Iran is no threat to Israeli people
John Fitzgerald (Letters, Tuesday) writes that Iran poses "the greatest threat to the Jewish people since the days of the Third Reich".
It is impossible to reconcile that view with the fact that Iran is home to the largest number of Jews in any state in the Middle East outside Israel.
Not only that, Iran's 1979 Islamic Constitution recognises Jews as an official religious minority and reserves one seat (out of 290) in the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament, for them.
Mr Fitzgerald writes that President Mahmoud Ahmadin- ejad "has made clear his desire to wipe Israel off the map".
That is simply a fiction, which arose from a mistranslation from Farsi of a remark he made in a speech on October 26, 2005, as American Professor Juan Cole has pointed out.
The remark was an old quote from Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Republic, to the effect that "this occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time"
This was not a threat to destroy Israel by military action, but the expression of a hope that the Israeli regime will collapse, just as the Soviet Union did.
Dr David Morrison
Lansdowne Road, Belfast
