Two decades ago, the message from Netanyahu was clear: the then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was so rabidly antisemitic that he deserved to be compared to Hitler.

Ahmadinejad was so eager to pursue a nuclear weapons programme that he was prepared to defy the country’s supreme religious leader. He was so mentally unstable that he was ready to use those weapons to exterminate Israel, even though such a move would ensure a retaliatory nuclear counter-strike on his own country.

Lest we forget, Ahmadinejad had a reputation for such ruthless crackdowns on political opponents that Amnesty International noted in 2014 that his rule had “sounded the death knell for academic freedom in Iran”.

Yet, fast forward two decades, and Netanyahu reportedly now thinks Ahmadinejad is the best person to lead Iran; the person for whom it was worth killing Khamenei, Iran’s most influential opponent of nuclear weapons.

The New York Times reports that in recent years, there were strong suspicions inside Iran that Israel, Britain and the US were cultivating ties with Ahmadinejad and those around him – suspicions that now seem to be confirmed by Israel’s regime-change plan.

The newspaper further reports that Ahmadinejad had recently travelled to both Guatemala and Hungary, countries with very close ties to Israel.

Does any of this make sense? And yet for western media, the fact that Netanyahu was championing Ahmadinejad as Iran’s saviour, and that the US administration wholeheartedly bought into this idea, is little more than “surprising”.

In truth, it wrecks Israel’s entire narrative about Iran. It is a telling reminder of the yawning gap between what we have been told about Iran for decades, and what has actually been going on.

Image and reality bear almost no resemblance to each other. This has all been smoke and mirrors.

In my 2008 book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, I pointed out that nothing Israel was telling us about its Middle Eastern rival could be accepted at face value – least of all Israel’s assertion that Ahmadinejad was a Jew-hating “new Hitler”.

Many of the claims promoted 20 years ago by Israel about Ahmadinejad’s genocidal intent stemmed from a mistranslation of a speech in which the Iranian leader had quoted the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

According to western politicians and media, Ahmadinejad had called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” – widely portrayed as an ambition to launch a nuclear strike on Israel.

In fact, Ahmadinejad had been repeating Khomeini’s observation that Israel could not survive indefinitely in the form of an illegitimate Jewish supremacist state oppressing another people. He was pointing out that Israel’s days as a racist state were numbered, just as apartheid South Africa’s had been.

The sentiment behind Khomeini’s statement should be much clearer in the present circumstances, when it is Israel, not Iran, that has been busy wiping people off the map – in Gaza and southern Lebanon.

Similarly, Israel and its western allies made a great deal of noise in 2006 when Ahmadinejad called what was widely misrepresented as a “Holocaust denial” conference in Tehran. In fact, Ahmadinejad had organised what was intended to be a provocative – and to some, offensive – stunt to challenge western taboos about Israel and underscore the West’s hypocrisy towards Muslims.

Ahmadinejad’s point was twofold: firstly, if Muslims are not entitled to have their beliefs and sensitivities respected by westerners – as evidenced by the 2005 “Danish cartoon affair” and the “free speech” defence for presenting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad – why should westerners expect their own sensitivities about Israel and the Holocaust to be exempt from challenge?

He also wanted to dissect the western belief that someone else, the Palestinian people, should pay a heavy price, including decades of dispossession and abuse, for the West’s crimes against Europe’s Jews.

That was a warning we should have taken seriously at the time – and that might have forestalled the current genocide.

This is an extract from my latest article. Read more here: