These are no idle threats. In early 2007, law professor Glenn Reynolds posited in a post on the right-wing website Instapundit that, with regard to alleged Iranian involvement in resistance activity in Iraq, the United States “should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian [sic] atomic scientists, [and] supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran.” Reynolds continued,

“[T]o be clear, I think it’s perfectly fine to kill people who are working on atomic bombs for countries — like Iran — that have already said that they want to use those bombs against America and its allies, and I think that those who feel otherwise are idiots, and in absolutely no position to strike moral poses.”

The fact that not a single Iranian official in recent memory has ever threatened to build nuclear weapons, let alone use them “against America and its allies,” is beside the point. So is the fact that the United States has explicit laws against political assassination. The point is that Reynolds, a law professor, was calling for the willful murder of Iranians – government officials, religious leaders, scientists and academics – who have never been charged with or found guilty of any crime and who pose absolutely no threat to the United States or its citizens.

Less than a month earlier, in January 2007, a senior Iranian nuclear physicist and professor at Shiraz University working at the uranium enrichment facility at Isfahan, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, was found dead in his apartment. While some publications attributed his death to an explosion in his laboratory, other reports claimed he was assassinated by the Mossad, Israel’s foreign spy agency, using “radioactive poisoning.”

In addition, the day after Reynolds posted his assassination wishlist, a bomb explosion killed at least 18 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in the southeastern Iranian city of Zahedan. Responsibility for the bombing was subsequently claimed by the Iranian separatist group Jundallah, which has carried out numerous terrorist attacks in the region and has financial ties to the United States. Since then, at least 164 Iranians have been murdered in similar actions undertaken by Jundallah, the most recent occurring on December 15, when at least 38 worshippers celebrating the holiday Ashura were killed, and over 50 wounded, in a suicide bombing outside a mosque in the city of Chabahar.

In November of this year, the U.S. State Department finally designated Jundallah as a terrorist organization.

On September 22, 2010, twelve people were killed and at least 80 injured in a bombing at a military parade in the West Azerbaijani city of Mahabad in northwest Iran. The Kurdish separatist group Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), which also has connections to the United States and Israel, may have been behind the attack.

Early this year, on January 12, 2010, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a 50-year-old Iranian nuclear physicist and professor at Tehran University, was killed outside his home “when a bomb-rigged motorcycle exploded as he left for work.” The blast, which shattered nearby windows in northern Tehran’s Qeytariyeh neighborhood, was activated by a remote trigger. Ali Mohammadi was a lecturer and researcher with “no prominent political voice, no published work with military relevance and no declared links to Iran’s nuclear program.” The New York Times reported that Ali Mohammadi taught neutron physics and “was the author of several articles on quantum and theoretical physics in scientific journals.” Experts agree the victim “was not involved in the country’s nuclear program,” that his writing, given its highly abstract nature, has “virtually no military applications and that “nuclear physicists interested in bomb-making would have no interest in these papers.”

But calls for the assassination of Iranian scientists didn’t stop there. This past July, former CIA operative, death squad and genocide enthusiast, and current neocon blowhard, Reuel Marc Gerecht penned an article for The Weekly Standard entitled “Should Israel Bomb Iran? Better safe than sorry.” In addition to advocating the illegal and immoral murder of thousands of Iranians because their country’s defiance of U.S. and Israeli demands to relinquish its inalienable rights, Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Zionist Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, kvetched, “If the Israelis (or, better, the Americans under President Bush) had struck Iran’s principal nuclear facilities in 2003 and killed many of the scientists and technical support staff, Khamenei’s nuclear program likely would have taken years, even decades, to recover.”

On November 29, 2010, as American pundits and politicians were busy calling for the murder of Julian Assange, two separate but connected incidents occurred. Two of Iran’s top nuclear scientists were attacked on their way to work by “men on motorbikes who attached bombs to the windows of their cars” and then detonated them from a distance. One of the scientists, Dr. Majid Shahriari, a member of the nuclear engineering department of Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, was killed. Shahriari had published dozens of esoteric conference reports and peer-reviewed articles on nuclear research and is said to have managed a “major project” for the country’s Atomic Energy Organization. The Guardian reported that “Shahriari had no known links to banned nuclear work, but was highly regarded in his field.” His wife was injured in the attack. The other scientist, Fereydoon Abbasi, and his wife were also wounded.

“They’re bad people, and the work they do is exactly what you need to design a bomb,” an anonymous U.S. official who assesses scientific intelligence told The New York Times. “They’re both top scientists.”

Both Dr. Mohammadi, who was assassinated in January, and Dr. Shahriari were associated with a non-nuclear scientific research unit known as Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) which is based in Jordan and operating under United Nations auspices.

The day after the attacks on Shahriari and Abbasi, Yossi Melman, the senior terrorism and intelligence commentator for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, reported on the connection between the WikiLeaks diplomatic cable release, the assassination of Iranian scientists, and the appointment of a new head of the Mossad, all of which occurred the same day. Melman wrote:

“They are part of the endless efforts by the Israeli intelligence community, together with its Western counterparts including Britain’s MI6 and America’s CIA, to sabotage, delay and if possible, to stop Iran from reaching its goal [sic] of having its first nuclear bomb.”

Melman, who publicized the mysterious death of Hosseinpour in 2007, stated that, regarding the new attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, “it is obvious…that Israel was behind it.”

Less than two weeks later, on December 12, the Washington Post‘s new neoconservative, warmongering columnist Jennifer Rubin made a number of suggestions about how the United States should “deal” with Iran’s nuclear program. In addition to supporting Iran’s small opposition movement and beginning to “make the case and agree on a feasible plan for the use of force,” Rubin wrote, in back-to-back bullet points,

“Second, we should continue and enhance espionage and sabotage of the Iranian nuclear program. Every nuclear scientist who has a ‘car accident’ and every computer virus buys us time, setting back the timeline for Iran’s nuclear capability, while exacting a price for those who cooperate with the nuclear program. Think of it as the ultimate targeted sanction. Third, we need to make human rights a central theme in our bilateral and multilateral diplomacy regarding Iran.”

As Salon‘s Justin Elliott summarized, “Rubin wants the United States to make human rights a central theme in its Iran policy — and to indiscriminately assassinate civilian scientists,” continuing that “even the U.S. State Department referred to these attacks as acts of terrorism, which would make them antithetical to any serious concept of human rights.”

This is certainly not the first time Rubin, who has written that “nearly all wisdom” can be found in the Torah (and the first two Godfather movies), has contradicted herself within the span of a sentence or two. In her very first Washington Post blog, Rubin declared her ideological belief in “American exceptionalism, limited government, free markets, a secure and thriving Jewish state, defense of freedom and human rights around the world, enforced borders with a generous legal immigration policy, calling things by their proper names (e.g. Islamic fundamentalism), and recapturing vocabulary (a ‘feminist’ is not the same as a pro-choice activist).” How one can believe simultaneously in “freedom and human rights” and a “secure and thriving” heavily-militarized and inherently discriminatory ethnocracy is unclear, unless of course the “world” doesn’t include Palestinians. Also, so long as things are being “called by their proper names” and vocabulary is being “recaptured,” writers like Rubin, Reynolds and Gerecht should undoubtedly be labeled as what they are: Zionist apologists who advocate the murder of innocent people to advance their own political and ideological agendas; in other words, they are proponents of terrorism.