The very courageous Melanie Phillips, one of the few people in Britain who dare speak publicly about the threat of Islam to the West, writes about a brutal experience she had on a BBC television show. In addition to enduring the howls of a hostile audience, she came up against the obdurate willful blindness and determined foolishness of the British establishment:

For a distressing snapshot of how Britain is steadily sliding into irrelevance and indeed civilisational defeat, take a look at this week’s edition of BBC TV’s Question Time where I was on the panel. My statement that Iran currently posed the greatest threat to the UK and the west provoked a display of truly shocking ignorance amongst the political class, as well as venomous imbecility and resistance to truth-telling amongst the public.

There was booing and general outrage and disbelief at my remarks that Iran was a mortal threat to the west, that it was working to get a nuclear bomb in order to carry out its threat to exterminate Israel and ratchet up its war against the free world, and that it was impossible to negotiate with the religious fanatics ruling Iran, people who believe that producing an apocalypse will hasten the return to earth of the Shia ‘messiah’, the Mahdi, or ‘hidden Imam’.

All these statements, however, are true.

There are countless references, in books, articles and scholarly journals, to the grip of the “Twelver” sect – the most extreme proponents of the Mahdi belief – on the Iranian ruling elite. Here are just a few.

A former Iranian diplomat who defected to Norway in 2010 warned:

“If Iran is given more time, it will acquire the knowledge necessary to build a nuclear bomb within a year.” Asked whether it would use the bomb against Israel, he said: “If Iran gets to the point where it has an atomic bomb, it will certainly use it, against Israel or any other [enemy] country.”

…“They are busying themselves with ideological preparations for the arrival of the hidden Imam and are preparing the ground for that in a practical way; for this purpose, they are willing to spill much blood and destroy many countries.”’

The grip of “Twelver” fanaticism on the Iranian Revolutionary Guards is described here:

Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, whose journal deals with the return of the Mahdi; in 2005 it wrote that the Koran calls on Muslims “to wage war against the unbelievers and prepare the way for the advent of the Mahdi.” A Yazdi disciple has given the religious justification for the use of nuclear weapons. Yazdi was a teacher at the Haqqani School which trained senior officers in the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian intelligence services. He continues to appear in various events sponsored by the Revolutionary Guards.

This video, which surfaced in 2011, claims that Iran is destined to rise as a great power in the last days of the world to help defeat America and Israel and usher in the return of the Mahdi. And it makes clear the Iranians believe that time is fast approaching.

In 2012, the representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamanei urged action to provoke the reappearance of the Mahdi. …

Despite all this, London Mayor Boris Johnson – in reply to an Iranian woman in the audience who tried to draw a disgusting parallel between the desirability of taking action against genocidal Iran and its putative victim, Israel – came up with the staggering claim that Iran was not trying to manufacture nuclear weapons and was no threat to the west.

This despite the fact that Iran has been conducting acts of terror against western interests since the Iranian revolution in 1979; that it waged war against and caused the deaths of countless British and western forces in Iraq; and that its centrifuges are spinning in order to equip itself with nuclear weapons to carry out its infernal aims, a purpose attested by every western intelligence agency and even by the International Atomic Energy Authority, which said in 2011 that Iran has carried out tests “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device”.

Then there was the view expressed by another panel member, the Energy Secretary Ed Davey, that the new Iranian President Hassan Rohani was a moderate whose election gave hope for a solution to the Iranian crisis. But Rohani is not a moderate at all, merely a wily operator who poses as such in order to dupe western gulls such as Ed Davey. A former nuclear negotiator, Rohani has previously boasted that he enabled Iran to make critical progress with its nuclear programme even while negotiations were proceeding.  … Rohani is neither moderate nor a reformer … The Argentine government has said that Rohani was connected to the 1994 terrorist bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires which killed 85 people and injured 300:

Iranian President-elect Hassan Rohani was on the special Iranian government committee that plotted the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, The Washington Free Beacon reported, citing an indictment by the Argentine government prosecutor investigating the case. According to a 2006 indictment, the decision to launch the attack in Argentina was made within a special operations committee connected to the powerful Supreme National Security Council in August 1993. According to the report, former Iranian intelligence official Abolghasem Mesbahi testified in 2006 that Rohani was a member of the special committee, as he was then serving as secretary of the council. With regard to the committee’s role in the decision to carry out the AMIA attack, Moghadam stated that this decision was made under the direction of Ali Khamenei, and that the other members of the committee were [then-Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi] Rafsanjani, Mir Hejazi, Rohani, Velayati and Fallahijan …

The oafish idiocy and worse of the Question Time audience was bad enough … But the ignorance about matters so vital to the security of the free world, displayed by both a Cabinet Minister and the politician considered by many to be the best future hope of leading the Conservative party to victory, was simply terrifying as an indication of Britain’s now apparently terminal decline.

