Second Holocaust Countdown: 1,000 days

Today this blog begins a new "thread" counting down the days until the Second Holocaust.

When Iran detonates its nuclear weapons over or in Israel.

Delivered either by missiles or by its client organisations, Hizbollah or Hamas.

The timeline will periodically be updated and relevant articles be provided.

How do I know it will happen? How do I know it will happen in 1,000 days?

The answers to both questions are that like everyone else, I cannot see into the future.

However, consider the following and then it may cast the above two questions in a different light:

1. Has any action so far been able to stop or even slow down the development of nuclear weapons in Iran?

2. Who has sufficient capability, will and motivation to prevent the use of Iranian nuclear weapons with the support of the world? (Hint: Neither the US nor Israel satisfy all these criteria)

3. Why would a millenarian President and the mullahs - who put Islam and the eradication of Israel above their own country - NOT strike Israel with nuclear weapons once they acquired them?

The 1,000 days comes from an interview with Benjamin Netanyahu:

When the chief of the Mossad says that within three years Iran will have a nuclear weapon, that's 1,000 days, and each day that goes by is a day lost to our efforts to stop this.

Onto the articles.

Professor Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University, recently had an article published in the Jerusalem Post titled This Holocaust will be different:

One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.

The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Front Command units.

This is arguably the most powerful article written so far about this subject. A must read.

Saul Singer follows up in the Jerusalem Post this week with some further thoughts:

REACTIONS TO Morris's piece tend to bifurcate into despair at being forced to face an inescapable truth, or dismissal as baseless warmongering. Neither reaction is warranted and both lead to the wrong result: doing nothing.

First, it must be stated that Morris has faithfully described a plausible scenario if present trends continue. Israel is demoralized by a crisis of confidence in its political and military leadership not seen since the 1973 war. The US is stumbling into an Iraq-driven isolationism not seen since the Vietnam war.

Europe, absent American leadership, will not risk confronting Iran, and will attempt to adjust to living under a new nuclear threat. And once nothing is stopping Iran, and in the face of the global silence that has met Iran's open calls for Israel's destruction, we cannot expect that the mullahs will act "rationally" according to Western lights rather than their own.

After the Holocaust, and after 9/11, can we really assume that genocidal fantasies are just overheated rhetoric rather than preparations for action?

The countdown began some time ago.

What is different is that now we no longer count in years, but in days.

The yardstick for the next 1,000 days is what tangible action every country and every leader is doing to prevent the Second Holocaust?