NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING physicist Steven Weinberg told an Irish audience yesterday that Israel was the "most exposed salient" in a war between liberal democracies and Muslim theocracies.

Prof Weinberg, a strong supporter of Israel, said the conflict between Israel and Hamas was part of a wider conflict.

This included the Madrid, London and Mumbai bombings, the conflict between Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq and the Janjaweed in Sudan, all of which had nothing to do with Israel, he said.

"It is a war between secular liberal democracy as you find it in Israel, Ireland and the United States, and the militant theocratical-oriented Islam," he told an audience at Trinity College Dublin last night which included the Green Party spokesman on finance, Senator Dan Boyle, and Fianna Fáil Senator Mark Daly.

Jewish-born Prof Weinberg won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979. Though now an atheist, he is a supporter of the Jewish state and cancelled a trip to the UK recently because of a proposed boycott of Israeli academics...