(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - In a poem published earlier this week, the Nobel Prize-winning writer criticized Israel and said it must not be allowed to launch military strikes against Iran.
Grass, 84, a seasoned campaigner for left-wing causes and a critic of Western military interventions, such as in Iraq, also condemned German arms sales to Israel in his poem "What must be said", that was published on Wednesday.
"Why do I say only now ... that the nuclear power Israel endangers an already fragile world peace? Because that must be said which may already be too late to say tomorrow," Grass wrote in the German-language poem.
"Also because we - as Germans burdened enough - may become a subcontractor to a crime that is foreseeable," he wrote, adding that Germany's Nazi past and the Holocaust were no excuse for remaining silent now about Israel's nuclear capability.
"I will not remain silent because I am weary of the West's hypocrisy," wrote Grass, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999 for novels such as "The Tin Drum" chronicling the horrors of 20th century German history.
Israel is widely assumed to be the Middle East's only nuclear-armed nation, which it neither confirms nor denies. These could be carried by Dolphin submarines that it has bought, at a sharp discount, from Germany.
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