Write On: Letters to the Editor

November 17, 1993
Issue 

Lebanon/Gaza attacks

We are horrified at the slaughter of civilians and destruction of homes and infrastructure that has occurred and continues in Lebanon, Israel and Gaza. The Israeli action constitutes collective punishment of the Lebanese civilian population because of the resistance to the Israeli invasion by Hezbollah.

We also condemn the Israeli attacks in Gaza and believe that Israel is undermining the democratically elected Palestinian government by detaining elected officials. The cycle of violence provokes and sustains hatred.

History has proven that such conflicts have no military solutions and we call for an immediate ceasefire and a return to the path of negotiations. The appropriate response to the capture of Israeli soldiers would have been a negotiated prisoner exchange as occurred in 2004.

We place an equal value on Palestinian, Israeli and Lebanese lives and regard any loss of life as unnecessary and tragic. We mourn the deaths of all civilian casualties. We regard the Israeli action in Lebanon as a violation of Jewish teachings, universal human rights and international law.

We call on the Australian government to take a positive role in resolving this conflict by seeking an immediate ceasefire.

Ultimately, the only resolution for the whole area is for Israel to sit down with the elected Palestinian government to negotiate a solution based on human rights and international law.

Angela Budai & Vivienne Porzsolt
For Jews Against the Occupation
Sydney

Gaza

In this "normalisation of barbarism" (Ghassan Hage, GLW #677), it is kids who ae bearing much of the brunt. Nearly a third of the uprooted and many of the dead and orphaned in Lebanon are children. The ongoing slaughter against the Palestinians in Gaza continues, killing children almost every day.

A number of us in the network Teaching English for Palestinian Purposes (TEPP) have just issued a statement that should be listened to: "As English teachers, teacher trainers and materials-writers who have worked in Palestine, Lebanon or neighbouring countries, we want to express our outrage at the recent killing and destruction of infrastructure in Gaza and Lebanon.

"For years we have worked with our Palestinian colleagues — in often unbearable conditions — to educate their students to be responsible, rounded members of society. These patient attempts have been smashed by the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of Palestinian children and their parents over the past weeks, culminating in the massacre of 37 children in Qana on July 30. Those who survive will learn only one thing: how to hate."

Eleanor Watts, Scott Thornbury, Bill Templer, Maggie Baigent, Susan Barduhn
Via email

Qana massacre

This was reported in the British Guardian but not in any Australian media: "Serious questions about the air strike on Qana on July 30 that left dozens dead, which continues to arouse international outrage. From the outset, the Israeli military's version of events has been shrouded in ambiguity, with the army releasing a video it claims shows Katyusha rockets being fired from Qana, even though the video was dated two days earlier, and claiming that more than 150 rockets had been fired from the location.

"Some IDF officials have continued to refer vaguely to Katyushas being launched 'near houses' in the village and to non-specific 'terrorist activity' inside the targeted building. In a statement on Thursday, the IDF said it the air force did not know there were civilians in what they believed was an empty building, yet paradoxically blamed Hezbollah for using those killed as 'human shields'."

As this shows, it is pretty hard to defend the murders in light of a two-day old video and in light of Peter Wilson's gut-wrenching report on the deaths of the children published in the Australian.

Marilyn Shepherd
Kensington, NSW {Abridged]

Climate change

I attended the Jack Beale Memorial Lecture on the Global Environment held at UNSW on July 25. Entitled "Wicked problems, Clumsy solutions: Diagnoses and prescriptions for environmental ills", the hour-long lecture was given by Professor Steve Reyner, director of the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation at Oxford University, as well as a consultant on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I was hoping to hear an authoritative speaker discuss concrete solutions to climate change. However, I was extremely disappointed, as the "expert" turned out to be thinly disguised apologist for corporate abuse of the environment.

Reyner's advice was that in any consulting process on climate change that "all voices are heard" —- whether they be free-market profiteers wanting to sabotage any restrictions on their ability to pollute or environmentalists desperate to get action to save the planet.

However, Reyner's phony neutral position thinly disguised his own free-market ideology and do-nothing attitude to the looming global crisis of climate change. Reyner advised the audience not to dismiss the possibility that "international competition", rather than cooperation, might solve the problem of climate change, i.e., that the current capitalist free-for-all which is responsible for the mess will, of its own accord, solve the crisis.

