LETTERS
Justice and war crimes
Sir: On 31 March (The media) you pub- lished what was obviously a painfully reasoned discussion by Paul Johnson of the merits of the War Crimes Bill which, in the event, was rejected by the House of Lords. No one has a right to object to his conclusion that 'to proceed with the Bill would be an error of judgment', for he shows in his article that he has arrived at that conclusion, not on the basis of pre- formed sympathies and antagonisms, but by applying his judgment to the many considerations which are involved.
On 2 June you published an editorial with the extraordinary title 'War Crimes Injustice', whose principal argument seemed to be that everybody commits war crimes and therefore it is unfair to try Nazis for theirs. This argument will, I think rightly be seen by Jews as giving support to those revisionists who deny the reality and the uniqueness of the Holocaust. While the Bill is entitled a War Crimes Bill, the crimes it is designed to deal with are unparalleled crimes against humanity, to wit, participation in genocide. It is not stretching the dictionary meaning of the word at all to say that your editorial comes very close to condoning these offences.
But this is nothing to what you published in Jo Grimond's Diary on 9 June. All pretence at judicial consideration is aban- doned. The Bill is now an invitation to 'an inexcusable public exhibition of ghoulish cold-blooded retribution'. What does this torrent of inappropriate effect import? The answer is given away in the next two sentences: 'And if the Nazi torturers are to be hounded down, why not others? Why not the Stern gang?' For those who are unaware, the Stern gang was a small group of Jews dedicated to political assassination in the service of the aim of providing a haven in Palestine for the victims of the Holocaust. Among their victims was the British Lord Moyne, and the Swedish Count Bernadotte. Israel's current Prime Minister, Yitzak Shamir, was a leading light. Lord Grimond cannot see the distinc- tion and by making this association has declared himself an anti-Semite, and should not, I suggest, be given the hospital- ity of your pages again.
David Wolfers
King David Street, 27/12 Jerusalem, Israel
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