Thursday, January 27, 2011

Moral depravity


Melanie Phillips

As the excellent Just Journalism points out, apart from publishing an op-ed today by Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan – thus providing a platform, as Robin Shepherd amplifies, for a proponent of a terrorist movement which puts out deranged neo-Nazi Jew hatred and regularly slaughters not just Jews but fellow Arabs – and also publishing a cartoon by Carlos Latuff, who claimed second prize in the Iranian International Holocaust Cartoon Competition, the Guardian publishes this letter from the philosopher Ted Honderich, a professor at University College, London: The revelations in detail (Report, 25 January) of the intransigent greed, the escape from decency, of Israeli governments in negotiation with our selected leaders of the Palestinians, serve one purpose among others. They provide a further part of what is now an overwhelming argument for a certain proposition. It is that the Palestinians have a moral right to their terrorism within historic Palestine against neo-Zionism. The latter, neither Zionism nor of course Jewishness, is the taking from the Palestinians of at least their autonomy in the last one-fifth of their historic homeland. Terrorism, as in this case, can as exactly be self-defence, a freedom struggle, martyrdom, the conclusion of an argument based on true humanity, etc (my emphasis).

Ted Honderich

London

The UK has a law criminalising incitement to terrorism. Now that Professor Honderich has endorsed the murder of Israelis, will the Director of Public Prosecutions apply the law to him?

1 comment:

merachefet said...

Thank you for spreading the word about this horrifying development. I have submitted a letter to the Guardian, which I hope they will publish. My letter can be viewed meanwhile here: http://ruchoshelmashiach.blogspot.com/2011/01/uk-philosopher-legitimizes-palestinian.html