Iran has threatened to wipe Israel from the map

Yesterday’s Irish Examiner editorial, ‘A Sobering Lesson for Israel’, was one of the most unbalanced and ill-informed commentaries I have read. You blame Israel for alienating its allies, but give no sensible explanation of why.

Israel has been attacked illegally by major armed forces and militias, and been forced to fight defensive wars, no fewer than eight times. It has lost many thousands of its civilian population to 66 years of terrorist attacks and suicide bombings, it has given up land for peace (the Sinai Peninsula, southern Lebanon, Gaza), and it has made a dozen peace offers with outstanding concessions, all of which would have ended the occupation of the West Bank and all of which have been turned down flat.

It has pulled out from Gaza and been atacked from there by a fascist jihadist terror group — and you think Israel is to blame for their problems and has alienated allies with no good reason.

The Iranian leadership has threatened, on numerous occasions, to wipe Israel from the map. This is not a fantasy: I read Persian fluently and can affirm that these threats are genuine. Today, Iran is reckoned the largest state sponsor of terrorism across the globe: it is slowly taking control of Gaza, parts of Syria, Iraq and Yemen; it is building inter-continental ballistic missiles, whose only purpose is to carry nuclear warheads; it is gripped at all levels of society by an obsession with supernatural and apocalyptic ideas. These involve the fighting of a holy war in which the Shi’i Mahdi will conquer the world, and it has just agreed to a deal that will give it everything it wants.

And you blame Israel for just asking that part of the deal should be a formal, internationally guaranteed act of recognition by Iran that Israel (established by the United Nations in 1947) has a right to exist and not to be subjected to a threat of annihilation by a country with the worst human rights record in the world, barring North Korea.

No doubt, you would have blamed Winston Churchill for his ‘obsessive’ fears of Nazi Germany.

And, no doubt, you would expect us Irish to carry on regardless, if the government in the North planned to wipe us from the pages of time. If you did, I doubt if you would be very popular.

Dr. Denis MacEoin

Distinguished Senior Fellow

The Gatestone Institute

New York, NY

USA