UK-Israel
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been criticized by an Irish evangelical researcher for misquoting comments made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about Israel.

"It has been mentioned in the press so often that the 'wipe off the map' statement about Israel by Ahmadinejad was a mistranslation, yet Gordon Brown repeated the same mistranslation in his speech to the Israeli parliament," said Anthony McRoy.

In an interview with IRNA, McRoy suggested that while there may be an excuse claimed by the US for the misquotation, there was no justification for Brown.

"The difference between us and America is that we have diplomatic relations with the Iranians. There's obviously an Iranian embassy in Britain," he said.

"The Foreign Office would have received the official documents and they would know all about that. Therefore, it's impossible to think that the prime minister could be unaware of that," said the academic, who writes and comments on Islamic affairs.

He also criticized Brown's unbalanced remarks in his Knesset speech on Monday about the rights of the Israelis to live in their country with security and freedom.

The leading question, he suggested, was when will the British premier go to 'visit the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan and accept that they have the right to go back to their homes and live in freedom and peace as well'.

McRoy, who authored 'From Rushdie to 7/7: The Radicalization of Islam in Britain', also believed that Brown should apologize for the 'immoral action' by Britain in helping with the creation of Israel.

"Last year was the 90th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration and the question is why the British government did not apologize for it," he said.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was a classified formal statement of policy by the British government stating that the British government 'view with favor' the establishment of 'a national home for the Jewish people' in Palestine.

While former British prime minister, John Major, officially revoked the Munich Agreement, upon which Czech land was handed over to the Germans in 1938, during his first visit to Prague in the 1990s, McRoy believed Brown should apologize to the Palestinians for the Balfour Declaration as 'there's been precedence for apologizing and revoking an immoral action'.