In a speech today before the United Nations General Assembly (embedded below), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified the greatest threat to the world as “militant Islam” and argued that the threat Israel faces from Hamas is the same that the rest of the region and the world faces from both the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Iran. While Netanyahu hailed the international cooperation in challenging ISIS, he warned that “[t]o defeat ISIS & leave Iran as a threshold nuclear power would be to win the battle & lose the war.”

PM Netanyahu at #UNGA2014: "To defeat ISIS & leave Iran as a threshold nuclear power would be to win the battle & lose the war."

— Israel Foreign Min. (@IsraelMFA) September 29, 2014

Netanyahu began his speech by saying that the people of Israel pray for peace, “but our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace are in danger because everywhere we look militant Islam is on the march.” Netanyahu noted that militant Islam’s “first victims are other Muslims but it spares no one – Christian, Jews, Yazidis, Kurds – no creed, no faith, no ethnic group, is beyond its sights. … For the militant Islamists, all politics is global, because their ultimate goal is to dominate the world.”

After outlining the threat of militant Islam, Netanyahu observed that “[l]ast week, many of the countries represented here rightly applauded President Obama for leading the effort to confront ISIS, and yet weeks before, some of these same countries, the same countries that now support confronting ISIS, opposed Israel for confronting Hamas.” He further underscored the similarity between Hamas and ISIS by quoting their respective leaders:

ISIS and Hamas share a fanatical creed, which they both seek to impose well beyond the territory under their control. Listen to ISIS’ self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This is what he said two months ago: A day will soon come when the Muslim will walk everywhere as a master. The Muslims will cause the world to hear and understand the meaning of terrorism and destroy the idol of democracy. Now listen to Khaled Mashal, the leader of Hamas. He proclaims a similar vision of the future: We say this to the West — by Allah you will be defeated. Tomorrow our nation will sit on the throne of the world.

Netanyahu argued that while Hamas’ short term goal is the destruction of Israel, the group holds the same goals as all militant Islamist organizations, including Hezbollah and ISIS, which “seek to create ever-expanding enclaves of militant Islam where there is no freedom and no tolerance.”

Netanyahu proceeded to question whether the world would oppose “militant Islam [having] the power to realize its unbridled ambitions.” Netanyahu pointed out that Iran’s goal, like other militant Islamists, is global revolution and that if it is allowed to become a “threshold nuclear power,” then “at the time of its choosing, Iran, the world’s most dangerous regime, in the world’s most dangerous region, would obtain the world’s most dangerous weapons.” He then drew a clear equivalence of the threats posed by both ISIS and Iran:

Ladies and gentlemen, would you let ISIS enrich uranium? Would you let ISIS build a heavy water reactor? Would you let ISIS develop intercontinental ballistic missiles? Of course you wouldn’t. Then you mustn’t let the Islamic state of Iran do those things either, because here’s what will happen. Once Iran produces atomic bombs, all the charms and all the smiles will suddenly disappear. They’ll just vanish. And it’s then that the ayatollahs will show their true face and unleash their aggressive fanaticism on the entire world.

Towards the end of the speech Netanyahu defended Israel’s conduct during Operation Protective Edge and blasted Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for his accusations of genocide.

Yet Israel faced another challenge. We faced a propaganda war because in an attempt to win the world sympathy, Hamas cynically used Palestinian civilians as human shields. It used schools — not just schools; U.N. schools — private homes, mosques, even hospitals to store and fire rockets at Israel. As Israel surgically struck at the rocket launchers and at the tunnels, Palestinian civilians were tragically but unintentionally killed. There are heartrending images that resulted, and these fueled libelous charges that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians. We were not. We deeply regret every single civilian casualties.

And the truth is this: Israel was doing everything to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties. Hamas was doing everything to maximize Israeli civilian casualties and Palestinian civilian casualties. Israel dropped flyers, made phone calls, sent text messages, broadcast warnings in Arabic on Palestinian television, all this to enable Palestinian civilians to evaluate targeted areas. No other country and no other army in history have gone to greater lengths to avoid casualties among the civilian population of their enemies.

As an example of the war crimes committed by Hamas during Operation Protective Edge, Netanyahu pointed to a picture of children playing near rocket launchers and emphasized the hypocrisy of investigating Israel for violations of international law:

By investigating Israel rather than Hamas for war crimes, the U.N. Human Rights Council has betrayed its noble mission to protect the innocent. In fact, what it’s doing is to turn the laws of war upside down. Israel, which took unprecedented steps to minimize civilian casualties — Israel is condemned. Hamas, which both targeted and hid behind civilians — that’s a double war crime — Hamas is given a pass.

Netanyahu charged that the “council’s biased treatment of Israel is only one manifestation of the return of one of the world’s largest prejudices. …  It’s called anti-Semitism.”

At the end of his speech Netanyahu offered his hopes for a peaceful future, asking moderate Arab states who realize that they and Israel are facing the same dangers “to transform these common interests to create a productive partnership, one that would build a more secure, peaceful and prosperous Middle East.”

[Photo: jacob kornbluh / YouTube ]