Netanyahu on Iran, once more once

The Office of the Israeli Prime Minister has posted Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency. It is an interesting speech at whose heart lies the question of Iran:

I think that the development of nuclear weapons by Iran will be a pivot of history, will change the balance of power irrevocably in the world. When people with unlimited ambitions of aggression get unlimited weapons, what they believe are weapons of unlimited power, the demon is uncorked, and it’s happened before.

Up to the point when they think that they’ve got the power to work out their mad designs, up to that point, they’re careful, even though they can be quite aggressive and they are, they can use terror and they can use subterfuge and they can use many other acts of violence, but this is nothing compared to the point where they think they’ve assumed the critical mass of power necessary to carry out their fantasies. This is the greatest mistake of history – to assume that people will behave rationally when they’re fundamentally irrational when you give them the power of mass death. Iran is seeking the power of mass death, and it’s enough to see what they’re doing now to realize what they’ll do then. Because what they are doing now is conducting a worldwide web of terror – brazen, unabashed, across a dozen countries. That number is growing every day, with their henchman, Hezbollah – they’ve just been exposed in Bulgaria, but they’re exposed everywhere. Governments know it, they know it, but they don’t call it like it is, and I congratulate Bulgaria for doing so. You should congratulate them too. And in addition what they’re doing, they’re conducting a brazen campaign of cyber attacks against everyone – against Israel, against the United States.

This is the unseen attack, but it’s felt and it will be felt more and more. And they’re arming their tentacles, their poisoned tentacles of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah with tens of thousands of rockets and deadly weapons. They’re threatening, I believe, not only the security of Israel but the security of every regime in the Middle East, and certainly the flow of oil from this region. And certainly their development of nuclear weapons will spark a nuclear arms race. It will make the Middle East a nuclear tinderbox. It will change the world. We’ve not seen anything like it. We’ve not seen since the advent of nuclear weapons a power that could contemplate using those weapons with happy abandon – they say so. Nobody has said so since the Cuban missile crisis, over a half a century ago. Nobody has said that.

They say it. They move forward. They’re progressing. They’re getting closer to the red line that I had set at the UN. They’re building rapid centrifuges: that is centrifuges that enrich the uranium needed to make nuclear bombs at three times the pace so that they could cross that red line and get to a high enrichment to a sufficient amount of 90% enriched uranium within a much shorter time. They’re doing all that. So far, they’ve not been stopped. And the sanctions themselves – even tougher sanctions – will not stop them.

Case in point, North Korea. Have tough sanctions stopped North Korea? No. And the fact that they produced a nuclear explosion reverberates everywhere in the Middle East, and especially in Iran. They say, “Where is the world? Where is the international community? Where is the tough response?” It’s a question that everybody deserves to ask. Sanctions alone will not stop the nuclear program of Iran….

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