Sir, – Dr David Woods claims “The US-Israel attack upon Iran demonstrates intellectual clarity and moral courage” and “US president Donald Trump and Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu deserve our eternal gratitude” for their “heroic efforts to avert nuclear war” (Letters, March 4th).
The front page of the same edition of your paper is dominated by a photograph of mourners weeping “during the funeral yesterday of children killed in a reported strike on a primary school in Iran’s Hormozgan province”. The current assessment is that 165 schoolchildren were killed in this Israeli bombing.
As a further example of “moral courage”, Woods might have cited Israel’s bombing of Iran’s Evin Prison last June, which killed some 80 people, most of them dissidents imprisoned by the Islamist regime. This action was rated as “an apparent war-crime” by Human Rights Watch.
In view of such “intellectual clarity” it’s hardly worth pointing out that Iran has no nuclear weapons, whereas Israel not alone has them but boasts a nuclear doomsday plan known as “the Samson option”, which, in the words of your columnist Fintan O’Toole, “is pulling the temple of international order down on all our heads”. - Yours, etc,
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Raymond Deane,
Broadstone,
Dublin 7.
Sir, – I can only assume that Dr David Woods’s letter extolling the “pre-emptive” attack on Iran is a joke.
For me the words “moral” and “courage” cannot be used in association with Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu. – Yours, etc,
Gill McCarthy,
Shillelagh,
Co Wicklow.
Sir, – There was a time when the deaths of children in war zones would provoke outrage and demands for accountability – but it seems Gaza has made many of us immune to the visceral upset of seeing such images as an obliterated school and scores of small coffins, small freshly dug graves and inconsolable crying.
Precision bombing in areas of high population density is an inaccurate and cynical euphemism that does not exclude dead children.
Fortunately, they are not our children. Imagine if they were – and we were the mourners in the photograph on the front page of The Irish Times (March 4th). - Yours, etc,
Chris Fitzpatrick,
Dublin 6.
Sir, – The Taoiseach’s refusal to clearly condemn the illegal US and Israeli attacks on Iran marks a pivotal moment for Ireland’s foreign policy. In choosing equivocation over principle, he appears to have abandoned Ireland’s long-argued commitment to a rules-based international system.
One can abhor the Iranian regime’s repression and still recognise that international law cannot be applied selectively, depending on who launches the missiles. To suggest otherwise fatally undermines the very norms small states rely upon.
By contrast, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has shown notable political courage in unequivocally defending international law and the UN Charter, despite the diplomatic pressures such clarity inevitably brings.
That willingness to risk discomfort in order to uphold principle is the essence of leadership. It stands in stark contrast to the hesitancy emanating from Government Buildings. – Yours, etc,
Séamus White,
Stoneybatter,
Dublin 7.
