Don’t mince words over Hamas terror attack
The BBC coverage of the 7th October terrorist attack on Israel has been a thoroughly deplorable display of terminological inexactitude.
Time and time again the BBC talks about people being abducted, kidnapped, and taken hostage. All these terms are technically correct, but the medieval word “enslaved”, with all its terrible implications is the only correct word to describe the horror of being captured by psychopathic soldiers who enjoy torturing people.
Rescuing the citizens of Israel is a moral imperative for the government of Israel.
Ensuring that the citizens of Gaza do not suffer should be a moral imperative for the government of Gaza, but the BBC doesn’t seem to have noticed.
28 October 2023
Israelis right to remove terrorists from borders
Protecting Jews from anti-semitic genocidal terrorists should not be a partisan political issue.
Freedom of choice is a gift from God, but some choices are a moral imperative.
I stand with Israel.
15 November 2023
Support for Palestine is West’s moral failure
John L Horsham (“Hamas broke ceasefire which was in place”, November 17th) is quite right, but the behaviour of the “bleeding hearts” of the anti-war faction of the Labour Party is nothing more than a symptom of the moral failure of the Western democracies.
Many people in Western Europe have difficulty telling the difference between a war and a just war and very little understanding of the difference between evil and suffering.
Just wars have to be won because the alternative is permanent and almost unimaginable horror.
I think that everyone should stand by Israel and I am grateful for the support of Rodger Ruse (“Peace is not possible until Hamas is wiped out”, November 17th).
20 November 2023
War will only end when Hamas are destroyed
Like Pontefract Castle, the main feature of the Hamas stronghold in Gaza is a huge network of tunnels which allow the terrorists to hide whenever the IDF is attacking, and ambush the IDF whenever they relax their vigilance.
Like many other mainstream media outlets, the BBC does not seem to understand that the war in Gaza will only be over when every tunnel has been collapsed and every terrorist attempt to hide inside the civilian population has been thwarted.
By the grace of God, my knowledge of warfare comes only from history books, but there is no shortage of ex-servicemen in Plymouth and I would appreciate their opinion about the BBC coverage of the war in Gaza.
5 December 2023
The war in the Holy Land is not like the war in the Ukraine
Tony Staunton (“Peace cannot be just for Christmas”, December 27th) shares the opinion that the war in the Holy Land is nothing more than a dispute about territory, just like the war in the Ukraine.
His analysis of the problem is fatally flawed by ignoring the rather obvious reality that Islam has been riven by schism for centuries. Like Christians who support abortion, Islamic terrorists honestly believe that their religion condones crimes against humanity.
I stand with Israel because the Islamic terrorists have enthusiastically embraced evil.
Bernard John Toolan -This letter was not published by the Plymouth Herald, but I still think it has merit.
Getting to the political root of fascism
Tony Staunton (“This scale of injustice should put fear into us”, September 3rd) is entitled to his opinion that “Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu is pursuing a strategy of genocide against the Palestinians”, but there is not the slightest doubt that Adolph Hitler would have agreed with Mr Staunton.
Tony Staunton (“Never be afraid to speak out on racism”, September 24th) is entitled to his opinion that fascism is a far-right political ideology, but Mussolini was a member of an extreme left-wing political party which expelled Mussolini in 1914 and joined the Communist International in 1919.
The Plymouth Herald has published several letters pointing out that the National Socialist German Workers Party was clearly a left-wing political party, and they were not all written by me.
Socialists, Marxists and Communists can say that fascism is an extreme right-wing political ideology till they go blue in the face, but they really do need to produce a rational argument if they want conservatives to agree with them.
28 September 2024