LESSON OF '38.

Byline: Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman

WHILE Time Magazine chose Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono as its 2005 Persons of the Year, the cover of the Devil's Advocate certainly would bestow the honor on Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Since ``winning'' July's presidential sweepstakes, he has defied the world over nuclear weapons, purged his country's diplomatic corps of ``moderates'' and all but declared war on Israel and the Jewish people.

How to respond to Ahmadinejad's in-your-face challenges? Retreating into silent paralysis would be read in the Mideast much as the way the world's silent acquiescence to Saddam's gassing of the Kurds was - as a tacit green light to up the ante.

So world leaders have two choices: Either ``decouple'' Iran's nuclear threat from Tehran's anti-Jewish genocidal declarations, in order to first defuse a clear-and-present danger, or insist on linking the nuclear and ideological threats, because there can be no meaningful nuclear deal with a regime flouting every international norm by threatening genocide.

On the surface, the ``decoupling'' strategy favored by foreign-policy ``realists'' seems compelling. A nuclearized Iran would pose an immediate threat to its neighbors and to most European capitals. Deal with the genocidal bombast only after an understanding on Tehran's atomic designs has been reached.

But treating genocidal threats as mere tactical bravado, rather than a strategic goal, proved disastrous at a pivotal moment of the 20 century.

In 1938, Western democracies recognized that they faced an aggressive Germany with designs on its neighbors led by a totalitarian dictator whose statecraft included inciting Jew-hatred on an international scale. In hopes of avoiding war, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Edouard Daladier decided to ignore threats against the Jews while seeking diplomatic compromise to achieve, as Chamberlain worded it, ``peace in our time.'''

It didn't work. Appeasement - the surrender of democratic Czechoslovakia - just whetted Adolf Hitler's aggressive ideological and territorial appetites. The result was a world war within a year and the Nazi war against the Jews that forever shamed European civilization.

Today, in the era of weapons of mass destruction and the Internet, the stakes are even higher. Tehran's mullahs are weaponizing hatred and marketing it globally, the same way they plan to weaponize uranium for missile warheads to menace Israel and Europe. Their hatred of Jews and Judaism is no fleeting tactic, but a pillar of their world view and game plan.

The line between anti-Semitic hate speech and terrorism was long ago erased when Iranian agents in 1994 murdered and maimed hundreds by bombing the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, members of Hezbollah, the mullahs' terrorist lackeys in Lebanon, can literally blow up peace at a moment's notice by unleashing 10,000 rockets aimed at Northern Israel's civilian population. And it should surprise no one that President Ahmadinejad chose Mecca, Islam's holiest site, as the place where he threw down the gauntlet to the civilized world by threatening genocide against Israel.

While this campaign may be geared in part to deflect anger over the regime's inability to meet the spiritual and material needs of Iran's burgeoning youthful population, it is also a bold stroke by a non-Arab leader to grab the center stage of power and influence in the broader Muslim world.

To drive home the point, Ahmadinejad shortly thereafter marched in Tehran - at the head of tens of thousands of young demonstrators burning Israeli and American flags - to a public square where he again dismissed what he called the ``myth that Jews were massacred'' in the Holocaust and suggested that the Jewish state - every bit as much a rightful member of the United Nations as Iran - be removed to Austria, Canada or Alaska. Tehran's state-controlled media quickly echoed their president's death wish against Israel and unveiled two new films that deny the Holocaust and validate the conspiracies of ``The Protocols of The Elders of Zion,'' a notorious anti-Semitic forgery.

Meanwhile, not a single Arab or Muslim government has condemned Tehran's pre-genocidal campaign. Perhaps government leaders remember how former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri - killed last year by Syrian agents - had put himself on the wrong side of Damsacus' Bashir Assad. In 2001, Harari courageously canceled an international Holocaust deniers' conference, scheduled for Beirut and organized by Jorgen Graf, a professional bigot who fled Switzerland to Tehran after being sentenced to jail for defaming the memory of Hitler's victims.

Ahmadinejad personifies the near-triumph of the 21st century's most dangerous ideology. No, not theocratic Islamic extremism, though that's menacing enough. Rather, the ideology of Holocaust denial, transmuted from European bigots into the Arab and Muslim mainstream, where it has come to serve as the great unifier coalescing haters - Arab or Persian, Muslim or Christian or others across every ethnic, religious and ideological line.

Despite recent condemnation, the world continues to give Mideast hate-mongers mixed signals. In June 2005, U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan eloquently described the world body as ``emerging from the ashes of the Holocaust' to rectify great evils like Jew hatred. But the U.N. General Assembly has failed even to censure Tehran for threatening a genocide against a member state. At the recent U.N. Palestine Day, Annan appeared in front of a map of the Mideast minus Israel.

It's beginning to dawn on some world leaders that we are approaching a 21st century ``Munich moment.'' Will Washington succumb to threats that Iran would activate a terrorist network to ``burn'' American cities if the world took action against its nuclear program? Will the European Union seek to appease Tehran's official policy of Jew-hatred in hopes that any toxic fallout would be limited to the Middle East?

After the riots in France, suicide bombings in London and Islamist murder in Holland, people everywhere - even in France, Iran's longtime ally - knows that they are all in the cross hairs of terror and hate. And we all know that 2006 is different from 1938. Now, global delivery systems of propaganda and weapons of mass destruction exist to fulfill Hitler's blueprint. But at the dawn of 2006, the jury is still out on whether the world has the will to thwart Tehran's twin threats before it is too late.

CAPTION(S):

drawing

Drawing:

(color) Iranian threat

Jorge Irribarren/Staff Artist