Offensive comparison made with Holocaust

SIR – I thought West Cork could not produce worse after last week’s news of a cult of anti-semitic, ex-communicated radical priests operating not far outside Rosscarbery, but The Southern Star is disgraced by the publication of Bob Storey’s latest screed.

Even if his accusations of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and colonisation were true, which they are not, these putative crimes bear no comparison with the Holocaust. There is no reasonable comparison that can be made between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews.

The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. The Nazis created an industrialised system to wipe out every last Jew. They moved people across Europe in cattle-car trains just to kill them more efficiently. The horror of the Holocaust goes far deeper than the fact a lot of people died. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, even at its worst, doesn’t come close.

The Palestinians are occupied. The Jews were starved to death in camps, burned in ovens, gassed in makeshift vans, shot into open trenches and buried, alive or dead.

The Holocaust distortion employed by Mr Storey would be a criminal offence in some European countries. In Ireland it is simply grossly offensive.

Teresa Trainor,

Dublin.