Madam, - Just what is Raymond Deane's point in continuing to apply the epithet "neo-Nazi" to the Lebanese Christian Phalange? All the many factions in the terrible Lebanese civil war, including the PLO, showed themselves capable of the utmost savagery against both combatants and civilians.
If his purpose is to discredit Ariel Sharon by blackening the only faction which was willing to make peace with Israel in 1982, then perhaps we could have an interesting debate about the Palestinian despot Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem between the two world wars, who, in November 1941, at the very moment when the Einsatzgruppen were shooting Jews by the tens of thousands in conquered Eastern Europe, arrived in Berlin to appeal to a receptive Hitler for "the right to solve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries, in accordance with the interest of the Arabs and by the same method that the question is now being settled in the Axis countries". He later played a key role in the recruitment of 20,000 Bosnian Muslim volunteers for the SS who went on to murder Croatian and Hungarian Jews.
Haj Amin was an old hand at Jew-murder himself, having orchestrated pogroms in Palestine which culminated in the 1929 massacre of 133 Jews, the wounding of 339 others and the expulsion of the centuries-old Jewish community from Hebron, long before Jews had a state or an army of their own to defend them. - Yours etc.,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.