While Tehran continues to deny its nuclear program is anything but peaceful, the
Revolutionary Guards-linked Fars News published an op-ed on Monday arguing that
Islamic countries – and Iran – need a nuclear arsenal.
The op-ed, titled
“Nuclear Confrontation: The Islamic World Needs to have the Atomic Bomb,” is
written in Persian by Alireza Forghani, an analyst and strategist allied with
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
After citing Khamenei,
Forghani writes that the “Islamic world should arise and scream that an atomic
bomb is our right, and so smash America’s and Israel’s
dreams.”
Forghani’s essay is also posted on a weekly culture magazine
website, Rooikard, and on Forghani’s own blog, where for wider impact it has
been translated into almost incomprehensible English, Arabic and Russian,
apparently using Google’s machine translate tool.
Forghani hit the
headlines earlier this year when he published another essay urging Iran to
launch a preemptive strike on Israel, in which he laid out a detailed strategy
and religious-legal case for destroying the Jewish state.
In his latest
essay, Forghani, who writes in a colorful and colloquial style, emphasizes that
the op-ed contains his personal opinions and is not an instruction to the
Islamic Republic.
The essay sets out what Forghani says are the religious
foundations for Islamic states to stockpile nuclear weapons, and frequently
cites Khamenei as well as his predecessor, Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Musavi
Khomeini.
Forghani says that the US is the “main enemy of the Islamic
Republic,” and blames America for using various methods to threaten
Iran.
In his essay, Forghani writes that the US is the only country that
has used a nuclear weapon, when it bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan at the
end of World War II.
In setting out his case for Iran to have a nuclear
bomb, Forghani poses the rhetorical question of whether Pakistan should be the
only Islamic country to be allowed such a weapon, and why the US only allows its
allies to have them.
“The Muslims of Syria and Lebanon are forever
concerned that if their governments don’t cooperate with Israel via the UN
Security Council – America’s bastard offspring – they will be condemned and then
right afterward they’ll have to host illegitimate NATO troops,” Forghani
wrote.
“Iran is one of those countries that the US keeps
threatening. We’ve experienced their failed attacks in the past, and
there’s no doubt that [America] will attack Iran again since it calls us the
‘Axis of Evil,’” he added.
The Khamenei-linked strategist warned that the
US would likely attack Iran again, this time with a nuclear bomb, “like it did
in Japan.”
“It is the right of the Islamic people to possess nuclear
weapons,” Forghani wrote, calling on the Islamic world to declare that right to
the US and Israel.
“Yeah, possessing nuclear weapons is a ‘right,’” he
added. “If that right did not exist, Israel would have been destroyed 30 years
ago and America wouldn’t have flaunted itself in Iraq and
Afghanistan.”
The strategist, whose personal website features a prominent
photograph of Khamenei, concludes by referring to the supreme
leader.
“According to Imam Khamenei, if we’re attacked we should respond
at the same level,” he wrote. “And that requires a rapid response at the level
of an atomic bomb to [an attack with] an atomic bomb.”