Israel is a threat to world peace and is plotting the “annihilation of Iran”, Nobel prize laureate Gunther Grass has said in a poem published today by the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and other European dailies.
The 84-year-old long-time leftist activist wrote in “What must be said” that he worried Israel “could wipe out the Iranian people” with a “first strike” due to the threat it sees in Tehran’s disputed nuclear program.
“Why do I only say now, aged and with my last ink: the atomic power Israel is endangering the already fragile world peace?” reads the poem.
“Tomorrow could already be too late” and Germany could be a “supplier to a crime”, referring to a deal sealed last month for Berlin to sell Israel a sixth nuclear-capable Dolphin-class submarine.
There is of course no reason for Israel to have submarines capable of delivering nuclear warheads to any target in the world – unless of course, it needs them to attack other nations, as predicted by of the Israeli military historian, Martin van Creveld, who in 2010 said that “Israel could find itself one day forced to exterminate the European continent using all kinds of weapons including its nuclear arsenal if it felt its demise neared,” and stressed that “Israel also considers Europe a hostile target.”
“We have hundreds of nuclear warheads and missiles that can reach different targets in the heart of the European continent, including beyond the borders of Rome, the Italian capital,” Creveld said, adding that most of the European capitals would become preferred targets for the Israeli air force.
He reiterated “Israel’s ability to destroy the whole world whenever it felt its existence would be doomed to extinction.”
In the poem, Grass said he “will be silent no longer, because I am sick of the hypocrisy of the West.”
He also called for an “unhindered and permanent monitoring of Israel’s nuclear potential and Iran’s nuclear facility through an international entity that the government of both countries would approve.”
Israel is the only country in the Middle East which does have nuclear weapons, and which has refused to sign the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Yet this is the same nation which threatens Iran because of that latter’ nation’s peaceful electricity generation nuclear program.
Wednesday’s poem is not the first time Grass has come out with critical views of Israel. In a 2001 interview with Spiegel, he described the extremist Jewish theft of Palestinian land as a “criminal activity” that “not only needs to be stopped — it also needs to be reversed. Otherwise there will be no peace.”
