21 October—We read this morning that Tehran (remember when it was spelled Teheran?) is complaining—objecting, as some sources have it—to the United Nations about Israeli threats to bomb or otherwise disable atomic energy sites in Iran. To make it official, the Iranian government sent a letter about it to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the useless UN’s useless nuclear watchdog.

Duh and aw gee. Let the treacherous bastards bitch. Do they really expect the Israelis to make nice to a regime that wants to annihilate the Jewish state?

A little history is in order. After the so-called Islamic Revolution in 1979, in which the theocratic Shiite Muslim bad guys overthrew the less bad and U.S.-friendly Shiite Shah, Iran severed all diplomatic relations with Israel. Most readers will recall that in 1979 Iranian Muslim student terrorists invaded the American Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for over a year—444 days, to be exact.

The hostages were ultimately set free partly because of international pressure but mostly because, after secret negotiations, a trade embargo was lifted, Iran’s frozen assets were released, and guarantees were made by all and sundry not to interfere in Iran’s internal politics. As admirers of Ronald Reagan recall, the big moment occurred just a few minutes after Reagan’s inauguration as 40^th POTUS on 20 January 1981. (Don’t ask what his people had to do with it.)

Despite not officially recognizing Israel, during the early days of the Iran-Iraq War—also known as the First Gulf War—which lasted from 1980 to 1988, Iran bought over a half-billion dollars worth of arms from the nasty little Jewish state. Indirectly, to be sure, just as Iraq bought “dual-use technology” (i.e., civilian and military), military intelligence, and special-ops training from the United States. No kidding.

More recently, in 2000, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s current Supreme Leader (i.e., dictator) since 1989, called Israel a “cancerous tumor” that should be removed from the region. In 2005, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (since demoted to mere membership in the Expediency Discernment Council, which we won’t go into; it certainly sounds like something American liberals would come up with, but isn’t) declared in no uncertain terms that “Israel should be wiped off the map.” That wasn’t received too well, even by the generally antisemitic world at large.

So top dog Khamenei, nice guy or at least more nuanced diplomat that he was, corrected Ahmadinejad by insisting that “the Islamic Republic has never threatened and will never threaten any country.” Of course, nobody with any intelligence and principles believed it then.

And nobody with any intelligence and principles believes it now . . .