October 10-14
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu says the Islamic State, Hamas and Iran are locked in a competition to become the dominant Islamist power in the Middle East.
“ISIS has got to be defeated because it’s doing what all these militant Islamists are trying to do. They all want to first dominate their part of the Middle East, and then go on for their twisted idea of world domination,” Netan-yahu said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday.
“The difference between ISIS and Hamas and ISIS and Iran and so on is they all agree that the world should be an Islamist hill, but … each of them wants to be the king of the hill. They want to accumulate enough power to then carry out their mad ambitions,” he said.
His inclusion of Hamas struck many as odd since Hamas’s ambitions run to Israel and the West Bank, not to the Islamic world as a whole.
Netanyahu backed President Obama’s decision to carry out air strikes in both Iraq and Syria. But he would not say what role Israel might play against the Islamic State, aside from saying Israel is ready to help “in every way that we’re asked.” The United States isn’t asking and wants Israel to stay out.
Netanyahu also spoke about what he believes are the dangers of making a nuclear deal with Iran.
“This is the greatest terrorist regime in the world. And we don’t want them to have the ultimate weapon of terror, which is nuclear weapons. My fear is that they would get the ability to enrich enough uranium for a bomb in a very short time—weeks, months—and that’s the deal that I hope is not signed,” Netanyahu said.
He said that such a deal would be bad for both the US and Israel because Iran would not allow inspectors in Iran and would exploit a time of crisis around the world to enrich enough material for a bomb that could be taken out of Iran by ship, if Iran did not yet have a missile able to carry a heavy nuclear warhead.
“The greatest danger that I see from these militant Islamists is that they will marry their mad ideologies to weapons of mass death. That is a threat not only to my people, the Jewish people and the Jewish state of Israel, but to your people. They view us as one because of our tolerant societies, whom they think is weak and corrupt,” he said.
He was particularly critical of Iranian President Rohani and Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif. Netanyahu suggested they were little more than front men for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi.
“They are supposed to smooth-talk their way to get in—basically bamboozling the West to get a deal that lifts the sanctions, the tough sanctions that the US has put in place, and that leaves them with enough centrifuges to be able to get to the bomb in a very short time. That shouldn’t happen,” he said.
