Madam, – Richard Whelan has in the past written cogently on the folly of assuming that Muslims support al-Qaeda, so it is disappointing to find in his Opinion piece of June 12th the same fallacies characteristic of anti-Iranian propaganda at its worst.
Given that nobody believes that Iran actually possesses or is shortly about to possess nuclear weapons, it is absurd to claim that it is Iran’s nuclear programme that is threatening the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), rather than Israel’s universally acknowledged possession of between 200 and 400 nuclear warheads.
In modern times Iran/Persia has never once invaded any of its neighbours, yet from 1980 to 1988 it was the victim of an illegal onslaught by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, backed by “the West”. On the other hand, Israel has at one time or another attacked most of its neighbours as well as states as far away as Tunisia, and has been utterly unscrupulous in the means employed, including the hundreds of thousands of cluster bombs dropped on Lebanon in the last days of the 2006 war.
To ignore the threat to humankind posed by hundreds of nuclear warheads in the hands of the unaccountable, belligerent Israeli rogue state yet to threaten unspecified action against Iran which possesses no such weapons is to be guilty of gross prejudice and imbalance. – Yours, etc,
RAYMOND DEANE,
Dun Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.