WarSclerotic

Rouhani’s charm offensive worryingly effective, admits top minister | The Times of Israel.

Netanyahu, at UN next week, will have to refocus world attention on the fact that Iran still speeding to the bomb, says Gilad Erdan

Interior Minister Gilad Erdan (photo credit: Gideon Markowicz/Flash90/File)

Iranian President Hasan Rouhani’s conciliatory rhetoric from the UN podium and in interviews with the US media is having an impact, a senior Israeli minister acknowledged on Wednesday, adding that he was concerned that the facts of Iran’s accelerating drive to nuclear weapons were being obscured amid the charm offensive.

“I’m more than worried. I’m distraught,” said Home Front Defense and Communications Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud), a member of Israel’s key decision-making security cabinet. “Rouhani’s language is having its effect.”

Rouhani pledged in a largely conciliatory debut speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday that Iran posed no international threat, opposed wars, and was not seeking nuclear weapons, prompting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to issue a bitter response, at 1 a.m. Wednesday Israel-time, that slammed the Iranian president’s address as a “cynical… hypocritical… PR charade.”

Ahead of Netanyahu’s own trip to the General Assembly next week, Erdan said it now fell to the prime minister to refocus international attention “on the facts” behind the rhetoric, and that those facts made plain that Iran’s bid for nuclear weaponry had not been slowed, much less halted. “The centrifuges are spinning faster,” said Erdan in an Israel Radio interview. “There’s also a plutonium core.”

Erdan acknowledged a growing sense that Israel — whose delegates were ordered by Netanyahu to leave the UN hall for Rouhani’s speech — is increasingly isolated in its tough line on Iran, with President Barack Obama having pledged Tuesday to “test” the diplomatic route to solving the nuclear standoff. Erdan said he hoped Netanyahu’s US visit, “including his meetings with international leaders, will have an effect.” The prime minister is to meet with Obama at the White House early next week.

In Erdan’s reading, the fact that Rouhani was elected, and that he is speaking out in moderate tones, is a direct consequence of Iran’s urgent imperative to heal its economy by getting international sanctions lifted. But the sanctions, the minister said, have not slowed the nuclear program. “There’s no change.”

Rouhani could have offered at least some step in his speech “connected to the [relevant] UN resolutions [on Iran’s unsanctioned nuclear program] or to the IAEA report on the military characteristics of the program. But there was nothing,” said Erdan. “He even refused to shake Obama’s hand. Remember, he’s not the one who makes the decisions [on the nuclear program],” said Erdan. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the only one who matters where that is concerned, “and he has not given the word” for genuine change.

As things stand, said Erdan, Iran poses “an existential threat” not only to Israel, but to the world.

He also said that Rouhani earlier this week presided over a military parade which featured a Shehab-3 missile truck bearing the slogan “Israel must be destroyed.” And he lamented that, although Rouhani made comments in a CNN interview Tuesday condemning the Holocaust, he was “not pushed hard enough” on the issue.

Other Likud leaders echoed Erdan’s themes Wednesday. While agreeing that the Iranian leader “didn’t deny the Holocaust” in the CNN appearance, Minister of Intelligence Yuval Steinitz said during an Israel Radio interview that Rouhani “didn’t condemn those who have denied it,” including previous Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other Iranian politicians.

Ze’ev Elkin, Deputy Foreign Minister, told Army Radio that just because Rouhani recognized that the Holocaust occurred doesn’t mean Iran is “enlightened and cultivated,” since “Iranian spiritual leaders who have denied the Holocaust are still in place.”

“I am not a historian and when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust it is the historians that should reflect,” Rouhani said during his interview with Christiane Amanpour. “But in general I can tell you that any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime the Nazis created towards the Jews, is reprehensible and condemnable.”

Steinitz, who was at the United Nations as part of Israel’s delegation to the UN General Assembly, told reporters that Rouhani is playing a “game of deception” with regards to Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

“We heard a lot of new rhetoric but zero new steps or even zero new commitments to meet the UN Security Council resolutions [on the nuclear issue],” Steinitz noted.

Steinitz and Erdan also defended Netanyahu’s decision to order the Israeli delegation to leave the hall for Rouhani’s speech, a move criticized by Finance Minister Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) as “a mistake” that made Israel look like “a perennial rejectionist.”

Tiger in sheep’s clothing – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Op-ed: Israel’s job is to convince world that Iran’s conciliatory rhetoric is just another ploy

Hagai Segal

The Israeli response to the Iranian reconciliation offensive was quick and worthy. Even if there is some chance that Tehran is giving up on its nuclear adventure, we must assume that it isn’t. A carnivorous tiger has to maintain a vegetarian lifestyle for at least five years before it achieves the status of a sheep.

