Madam, - Dermot Meleady (September 23d) defines the failure to implement binding UN resolutions concerning Israel as "the United Nations' moderation of certain anti-Israel stances". This is like defining the failure to punish a rapist as "the moderation of certain anti-rapist stances". When the rapist is powerful and has the backing of other powerful rapists, he (or she) is indeed quite likely to escape punishment.
Mr Meleady bemoans the number of General Assembly resolutions directed against Israel compared with those against Arab countries. But perhaps if Israel had complied with any of these resolutions, Arab countries and other tyrannies would no longer be able to hide behind the convenient and plausible alibi of Western double standards.
Perhaps if the Security Council - itself composed of permament member states that, between them, have killed more human beings than the rest of the world put together - had been less intent on exempting Israel from UN resolutions, the UN itself would long since have become more effective.
As for the EU's "record of help to the Palestinian cause", it is non-existent. The EU offers a measure of charitable aid to selected Palestinians to palliate - infinitesimally - the suffering caused by their Israeli oppressor with massive political help from the EU.
Israel, notoriously "an army with a state rather than a state with an army", is a state founded on racial and sectarian criteria that creates laws expressly designed to circumvent international law and humanitarian law. If this makes it, in Mr Meleady's words, an "outpost of Western democracy and liberal values", then these values are indeed bankrupt. - Yours, etc,
RAYMOND DEANE, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin