Lenni Brenner on "The Road to Tehran"

Let me be clear, I am not saying that Lenni Brenner is on the road to Tehran. He has tried to respond to a Wall Street Journal article by a Bret Stephens titled "The Road to Tehran." Luckily Jews sans frontieres is a cutting edge publishing concern and I've beaten the WSJ to it with publication of Brenner's response:

In "The Road to Tehran" (12/16), Bret Stephens charged "global polite society," i.e. Israel's critics, with "blazing" our "own merry trail" to Tehran's holocaust denial conference : "Once a country's policies are deemed Nazi-like, it necessarily follows that its leaders are Nazi-like." But what if a leader proclaims himself pro-Nazi?

In 1988, Ettela'at, a Tehran daily, pirated my book, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir. Yitzhak Shamir was then Israel's Prime Minister. Ettela'at did so because I reprinted a 1940 proposal by Shamir's anti-British National Military Organization, "to actively take part in the war on Germany's side." They had assured Hitler that "the NMO is closely related to
the totalitarian movements of Europe in its ideology and structure."

However my pirates were still not pleased. I wrote that six million Jews were killed, so Ettela'at added a footnote: "the number of European Jews massacred by the Nazis could not be greater than one million."

Stephens proclaims that "the road to Tehran is a well-traveled one, and among those who denounce it now are some who have already walked some part of it." Really? Hitler fought Stalin and Stalin fought Hitler. But denouncing Stalin didn't mean walking Hitler's road, and fighting Hitler didn't mean you were a Stalinist.

Similarly, exposing Zionism for its crimes doesn't mean sympathy for Shia fanaticism, and attacking Islamic despotism doesn't mean support for Israeli racism.

Lenni Brenner

I'm sure the Wall Street Journal will get round to it.