Iranian president wants to 'wipe Israel off of the map' or words to that effect

[bubble99]

Any views/comments?

World War Three, anyone?

yeah am wondering if america is shitting itself considering they are already overstretched. how the fk are they gonna police this one ha ha haa haa haa haaa

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ahhhh but you see it gave Blair a perfect 'end' to hisd cr*p EU summit - he just did his big Blah Blah Blah speech at the end and the media just forget about how bad it had been

I may be roasted for saying this but I think the media here were making more of it than they were in Iran.

That's not an attempt to excuse it either though.

Regarding anti-Semitism in the middle east, right up to the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes in 1948, levels of anti-Semitism in the Arab world were way below those in Europe. Throughout most of history, Jews were far safer in the Muslim world than they were in Europe, where anti-Semitism was vicious and virulent. There's nothing close to an Arab equivalent of the holocaust.

There weren't many Jews there for them to be "anti-Semitic" to before 1948, were there? And they tried 3 times (?) to get rid of them after that. The only difference now is Iran's potential nuclear capability. Would they dare?

Don't know the figures Jan - afaik, in 1939, about half the Jews in the world lived in Europe, mostly Eastern Europe. I can't remember hearing anything about what the global distribution of non-European Jews was though.

Lots in America...I don't know either, C, I just have a strong feeling there weren't many in Palestine!

Ah, thought you were talking about the Middle East in general. I think there was quite a sizeable community in Palestine - wasn't there a steady trickle of Jewish immigration from the end of the nineteenth century? (I could be dragging that out of the recesses of my memory, or alternatively, making it up!)

Blimey, it's hard to find figures without running across Holocaust denial stuff

Anyway, I finally found a table which may or may not be accurate here - world Jewish population in 1948 was:

Europe 3.7m
Asia 1.3m
Africa, Middle East 0.7m
N & S America 5.8 m
Australia -

Total 11.5m

(1938 total 16.6m....)