http://melaniephillips.com/the-other-britain
Last Thursday night I was on BBC TV’s Question Time in Plymouth, which you can view here.
The last question on the show came from a woman who asked whether, ‘since Israel has many more nuclear weapons than Iran’, we should agree with President Obama’s statement that no option (in other words, war with Iran) should be ruled out.
The woman who asked this question was doubtless a reasonable, moderate person with a benevolent and kindly approach to humanity, who would be astonished to be told there was anything shocking about her basic premise.
But the equation she made was of course obnoxious. There is no reasonable equation to be made between Israel and Iran over their possession of nuclear weapons. Israel’s nuclear weapons – like those in the possession of every true democracy – are intended solely for the country’s defence against attack.
Israel, moreover, is in the unique position of being threatened with extinction by most of its neighbours — of which the most terrifying is Iran, which regularly announces its intention to wipe Israel off the map and is racing to develop nuclear weapons with which to realise that infernal aim. To equate Israel’s nuclear weapons with those of Iran is thus to equate the prospective perpetrators of genocide with the prospective victims of that genocide.
Behind this astonishing failure to grasp the fact that if the Iranian regime is not stopped a second genocide of the Jews is in the making lies the corresponding failure of the British public to understand the scale of the evil and the threat, not only to Israel but to the west and to the peace of the world, represented by the fanatical and apocalyptic Iranian regime.
The historical precedent for the Iranian crisis is not, as the audience seemed to believe, that ‘we were taken to war in Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction which never existed’ (which I don’t believe was the case either, but let that pass for now). The proper analogy is with the 1930s, when Britain supported the appeasement of Nazi Germany on the basis that the threat posed by Hitler was much exaggerated.