In Iran's last presidential race, western governments and media favored Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He was a "known" quantity and a "moderate." Michael Rubin, the editor of the Middle East Quarterly and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, pricked that soap bubble.

Four years ago, when he took the podium at Tehran University to deliver the Friday sermon, Rajsanjani forecasted that one day the Islamic world would be equipped with nuclear weapons that only Israel possessed (in the Middle East. At that point, he explained, "the strategy of the imperialists will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything." And, added the "moderate" former president Rafsanjani, "It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality."

Another prominent "moderate," courted by Europe's democracies, was former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami. "In the Koran," he declared in a homily Oct. 24, 2000, "God commanded to kill the wicked and those who do not see the rights of the oppressed."

The Bush administration argues a small minority of terrorists that have perverted the meaning of Islam have hijacked the Islamic religion. But didn't Khatami speak for Shiite Islam when he said, "If we abide by the Koran, all of us should mobilize to kill." This is not Osama bin Laden or sidekick Ayman al-Zawahiri or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi speaking on behalf of militant Islam, but a man who at the time he invoked the Koran to kill infidels was regarded in the West as the "moderate" President of Iran.

Possession of a nuclear weapon is fundamental to Islamist belief. No odes to world peace if they do this, or dirges to world catastrophe if they do that, are going to deflect the mullahs' core belief as dictated by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Fundamental to Israeli defense doctrine is that no weapon of mass destruction can be tolerated in any Middle Eastern arsenal. Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, the geopolitical sage of the orient, said in a UPI interview three months before 9/11, the biggest threat on horizon 2010 is "an Islamist bomb and mark my words, it will travel."

Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, currently under the control of pro-Western President Pervez Musharraf, was developed by the same man who began assisting Iran's nuclear efforts 18 years ago. Dr. A.Q. Khan, also known as Dr. No for the nuclear black market he created for the benefit of America's enemies, began imparting his nuclear know-how to Iran in 1988. Israel believes if Iran resumes its weapons-grade uranium enrichment process, March 2006 becomes a critical month for the acquisition of its first nuclear weapon.

All is not well in Pakistan either. Radical clerics won a major victory against Musharraf by refusing to expel foreign students in madrassas, the Koranic schools where hatred of America and Israel, is still being taught.

Tehran started the new year by announcing it doesn't like a Russian compromise proposal and will resume nuclear fuel research shortly.

Iranian agents have also been scouring Europe for missile parts, says a 55-page intelligence assessment dated July 1, 2005. Leaked to The Guardian in the U.K., it draws upon material gathered by British, French, German and Belgian agencies.

Iran, says this report, has developed an extensive web of front companies, official bodies, academic institutes and middlemen dedicated to obtaining - in Western Europe and in former Soviet republics, the expertise, training and equipment for nuclear programs, missile development, and biological and chemical weapons arsenals.

The document, says the Guardian, lists scores of Iranian companies and institutions involved in the arms race. It also details Tehran's determination to perfect a ballistic missile capable of delivering warheads far beyond its borders. Iran is trying to extend the range of its Shahab-3 missile, which has a range of almost 1,000 miles, capable of reaching Israel.

Taking their cue from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who declared Israel "should be wiped off the map" and that the World War II Holocaust was a figment of Zionist propaganda, Iranian commentators are pushing the envelope to nauseous absurdity.

Tehran TV political analyst Hosein Rouyvaran said Nazi concentration camps were "detention centers" where no more than 250,000 Jews died and where "for hygienic reasons, they used to burn the bodies of those who died of typhus or contagious diseases (in crematoria)." Gas chambers, this moron explained, were "for disinfecting the clothes and the possessions of the prisoners.

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