LOS ANGELES, California — Two head rabbis at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles issued a joint statement condemning the nuclear accord between Iran and the P5+1, invoking history to remind Western leaders that they are repeating the mistakes of the past in trusting the tyrannical Iranian regime.
“It is not the first time in history that Western leaders would be fooled by tyrants,”Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper said in a statement.
“Seventy-five years ago, British Prime Minster Chamberlain thought he understood Hitler and declared ‘peace in our time.’ Shortly thereafter, Hitler plunged the world into the catastrophic World War II.”
Rabbis Hier and Cooper, echoing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, implored leaders to recognize that “[s]ince 1979, no Iranian leader has changed his mind or actions about Israel, about the U.S., or about human rights” and reiterated that “it is the height of folly and naiveté to believe that the Iranian regime will change its stripes in the next decade.”
The duo noted that under the terms of the deal, Iran would be allowed to develop nuclear weapons after ten years.
Critics of the deal have also suggested Iran could secretly produce nuclear weapons over the duration of the planned accords, using “non-accessible” military sites or “undeclared” nuclear sites to carry this out. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has explicitly stated that the IAEA will not be granted access to Iran’s military bases, where it is suspected this illicit activity is taking place.
Iran is also slated to receive over $100 billion in frozen assets. President Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice recently delivered remarks stating that of those soon-to-be thawed assets, it is “expected” that a chunk of those funds will be spent on Iran’s military arm and “potentially be used for the kinds of bad behavior that we have seen in the region–in other words, terrorism.
Iran is recognized as the largest state-sponsor of terrorism in the world, funding groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels which in January of this year toppled Yemen’s government. Yemen was previously seen by the Obama Administration as the “model” for the United State’s counterterrorism efforts in the region.
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