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Letters

Wednesday, 2nd July 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Cummins unstuck

Sir: Rod Liddle (Liddle Britain, 28 June) is mistaken to suggest that only Guardian journalists objected to articles published in the Sunday Telegraph under the pseudonym Will Cummins. My Sunday Telegraph colleague Alasdair Palmer and I (both of whom have written frequently to attack Islamic fundamentalism and Islamist terrorism) protested strongly about them at the time, in the office and — in my own case — in print.

The main reason for our disquiet was that Mr Cummins had not, as Mr Liddle argues, ‘made it clear that his beef was with the ideology, not the people’. In fact he did the opposite, energetically denigrating all Muslims as one identikit, menacing group. In a piece entitled ‘Muslims are a threat to our way of life’, Cummins remarked that, ‘All Muslims, like all dogs, share certain characteristics.’ In response to my mention of the 7,000 Bosnian Muslims massacred in Srebrenica, he asserted that such ‘defeats’ were ‘more a tribute to their incompetence than their humanity’, while describing Britain’s Muslim population as ‘the cuckoo in its nest’ which was closer to ‘a detested kite’. Would Mr Liddle say of these remarks, as he did last week of Cummins’s views on Islam, that ‘the general gist seems pretty sound’?

Jenny McCartney
London N6

Sir: Short of scouting around the BNP’s website, it is hard to imagine a more ignorant collection of rants on Islam and Muslims than those penned by Harry Cummins. They certainly do not merit the congratulatory praise heaped on them by Rod Liddle.

If this sort of routine Islam-bashing is, as Liddle claims, becoming more common, then it is a terrifying prospect. Cummins tried to scare us into believing there is a world where Islam is an evil threat trying to take over the globe. This is the sort of language that, if taken seriously, could incite violence and conflict. Quite where Liddle found any compassion in this stream of invective remains a mystery.

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P McNeill

July 3rd, 2008 4:59pm

With regard to Mr. Cummins' remarks about Muslims, it is a sad day when the free world has to listen to tirades that totally counter the pursuit of peace and understanding by people who are obviously more educated on the subject than himself.

Keith Bryer

July 4th, 2008 3:59pm

Chris Doyle's view of the Crusades is bent heavily in favour of the Muslims who invaded the middle east in 700 AD changing it over the next 300 years from a Hellenistic/Roman area into a Muslim one. That was what Pope Urban wanted to reverse by calling for a Crusade. So too did the Byzantine Emperor whose empire had been snatched from his dynasty by newly-enthused Muslim warriors. Cummins was not wrong -- at least on this point.