Meanwhile, it is hard to detect any real vegetarian habits on the Iranian side. It is only the music that has been refined a little. The international sanctions are a burden on the ayatollahs’ regime, and it is resorting to trickery in order to have them lifted. The first ploy was the election of Rohani as president by disqualifying candidates who posed a threat, and the most recent trick is the release of moderate statements the international community likes to hear. Rohani’s remarks are aimed at allowing this tired and wavering community to determine that the Iranian president has climbed down from the nuclear tree.

Iran is “loyal” to its pledge not to seek nuclear weapons, President Rohani said in a statement to the press before leaving for the display of peace at the UN General Assembly in New York. This is a lie. Even if Iran does not succeed in developing these weapons, it undoubtedly aspires to develop them. A homemade atomic bomb has been at the top of Iran’s list of aspirations since the 1980s. It has never officially declared this, but history has taught us that insane countries are careful not to expose their claws before they are able to accomplish what they set out to do. Until that time, they try to confuse the enlightened world with conciliation initiatives and peace babble.

Israel’s job at this time is to make sure the enlightened world does not get confused. As long as Iran dreams out loud of annihilating Israel, we must not believe it when it claims its nuclear industry is meant for civilian purposes only. Since when is the regime in Tehran interested in its citizens?

Ever since the revolution of 1979, Iran has been run by a belligerent and cruel regime. Currently it is experiencing operational difficulties that are causing it to slow down the race toward a bomb, but this delay is merely part of the plan to accelerate the nuclear program. Iran is trying to show that it is extending its hand in peace, but we must continue to step on its thumb.

Israel Hayom | Rouhani’s farce.

Boaz Bismuth

Israel Hayom | Obama waves the white flag.

Prof. Abraham Ben-Zvi

Obama launches diplomacy with Tehran after quietly accepting Iran’s current nuclear capabilities.

Barack Obama announces diplomacy with Iran

Iranian President Rouhani conspicuously avoided shaking the hand President Barack Obama extended to his government at the UN Tuesday, Sept. 24, by absenting himself from the UN reception for world readers. He made this gesture under strong international spotlight to underscore the value Iran places on being respected as an equal in the negotiations ahead with the United States, Iranian sources stress.

Although his words were relatively mild for an Iranian revolutionary, Rouhani nonetheless made no concessions on Tehran’s fundamentals: “Acceptance of and respect for implementation of the right to enrichment inside Iran and enjoyment of other related nuclear rights provides “the only path to the framework to manage our differences.”

Obama knew the “handshake rebuff” was coming, yet he went through with his announcement of direct engagement with Iran earlier Tuesday. To give his rhetoric weight, he demonstratively instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to take charge of the pursuit of “face to face negotiations” with Tehran.

The link Obama made in his speech between the Iranian and Palestinians negotiating processes as the two focal issues of his Middle East policy was further embodied by his appointment of the same official, John Kerry, to take charge of both tracks. This has placed Israel at a disadvantage on both fronts.
Kerry finds the Iranian track in good shape. It has been secretly active for the past two months between president Obama and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Rouhani, as first revealed by debkafile. Oman’s Sultan Qaboos was their go-between.

The Secretary of State wins a flying start from the four points of agreement they have already reached:

1. Iran’s nuclear capabilities will be preserved in their present state. Tehran has already pocketed respect for its right to enrich uranium and keep back in the country all accumulated stocks, including the quantities enriched to the 20 percent level (a short hop to weaponised grade).

2. Tehran accepts a cap on the number of centrifuges enriching uranium at the Natanz facility. The exact number has not been decided.
The number of machines for enriching uranium to 5 percent is still at issue. There are no restrictions on centrifuges generating a lower level of purity.
Discussions on this point have not been finalized, since Washington wants to limit the number of advanced IR2 and IR1 centrifuges in operation and Tehran is holding out against this,

3. Iran will sign the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty-NPT, which allows International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to make unannounced visits outside declared nuclear sites, when they are suspected of carrying out banned operations.
It will also allow the IAEA to install cameras in the chambers where the centrifuges are spinning and not just the areas where the enriched uranium is deposited.
Here too, it is not clear whether Tehran will also stipulated that Israel sign the same article and permit inspections of its reputed nuclear sites.

