Now that President Trump has decertified the Iran deal, I was reminded of the Cambridge Union debate on nuclear Iran from Feb 2012 in which Douglas Murray was brilliant.
Transcript from 7:13 on
But I will
not leave this debate tonight without mentioning the people it matters to most,
which is the people of the country that successive leaders in Iran have said they
will erase from the page of time. Leaders who deny the last Holocaust while
saying they want the next.
I was
speaking to a friend of mine just yesterday, whose father was a Holocaust
survivor and he said his father said one thing before he died: What one lesson would you take from
the Holocaust, and he said - I take this lesson: When someone says they want to annihilate you – believe them! Don’t think
they are joking. Don’t think they don’t mean it.
Israeli
people have reason not to want or need you or your opinions on their future.
In 1973 when Israel — six years after the previous attempt to
annihilate it as a state by its neighbors — once again saw its neighbors’
armies amassing on the borders the Israeli government wanted preemptively to
stop that war. They didn’t. They did not among other things because they knew
that if they did strike preemptively America would not provide them with any
munitions. Kissinger said that himself afterwards. So they waited and they were
attacked as they knew they would be, and they lost many
good people, but they were then able to retaliate.
“They were then able to push those armies out of Israel,
but — and this is a crucial thing to remember — the American planes
were not allowed to land and refuel (as they were) bringing supplies to that
country when it was on the brink of being ended. They were not allowed to land
in any European country, even to refuel. When Israel was about to be ended, you
couldn’t even stop a plane for a couple of hours on European soil, because the
Europeans cared more about the oil deals they were doing with Arabs than they
did about the future of that state.
Since October
1973 not a single Israeli has thought seriously that when they were about to be
annihilated, you or any Europeans would lift a finger, and they knew you wouldn’t,
and they were right to know you wouldn’t, and you wouldn’t.
When Israel is
pushed to the situation it will be
pushed to, of having to believe they mean it, and when every bit of jiggery-pokery behind the scenes runs out, when the UN and distinguished
figures have run out of time and Iran is about to produce its first bomb,
Israel will strike.
Every single
country, including this one, people from our elegant diplomatic service, people
from America, everyone will condemn Israel. Everyone in the Middle East will
condemn Israel. And they will go back to their homes and they will say in
private thank God for Israel. The Saudis,
the Bahrainis, the Egyptians, the Libyans, the Lebanese, everybody will say
thank God they did it. Because nobody else would.
The
proposition being put before you tonight is that you have a choice between war
and an Iran with the bomb. You have a
choice as has been said before, between war and dishonor – you will choose
dishonor this evening and you will get war.
You have a choice between a war with a nuclear Iran, or a war at some
point, with an Iran that is not nuclear which you stop from ever being nuclear,
and hope that in stopping that regime in
embedding itself, you will give the Iranian people the best chance of
overthrowing that regime. But as I say, thank God this does not rely on you or
any Europeans. Because you’ve made the same mistake before and nobody should
trust you to get it right this time.
