As the deadline for a nuclear deal with Iran looms on the horizon, Iran’s Supreme Leader has stepped up his calls for Israel’s annihilation. It is worth recalling that this stance, along with anti-Americanism, is in keeping with Iran’s official ideology. Michael Rubin writes:

As we enter the last two weeks of talks before the self-imposed deadline to conclude a deal with Iran, it now seems that Khamenei is taking his hatred to a new level. Hence, on the 76th anniversary of Kristallnacht, he tweeted a nine-step plan for the destruction of Israel. This, against the backdrop of current President Hassan Rouhani’s past endorsement of utilizing diplomacy as a means to lull America into complacency before delivering a knock-out blow, and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s reports suggesting Iran was backtracking on its promise of transparency and nuclear accountability, should raise red flags.

It is also important to analyze with consistency rather than cherry-pick. If President Rouhani’s Rosh Hashanah tweet wishing Jews a happy new year was a sign of real change in Iran, would not Khamenei’s tweet calling for Israel’s eradication be a sign that perhaps hope of such change was premature? After all, within the Islamic Republic’s system, Khamenei trumps Rouhani just as certainly as, in poker, a royal flush trumps a pair of twos. Nor is timing a coincidence. If Rouhani timed his tweet for the Jewish new year, why assume that Khamenei’s timing of his tweet to coincide with the anniversary of one of Germany’s great pogroms was simply a coincidence?

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].