4.  The US and European Union will gradually lift all sanctions.

The linkage President Obama made between the Iranian and Palestinian negotiating tracks is puzzling:

Does it imply that the more land Israel gives up on the West Bank for a Palestinian state, the more heavily he will lean on Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program?

Was the president suggesting that if Israel is ready to evacuate settlements and reach a land swap deal with the Palestinians, he will be all the more ready to use force to preempt a nuclear-armed Iran?

If that is the president’s thinking, he is giving the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, by accepting or rejecting the extent of Israeli concessions, the power to determine the endgame of US nuclear negotiations with Iran.
Does that make sense?

Obama’s interconnection of the two issues, if that can be extrapolated from his words, is self defeating: It would allow Tehran to carry on with its nuclear weapons program while spouting more pacific slogans to the American public and Binyamin Netanyahu to refuse to pull Israel out of substantial areas in Judea and Samaria, while advising the Palestinians to be satisfied with the control they have over seven West Bank cities and their economic autonomy.
Buried under the verbal avalanche produced in two days of UN business, was a major diplomatic concession tossed by Obama at Iran’s feet: His call on the UN Security Council to enforce Syria’s compliance with the international ban on chemical weapons as a major challenge to the international community.

First he shunted the Syrian chemical issue aside by relegating to the US Congress a decision on limited US military intervention.He then put it on the table for a US-Russian deal in Geneva; and finally he has passed it on to the UN. The Russians have made it clear that they will block any Security Council measures that would hold Syria to account for non-compliance with the Chemical Weapons ban.

So the buck-passing has reached a dead end and Iran’s ally Bashar Assad is off the hook for using poison gas against his own people.

Arab-Israeli Fatalities Rank 49th :: Daniel Pipes.

( Thanks for this Mladen… –  JW )

The Arab-Israeli conflict is often said, not just by extremists, to be the world’s most dangerous conflict – and, accordingly, Israel is judged the world’s most belligerent country.

For example, British prime minister Tony Blair told the U.S. Congress in July 2003 that “Terrorism will not be defeated without peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Here it is that the poison is incubated. Here it is that the extremist is able to confuse in the mind of a frighteningly large number of people the case for a Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel.” This viewpoint leads many Europeans, among others, to see Israel as the most menacing country on earth.

But is this true? It flies in the face of the well-known pattern that liberal democracies do not aggress; plus, it assumes, wrongly, that the Arab-Israeli conflict is among the most costly in terms of lives lost.

To place the Arab-Israeli fatalities in their proper context, one of the two co-authors, Gunnar Heinsohn, has compiled statistics to rank conflicts since 1950 by the number of human deaths incurred. Note how far down the list is the entry in bold type.

