Mr Myers' Gaza logic is twisted
Saturday January 17 2009
KEVIN Myers' piece (Irish Independent, January 14) is a masterful exposition of Orwellian "Newspeak".
Mr Myers compares an RAF raid on a Gestapo building in Copenhagen with current violent events in Gaza. In doing so, he twists logic.
For the record, even the most crude comparison of the two events cited by Mr Myers would need to take into account the following.
In April 1940, the Germans invaded and held Denmark by force of arms.
By 1943, the Danes had formed an effective resistance movement and engaged the German forces of occupation, even though they were massively outgunned.
The German authorities responded with reprisal killings of civilians, the blockading of cities and by cutting off electricity and water to the major centres of population.
In March 1945, at the explicit request of the Danish resistance, the RAF bombed the Shellhaus headquarters of the Gestapo in Copenhagen.
During this raid a school 900 metres from the Shellhaus target building was hit and many children and staff were killed.
In 1948, and again in 1967, Israel took Palestinian lands by force of arms and in defiance of international law, evicting owners from their properties and planting Israelis in their place.
The Palestinians formed an effective resistance movement and engaged the Israelis, even though they are massively outgunned.
Israel has responded with reprisal killings of civilians, blockading of cities and cutting off electricity and water to the major centres of population.
The Israeli government seeks to kill a large cohort of well concealed and highly mobile Hamas fighters who are living in Gaza in intimate association with civilians as part of the 1.5 million inhabitants.
It is clear that this intention cannot be addressed without killing large numbers of civilians.
By their actions, Israel has clearly demonstrated that it kills Palestinian civilians intentionally since the only way to avoid this outcome would be by ceasing all violent acts on the population in Gaza. This they refuse to do.
Yet Mr Myers' "interpretation" of these conflicts is to state that the Gestapo officers in the Shellhaus in Copenhagen were "In moral terms, the antecedents of the Hamas of today".
Not satisfied with this industrial-strength reversal of logic, he goes on to use a German term "Weltenschauung" to describe a view which is condemnatory of Israeli violence.
In using German rather than English, Mr Myers hopes that such anti-Israeli opinions would be somehow tainted with pejorative overtones of the Gestapo and, by means of this insinuation, silence us.
Nell and Paul McCarthy and Family
Clonmel, Co Tipperary
