Israel Tacticians Want Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Win

[Purveyor]

Abraham Rabinovich, Jerusalem | June 13, 2009

A SENIOR Israeli official said yesterday the consensus among his colleagues in Jerusalem was that a victory for the hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Iranian elections would be in Israel's best interest.

"His extremism and his calls for Israel's destruction have pushed the international community to try to head off Iran's nuclear program," he said.

A victory by the relatively moderate Mir Hossein Mousavi would not stop the nuclear program, the official said, but it could lull the international community into thinking the threat was over.

Since Mr Ahmadinajad's election in 2005, he has repeatedly called for Israel to be wiped off the map, and denied the Holocaust happened. And he has argued that the Israelis were punishing the Palestinians because of what the Germans did to the Jews in World War II, and called on European leaders to provide the Jews with territory so they could move their state to that continent.

This extreme aggressiveness combined with Mr Ahmadinajad's flaunting of Iran's nuclear program has clearly marked him as Israel's leading enemy.

However, in the run-up to the Iranian polls, Mr Ahmadinejad's re-election has come to be seen as a strategic advantage. "There is no one who has served Israel's information program better than him," wrote columnist Ben Caspi in the daily Ma'ariv yesterday.

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THE AUSTRALIAN: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25627629-15084,00.html

[konnichi wa]

1. Sure, it gives them a "legitimate" reason to hate Iran.

Politics 101

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Sort of the same way that OBL was rooting for * to win re-election.