Madam, - "Virtually without exception, we all approve of capital punishment," asserts Kevin Myers (An Irishman's Diary, June 14th), displaying an unexpected affinity with De Valera, who claimed an ability to discern the views of the Irish people by looking into his own heart.
As one who disapproves of capital punishment in all cases, I deplore the recent executions by the Palestinian Authority of four men in Gaza. However, despite Mr Myers's claim that The Irish Times "was virtually alone in reporting it", I read about it on page 16 of the Guardian of June 13th. A cursory trawl through the internet reveals that it was in fact widely reported.
While this proves that Mr Myers's way with facts, like his assessment of "our" views on capital punishment, is entirely subjective, it also robs his article of its point: the purportedly single-minded focus of the media on Israel's crimes, supposedly proving the existence of something called "pan-European anti-Semitism".
The fact that these crimes are committed by a state that lays claim to democratic legitimacy rather than by desperate and unrepresentative individuals might seem sufficient justification for such a focus if it in fact existed; but it doesn't.
Mr Myers's claim that we see no pictures of "any of the hundreds of dead Jews. . .who have been killed by Palestinian suicide bombers" is quite simply incorrect. On the very rare occasions when such atrocities occur, we are treated to lengthy television reports with images of bleeding bodies, burning wreckage, and weeping mothers - and this is as it should be.
However, because of Israeli restrictions we see few if any images of the daily horror that is the ongoing illegal Israeli occupation, or the catastrophic consequences of the continued building by Israel of its illegal wall inside (and not, as Mr Myers claims, "along") the West Bank. Nuala Haughey's recent report on Israeli checkpoints in this paper (June 11th) was an honourable exception rather than the rule.
It may well be that "the only people who desire another holocaust in the Middle East are Israel's fundamentalist enemies", but this neither justifies Israel's systematic violations of international law nor our Government's cowardly failure to hold it accountable for such violations. - Yours, etc,
RAYMOND DEANE, Chair, Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Dublin 1.
Kevin Myers writes: I may take it from this that Raymond Deane would have opposed the execution of the begetter of the Final Solution, Reichsmarschall Himmler.