Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu contrasts the Israel-Hezbollah conflict with the American Civil Rights movement.
"I don't think Martin Luther King would have preached nonviolence in the face of Hitler."
Tavis: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who I regard, Mr. Prime Minister, as the greatest American we've ever produced - indeed, one of the great leaders in the world - King said very simply, but very poignantly, "It's either nonviolence, or nonexistence." One, I wonder your thoughts on what King had to say about nonviolence or nonexistence; and number two, if you don't agree with that, or take exception to it, make your best case to me for why you don't support a cease-fire by any means necessary.
Benjamin Netanyahu: Martin Luther King was fighting for the rights of Black Americans in a country that had its flaws, but certainly had its limits in the use of violence. He did not advocate this in the face of Hezbollah. Hezbollah says, and Iran says, that they're out to destroy us. Wipe us off the face of the Earth. I don't think Martin Luther King would have preached nonviolence in the face of Hitler.
I'm sure he didn't. In fact, it is a tragedy in our world that we have mad people, mad ideologies, fantasy ideologies. And we have to understand that there are conflicts that can be resolved without the resort to arms, and the conflicts that can be resolved through diplomacy, in the end, by silencing arms. Silencing the fire. Extinguishing it. But there are moments when free societies have no choice.
If they want to protect the very rights that Martin Luther King was fighting for, the rights that Lincoln believed in, who I think also was a great American, as was Franklin Roosevelt, I think they understood that at certain junctures in history, men of pacific nature, men who want leaders, men and women who want to see a better, safer world, have to stand up and fight the original Nazis, and the radical Muslim fascists that are now threatening our entire civilization.
Tavis: Do you honestly believe that you can bomb any particular people into behaving the way you want them to behave?
Netanyahu: No, I didn't say bomb. I said defeat them. Could you have bombed and defeated Nazi Germany? Nazism, which took hold among 80 million people, and actually more, and inflamed their imaginations, and it was seen to be the creed of tomorrow? This was the march of tomorrow. Yes, you had to win. We had no choice. And yes, you'd better win.
It's not enough to win militarily. That I grant you. But it is indispensable to win militarily. The fact that something is a necessary condition doesn't make it sufficient. You also have to eventually have some kind of reformation, with a small "R," some say with a capital "R," in Islam. At least have the moderate forces come to the fore. They are threatened, many of the governments around us, even though they've changed their public tune, privately say win-win; otherwise, we have no future.
The president of Iran, Ahmadinejad, is a true believer. He is not a politician in the traditional sense. I wish he were. He's not. He really is a true believer of the creed of a sect of radical Shi'ism. They believe that there has to be an apocalyptic return of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, who disappeared a thousand years ago. He is supposed to return with fire and blood in a grand apocalypse, claiming millions of lives on all sides.
Iran is developing nuclear weapons to that effect, and weapons, missiles that now overreach Israel, and can reach into every European capitol. And within eight or 10 years, they'll reach the eastern seaboard of the United States. They're stark raving mad. But the important thing is don't dismiss them as people dismissed another lunatic in the 1930s.
They said he's mad, he's not serious. The point about these people is they are serious. And with this kind of lunacy, getting possession of a state a quarter of a century ago in the Islamic republic of Iran, building the nuclear stockpiles, having proxies like Hezbollah bombing people to smithereens and declaring a creed that says that the free Western - what we call pluralistic, they call hedonistic civilization - has to go for some pre-medieval conception of Islam, that has to be stopped.
Yes, I think you have to defeat them. I think you need also a reformation, or if you will, reform. Let the Iranian people understand what consequences to them this mad creed is going to bring.
How should the conflict between Israel and Lebanon be solved?
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