Letters
They are all guilty
Sir: Some weeks ago the Baathist regime in Syria massacred 25,000 of its own people in the city of Hama. The fascist military dic- tatorship of Iraq imprisons and puts to death several hundred of its trade unionists and political opponents on a regular basis. The Saudi Arabian theocracy beheads those of its citizens 'guilty' of adultery, lashes those 'guilty' of consuming alcohol and severs the limbs of those convicted of larceny. Such incidents of savagery are per- vasive throughout the 21-state Arab world. Yet none or these institutionalised acts of criminality appears to warrant a mention in your journal. Instead one can invariably count on Christopher Hitchens to churn out a 2,000-word piece of diatribe whenever Israel raps the knuckles of Arab terrorists dedicated both to its destruction and their genocidal objective — the 'liquidation of the Zionist entity'. The fact that Hitchens appears oblivious of the anti-democratic and oppressive nature of Arab states, indif- ferent to repeated PLO terrorism against Israeli civilians and yet markedly selective in chastising any Israeli retaliatory action, indicates, I believe, a certain innate an- tipathy towards the Jewish state. Just as Jews were the whipping boys of the Nazis in the Thirties, so the Jewish state has become the whipping boy of some of your con- tributors.
David Harounoff
Hendon, London NW4
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