Mick Hartley

This is interesting, from MEMRI TV, featuring Iranian International Relations professor Gholamreza Haddad.

Israel, he says, is accused of being an expansionist power – “from the Nile to the Euphrates”. But isn’t this slogan a much better fit for Iran, with its intrusions into Iraq and Yemen and Lebanon and Syria and Sudan and Gaza?

His main point, though, is that Israel and Iran should be natural allies against pan-Arabism, which has defined Jews and Iranians as the enemies in the Middle East. Nasser’s war-cry in 1967 was “breakfast in Tel Aviv, lunch in Ahwaz [in Iran]”. He quotes Saddam Hussein’s father-in-law, a senior Ba’ath Party official, who wrote “I am surprised that God created three creatures: the Jew, the Iranian, and the fly”. Yet what is Iran doing? It’s scaring the Arabs into Israel’s arms.