Israel and Iran in the Irish Times

The Irish Times recently published an interview with Iran's ambassador in Dublin.  The mere fact of such exposure will have thrown the (unusually hysterical and aggressive) Israeli embassy in Dublin into a considerable tizzy.

So a letter to the Irish Times by the Israeli embassy's (Irish) press officer, Dr Derek Flynn, was inevitable.   I replied to his letter, but my letter was not published.   Here's my reply:

June 2, 2014

Dear Sir

 

Dr Derek O'Flynn takes issue with the words of the Iranian Ambassador (letters, 2/6/14). But sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Dr O'Flynn says Iran attacks Israel at every international forum, but Israel regularly threatens to bomb Iran literally.  Dr O'Flynn drags up one nearly-mythical speech by a former Iranian president, but it is misquoted: Mr Ahmedinijad (aggressive and dictatorial as he was) called for the end of the 'Zionist regime' and that the 'occupying regime' be 'wiped off the map' - 'occupying' referring to the Occupied Territories - not quite the same thing as calling for Israel to be wiped out. 

Iran is at least a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and has never threatened to use nuclear weapons, unlike Israel, which threatened their use against Syria during the Yom Kippur war of 1973. Iran has not occupied another people's territory for the last 46 years, illegally colonising that territory, imprisoning and murdering that people, despoiling their resources. Iran commits many human rights infractions, but it is not an ethnically-defined state, where one ethnic group is constitutionally prioritised over all others. It does commit torture on dissidents, but so does Israel torture Palestinian prisoners - see the reports of the Public Committee against Torture in Israel. 

Dr O'Flynn accuses Iran of exporting terror all over the world, but this really is good for a laugh: Israel has exported weapons and expertise to murderous regimes all over the planet, including those of Amin in Uganda and Mobutu in Zaire, Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s, and apartheid South Africa. Israel was eager to install the murderous Lebanese Phalange in power in 1982. Most hilariously of all, Israel actively exported weapons to the brutal regime of the Shah in pre-revolutionary Iran, and even exported weapons and spare parts to the Islamic Republic during its war with Iraq. 

 

Some sauce, Dr O'Flynn?

yours sincerely

Conor McCarthy

Israeli diplomats apparently regard a posting in Dublin as being akin to being sent to one of the outer circles of Hell.   We need to confirm them in that impression.

Conor