Dear Sir... Readers' Views (11/10/16)
Syrian city of Aleppo may be destroyed by Christmas
There will be families around the world enjoying Christmas in a few months, but not everywhere. The UN representative to end the Syrian civil war said the city of Aleppo, with 275,000 people remaining, may be destroyed by Christmas. He has asked a group of fighters, associated with al Qaeda, to leave Aleppo. He would escort them to safety.
He believes their departure would lessen tensions and save the city. No guarantees, but he is looking for solutions. Some believe it won’t make any difference if they left.
We read reports of the war and the great work by the Irish navy saving refugees from Syria, and other countries, but we are safe, at a considerable distance from it. Parts of Syria have not seen war, but for Aleppo and other areas, it is an ongoing worry of which armed group is coming next.
Many people, women and girls, fear Isis groups the most.
Russia and the USA are in the war in the last few years on opposite sides to bring it to an end, and part of the reasons why the war goes on, with the president of Syria not willing to resign as a possible way to a peace deal. Most of the groups and the government in Syria seem to want to fight to the end — no matter the cost.
Two million people fled to nearby countries and Europe, putting immense pressures on governments to assist them. I think the war is the dark side of nationalism in the extreme and a crime against humanity.
Napalm and thermobaric missiles have been used. A thermobaric missile is to halt an infantry attack. Its warhead explodes over the ground and incinerates anyone beneath and if a person is not killed immediately, the blast will cause intense pressure to collapse a person’s lungs.
Napalm is an inflammatory liquid and causes scorching burns, like to a young girl in the Vietnam war in the 1970s, made famous in a war photo. “Too hot, too hot”, she screamed. (She now lives in Canada.)
Napalm is legal against military targets, but banned by the UN in 1980 against civilians, which is not always respected.
Most of the Syrian people want the civil war to end. It began in 2011 after a protest for democratic reforms.
President Assad succeeded his father in 2000 who had been president of Syria from the 1970s.
Remove religion from politics
I write in opposition to a letter by James M Bourke, which appeared in Saturday’s Examiner (“Insulting Catholics is no way for a TD to behave”).
It is first necessary, however, to provide the actual facts to James’ incorrect argument. He claimed that “95% of Irish people are Catholics”. According to the 2011 Census, 84.2% of the population in the Republic self identify as Roman Catholics.
It is not irrational either to expect this number to decrease in the 2016 Census.
Not even at the peak of Catholic triumphalism, circa 1961, did the figure reach as high as James claims.
This ignorance espoused by James is, perhaps, a motif for the state of residual doctrinarian Catholicism in Ireland today. Indeed, it is this viewpoint that jeopardises the position of the aforementioned religion in modern Irish society.
The vast majority of Irish Catholics, and indeed priests, recognise this relentlessly inflexible edifice that remains at the hierarchy of the Church; an intolerance to any such opinions that contradict ones own.
Kate O’Connell represents this alternative opinion. She is not “left-wing”, she is not “arrogant” and she is certainly not “irrelevant”.
Her words about Archbishop Martin were an emotional response to an institution that has hitherto dictated the legislative agenda of Dáil Éireann.
I doubt anybody rejects the Church opposing abortion given its history, but this does not allow them to morally guilt TDs into choosing between their religion and their constituents, who are more than just a religious zeitgeist.
It is 65 years since then Taoiseach John A Costello — incidentally a member of the same party, Fine Gael, as Kate O’Connell — declared in the Dáil, “I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first...”.
Irish society, and both TDs and voters alike, has evolved since then but the hierarchy of the Church has retrogressed.
The number of young Catholics is declining exponentially and the Church needs to respond by portraying a more inclusive and open structure. This begins with having a rational conversation about a topic such as abortion — not belittling the other side. TDs are accountable to Dáil Éireann; they are Irish citizens first and Catholics, if at all, second.
We are being treated like pawns
Allison O’Connor tells us that an American who was asked to give an opinion on the last election reached the conclusion that ‘voters are not to be treated as unthinking pawns in an episodic electoral drama’ [October 7].
Irish voters have been treated as unthinking pawns in all the episodic electoral dramas right through the pre-2009 boom.
Irish voters were told at all the boom- time elections that all in the garden was rosy but discovered in 2010 that the country was broke and needed to be bailed out by the taxpayers of other countries.
Some of the small number of powerful people who made the decisions during the boom which bankrupted the country were telling us during the election and since that it was all someone else’s fault.
They were unchallenged when they were treating all of us as unthinking pawns and are still unchallenged while continuing to do so. We should not need an American to tell us that.
Supporting peace in the Middle East
Given the controversial and confrontational nature of the recent Israel-Palestine thread in its letters page, the Irish Examiner is to be heartily congratulated for having the courage and vision to host the first official interview with Ze’ev Boker, Israel’s new ambassador to Ireland (Oct 10).
Giving Mr Boker the opportunity to address issues of common concern such as the outrageous use of Irish passports by Mossad agents to assassinate Palestinian commander Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, is all the more important if an inclusive understanding of Israel’s determination to defend its citizens by confronting terrorism on any-and-all fronts is going to be part of an inclusive discourse.
Moreover, the interview reveals a startling new development in the decades old hostile Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the willingness of the Jewish state enter direct “talks with Hamas, the militant Palestinian rulers of the Gaza Strip”.
In part this is a belated recognition that peace, if it is ever going to occur, oftentimes means doing a deal with the proverbial devil (in political and moral terms). Perhaps, as Mr Boker admits, the Israelis are finally prepared to incorporate aspects of the Irish peace process even if “no conflict is fully identifiable with another” (a template that has been consistently dismissed as irrelevant by senior Israeli officials in the recent past).
However, the ambassador also forcefully asserts, as all of his political as well as diplomatic predecessors have done that Hamas has “to first understand, to be a reliable partner, they cannot call for the destruction of the state of Israel, continue shelling rockets in Israel”.
Despite the inevitable pro-Palestinian onslaught that Mr Boker’s interview will no doubt unleash, surely the message that “we are ready to listen” is one we should embrace if the Irish state and people are going to be genuine supporters of the solving, rather than inflaming the tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Lincoln’s lib
Abraham Lincoln was heard saying “Women are the only people I am afraid of who I never thought would hurt me” I guess that’s before locker rooms were invented.
Taxing issue
The Government intends to introduce a special sperm bank tax in the Budget.
Once again the little guy is to be squeezed dry.
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