From Miss Fiorella Sultana De Maria
Sir, Gerard Noel's attempt to link pro-Palestinian activism with anti-semitism was objectionable to the point of being obscene.
He speaks as "one of those who knows" but if he is indeed such a man, he has no excuse for betraying such crass ignorance on the subject of the Israel-Palestine conflict. As a woman of Maltese origins, I easily passed as an Arab when I worked in Israel and had to put up with the hundreds of indignities and injustices which Palestinians are forced to live with on a daily basis, thanks to a racist system I can only compare with apartheid.
The "root of all the troubles of the Middle East" lies in Israel's flagrant disregard for International Law, its countless acts of aggression towards the Palestinians — land confiscation, military curfews, collective punishments, not to mention the killing of over four hundred Palestinian civilians, the majority of them children, since the uprising began.
If Arafat is a war criminal, what have the apologists for Israeli aggression to say about Sharon and his implication in the massacre of 2,700 Palestinians during the Lebanese civil war?
One only has to consider the recent legal sham in which an Israeli settler was given six months community service for beating a Palestinian child to death, to understand Israel's basic disregard for the human rights of the Palestinians I doubt that a man would be treated so leniently in this country if he killed his pet dog. No doubt Gerard Noel would consider this appalling act of brutality, like the long list of brutalities for which the Israeli government is guilty, "justifiable."
I tun not an anti-Semite, as my Jewish friends will testify, but if the likes of Gerard Noel think that I will be silenced whilst Palestinians continue to suffer with the blessing of the West, he can think again.
Yours faithfully.
MORELLA SULTANA DE MARIA, [email protected]