Free speech is not a blank cheque

SIR – AS a keen letter-writer, I take issue with Karl Martin’s claim that I asked for a ban on letters from anyone.

When writing in support of a Jew who was maligned by Maerton Davis just because she supported justice for Palestinians, I instead pointed out that free speech is not a blank cheque for his hate speech.

It was interesting that Martin, instead of challenging my examples of Israeli oppression chose instead to respond to my remark in jest about Israel rugby by saying: ‘It seems to have escaped his (my) notice that rugby is not played in the Middle East’.

As is usual with Zionist apologists, he demonstrated his ignorance of the region and in fact, Israel has eight rugby clubs with some 400 + players and has entered teams in the Rugby World Cup Sevens.

Martin’s characterisation of Israel as unfairly subjected to UN Resolutions, and International Laws and Geneva Conventions which it ignores, is looking to victim-hood as its excuse for aggression against Palestinians.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the product of ancient ethnic hatreds, nor is it the tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same land.

It is rather a manufactured conflict, the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial occupation by Jewish Zionists in Israel backed by major imperial powers, starting with the British and a century later with the United States.

This project from its inception has always been about the forced and often violent displacement of Palestinians from their land, the seizure of that land by the colonizers, and the rendering of the Palestinians as non-people as if they never existed.

This century-long assault first by the Zionists and later by Israel has always been waged against an indigenous people to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.

The incontrovertible fact of Jewish colonization supported by innumerable documents, official statements, exhaustive reports, and historical records and events see Israel’s defenders level charges of anti-Semitism and racism against those who speak this truth.

Bob Storey,

Skibbereen.