A nuclearized Iran could alter the course of mankind

- Khamenei, again, to visiting Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir: "The Islamic Republic of Iran is prepared to transfer the experience, knowledge and technology of its scientists" to other regimes desiring it. And: "The mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran (is) to erase Israel from the map of the region."

- Khamenei's predecessor, Iran's first Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - popularizer of the notion of the U.S. as "the Great Satan" -  calling for Israel to be "wiped off the face of the Earth": "We must all rise, destroy Israel and replace it with the heroic Palestinian nation." He added: Israel is "a pit viper," a "degenerative tumor that has, with backing of major powers, been planted in the heart of Islamic states and whose roots daily threaten the Islamic lands."

- Mohammad-Ebrahim Dehqani, rear admiral of Iran's Revolutionary Guards: "Whenever America does something evil, the first place that we target will be Israel."

- Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani: "The use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam."

Such statements recall Khrushchev's "We will bury you!"

Iran long has been a state sponsor of terrorism. Yet regarding Iran's rants, old Europe, the old media, and the old left urge more diplomatic dialogue, reliance on Kofi and the U.N., the mediation of Russians and Chinese. And of course, the eternal hope always is for conciliation and compromise. Lenin had in mind exploitation of that hope when inviting Westerners to sell Soviet Russia the rope with which it would hang the West: He called them "useful fools."

It's all very well to anguish over marriage amendments and the outcome of "American Idol," but none of that really seems to count for much in the face of the worsening present danger: an Iran interested not in dialogue but in killing us.

In November 1938, a month after Nazi troops occupied the Sudetenland, Hitler said in Weimar: "We want the possibility of going on with our work. We claim for our people the right to live, the same right which others claim for themselves." Three days later he staged Kristallnacht - and went on, through the Holocaust, to incinerate 6 million Jews.

Today's Iranians - today's jihadists - speak with no such Hitlerian blandishments. An Iranian nuclear bomb could incinerate 6 million Israelis and alter the course not only of the West - but of mankind.