In her Jerusalem Post column this week, Sarah Honig tells a story about a man being offered a choice between two ways of getting killed.

It is an apt illustration of the choice Obama is offering Israel.

Sarah Honig writes:

Time to quit quibbling. No pedantic hairsplitting can mitigate the evidence: The Obama administration cynically links Iran to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The premise is simple and chilling. If Israel wants a last-minute, last-ditch, quasi-credible American move to keep Iran from obtaining nukes, it must pay the piper by making hefty concessions to the sham paraded as the Palestinian Authority. Boiled down to its bare essence, the White House diktat means that Israel can maybe extricate itself from existential Iranian threats by submitting itself to existential Iranian-proxy threats.

Had Barack Obama ever read Shalom Aleichem’s autobiography he’d have encountered the author’s harrowing recollection of the story his grandfather told him about “the bird-Jew.” That was how the grandfather referred to Noah, a pious innkeeper who lived in constant dread of the gentile village squire. Trembling, Noah headed for the manor to renew his lease. His timing was off, because the courtyard was full of festive guests ready to go hunting.

The squire, in a jovial mood, agreed to renew the lease if Noah would climb the stable roof and pretend to be a bird, so he could shoot him. Fearful of angering the nobleman, the worst consequence the Jew could imagine, Noah obsequiously did his bidding. He went up and, as ordered, bent forward, flung his arms sideways and assumed a birdlike pose. At that point the squire fired and Noah fell, as any slain bird would.

Although realizing he was about to be put to death anyway, the bird-Jew played along with his executioner, still absurdly terrified of what might happen if he didn’t. Obama is the proverbial squire in our own tale, casting Israel as the latter-day bird-Jew.

Israel is now squarely in Obama’s gun sights. It’s blamed for all Mideast ills. Obama, after all, is the high priest of the political theology of American/Western guilt. Israel embodies Western culpability. If Obama preaches American penance vis-à-vis Arabs/Muslims, Israel obviously must atone in more than words for the sins he ascribes to it. …

Patriotic Americans are now told insidiously that by not bowing down to Obama’s ultimatums Israel jeopardizes the lives of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. When depicting a pacified Mideast as a “vital national security interest” that must be secured, the “peeved” Obama puts Israel on notice that he will shove a solution down its intransigent throat.

The nature of his cure is determined by his diagnosis, which in turn is colored by his perception of democracy’s foes as frustrated potential friends. In Obama’s universe, it’s the West’s haughty insensitivity which sparks Arab/Muslim hostility. Islamic expansionism and exclusionism aren’t problems but cultural assets for America. Consequently democratic Israel must sacrifice its self-preservation to facilitate appeasement of Muslims sworn to annihilate the Jewish state.

Obama’s radical worldview places the onus on the victim. Its corollary contention is that were the aggressor’s grievances redressed, all would be hunky-dory.

The great American silent majority may not be fully aware of Obama’s dangerous undertones. Many of his Jewish voters willfully prefer not to understand. They’d rather not admit liability for their political folly – a common psychological shortcoming.

So we Israelis are left alone. It’s up to us not to be bamboozled.

While the current US administration calls the shots, there is no Israeli-American alliance we can remotely count on. Obama will do nothing whatever to even diminish the danger of an Iranian nuclear threat against Israel. Otherwise he wouldn’t have frittered valuable time for more than a year, twiddling his thumbs. The sanctions Obama proposes are preposterously useless anyhow and further diluting them to win Chinese and Russian acquiescence would make them altogether laughable. China and Russia, let’s not forget, are Iran’s principal enablers. Obama knows this.

Had Obama wanted to effectively deal with Iran’s rogue regime, he’d need no allies. America could have unilaterally declared stringent sanctions, imposed them on prime trading partners and enforced an air-and-sea blockade that few would have dared breach. No military attack would be required. [We’re not convinced of this – JB.]

But that’s not Obama’s agenda. We must suspect that he desires a nuclear Iran to render Israel more vulnerable, pitiably dependent and pliable, thereby facilitating his envisioned great rapprochement with the Muslim world.

Obama’s endgame is to debilitate, demoralize and destabilize Israel. All he offers Israelis is a choice of how his inimical goal will be achieved. This may be via allowing Iran the weaponry with which to intimidate Israel or by shrinking Israel into the Auschwitz borders (as ultra-dove Abba Eban called the 1949 armistice lines into which Obama schemes to squeeze us).

We can avoid Iranian nukes by opting for the Auschwitz borders or we can avoid the Auschwitz borders but be bullied by Iranian nukes. The unspoken signal from Washington is: Either way, you’re dead. …

We agree that Obama is intent on debilitating, demoralizing and destabilizing Israel, but we don’t think that is his “endgame”.  Those are means to an end.

Obama’s end is to destroy the State of Israel.