Iran set up for US proxy strike

IN his letter (August 11) suggesting that Israel had the right to attack Iran, John Fitzgerald should have quoted directly from the proverbs: “The people of Israel have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind.”

Mr Fitzgerald chooses to indulge his own paranoia by basing his case on a classic example of blatant propaganda — the claim that Iran wants to ‘wipe Israel off the map’.

This claim has precisely the same status as the claim about Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ — it is a clever piece of propaganda based on a misquote deliberately taken out of context, deliberately misinterpreted, endlessly and uncritically repeated in western media so that it becomes received ‘fact’.

Its purpose is exactly the same as the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ claim — to prepare American and (they hope) European public opinion to accept that a proxy American strike against Iran is justified.

Is Mr Fitzgerald aware that Iran’s UN press officer, MA Mohammadi, made the following statement to The Washington Post in a June 2006 letter: “We have no problem with the world. We are not a threat whatsoever to the world, and the world knows it. We will never start a war. We have no intention of going to war with any state.”

He was quoting Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader.

If Israel, America and Russia were prepared to make such public commitments to peace, the world would certainly be a safer place. Apparently, Israel is entitled illegally to acquire nuclear weapons, to hold them without publicly acknowledging the fact, to defy UN demands that it sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty while at the same time stridently demanding that other countries that are signatories to the treaty may not enrich uranium for any purpose.

India is equally guilty in this respect. Both, of course, are supported in their intransigence by the US.

Mr Fitzgerald seems just as blissfully ignorant of the continued refusal of the five official nuclear powers — Britain, France, China, Russia and the US — to comply with their obligations under the treaty, but who ever talks about that?

These countries — and especially Israel as America’s mideastern aircraft carrier and weapons tester — can easily ignore their obligations by using their veto as permanent members of the UN Security Council. Just check the voting record of the US/Israel alliance in particular on UN resolutions.

Their record is appalling in its utter immorality, but again no one seems to care.

I’m disappointed that any Irish citizen, such as Mr Fitzgerald, can be so easily taken in by such an obvious case of orchestrated propaganda.

Con Hayes

Kerry Road

Tower

Blarney

Co Cork