At Least No One Can Say She'll Lend Legitimacy To Iran

From The Jerusalem Post:

For the first time, an American rabbi will be traveling to Iran Tuesday on a mission of interfaith dialogue and understanding.

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, one of the early forces behind the Jewish Renewal movement in America, will co-lead a delegation of 21 peace activists to the Islamic Republic on a mission "to humanize the face of Iran, lest we end up with a disaster of global proportions we cannot imagine," she told The Jerusalem Post by phone on Monday.

Gottlieb, a longtime peace activist and recent cofounder of the Shomer Shalom Institute for Jewish Non-Violence, said her participation in the mission came out of Tuesday's threat by Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton that an Iranian assault on Israel would be met with an American response that would "obliterate" Iran.

"It is important to negotiate and not threaten obliteration," Gottlieb believes, "in particular because there are between 30,000 and 40,000 Jewish people living in Iran, the oldest extant Jewish community in the Middle East, which has been there since the first exile in 586 BCE."

That last is a point that Clinton probably did not take into account--good for Gottlieb.
Still, the idea that she will do anything other than serve as a tool of Iran--similar to the Neturei Karta rabbis who attended Ahmadinejad's 'Holocaust Conference'--is difficult to escape, though her motives and message are admirable (unlike Neturei Karta).

But her naivete does show:

What about the threat to Israel? "I don't think Iran is going to attack Israel; I think it's a chimera. Iran has never initiated a war. And the fact that Israel has never signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it has nuclear weapons, is one of the reasons Iran wants nuclear weapons. Israel has already bombed Iraq and Syria. It is not [unreasonable] for Iran to think it will also be a target. Maybe we should be pressuring everybody to sign the NPT. We should be [backing] the forces of peace, not the forces advocating war."

Gottlieb overlooks or ignores that Iran backs--with money as well as weapons--Hamas and Hizbollah, not to mention the American troops that have died as a result of weapons Iran has supplied to insurgents in Iraq.

Of course, Gottlieb might respond that Iran is merely frightened by the US and Israel and is taking 'defensive' measures.

If so, there is apparently no excuse that cannot be made on behalf of Ahmadinejad and friends. It's just unfortunate that it is being made by a Jew.

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