Madam, - John Waters has many telling things to say about al-Qaeda (Opinion, July 11th). However, he is wrong to say that "its objective is to remake the world in the image of Islam". That implies that Islam is a monolithic entity, while in reality it is no less diverse than any other of the large religious traditions, including Christianity.
No, if we are to defeat al-Qaeda-sponsored or -associated terrorism we need to know the enemy we are fighting. The ideologue who sits on the shoulder of bin Laden is one Sayyid Qutb, executed by pan-Arab socialist and nationalist President Nasser in 1966. He is Marx to Bin Laden's Lenin, with the added attraction of martyrdom.
Qutb has influenced almost every extreme movement within Sunni Islam so there is a good reason for calling the terror used by his followers "Qtubist", much in the same way as one could have once talked about "international Marxist" terror, which had similar global pretensions.
The grim logic of Qtubist terror is partly motivated by the fate experienced by Qutb under the socialist secularism of Nasser's Egypt (a version of which underpinned Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist Iraq).
We should not forget that in the 20th century, secularism in the guise of Marxism, National Socialism and liberalism could also take on fundamentalist forms and be antagonistic to all religious faith.
Al-Qaeda's goal of re-establishing a pre-democratic, medieval caliphate seems very unlikely to be achieved, but if that is your goal then it makes strategic sense to exert pressure on Western democracies by attempting to terrorise their populations so that in response the governments cease supporting the existing regimes or withdraw their troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Such a strategy has already had a considerable success in forcing a change of government in Spain and the withdrawal of its forces from Iraq.
The last thing we want to do is drive moderate Muslims - still the overwhelming majority - into the hands of the Qtubists. Over-reaction and the clumsy use of rhetoric can achieve this. It is worth remembering that it was not the Rising of 1916 which forced the British government out of southern Ireland (the ordinary people of Dublin spat on the rebels as they were led away). It was the consequences of the subsequent executions, which Sinn Féin exploited brilliantly.
The people of these islands have a warning on their doorstep. - Yours, etc,
SIMON PARTRIDGE, London N2.
Madam, - Firstly, I would like to offer my condolences and heartfelt sympathy to the families who have lost loved ones in the recent bombings in London. Secondly, please allow me to express my disgust and revulsion at some of the letters to your paper about this matter.
It seems there are some "citizens" who cannot bring themselves to sympathise with the injured and bereaved without also taking a cheap swipe at the British and US administrations and repeating their objections to the war in Iraq. In effect, the tone of these letters suggests that the terrorists were somehow justified in their attacks, and that the deliberate killing of unarmed civilians is somehow comparable to the accidental killings perpetrated by an accountable US military during the forced removal of a brutal dictator who murdered and tortured his own people.
Let us not forget that it is not, for the most part, American and British soldiers who are killing Iraqis - we have a situation where Iraqis are killing Iraqis because fundamentalists oppose the freedom and democracy which leaders are attempting to instil, and which the vast majority of the population support.
I find it beyond belief that some people in this country are so fantastically naïve as to believe that changing foreign policy decisions, pulling soldiers out of Iraq, preventing US aircraft landing at Shannon, etc, etc would make any difference to the terrorists who committed the atrocities in London, or that such atrocities could be prevented in the future by doing so.
The Twin Towers were destroyed long before the war in Iraq. The people who commit these crimes have only one objective - the imposition of their particular brand of extreme religious fanaticism on the West - and only one motive: a hatred of freedom. We cannot reason with them, we cannot give in to their demands. Nothing we do will prevent them from seeing us as the enemy. All we can do is hunt them down and bring them to justice.
The great majority of Londoners have not changed their daily routine as a result of the bombings. Their resolve alone demonstrates why the terrorists will never win. - Yours, etc,
JAMES FRYAR, Albert College Park, Dublin 9.
Madam, - With an estimated 39,000 innocent civilians having been killed since the illegal American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 (Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva) one has to wonder at the view of certain correspondents to this newspaper with regard to the rights and wrongs of different types of bombing atrocities, not to mention the obvious links between sustained Iraqi and Afghan bombings and the recent London bombings.
The only factor which appears to distinguish "acceptable" bombings from "horrifically random acts of terrorism" is which country's citizens the bombings might be directed against - a point made most eloquently by Conor Meade. Repugnant as the London bombings were, they have underlined yet again an inescapable fact: that certain countries' citizens are far more equal than others.
When retribution for America's actions in the Middle East comes home in this most feared and obnoxious manner, it forces us all to examine our own astonishing ability to ignore and explain away the ghastly conditions that so many people have to endure there at the hands of their invaders, and re-calibrate our own humanistic values. - Is mise,
PETER ROYCROFT, St Brendan's Drive, Dublin 5.
Madam, - I note that the London bombers, suspected to be Muslim extremists, are called terrorists by the Irish media. This is in sharp contrast to the period when IRA was bombing London: the bombers were never referred to as Irish terrorists by the Irish media.
Is there a difference between bombs, depending on their source? Are the unfortunate victims aware of this difference? - Yours, etc,
Dr MA HONAN, Portarlington, Co Laois.