Madam, - Many letter-writers to your newspaper rightly condemn the threats to human dignity and freedom posed by radical Islamists, but it is important to be wary of any suggestions that Islam is the only religion or belief system that poses such threats. Michael Kelly (August 17th) asks a number of questions of Islam that could and should be asked equally of Judaism and Christianity.
"What sort of ideology leads people to believe that it is the will of the Almighty to blow up thousands of innocent people in the name of some 'greater good'?" Perhaps we should ask the Israeli people, or better still George Bush or Tony Blair, both avowed Christians, who have in the past explicitly mentioned their belief that they are doing God's work in Iraq. Or Condoleezza Rice, who expressed her belief that a better Middle East would emerge from the slaughter her administration had helped to cause, just as Madeleine Albright famously said that the death of half-a-million children in Iraq was a price worth paying.
"What sort of theology promises young men a reward in paradise for blowing themselves to pieces on a packed bus bringing children to school?" A twisted ideology, to be sure; but what sort of belief system allows young soldiers to launch missiles at ambulances, hospitals and funerals, and then considers it a mark of their superiority that they themselves are far from harm's way thousands of feet above in the clouds or hundreds of miles away behind a computer screen? - Yours, etc,
PAUL CARROLL, Clane, Co Kildare.