Madam, Like all unhealthy obsessions, that of Raymond Deane with the state of Israel does not remain static, but steadily expands its dimensions.
Having already promoted Israel from "rogue state" to one "based on ethnic cleansing, racism, xenophobia and other expressions of hatred and discrimination" (May 29th), he then presumes to lecture the spokesman of the Israeli embassy on "debasing the memory of the Holocaust"!
A longer letter could take apart Mr Deane's allegation that the Palestinian Nakbah was the result of ethnic cleansing, but it is easier to point to the absurdities to which his Israel-fixation currently leads him.
The extent of his dissociation from reality can be gauged from a cursory look at recent happenings in the madhouse that is the neighbourhood of Israel.
Sunni slaughter Shia in the latest phase of a 1,300-year-old religious civil war; Fatah and Hamas gunmen turn Gaza (unwisely abandoned by Israel less than two years ago) into a hell for ordinary Palestinians while seeking to make the adjoining part of Israel uninhabitable; and al-Qaeda tries to emulate the example of Iran's proxy, Hizbullah, in creating a state within a state in the territory of Lebanon. All this while Palestinian and other Arab children are fed a diet of Jew-hatred and suicide-bomber role models, and taught to look forward to the Islamic reconquest, not just of Palestine, but of Spain.
Yet the state singled out for denunciation by Mr Deane is the tiny one which has managed to remain the only democracy in the region despite living under permanent threat of annihilation, being forced to defend itself - its real crime, in his eyes - in every decade of its existence against attack by varying combinations of its neighbours.
Mr Deane routinely denies the charge of anti-Semitism, but the singularity of his gaze upon the Jewish state makes it difficult to know what else to call it. - Yours, etc,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.