He also advocated that policy-makers would be better off working on "adaptive" responses to climate change rather than "preventative measures" as these would produce "more bang for your buck". So, in the face of the gravest environmental problem the world has ever faced, an "expert" whose opinion is sought on the most authoritative international bodies can only offer the advice of "let the market sort it out and if that doesn't work learn to live with it".

Zoe Kenny
Glebe, NSW

Biassed

Zoe Kenny of Glebe in Write On, GLW #678 takes issue with my previous letter (Write On, GLW #677) when I stated that GLW is biased and almost always anti-Western. She goes on to write that she is "proud of the fact that GLW is unashamedly biased in favour of the world's oppressed people, including the dispossessed Palestinian people who are waging a just struggle against the Zionist colonisation of their national homeland". Kenny goes on to say that she "helps produce GLW". Well, this then explains, in part, the peculiar and twisted thinking that makes up much of the philosophy of GLW.

GLW is lost in a world of black and white, us and them, villain and victim. In this polarised world, complexities, paradoxes and nuances are dismissed. Instead, judgments, sloganeering and simplistic solutions are offered. To an unthinking and propogandised follower, it can be very appealing and comforting.

In an organisation where its followers, be they Islamic fundamentalists, born-again Christians or GLW converts — the "Great Satan" is either the West, Satan, capitalism or a mixture of all three.

When people dare to depart from GLW's tired script, alternatives then amount to heresy as does thinking for oneself. And it is here that GLW is guilty of the biggest hypocrisy. For GLW claims to stand for freedom and liberation. However, its writings for the most part contradict this. Debate and an exchange of ideas is shut down by labelling people "racist", "imperialist", "capitalist" and a range of other well-worn cliches.

It's a pity really. GLW could be a credible alternative to the mainstream. It's chances of achieving this is minimised by writers of her ilk and there is little chance if any of fresh ideas as long as GLW peddles it's one- sided dogma.

Peter Panania
Via email [Abridged]

Hiroshima bombing

The debate regarding the Hiroshima bombing has never been one that people and historians have ever agreed on. Some believe that it was entirely necessary to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and others disagree entirely and say that it was uncalled for and a waste of lives, as Japan was about to surrender.

I think that one of the prime reasons that the bomb was dropped was for the US to show that it had an atomic bomb that would wipe the Russians out if they decided to attack at any stage.

I think that the US should have not just dropped a nuclear bomb on innocent people without having thought about a reasonable alternative.

General Dwight Eisenhower said in a Newsweek interview in 1963 said: "The Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

There is a lot of evidence that the bomb should not have been dropped and it seems to me like a rushed decision was made in an outcome of the loss of 200,000 innocent lives.

Rosie Burford-Rice
Via email [Abridged]

War crimes

With the multiple war crimes being committed now, the continuing occupation of Iraq, the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon (dwarfing lives lost, also tragically in Israel) it is not so hard to forget the multiple atrocities committed during the 24-year occupation of East Timor. The recent violence in East Timor has not helped.

But having to sort the torture photographs that Andrew McNaughtan obtained from East Timor has thrown the issue, for me at least, into relief. He left a large number of photos of East Timorese men and women being tortured by Indonesian soldiers.

Are we really going to allow Howard to organise a 'security treaty' with the people who organised the cigarette burns, setting fire to the bodies, the shovelling in of the earth? Are we going to train here, soldiers who raped and killed Timorese women. And we should remember the psychological damage done to the balaclaved soldiers given free reign to kill and torture.

We say no to the training of Indonesian soldiers here, or Australian soldiers in Indonesia, or a "security treaty" until the Wirantos and the Sutrisnos and the Probowos are brought to justice.

Stephen Langford
Paddington, NSW {Abridged]

Elephants

Abducted from their homes. Packed in crates and transported to a foreign land. Thai elephants, illegally removed from their environment and transported to Australia are destined to spend their life sentence in tiny barren cages, half a world way from their native habitat. The federal government is responsible for allowing their importation and detention. It is impossible to simulate their native homeland nor to meet the complex needs of these highly intelligent animals in Australian zoos. To attempt to breed these animals in captivity is inhuman, since these animals will never be returned to the wild. Ethically and responsibly, zoos should serve these animals by funding efforts to stop poaching and habitat loss.

Ian Bell
Sandgate, Qld


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