Pakistan ‘supports terrorism’
From Sam Mukerji
Sir: Stephen Schwartz (‘Britain has a unique problem’, 19 August) brilliantly exposes the doctrinal poison coming to us from Pakistan. Over the 1980s and the 1990s there has been evidence to suggest that the radical Sunni community in the UK, US and Canada has funded terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir and that the government here has experienced great difficulty in restraining this activity. On the ground in Jammu and Kashmir, innocent shepherds have been slaughtered in their thousands, only because they were Hindus, in order to terrify the rest of the population and force them to run for the plains.
By describing the terrorism in Kashmir as a ‘freedom struggle’ following the Mumbai train blasts last month, Musharraf’s team have revealed once again that they are active supporters of terrorism and thus continue to see eye to eye with Mr bin Laden and the rest of his gang.
Sam Mukerji
Dundee, Scotland
From: Tony Carroll
Sir: Further to Stephen Schwartz’s piece, I suggest that British strategy in Ireland at the end of the 18th century offers some guidance. Then the repressive penal laws against Catholics resulted in the wealthier Irish sending their children to the Continent for their education, and indeed there were special seminaries for the Irish priesthood in Louvain, Paris and Salamanca. The revolutionary ideas they brought back were causing increasing concern. In a stroke of genius, the government established a Roman Catholic seminary (St Patrick’s College) in Maynooth, Co. Kildare, in 1795 and grant-aided it on an annual basis. Throughout the 19th century the loyalty of the Irish Catholic Church to the Crown continued to be remarkable, to the extent that Fenians and other revolutionaries were almost invariably excommunicated.
While not exactly a parallel, could not a version of the Maynooth gambit be devised for the jihadist madrasas in Pakistan?
Tony Carroll
Galway, Ireland
Islamist threat exaggerated
From Correlli Barnett
Sir: Your YouGov (19 August) poll suggests that the British public has been infected with the hysteria of the political classes. How else to explain the finding that 73 per cent agreed that ‘we are in a world war against Islamic terrorists who threaten the West’s way of life’?
Moreover, it is only a fortnight since your leading article, together with Stephen Pollard and Melanie Phillips, claimed that Israel, in its onslaught on Lebanon, was simply acting as a proxy for our own fight against Islamism. Phillips and Pollard even employed the fashionable epithet ‘Islamofascism’. As it happens, ‘Islamofascism’ makes a neat enough double with ‘Nazo-British occupation forces’ — the term applied to the British army in Palestine in 1946-48 by the Jewish terrorists of the Irgun Zwei Leumi led by Menachem Begin, later to found Likud and become prime minister.
The point about all these hot-under-the-collar effusions is that they rely on sheer iterated assertion about the scale of threat from militant Islam. Far from being the result of sober, strategic calculation, they are inspired by ideology and moral passion as evinced in the windy rhetoric about good versus evil and ‘freedom and democracy’.
I therefore plead for cool heads, calm judgment and a sense of proportion. We are not engaged in a grand ideological war for the future of the world, but in inter-state police operations against small groups of militants who often have merely local grievances.
Correlli Barnett
East Carleton, Norwich
Ethical ends and means
From Dr Andrew Lawson
Sir: Paul Robinson (‘Let’s get a sense of proportion about disproportion’, 12 August) states that a key principle of moral philosophy is that ‘the end cannot justify the means’. To which branch of moral philosophy does he refer? The principle may be true for some aspects of normative ethics but it is certainly not the case for a strong utilitarian to whom the balance of consequences is the litmus test of morality. The arguments about the means used to end the war in the Pacific continue, and the division is often between those who accept the means, the atomic bombs, as justifying the ends and those who for other reasons believe that the use of atomic weapons was immoral. Both arguments are valid. Utilitarian moral philosophy underpins much of the decision-making process in healthcare. When a decision is made, for example, not to give Herceptin to everyone with breast cancer it is partly because the allocation of resources elsewhere might be judged to maximise health in a general sense, but clearly not in an individual sense for a particular woman with breast cancer. This conflict between individual rights and decisions made for the common good mirrors the conflict between the individual caught up in a war and the war itself. There is no moral theory or principle that can fully reconcile these conflicts.
Dr Andrew Lawson
Hon. Sen. Lecturer, Medical Ethics,
Imperial College, London
Passport strictures
From Mira Bar-Hillel
Sir: Another country which will not allow its nationals to travel in or out other than on its own passports is Israel (‘That’s it, Uncle Sam’, 12 August). Moreover, even those with dual nationality who are permanently resident elsewhere are not allowed to reclaim VAT on purchases in Israel if they have an Israeli passport — an added irritation which often leads to bad-tempered exchanges at Ben Gurion airport.
Mira Bar-Hillel
London SW19
Les pantalons
From David Talintyre
Sir: Paul Johnson’s column on trousers (12 August) reminded me that during the Napoleonic war the British soldier’s slang term for his French counterpart was ‘Old Trousers’.
David Talintyre
Sydney, NSW, Australia
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