Observe these!

I'm only just back from holiday and so my posting is still a bit sporadic. The Observer had an absurd editorial last week suggesting that Muslims generally and islamists in particular had no case against the west back in 1993. They even said that it was a lie to suggest otherwise. More, they even go so far as to imply that Bill Clinton was an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians back then:

British and American foreign policy was focused not on the Islamic world, but on the unstable transition of former communist countries to democracy. Twice during the Nineties, Nato launched military interventions in the Balkans, both aimed at protecting Muslim populations in Bosnia and Kosovo. What Middle East policy there was focused on diplomatic efforts, led by President Clinton, to negotiate lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Well thankfully they have just enough integrity to publish letters countering their selective memory of events between the west and the middle east:

The premise underlying your editorial ('These ludicrous lies about the West and Islam', last week) is wrong. Saying that the February 1993 plot to bomb the World Trade Centre could not have been 'a response to Western actions overseas' because it took place when Western policies in the Middle East were uncontroversial leaves out the 1991 Gulf War.

In fact the terrorism of the early Nineties was closely related to Western policy, and American encouragement to armed Islamists in the war against the Soviet-backed Afghan regime in the Eighties. The military infrastructure and contacts created then provided a vehicle for the extremists to campaign against the West's military presence in the Gulf during and after the 1991 war. Their opposition was fuelled by the effects of Western policy, with more than 500,000 Iraqis dying through the effects of Western-orchestrated sanctions against Iraq in the first two years after the war.

Nor is it true that the West was busy negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. By February 2003 the Madrid peace process, initiated in 1991, was going nowhere. The US had shown itself unprepared to exert the degree of pressure on Israel which could have brought results.
Tim Niblock
Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter

Your editorial fails to mention Palestine. The car bomb in New York took place in 1993, after the misery and injustice of the Palestinian people had continued for more than 50 years. I am deeply ashamed that the West has allowed this to go on.
Joan Machin
Leeds

In what idiosyncratic way do you apply the epithet 'bogus' to the 'sense of victimisation' of the Palestinians, deprived of their country to assuage Europe's guilt at the Holocaust and subjected to Israeli oppression; or of the Iraqis, bombed, beaten, raped and murdered by their 'liberators'?
Robin Seager
Liverpool

If it is a 'ludicrous lie', as your editorial claims, to suggest a connection between 'Western actions overseas' and anti-Western violence, surely consistency would compel you to deride any claim that the recent Israeli slaughter of Lebanese children was somehow linked to Hizbollah's actions in northern Israel? Your argument that Western interventions cannot possibly be grounds for Muslim grievance because some of them have helped Muslims is truly ludicrous. You might as well argue that Israel should embrace Palestinian suicide bombers because Palestinians have helped to build their so-called security fence.
Aran Lewis
London SW17

I should say here that I think the idea that the imperialist powers felt any sense of guilt over the holocaust is as absurd as the editorial and to suggest that the west's support for the on-going torture of the Palestinians is related to that guilt is even more absurd. Who but a racist would suggest that the on-going torture of millions of people is somehow morally superior, less guilty, than the killing of millions? Anyway, they published a couple of letters supporting their position but it's good to see them publishing such cutting demolitions of so ridiculous an editorial in what passes for a newspaper of record.