Hanania column totally off base

I don't know which is more comical: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speeches at the United Nation and Columbia University or Ray Hanania's column "Too busy ripping Ahmadinejad to hear his message" (Oct. 1) praising him.

Ahmadinejad does not accept the Holocaust as fact. That is why he called for it to be scientifically investigated in his speech and why he sponsored a Holocaust Denial conference in Tehran last year. The Holocaust is probably the most documented event in human history and doesn't need further investigation to prove what happened.

The Palestinians were active participants in the Holocaust. The leader of the Palestinians, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, organized Muslim death squads in Europe to murder Jews. He had to flee to Berlin and spend the duration of the war as Hitler's personal guest. And Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial.

Is Hanania admitting that Ahmadinejad did state that Israel must be "destroyed"? That would make him more than the "foe of Israel" Hanania describes him as. In Ahmadinejad's own words, he stated this past June "God willing, in the near future we will see the destruction of the corrupt occupier regime," and in 2005 he made the widely publicized statement "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world."

Iran is a signatory to the U.N. Genocide Convention. It prohibits calling for the annihilation of another member state. Instead of having been given a public forum, Ahmadinejad should have been arrested and indicted for incitement to commit genocide as soon as he landed in New York.

Hanania's claim that Israel was established on land that was majority Arab is false. The November 1947 U.N. partition plan called for creating a Jewish state in the areas that were majority Jewish populated and an Arab state where the Arabs were the majority. The Jews accepted this even though it would have only given them 10 percent of the land designated for them as a homeland under the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The Arabs, along with all the other Arab countries, unanimously rejected this and launched a war to wipe out the Jews. Israel survived and Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt took over Gaza. The fact that an Arab Palestinian state was not created in 1948 is 100 percent the fault of the Arabs.

Steven Peck

Riverwoods