The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in the news last week again spilling his venom onto the flag of Israel. Speaking to a similarly venomous hater of Israel, Farouk Kaddoumi, the head of the PLO’s political department, he observed that “The Zionist regime has always shown that aside from the language of guns, it does not know any other language.”

No doubt Ahmadinejad felt spritely buoyed by the sense of increasing uncertainty in the integrity of oil supplies, especially to Europe, created by the ongoing instability in the Caucasus region. He probably also felt smug over the very public display by Russia of its talks with his quasi-client state, Syria, concerning the possible resumption of Russian military systems to Syria and the use of Syrian port facilities by the Russian navy.

Regional instability, he calculates, works in his country’s favour as does the possibility of a heightened Russian presence in the area, which presumably would be to the displeasure and consternation of Israel and the U.S. What is displeasing to Israel and America, of course, is quite contrarily very pleasing to him.  

But his pleasures may be short lived. Early in the new year, Ahmadinejad must stand for re-election. And while the outcome might be fore-ordained, there are very clear signs that he does not enjoy the favour of all of his countrymen.

According to reports in the JTA, Iranian Grand Ayatollah Bajat Sanjani called Ahmadinejad “a major threat” to the Iranian people and encouraged the country’s reformers to defeat him in elections next year. In an interview in the German Financial Times Deutschland, Sanjani accused Ahmadinejad’s government of breaking the law, seriously encroaching on existing freedoms, and illegally empowering the Revolutionary Guard. Indeed, so frequent has been criticism of Ahmadinejad by Iranians inside Iran, that supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, felt compelled to defend his president and his quirky, failed policies.

Those policies essentially forsake the domestic needs of his own people and blame, Israel, his favourite scapegoat, for the suffering of Iranian people.

About the scurrilous, dangerous nature of that scapegoating, The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center in Israel recently wrote the following: “Throughout the Middle East and the entire world, Iran stands out as the only country to make deliberate, intensive use of ‘the weapon of anti-Semitism,’ combined with a genocidal policy which seeks to destroy Israel… That characteristic of its policy makes Iran markedly different from other Arab and Muslim countries, which avoid jumping on the Iranian policy bandwagon, and from every other country in the world. In fact, Iran is the first country since Nazi Germany which officially embraces an active policy of anti-Semitism as a means to promote its national objectives.”

The upcoming Iranian election is worth watching, even as Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel national objectives are worth defeating.