Hamas’s human shields
Sir: Unlike the rockets fired at Basra air base by Iraqi fighters (Tom Drife, Letters, 9 August), rockets from Gaza aim to kill Israeli civilians. A more accurate analogy would be if English cities were under attack by thousands of rockets from Scotland.
Any country under such attack would try to destroy the aggressor’s rocket launch capability. Since Hamas deliberately sites its rockets amongst Gaza’s civilians, it is impossible to do so without civilian casualties. Israel goes to great lengths to avoid these, but with an enemy determined to sacrifice its own people this is not always achievable.
Human shields are not ‘less immoral’ than Israel’s defensive war. Using civilians in this way is a Hamas war crime.
It would indeed be preposterous to accuse all of Israel’s critics of being motivated by anti-Semitism. I didn’t.
Melanie Phillips
Jerusalem
Israel has no choice
Sir: Tom Drife wrote to contrast Israel’s actions in Gaza when confronted with civilians being used as human shields with his own experience with the British army in Basra, where he says the British army never returned fire if fired upon from a residential area. He fails to add the fact that Basra was a humiliating defeat for the British army.
Arguably, Britain could afford to lose in Basra, although the value of committing the lives of hundreds of our young soldiers and billions of pounds to a lost cause is debatable. The Israelis, with millions of militant Muslims on their doorstep willing their demise, cannot afford such luxuries.
Richard North
Netley Abbey, Southampton
The leadership vacuum
Sir: Douglas Murray asks ‘Where have all the leaders gone?’ (9 August). The answer would seem evident. Modern western society doesn’t produce leaders, conditioned as its politicians are to taking their lead from focus groups. In similar vein, that same society rejects leadership, having been taught that it is elitist. So a vacuum exists and the West wanes.
N.S. Southward
Edinburgh
Build it and they’ll come
Sir: I read your editorial opposing HS2 (‘The welfare line’, 9 August) while travelling on an unbelievably overcrowded Jubilee line train. Virtually all the passengers got out at Canary Wharf to earn money for themselves and, coincidentally, the UK economy. The relevance of this is that the Jubilee line extension had a forecast negative cost benefit analysis before it was built. London could not function without it now. Two hundred years ago commentators opposed Stephenson’s railway line from London to Birmingham on the basis that ‘the canal and the turnpike are totally adequate’.
The population of the UK is set to grow by several million. The number of passengers on Britain’s railways has doubled in the past 20 years and is forecast to double again. Without a new north-south main line, our vital railways will become overwhelmed. HS2 is about much needed capacity; reduced journey times are just a valuable by-product.
You compare this vital railway line with a Spanish airport built in the middle of nowhere. But HS2 will connect 11 of Europe’s biggest conurbations with a magnificent 21st-century railway.
David Reed
Houses Hill, Huddersfield
Dusty answer
Sir: I’m surprised and appalled by your decision to publish Roger Lewis’s review of our book Dusty: an Intimate Portrait (Books, 2 August). The reviewer clearly displays homophobic sentiments towards his subject and, indeed, a litany of other celebrity lesbians. The reasoning behind your decision is as incomprehensible to me as his overt homophobia is. We had been discussing with Mr Lewis the possibility of publishing his next book. He has just been told those discussions are at an end.
Iain Dale
MD, Biteback Publishing, London SE1
The tax and benefits gap
Sir: Your leader ‘Unfair welfare’ (2 August) was generally a well-balanced and thoughtful piece. However, you appear to have fallen for the now common trick of comparing tax paid with benefits claimed. You concluded, correctly, that they were roughly equal for EU migrants. But benefits represent just one seventh of total government spending. Who pays for schools, social services, roads, the army and hospitals? Certainly not those migrants. Clearly, then, they do not pay their way.
Your conclusion was right: EU-wide movement and national benefits systems are incompatible. The first party to promise to stop such nonsense will no doubt gain many votes from hard-pressed workers who have been footing the bill for over a decade.
William Poll
Whitchurch, Cardiff
Silly productions
Sir: I was interested to note that, in the 2 August issue, both the opera reviewer Michael Tanner and the beverage connoisseur Bruce Anderson criticise modern productions of operas that have destroyed much of their meaning. My husband and I attended several performances from the ROH and the Met in recent years which had been drained of much of the pleasure. One performance from Covent Garden was soft porn. The WNO’s Donizetti ‘Tudors’ operas were mostly black and grey and their Nabucco was virtually incomprehensible, set as it was in the 20th century, without the benefit of costume from Old Testament days. We go to the opera for the atmosphere and visual pleasure. I suppose if we all vote with our feet, those who direct these unfortunate performances will not have the faintest idea why this has happened.
Sally A. Williams
Dinas Cross, Pembrokeshire
Comments