IRANIAN PRESIDENT MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD HAS REPEATEDLY PREDICTED ISRAEL’S DEMISE. PICTURE: AP. AP

He may bark about killing all Jews it’s a common theme but in the equation of power in Iran, he doesn’t add up to much.

Other extremists in his country, well-funded, state-sponsored and mostly unknown to us, are the real issue.

Like Ahmadinejad, they are Shia Muslims, the branch that, more than most, has a reverential regard for suicide although they would characterise it as martyrdom.

Islamists differ from the rest of us; we may recognise the similarities that exist in the genome of the murderously insane Ahmadinejad and his ilk, but evolution has favoured the advanced, Western homo sapiens whereas deep pockets of the Middle East remain stalled somewhere in the seventh century.

Nonetheless, we’re to take seriously the ambitious Iranians and their plans for a global suicide in which all (Shia) Muslims will ascend to Paradise while infidels and Sunnis must queue for hell.

Because it’s not about Ahmadinejad and his theatrically hysterical speeches.

It is actually about an even more menacingly ignorant crew: Iran’s Republican Guard.

Iran is a thoroughly corrupt country where anything can be bought and your life is only as valuable as the people you know

Originally, these illiterate brutes were hired by Ayatollah Khomeini to subdue through thousands of public executions the then quite educated Iranian population in the wake of the 1979 revolution that saw Khomeini installed as supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

But far from just securing stability for the revolutionary regime, they have emerged as the most powerful military-industrial driving force of the country’s economy, a robust challenge to the “elected” president, and in a display of symbiotic perversity the heavily armed right-hand of the latest studious Ayatollah.

Iran is a thoroughly corrupt country where anything can be bought and your life is only as valuable as the people you know.

Against this background the Republican Guard has developed in to the most powerful men’s club on earth. Its leader, the extremist former soldier Mohammad Ali Jafari, may be the most dangerous man on the planet.

Apart from its media outlets, and heroin exports, the Republican Guard, through an endless tangle of companies that is its shop front in the West, is able to purchase the latest technology, reverse engineer it, and then make it locally.

The Republican Guard bought just one of Italy’s Levriero super fast patrol boats in 1998; by 2007 they had built their own fleet of them and used them to kidnap 15 British sailors in May 2007.

Experts believe they will use these craft think September 11 in spectacular suicide missions to disable the US fleet in the Strait of Hormuz on the day they launch a nuclear strike on Israel.

As that day nears, the Iranian leaders’ rhetoric intensifies and the disembowelled logic of the Islamist becomes ever clearer.

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said last week that Israel will one day “disappear from the landscape”.

“With God’s help, this year the . . . Iranian nation will punch the faces of the enemies of Islam,” he added.

Days earlier, an Iranian defence department official had said that Israel must be destroyed.

And a few weeks ago, Alireza Forghani, a fellow described as Khamenie’s “strategy specialist”, wrote a fascinating piece that appeared on a Republican Guard website and then on “approved” outlets around Iran.

In it Forghani states that the “Islamic world should arise and scream that an atomic bomb is our right, and so smash America’s and Israel’s dreams”.

He has previously called for a pre-emptive strike on the West and has compiled a religious argument justifying this mass slaughter.

He states that 5.7 million of the 7.5 million Israelis are Jewish and that 60 per cent of them live in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa and these can be wiped out in nine minutes.

If Forghani were, say, the Bob Katter of Iran, we could dismiss his resentful rants, but that his editorials appear prominently on Republican Guard-sponsored media means his ideas have traction with men who will have access to nuclear codes.

Forghani, and those for whom he works, understand that a conventional weapons strike in Israel would invite a conventional response.

What they want is a nuclear pass to Paradise.

The UN will do nothing. That’s what it does best.

It is up to us: The time has come for the West to really hurt Iran.

Alan Howe is the Herald Sun’s executive editor