Iran threatens to kill 600,000 Jews

From Times of Israel:

Senior Iranian military official warned on Thursday that any Israeli attack would unleash a firestorm of missiles on its cities fired by the Islamic Republic’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

The Shiite militia has more than 80,000 rockets ready to fire at Tel Aviv and Haifa, said General Yahya Rahim Safavi, military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“Iran, with the help of Hezbollah and its friends, is capable of destroying Tel Aviv and Haifa in case of military aggression on the part of the Zionists,” he said, quoted on state television.

“I don’t think the Zionists would be so unintelligent as to create a military problem with Iran,” the general said. “They know the strength of Iran and Hezbollah.”

Tel Aviv has 404,000 people, Haifa another 267,000. The vast majority are Jewish. He isn't talking about targeting military facilities, he is threatening the murder of two thirds of a million people.

Last I checked, that was a war crime.

Maybe Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch will mention it among his hundreds of anti-Israel tweets.

Sure.

The FARS News version of the story includes a nice lie:

Top Military Aide to the Iranian Supreme Leader Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi described the recent statements of Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon about nuking Iran as an empty threat, warning that the Islamic Republic has tens of thousands of missiles ready to wreak havoc on Israel.

Did Yaalon threaten to nuke Iran?

Only in the fevered imaginations of the haters at Mondoweiss, where Iran apparently gets its news from.

Mondoweiss noticed a speech that Yaalon gave where he mentioned how Truman justified Hiroshima, but in no way did he threaten Iran. Here is what he said in context:

Now those who claim that this battle is not fair because democracy can't fight back tyrannical regimes, not [to mention] terror organizations, I don't agree with it.

In certain cases we might take certain steps that we believe ... should be taken in order to defend ourselves. I mentioned the discussion about the interception of the rockets positioned on civilian houses. We decided to do it. I can't imagine some other step that should be taken.

Of course, we should be sure that we can look [in] the mirror after the decision or operation. Of course, we should be sure that it is a military necessity. We should consider costs and benefits, of course, but at the end we might take certain steps.

I do remember the story of President Truman, who was asked, "how did you feel after deciding to launch the nuclear bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, causing at the end [200,000 fatalities]?" And he said, "when I heard from my officers that the alternative is a long war with Japan, with potential fatalities of a couple of million, I saw that it is a moral decision."

We are not there yet. But that's what I'm talking about: certain steps in cases in which we feel like we don't have the answer by surgical operations or something like that.

Yaalon was using Hiroshima as an extreme example of having to kill civilians to save a much larger number of people, and relating it back to his earlier mention that Hezbollah is hiding rockets in civilian houses on Israel's border and Israel will need to attack those locations in case of war.

He was not saying Israel was planning to nuke Iran. On the contrary, he was saying that any difficult decision must be a military necessity and the decisions must be made in the context of the laws of war, which do allow actions that would kill civilians sometimes. There are more tools in Israel's arsenal under international law than one would think from reading the false interpretations of that law given by Amnesty and HRW.

But Iran explicitly threatened to do the equivalent of 4 Hiroshimas in Israel.

Will any human rights defender condemn this threat of murdering hundreds of thousands of people?

Nah...they're only Jews in Israel. No one defends their human rights.

(h/t Yoel)