Mick Hartley

At Democratiya (below) I’d recommend Jeffrey Herf’s piece – a translation of a speech delivered in November last year in Frankfurt:

From May 1945 to spring 2006, there was not a single government in the world that both threatened the Jews with mass murder and had the means to carry out such a threat. We have seen anti-Semitic movements, parties, neo-Nazis and skinheads. The Arab states have conducted wars with conventional weapons against Israel. With its aerial strike in 1982, Israel brought Saddam Hussein’s effort to build a nuclear arsenal to a temporary end. However, in 2006, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad changed this situation when he said that Israel should be eliminated from the map and that Iran would insist on its ‘right’ to have nuclear technology. It has been utterly clear to almost everyone inside and outside Iran that by ‘nuclear technology,’ Ahmadinejad means nuclear weapons. In other words, in the spring of 2006, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened the Jews with a second Holocaust. For Germans in the Berlin Republic who think that coming to terms with the Nazi past is a good and necessary thing to do, Ahmadinejad’s threat now poses this question: What will and what can Germany do to prevent Ahmadinejad from having the means to carry out this threat?