Re: The Shi'a Bomb, Persian Aspirations, and Israel.

Submitted by Sudad Jawad (United Kingdom), Feb 5, 2010 at 17:46

I read with interest the recent article by Dr Daniel Pipes advising the US to bomb the nuclear facilities of Iran to protect the US and its allies.

The Iranian threat towards Israel and Western interests has its transcultural aspects that are misunderstood in the West. The Persians, unlike the Arabs, have their own national and ethnic identity. These two dimensions were further reinforced by the adoption by the Iranians of Shi'a Islam which has become gradually inseparable in Arab perception from the Safavid imperial aspirations. The Middle East has become polarised into a Sunni or orthodox Muslim world, and a Shiite Persian one. The Persian attempt to use the Arab Israeli conflict to dominate the Arab and Islamic World would never succeed as the Shi'a are often viewed as heretics who were allies of the Tatars and the Crusaders. Furthermore the Shi'a themselves do not consider Jerusalem as a sacred place unlike the Sunni Muslims, and it is fact that its prominence in Islamic History was fabricated at the time when the Umayyad dynasty were unable to control Mecca and Medina for almost a decade in the 7th Century. Hence the Arabs and Sunni Muslims do not believe the Iranian Rhetoric about Jerusalem and the cry for the Palestinians, and to them it is a tactic to gain influence in an Arab World which lacks the ethnic and national homogeneity of the Iranians.

The aspirations of Iran to possess a nuclear bomb are real, and it is needed to balance the Sunni bomb already in existence in a more volatile place (i.e.Pakistan). It would provide the muscle needed to control and regain the lost land of the Safavid Empire.

I think that Israel has a good understanding of the dynamics controlling their Arab and Muslim neighbours, and probably would not wait for Barack Obama to deliver the strike needed with the blessings of the Arabs and Sunni Muslims. However I also believe that Israel is fully aware that the Iranian threat is more directed towards the Arabs and Sunni Muslims, and if a job were needed they would execute it better than the Obama administration.

Sudad Jawad Al Timimi, MD

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