Madam, - We have long become used to the rulers of the West treating Israel as a licensed outlaw. But for those of us who are not party to the high strategy behind this, it makes hard going. This has been particularly the case in recent months.
Killing Palestinian men, women and children has become for the brave Israeli military a daily routine, much like shooting rabbits on a farm. More than ever, their behaviour seems marked by a playful sadism.
A naval ship shoots dead a fisherman for venturing too far out to sea. Instead of a bulldozer straightforwardly demolishing a house, a telephone call is made to the owner advising him and his family to leave, because their home is to be blown up in fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, as ever, posh Jewish housing estates march forward on stolen Palestinian land.
The tolerance extended to such behaviour, for unknown reasons, by Western governments and mass media makes Westerners appear to the Muslim world as arrogant hypocrites. It makes a mockery of those same rulers' ritual admonitions to Russia, China and a dozen other countries about their "human rights record".
It makes a farce of the court trials of the late Slobodan Milosevic and the living Saddam Hussein.
And given that Israel has been regularly pointed to as "the Middle East's only democracy", this Western tolerance makes decent Middle Easterners shudder when they hear the American president declare his intention of establishing more states of that kind in their region. - Yours, etc,
DESMOND FENNELL, Anguillara, Rome, Italy.