LETTER OF THE WEEK

A little bit of reality in the Sunday Age letters section today (buried under an expected and unhinged Israel is Apartheid piece of agitprop from Mark Bradbeer):-

Armchair philosophising a total waste

WHY are Australian authorities wasting resources on finding Mahmoud al-Mabhouh's assassins (''Australia joins hunt for killers'', 28/2)? They would be far better employed using our taxes to assist Israel, the only civilised, liberal democratic state in the Middle East, in its struggle against its Islamofascist regional neighbours such as Ahmadinejad's Iran, from whom al-Mabhouh was buying weapons to murder Jewish children.

And what gives Ross Burns the right to sit in comfort and safety on the other side of the world and pontificate and moralise and split legal hairs about a country surrounded by enemies who either deny the Holocaust or are keen to repeat it? Thank goodness for Sarah Honig's exposure of the double standards in the current orgy of Israel-bashing.

The single greatest scandal of Western journalism is the fact that Israel receives more criticism than all the world's genuine abusers of human rights - communist, Islamist and other (e.g. Burma, Zimbabwe) - put together.

BILL JAMES, Bayswater