The second Holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or ten years’ time, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran’s acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will co[n]voke in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Ahmedinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go ahead. The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel’s half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel’s anti-missile batteries and Home Guard units.
With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 8,000 square miles), probably four or five hits will suffice : No more Israel. A million or more Israelis, in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem areas, will die immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about seven million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will be quite impersonal.
Fault has been found with Benny from various quarters, but he's not the only one for whom this fearful (but not unimaginable) potentiality seems to be acquiring an air of inevitability. Here's Wolf Biermann:
The Hizbullah leader with the velvety voice preaches in Lebanon that Arab citizens of the State of Israel who are hit every now and then by rockets should be happy because they'll go to paradise as Allah's martyrs. And the lunatic leader of Iran who is bank-rolling the carnage, copies down speeches by Goebbels and Hitler, word for word, like a school boy. The whole world is convinced that Iran will soon have its atom bomb and launch vehicles as flying Persian carpets to boot. Ahmadinejad threatens: We'll do the Jews a favour and turn their Auschwitz lie into truth, then we'll put the final solution to the Jewish problem into action.
Supposing, just supposing, they've guessed it right, the question that follows is, does the dying Samson bring the house down as he goes atomically into that good night?
