Madam, - In the course of his generalised rant against the failure of Barack Obama and the US political system to conform to the Brownian blueprint for how the world should run - taking in Harry Truman, Japan, Vietnam, child rapists, handguns and phone taps along the way - Vincent Browne (July 16th) discharges another of his periodic and predictable toxic hate-emissions against Israel.
In the strange topsy-turvy moral world espoused by Mr Browne, "savagery" is what Israel does when it carries out the first duty of any state - the protection of its citizens against violent enemies sworn to their and its destruction. There is a nice unintentional appropriateness in his choice of this word at a time when we have just had three reminders of the savage Jew-hatred that motivates the actions of these enemies.
Two weeks ago, an east Jerusalem Palestinian, embarking on a piece of private jihad, murdered three Israeli civilians on the capital's main street by crushing them in their cars and buses with a commandeered bulldozer, shouting about the greatness of God as he did so.
This week, the Israeli government has released the Lebanese terrorist prisoner Samir Kuntar, paraded by Hizbullah as a hero of the war against Israel. His heroism lies in the fact that one night in April 1979, he and three other terrorists, having landed from the sea at Nahariya and killed a police officer, broke into the home of the Haran family. They took Danny and his four-year-old daughter to the beach, where Kuntar shot the father in front of the child, then finished the job by smashing the little girl's head against a rock. Meanwhile, at the house, Danny's wife had crawled into a hiding place but accidentally smothered her other child while stifling her cries to prevent the terrorists from discovering them.
Kuntar belonged to the Palestine Liberation Front, a branch of Arafat's PLO, which demonstrated its heroism in 1985 by murdering the 69-year-old disabled American Leon Klinghoffer on the deck of the hijacked Achille Lauro, before throwing him overboard with his wheelchair, all for the crime of being Jewish.
The release of Kuntar is an exchange with Hizbullah for the dead bodies of two soldiers abducted two years ago. Private Gilad Shalit, abducted by Hamas at the same time, remains in captivity. The detention of these soldiers without any communication as to their fate violates every humanitarian code governing warfare.
If Mr Browne and the other Israel-bashers on this page, so fond of invoking international law against Israel, have made any complaint about this, I missed it. - Yours, etc,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.