Conflicts since 1950 with over 10,000 Fatalities (all figures rounded)*

1	40,000,000	Red China, 1949-76 (outright killing, manmade famine, Gulag)
2	10,000,000	Soviet Bloc: late Stalinism, 1950-53; post-Stalinism, to 1987 (mostly Gulag)
3	4,000,000	Ethiopia, 1962-92: Communists, artificial hunger, genocides
4	3,800,000	Zaire (Congo-Kinshasa): 1967-68; 1977-78; 1992-95; 1998-present
5	2,800,000	Korean war, 1950-53
6	1,900,000	Sudan, 1955-72; 1983-2006 (civil wars, genocides)
7	1,870,000	Cambodia: Khmer Rouge 1975-79; civil war 1978-91
8	1,800,000	Vietnam War, 1954-75
9	1,800,000	Afghanistan: Soviet and internecine killings, Taliban 1980-2001
10	1,250,000	West Pakistan massacres in East Pakistan (Bangladesh 1971)
11	1,100,000	Nigeria, 1966-79 (Biafra); 1993-present
12	1,100,000	Mozambique, 1964-70 (30,000) + after retreat of Portugal 1976-92
13	1,000,000	Iran-Iraq-War, 1980-88
14	900,000	Rwanda genocide, 1994
15	875,000	Algeria: against France 1954-62 (675,000); between Islamists and the government 1991-2006 (200,000)
16	850,000	Uganda, 1971-79; 1981-85; 1994-present
17	650,000	Indonesia: Marxists 1965-66 (450,000); East Timor, Papua, Aceh etc, 1969-present (200,000)
18	580,000	Angola: war against Portugal 1961-72 (80,000); after Portugal’s retreat (1972-2002)
19	500,000	Brazil against its Indians, up to 1999
20	430,000	Vietnam, after the war ended in 1975 (own people; boat refugees)
21	400,000	Indochina: against France, 1945-54
22	400,000	Burundi, 1959-present (Tutsi/Hutu)
23	400,000	Somalia, 1991-present
24	400,000	North Korea up to 2006 (own people)
25	300,000	Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, 1980s-1990s
26	300,000	Iraq, 1970-2003 (Saddam against minorities)
27	240,000	Colombia, 1946-58; 1964-present
28	200,000	Yugoslavia, Tito regime, 1944-80
29	200,000	Guatemala, 1960-96
30	190,000	Laos, 1975-90
31	175,000	Serbia against Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, 1991-1999
32	150,000	Romania, 1949-99 (own people)
33	150,000	Liberia, 1989-97
34	140,000	Russia against Chechnya, 1994-present
35	150,000	Lebanon civil war, 1975-90
36	140,000	Kuwait War, 1990-91
37	130,000	Philippines: 1946-54 (10,000); 1972-present (120,000)
38	130,000	Burma/Myanmar, 1948-present
39	100,000	North Yemen, 1962-70
40	100,000	Sierra Leone, 1991-present
41	100,000	Albania, 1945-91 (own people)
42	80,000	Iran, 1978-79 (revolution)
43	75,000	Iraq, 2003-present (domestic)
44	75,000	El Salvador, 1975-92
45	70,000	Eritrea against Ethiopia, 1998-2000
46	68,000	Sri Lanka, 1997-present
47	60,000	Zimbabwe, 1966-79; 1980-present
48	60,000	Nicaragua, 1972-91 (Marxists/natives etc,)
49	51,000	Arab-Israeli conflict 1950-present
50	50,000	North Vietnam, 1954-75 (own people)
51	50,000	Tajikistan, 1992-96 (secularists against Islamists)
52	50,000	Equatorial Guinea, 1969-79
53	50,000	Peru, 1980-2000
54	50,000	Guinea, 1958-84
55	40,000	Chad, 1982-90
56	30,000	Bulgaria, 1948-89 (own people)
57	30,000	Rhodesia, 1972-79
58	30,000	Argentina, 1976-83 (own people)
59	27,000	Hungary, 1948-89 (own people)
60	26,000	Kashmir independence, 1989-present
61	25,000	Jordan government vs. Palestinians, 1970-71 (Black September)
62	22,000	Poland, 1948-89 (own people)
63	20,000	Syria, 1982 (against Islamists in Hama)
64	20,000	Chinese-Vietnamese war, 1979
65	19,000	Morocco: war against France, 1953-56 (3,000) and in Western Sahara, 1975-present (16,000)
66	18,000	Congo Republic, 1997-99
67	10,000	South Yemen, 1986 (civil war)

*Sources: Z. Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century, 1993; S. Courtois, Le Livre Noir du Communism, 1997; G. Heinsohn, Lexikon der Völkermorde, 1999, 2^nd ed.; G. Heinsohn, Söhne und Weltmacht, 2006, 8th ed.; R. Rummel, Death by Government, 1994; M. Small and J.D. Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816-1980, 1982; M. White, “Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century,” 2003.

Mao Tse-Tung, by far the greatest post-1950 murderer.

This grisly inventory finds the total number of deaths in conflicts since 1950 numbering about 85,000,000. Of that sum, the deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1950 include 32,000 deaths due to Arab state attacks and 19,000 due to Palestinian attacks, or 51,000 in all. Arabs make up roughly 35,000 of these dead and Jewish Israelis make up 16,000.

These figures mean that deaths in Arab-Israeli fighting since 1950 amount to just 0.06 percent of the total number of deaths in all conflicts in that period. More graphically, only 1 out of about 1,700 persons killed in conflicts since 1950 has died due to Arab-Israeli fighting.

(Adding the 11,000 killed in the Israeli war of independence, 1947-49, made up of 5,000 Arabs and 6,000 Israeli Jews, does not significantly alter these figures.)

In a different perspective, some 11,000,000 Muslims have been violently killed since 1948, of which 35,000, or 0.3 percent, died during the sixty years of fighting Israel, or just 1 out of every 315 Muslim fatalities. In contrast, over 90 percent of the 11 million who perished were killed by fellow Muslims.

Comments:

(1) Despite the relative non-lethality of the Arab-Israeli conflict, its renown, notoriety, complexity, and diplomatic centrality will probably give it continued out-sized importance in the global imagination. And Israel’s reputation will continue to pay the price.

(2) Still, it helps to point out the 1-in-1,700 statistic as a corrective, in the hope that one day, this reality will register, permitting the Arab-Israeli conflict to subside to its rightful, lesser place in world politics.

