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Source: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/190300/inside-obamas-meeting-with-jewish-leaders
Legitimizing Iran's Exterminationist Anti-Semitism
(Tablet) Lee Smith - For 36 years now, Iranian officials have threatened to annihilate Israel. There may be different centers of power throughout the regime, but everyone agrees with the Supreme Leader that Israel - the "Zionist cancer" - has got to go. President Obama called American Jewish leaders to a meeting at the White House on Monday. "It was one of the tensest meetings I can ever remember," said one participant who has been invited to many White House sit-downs over the years. "Lots of people challenged him very strongly, like about taking the threats of dictators seriously when Khamenei says death to America, death to Israel, death to the Jews. The president said he knows what the regime is, which is why he is trying to take away their weapons. He didn't dismiss what the Iranians say, he just didn't really address it." Who knows if the Iranians actually mean to make good on their threats against Israel? After all, say the experts, Iran is not irrational. Of course Iran is irrational. It is irrational in its very essence, for anti-Semitism is the form that unreason takes in modern political life. Disregarding the regime's anti-Semitism is to willfully ignore the nature of the regime. To strike a deal with such a regime is willfully perverse and doomed to failure.