Iran’s Ahmadinejad draws ire for silence on Israeli aggression on Gaza

Ahmadinejad, who is best known – among many other things – for his famous saying in 2005 that Israel “should be wiped off the map”, is conspicuously silent after ten days of brutal Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip that has left the besieged territory ,home to over 2.3 million people, on the brink.

Iran’s principlist daily Javan, in an article published on Monday, said Ahmadinejad has chosen to remain silent, while even the most reticent Iranian figures like former president Seyyed Mohammad Khatami and other prominent members in the reformist camp have been vocally critical of the Israeli carnage of civilians.

“In the recent horrific crimes by Israel, those who were not expected, took a (critical) stand, but others, despite their past claims and positions, surprisingly remained silent or took a stance in favor of the criminal Zionists,” the principlist daily wrote.

During his tenure, Ahmadinejad never missed an opportunity to make vitriolic statements against Israel and caused uproar in the West in 2005 for undermining the Western narrative of the Holocaust, considered a strictly no-go area among Israel’s allies, Javan noted.

“The former president, however, did not make the slightest objection to Israel, while he is in a foreign seminar and has access to a wider global audience,” the newspaper wrote.