The other Iranian breakthrough
The rhetoric from Iran about Israel is still unacceptable, but the nuclear deal, while not perfect, offers Israel a chance for a diminished Iranian threat.
With the international community focused on the nuclear deal with Iran, little attention has been given to the other Iranian breakthrough, which happened at around the same time. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Israel a country “doomed to failure and annihilation,” “an illegitimate regime led by untouchable rabid dogs” whose leaders “cannot be called human beings, they are like animals.”
Are such heinous, hate-filled words a breakthrough? Well, yes. In the past, Khamenei referred to Israel as a “cancerous tumor that should be cut off.” So we are not yet human beings in his eyes, but are no longer cancerous cells and have at least joined the animal kingdom. Moreover, he also refrained from explicitly stating that Iran would annihilate Israel, leaving this to an unspecified, though not hard to surmise, mechanism. A breakthrough!
