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Netanyahu: Iran Says Israel Is the Small Satan and the United States Is the Great Satan

(CNN) Piers Morgan - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview on CNN Thursday: "The 20th century passed by a lot of the Arab world and the Muslim world, and then in comes the information technology of the 21st century and is telling all these people what they missed out on. And this creates the turbulence. Will it end quickly? I doubt it." Q: What is the nightmare scenario for you? Netanyahu: "That you get another Iran. You had a revolution five years ago in Lebanon. A million Lebanese, that's equivalent to 20 million Egyptians, walked in the streets of Beirut chanting for freedom, chanting for a secular, reformist, liberal Lebanese state. Five years later, Lebanon is controlled by Hizbullah which is controlled by Iran. That's what we don't want to see. We don't want to see the stark medievalism that represses women, that crushes the rights of people, that rolls us back a millennium, that fosters violence and does everything that we abhor - that it would take over. And I think these are the two poles. One is real democratic change and the other is a descent to militant Islamism that squashes all freedoms and threatens the peace of everyone." "Everybody says take the nonproliferation treaty and expand it and bring Israel into it. No, the problem in the Middle East is not that countries don't join it, it's that those countries who join the nonproliferation treaty have violated it left and right beginning with Iraq under Saddam Hussein, going on to Libya, Syria, recently. They're all signatories of the NPT. They all developed nuclear weapons programs. Syria just did that and was exposed and Iran is doing it every day." "The problem in the Middle East is this tyrannical, medieval, terrorist regime of Iran in which the mullahs and the ayatollahs want nuclear weapons with which they openly threaten to make another holocaust, to wipe out the Jewish state. But that's just for starters. They say that we're the small Satan, that the United States is the great Satan." "Seven prime ministers have tried to get peace with the Palestinians since the peace process began in Oslo in 1993. Some of them made extraordinarily generous concessions. And it didn't work, because the Palestinians, first under Arafat and now under Abu Mazen [Abbas], have not picked it up. They refuse to go the distance and actually recognize the Jewish state and make the compromises that are required from both sides. The entire world is focusing on the compromises that are necessary from Israel's side. And I'm prepared to make a lot of those compromises for peace. But they're not focusing on the fact that the Palestinians refuse to make the necessary compromises that are required on their side for peace." "I nearly died several times in firefights. I had a brother lost in battle. I had many friends lost. One of the experiences I remember was as an 18-year-old soldier, just a few short weeks after entering the army, holding a friend who died in my arms....We want peace more than any other people. We pray for peace, yearn for peace, dream about peace. I want to make sure that the peace holds. And...the only peace that would hold is a peace you can defend...a peace with security." "Talk about concessions. We uprooted 10,000 Israelis out of Gaza, just eliminated the settlements that were supposed to be the obstacle to peace. We walked out. Iran walked in. We didn't get peace. We walked out of Lebanon....Iran walked in. Now they say just walk out of the West Bank. Make the concession, come on, do it again, a third time....We say that Jerusalem has to remain united under Israel." Q: The Palestinians have said that they're prepared to bring Hamas into government....Could you ever imagine having any kind of workable [Palestinian] administration that involved Hamas? Netanyahu: Can you imagine a peace deal with al-Qaeda? Of course not....Hamas has a constitution [that] calls for the annihilation of Israel. Not only that, but the expansion of r
2011-03-18 00:00:00
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