Professor Heinsohn is director of the Raphael-Lemkin-Institut für Xenophobie- und Genozidforschung at the University of Bremen. Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum.

US Congress skeptical over Obama-Rouhani overtures | JPost | Israel News.

Democrats, Republicans unite in wariness on Iran.

WASHINGTON – After balking at President Barack Obama’s plan to attack Syria, the US Congress is also stirring in opposition to his latest foreign policy goal: an effort to improve relations with Iran.

Congress imposed sanctions that are damaging the Iranian economy and, according to US officials, are responsible for a moderate tone from Iran’s new leadership, which will restart talks this week over its nuclear program.

US lawmakers have the power to lift sanctions if they think Tehran is making concessions and scaling back its nuclear ambitions, but many Republicans and some of Obama’s fellow Democrats are skeptical about a charm offensive by new President Hassan Rouhani.

“We need to approach the current diplomatic initiative with eyes wide open, and we must not allow Iran to use negotiations as a tool of delay and deception,” Republican Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte said in a statement.

Many US lawmakers are deeply supportive of Israel and suspect Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapons capability, one of the few areas where bitterly divided Republicans and Democrats agree on policy.

“Congress has no stake in giving Iran the benefit of the doubt, period. And until they see something quite dramatic on the part of the Iranians, they won’t,” said Aaron David Miller, a former senior State Department official now at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

The Senate and House of Representatives have passed repeated packages of tough sanctions on Iran. Obama has the legal right to waive most of them for 120 days, and then another 120 days, as an option if nuclear negotiations with Iran, which begin on Thursday, are going well.

In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Obama said he was determined to test President Rouhani’s recent diplomatic gestures and challenged him to take concrete steps toward resolving Iran’s long-running nuclear dispute with the West.

“Conciliatory words will have to be matched by actions that are transparent and verifiable,” Obama told the annual gathering of world leaders in New York.

In the event Obama were to temporarily waive sanctions, however, it could worsen already bad relations with Congress, which pushed back against the administration, expressing serious misgivings earlier this month about a planned US attack on Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons.

Lawmakers ended up not taking a vote on Syria, perhaps saving Obama from an embarrassing defeat, but now the White House is at odds with Republican fiscal conservatives in Congress over a possible government shutdown and the debt ceiling.

Failure by Obama to rein in sanctions hawks in Congress could hinder talks on Iran’s nuclear program, which Tehran says is peaceful.

“For the Iranians to negotiate with the Obama administration, they have to be convinced that the Obama administration can deliver what they need from Congress,” said Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“CONSISTENT VOICE”

Rouhani hinted at that problem in a speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday.

He called for “a consistent voice from Washington” and expressed hope Obama would not be swayed by “war-mongering pressure groups” in dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue.

The Senate Banking Committee is expected soon to begin debating its version of a new package of sanctions that easily passed the House of Representatives in July. The House bill would cut Iran’s crude exports to global customers by an additional 1 million barrels per day in a year, on top of US and European Union sanctions that have about halved Tehran’s oil sales since 2011.

Deeper cuts in Iran’s oil sales could worsen the damage Western sanctions have already done to Iran’s economy, which suffered a loss of about $26 billion in petroleum revenue in 2012, soaring inflation, and a devaluation of its currency, the rial.

Republican Representative Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a co-author of the new House sanctions bill, dismissed Rouhani’s speech as rhetoric.

“Through crippling economic sanctions we can continue to increase the pressure on the regime, targeting its ability to pursue a nuclear weapons capability,” Royce said in a statement.

Two senior Democrats – Senator Charles Schumer and Robert Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – joined Republican lawmakers on Monday to call on Obama to stay tough on Iran.

Menendez was unimpressed with the UN speech by Iran’s new president.

“While I welcome the statement by President Rouhani that Iran is seeking a peaceful and diplomatic path, I was disappointed by the overwhelmingly antagonistic rhetoric that characterized his remarks,” he said.

On Tuesday, 11 Republicans who opposed Obama’s proposal to strike Syria, led by potential 2016 presidential contender Senator Marco Rubio, urged a hard line on Iran.

“We all agree that Iran should not perceive any weakness as a result of our differences over Syria policy,” they said in a letter released while Obama delivered his address to the UN General Assembly in New York.

What’s a bomb between allies? | JPost | Israel News.

Netanyahu slams Rouhani’s UN speech as a ‘cynical PR charade’ | The Times of Israel.

