Hezbollah once and for all, thus allowing them to regroup and fight another day, which they almost certainly will.

And just what is Ahmadinejad intimating? That Israel has no right to self-defense when brutally attacked for the awful "crime" of existing? That unless it rolls over and allows itself to be pummeled into oblivion, he'll obliterate them in a single radioactive stroke? Some choice that is – death by a thousand blows, or immediately. Either way, you're dead, which is entirely the point.

I'm not going spend any more time trying to analyze Mahmoud – reasoning with crazy people bound by no set of rules is by definition an exercise in futility. There is more than enough justification for taking this nutburger out. He routinely threatens both Israel and the United States with violence and destruction. He is obtaining both the weapons to kill many thousands and the means to deliver them. He is blatantly interfering in Iraq and helping to shed the blood of American soldiers. He oppresses his own people, using torture and murder to keep control and viciously siccing his police forces on those young Iranians who so bravely dare to demonstrate against him and his regime.

And last, but certainly not least, he was part of the mob of screaming madmen who took American citizens hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 under the watchful eye of the Ayatollah Khomeini. He still hasn't had some much-deserved payback for that little stunt, much less all the evil that has followed in its wake in the nearly 30 years since.

Perhaps it should happen in a more covert way, or perhaps we'll get real lucky and he'll be toppled from within. Or maybe we'll just have to do it the old-fashioned way. But no good end can come from keeping this creep around even one day longer. One way or another, Ahmadinejad has to go.

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