Madam, - Dermot Meleady (May 17th) is no doubt correct in highlighting the disturbing elements of irrationalism in the discourse of Iran's president Ahmadinejad.
However, many of Israel's Christian supporters believe that the Jews must take over "the promised land" in its entirety so that after Armageddon "the rapture" may take place, whereby Christians are assumed bodily into Heaven and those Jews who haven't converted are consigned to the flames of Hell.
The "actual sanity" of those holding these millenarian and anti-Semitic beliefs is surely as questionable as that of the Iranian president with his "world conflagration", "Twelfth Imam", and "green aura", yet their support has been welcomed by successive Israeli regimes and their acknowledged influence on George W Bush is enormous.
As for "The suicide cult of radical Islamism" which is "unamenable to the rational calculation of mutual destruction", let us not forget that US Jewish author Seymour Hersh coined the phrase "the Samson option" a generation ago for Israel's willingness to bring nuclear catastrophe to the world if it ever felt itself seriously threatened.
The best response to Iran's nuclear ambitions is to advocate a nuclear-free Middle East in a nuclear-free world. The only state in the region that possesses nuclear weapons is Israel; hence it must be prevailed upon to relinquish its arsenal before other states can be induced to renounce the possibility of nuclear deterrence. - Yours, etc,
RAYMOND DEANE, National Executive, Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Dame Street, Dublin 2.