CAN someone please interview John Mason and demand an answer to the following questions?
If the slaughter in Gaza is not genocide, but just self-defence against Hamas, why has Netanyahu:
a) Closed the borders to allow no-one to escape?
b) Continually herded the population into a so-called “safe area”, then bombed it?
c) Cut off water, power, sanitation and medical aid?
d) Blocked and attacked humanitarian convoys?
e) Destroyed hospitals, schools and most of the buildings?
f) Left no homes, amenities and other essentials of life for Palestinians to return to, even if hostilities were to cease right now?
READ MORE: Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar killed in Gaza, says Israel
If this systematic slaughter of the population, group by group and area by area, without allowing any escape route, is NOT genocide, what is it? Now the same is happening in Lebanon, with the same excuse. Yet David Cameron still believes that it is unacceptable that Israelis cannot return to their homes. Do Palestinians and Lebanese not have that same right?
I wonder how many countries on Israel’s borders Netanyahu believes he has turned into peaceable friends and neighbours to ensure Israel’s future security? John Mason’s views shame Scotland.
P Davidson
Falkirk
THE politicians of Israel are a deeply sick and twisted bunch of evildoers. No sooner have they murdered and maimed thousands of innocent Palestinians than they are planning the ghoulish handout of their homes (Israeli minister and Likud MPs to attend ‘resettling Gaza’ event, thenational.scot, Oct 17).
It is amongst the most wicked performances of the Israeli state genocidal atrocities that they now look to expand into the land they bombed, taking even more from the people they have oppressed for decades. They are evil and there needs to be a proper and real reaction from the West to try to stop this.
Sanctions on Israel and individual Israelis must follow the ending of all arms support for this rogue and evil state. They had already gone too far but this is sickening in its barbarity, stealing the homes of those they’ve murdered and displaced, is low but not unprecedented.
Gordon Mulholland
via thenational.scot
WHILST generally agreeing with Lesley Riddoch’s excellent columns, I do hope she would take on board the following facts about Tom Johnston, often described as “best Prime Minister that Scotland never had” (Heating timebomb is being ignored by Scotland’s feeble cohort of Labour MPs, Oct 17). Tom Johnston reneged on his old ILP Scottish Republican Socialism. As a millionaire printer in the Campsies, he withdrew his excellent books History of the Scottish Working Classes and Our Noble Families.
Whist acknowledging Tom Johnston’s promotion of the hydro schemes, it was Churchill’s idea to promote hydro dams in Scotland to use the plutonium by-product to develop the atom bomb. Bevan is on record as wanting a Union Jack Bomb to be ahead of the USA. Even Roosevelt had to yield to the nuclear bomb lobby in order to get his large dam bills passed.
Tom Johnston at first refused to recognise the Westminster oath of obedience. They docked his pay, but when they also taxed him on it he gave up and took his seat.
Donald Anderson
Glasgow
AN Army veteran and father of two, Adam Smith-Connor, has been convicted for the first “thought crime” in modern British history.
The new abortion facility “buffer zones” that are being implemented represent a potentially chilling new chapter in the incursion of government into the public space, as this particular legislation has all the capacity to make it a criminal offence to be even discussing abortion in your own home, if you’re unlucky enough to be within an exclusion zone and your conversation is overheard.
Charges were filed against Adam Smith-Connor after it was found he had paused outside an abortion clinic in Bournemouth to pray privately and silently for his deceased son. Adam had paid for the abortion of his first son, whom he conceived with an ex-girlfriend – a decision that he deeply regrets. He knows firsthand the trauma of abortion and the loss of life it causes.
What makes the Connor-Smith case such a defining moment in British legal history is that it has slipped the extent of the law over into the realm of defining guilt in terms of ideologies rather than just actions. “Reasonable behaviour” is evidently no longer what the public ethic determines, but what the state dictates.
Simply, the state is no longer the servant of the public; and the public is now the servant of the state. At the heart of this profound shift in the body of law is that no longer will it be sufficient to define anti-social behaviour, rather legislators will be free to categorise any unwelcome behaviour as potentially contrary to the secular common good.
B McKenna
Dumbarton
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