Irani President Hassan Rouhani at the United Nations. Photo: Screen shot.

President Obama’s overtures to Iran are troubling and dangerous, and I find it astonishing that the leader of the free world would reestablish communication with the world’s foremost sponsor of international terror at the Presidential level without any preconditions.

First, there is Iran’s funding of Hamas and Hezbollah, murderous organizations with declared genocidal intent against Israel and Jews worldwide. How could the President of a Nation that experienced the horrors of 9/11 pick up the phone to the leader of a country that pays for the maiming and murder of Jewish and Arab children?

In Syria, Hezbollah (Iran’s proxy army) has become the private militia of Bashar Assad, and has helped him slaughter the Syrian people. President Obama has unfortunately chosen not to punish Assad for the chemical gassing of children, rendering his own red line less than useless.

But can Obama not, at least, demand that Iran cease funding and supplying Assad’s butchers in Syria before Tehran can rejoin the community of nations? Is outreach to mass murderers consistent with American values?

In Israel, Hamas, which until recently received a river of funding from Iran, recently tried to plant a bomb in the Mamilla mall – just a few minutes walk from the kotel. This is a place that is always packed with people, and where I often walk with my children.

Then there are the oft-repeated genocidal aspirations of the Iranian government itself to wipe the State of Israel off the map. And lest someone say that those threats were all Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and not President Rouhani, I remind you that the real leader of Iran is Ayatollah Ali Khameini who threatened as recently as this past March to “destroy Tel Aviv and Haifa.” And last August, he said that “the fake Zionist (regime) will disappear from the landscape of geography,” adding that the “cancerous tumor” – Israel – had to be removed, and expressing the hope that the Arab spring would inspire an Islamic “awakening” that would ultimately fulfill Iran’s goal of annihilating Israel.

Is it possible that an American president would open negotiations with a country who has not renounced its intention to produce a second holocaust and who continues to enrich uranium and work on a plutonium bomb that can be used to that effect?

As for Holocaust denial, when Christiane Amanpour asked Rouhani, “Does the right honorable gentleman from Tehran believe the Holocaust actually happened?,” the accurate Fars news agency translation of his response was this: “I have said before that I am not a historian and historians should specify, state, and explain the aspects of historical events. But generally we fully condemn any kind of crime committed against humanity throughout the history, including the crime committed by the Nazis both against the Jews and non-Jews… Therefore, what the Nazis did is condemned, (but) the aspects that you talk about, clarification of these aspects is a duty of the historians and researchers. I am not a history scholar.”

Yet, last week, an acquaintance of mine who has connections with the Israeli government, received a phone call from an Iranian diplomat asking him to intervene with Prime Minister Netanyahu himself. “Can you tell Netanyahu to leave us alone already, to stop abusing Iran?” This phone call, as well as the many attacks by the Iranian government against Netanyahu personally, shows that the Prime Minister’s message that Tehran remains a regime of unrepentant murderers is working. Rouhani’s charm offensive is not breaking completely through.