Amid international and Israeli controversy over whether or not to attack Iran's nuclear program, the rulers of the Islamic Republic have just "upgraded" their strategic objective of wiping Israel off the map and extended it for the first time to the more ambitious one of annihilating the Jews worldwide. They are using the age-old weapon of anti-Semitism to promote their new goal.

Two weeks ago, as their nuclear bomb moved menacingly up the pipeline, the ayatollahs in Tehran and Qom unleashed a virulent campaign of anti-Semitic propaganda in their sermons. A new book and a film were released for wide distribution on orders from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They draw heavily on the infamous Elders of Zion fiction to accuse the Jews and their rabbis of conspiring to corrupt and rule the world.
Under the title "How Israel should be destroyed," this book was awarded the best book prize at the Khorassan book fair when it was first displayed there on Thursday, Dec. 1.

The authors of its seven chapters, identified only as "seminary students of the Holy City of Qom," set out tactics for destroying Israel and the Jews of the world. They quote the Qoran as well as the Protocols of Zion on "the Jewish world view," asserting that the persecution of Jews through the ages - including the Nazi Holocaust - was "just punishment for their crimes."

The Qoran is cited as urging Muslims to keep their distance from Jews because of their "perfidious and deceitful nature."
The book quotes extensively from the views of Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, under the heading, "Israel Must Be Destroyed." The book's editor Hojjat-ol-Eslam Mohammad Ebrahim-Nia stresses that this prescription has the force of a fatwa (religious edict) and is binding on every Muslim.

He adds: Notwithstanding every effort to destroy this "criminal" people, it continues to exist and in the guise of Zionism continues its wicked assault on Islam.

The anti-Semitic film, "The Sabbath Hunter," has been circulating for some time but was a flop with Iranian movie audiences. Now the Supreme Leader has ordered it to be screened at every university in the land. The Basij students who rampaged through the British embassy in Tehran this week were made responsible with getting it widely shown.