Prime minister say he’s glad he ordered Israel’s delegation to be absent, says Iranian president made ‘no realistic offer to halt nuclear program’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (photo credit: Youtube screenshot)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed Iranian President Hasan Rouhani’s speech to the UN General Assembly Tuesday, calling it “cynical and full of hypocrisy.”

He said he was vindicated in ordering the members of Israel’s UN delegation not to be in the hall when Rouhani spoke, since their presence “would have given legitimacy to a regime that does not accept that the Holocaust happened and publicly declares its desire to wipe Israel off the map.” As Israel’s prime minister, he said, “I won’t allow the Israeli delegation to be part of a cynical public relations charade by a regime that denies that Holocaust and calls for our destruction.”

Rouhani, said Netanyahu, “spoke about human rights at a time when Iranian forces are participating in the slaughter of innocent civilians in Syria. He condemned terrorism at a time when the Iranian regime carries out terrorism in dozens of countries worldwide. He spoke of a peaceful nuclear program at a time when the IAEA has established that the [Iranian] program has military characteristics, and when it’s plain to all that one of the world’s most oil-rich nations is not investing a fortune in ballistic missiles and underground nuclear facilities in order to produce electricity.”

Netanyahu, who had earlier Tuesday urged the world not to be “fooled” by Iran’s new moderate rhetoric, said that it was no coincidence that Rouhani’s speech featured “no realistic offer to halt Iran’s nuclear program and contained no commitment to uphold the [relevant] UN Security Council resolutions.”

This, the prime minister said, precisely reflected Iran’s plan: “To talk, and buy time, in order to advance Iran’s capacity to attain nuclear weapons.” Rouhani was a past master of such tactics, said Netanyahu, recalling that the new president “has boasted about the way in which he misled the world a decade ago [as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator], when Iran was negotiating while simultaneously advancing its nuclear program.”

The international community, Netanyahu said, “must judge Iran by its actions, not its words.”

In his comments earlier in the day, in the wake of a relatively welcoming speech by US President Barack Obama for Iran’s recent moderate rhetoric on the nuclear issue, Netanyahu said, “I appreciate President Obama’s statement that ‘Iran’s conciliatory words will have to be matched by action that is transparent and verifiable,’ and I look forward to discussing this with him in Washington next week.”

“Iran thinks that soothing words and token actions will enable it to continue on its path to the bomb,” Netanyahu said. “Like North Korea before it, Iran will try to remove sanctions by offering cosmetic concessions, while preserving its ability to rapidly build a nuclear weapon at a time of its choosing.”

He stressed: “Israel would welcome a genuine diplomatic solution that truly dismantles Iran’s capacity to develop nuclear weapons. But we will not be fooled by half-measures that merely provide a smokescreen for Iran’s continual pursuit of nuclear weapons. And the world should not be fooled either.”

In calling for Israel’s diplomats to walk out on the Iranian president, Netanyahu said that the policies of the Iranian regime toward Israel have not changed with the new government, and noted that Rouhani has refused to recognize the Holocaust as a historical fact; his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeatedly denied any genocide against the Jews had taken place.

“When Iran’s leaders stop denying the Holocaust of the Jewish people, stop calling for the destruction of the Jewish state and recognize Israel’s right to exist, the Israeli delegation will attend their addresses at the General Assembly,” Netanyahu said.

Finance Minister Yair Lapid called Netanyahu’s decision to have the Israeli delegation absent during Rouhani’s speech “a mistake,” and said such an action did not advance Israeli interests.

“Israel doesn’t need to be seen as a perennial rejectionist of negotiations and a state that isn’t interested in peaceful solutions,” Lapid said. “We have to let the Iranians be the ones to reject peace, and not appear as though we’re the ones who are not open to change. Leaving the Assembly hall and boycotting it isn’t relevant in modern day diplomacy and is reminiscent of the way Arab states behaved towards Israel,” Lapid said.

More than 130 world leaders are meeting this week at the annual General Assembly of the United Nations in New York. Obama, who spoke fourth, said his country was willing to engage with Iran if the Islamic Republic’s new government proves willing to make concessions on its nuclear program.

“The roadblocks may prove to be too great, but I firmly believe the diplomatic path must be tested,” Obama said.

The US president added that although the US prefers to resolve the Iranian issue peacefully, it is determined to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and would use any means necessary in order to do so. Resolving Iran’s “pursuit of nuclear weapons,” Obama said, would help bring peace and stability to the region.

Rouhani’s charm offensive | JPost | Israel News.