With the international community focused on the nuclear deal with Iran, little attention has been given to the other Iranian breakthrough, which happened at around the same time. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called Israel a country “doomed to failure and annihilation,” “an illegitimate regime led by untouchable rabid dogs” whose leaders “cannot be called human beings, they are like animals.”

Are such heinous, hate-filled words a breakthrough? Well, yes. In the past, Khamenei referred to Israel as a “cancerous tumor that should be cut off.” So we are not yet human beings in his eyes, but are no longer cancerous cells and have at least joined the animal kingdom. Moreover, he also refrained from explicitly stating that Iran would annihilate Israel, leaving this to an unspecified, though not hard to surmise, mechanism. A breakthrough!

OK, tongue-in-cheek; but words do matter, indeed, they matter a great deal, as we have learned from bitter experience with anti-Semitic, anti-black and various forms of racial and other hatred. They especially matter at a time when many, this author included, believe that the nuclear deal with Iran is an important breakthrough.

The world, however, has become blase. We have become used to and inured to Iran’s endless expressions of what is, in effect, genocidal hatred. We forget that Hamas’ formal charter refers to Jews as “apes and pigs,” that Hezbollah uses similarly reprehensible rhetoric, as do many others in the Arab world. We have come to ignore the endless Palestinian, Arab and Third World references to Israel, one of the world’s greatest (if not fault-free) democracies as a Nazi and apartheid state, or their repeated descriptions of the deaths of a handful of people as “genocide,” which cheapens the true meaning of this word, whether applied to the horrors of the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda and elsewhere. We forget that leaders of Arab countries used to speak explicitly of “driving the Jews into the sea” and other expressions of Israel’s annihilation, and though they no longer do so, many in the Arab world still do.