Sunday, June 21, 2009

LETTER OF THE WEEK

I don't think anything could surpass the two letters from yesterday but the following letter from a Mr. Bill Anderson published in today's Sunday Age comes a close third.

I don't know if this one's been censored and the Australian doesn't have a Sunday issue so I'll assume this is the full letter and then sit back and, as surely as night follows day, wait for the inevitable responses from the usual crowd which will no doubt include many lies* about the Jewish State.

Why single out Israel?

ANTONY Lowenstein subjects us to his usual wild and vicious diatribe against Israel and adds a call for a "campaign to boycott Israel" (Letters, 14/6). Sadly, one is no longer shocked by such anti-Israel statements. Anti-Zionism has become so widespread and "politically correct" and it is so extreme and so divorced from political and historic reality that one suspects that it masks even more dangerous and more ancient hatreds.

The call for a boycott of Israel is an indictment not only of Lowenstein's political judgement — Israel is, after all, the only true democracy in the Middle East — but also of his commitment to democracy. Whatever happened to the idea that open and free debate, argument and counter-argument, are central and crucial to democratic discourse? Why would anyone call for a boycott of Israel when examples of regimes that really are awful abound? Does Lowenstein favour a boycott of China, Burma, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Iran, Sudan, Russia, North Korea?

Lowenstein would claim to be a progressive and clearly sees himself as the voice of progress. If his views do indeed represent progress and thus the future, I fear that there are dark days ahead for us all.


BILL ANDERSON, Surrey Hills

Meanwhile, I would appreciate some answers to the question I posed yesterday. This one is not going to go away.

* an example of the lies you're going to read in the response will be the ethnic cleansing lie, the apartheid lie, the settlement lie and of course the human rights abuses. Nothing in the letter will suggest that the Jewish State has a right to defend its citizens from attack by terrorist thugs bent on wiping the country off the face of the earth.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"* an example of the lies you're going to read in the response will be the ethnic cleansing lie, the apartheid lie, the settlement lie and of course the human rights abuses. Nothing in the letter will suggest that the Jewish State has a right to defend its citizens from attack by terrorist thugs bent on wiping the country off the face of the earth."

The question is which of the usual suspects will be the one who submits the letter?