Letters: Brown should be concentrating on pushing for a solution in Palestine

All people are open to criticism if they breach UN human rights codes. That applies as much to Jewish people and the Israeli state as it does to the rest of us. We are not being anti-Semitic to say so unless we say our criticism applies to all Jewish people just because they are Jewish. It is obvious that Jewish people support a broad range of opinions on the matter as does the rest of the British community.

Surely Mr Brown should be pushing for a solution to the Palestinian question and not stirring up ill-feeling.

It would be helpful if he pushed for a new, unbiased UN definition of anti-Semitism, essentially one that cannot be vetoed by the US and the UK, one which takes into account freedom of speech and the rights of others, including the Palestinians.

Bill Melville,

Old Police House, Perth Road,

Little Dunkeld, Perthshire.

JEREMY Corbyn needs no lecture from the likes of Gordon Brown. All politicians rub shoulders with people who are responsible for the murder of men, women and children. We all saw Tony Blair in the tent of Colonel Gaddafi. I believe Mr Brown also is a member of Labour Friends of Israel along with Tony Blair and Jack Straw.

Any decent person must sympathise with the Palestinians driven from the homeland . And just how many innocent Muslims have been killed since Mr Blair and Mr Brown along with Mr Straw told the British people that Iraq was about to use weapons of mass destruction against us? A calculated lie.

Mr Corbyn is basically a decent man. I don’t always agree with him or any other politician. They all live in a goldfish bowl and are always ready to put the knife into one another.

It seems Mr Brown and his colleagues from that Labour government are incapable of having any feeling of guilt for the destabilising of the Middle East and North Africa with the countless deaths they have caused at the behest of George Bush.

John G Phimister,

63 St Clair Street, Kirkcaldy.

ISN’T it interesting that Jeremy Corbyn can attend a Black September memorial in support of peaceful negotiation and ignore the memorial for the Omagh bombing, the worst atrocity of the Irish Troubles after peace negotiations were concluded?

James Campbell,

Rubislaw Drive, Bearsden.

THE endless commentary regarding anti-Semitism in the Labour Party increasingly suggests to me that there is a hidden agenda operating here, namely to use this issue to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn. I have no interest in the Labour Party or its internal machinations but I do object to the amount of misinformation being peddled regarding the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism.

Ten days ago one media commentator stated on a news programme that he was baffled that this “universally accepted” definition was not being embraced by Labour’s NEC. A quick analysis shows that in reality only 16 per cent of the nations in the UN have adopted this definition. Since when did a rejection rate of 84 per cent make something “universally accepted” ?

The following night the editor of Jewish News stated on another news programme that the IHRA definition was exclusive to Jews when in fact the IHRA states quite categorically that it applies equally to “non-Jewish individuals and/or their property”. So once again we see blatant misinformation.

When I lived in Israel in the 1970s it was not uncommon for ultra-orthodox Jews to throw rocks at the cars of secular Jews travelling through their neighbourhood on the Jewish sabbath to attend football matches. Under the IHRA examples this would constitute an anti-Semitic act. Equally the nation/state law recently passed by the Israeli Parliament essentially removes the separation between church and state and thereby holds all Jews to be part of the Jewish state of Israel with the elected government acting on their behalf. However the IHRA states that holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel is again anti-Semitic.

I can give other examples, all of which simply highlight that the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is unworkable in practice in much the same way as Scottish Labour MSPs claimed that the Offensive Behaviour at Football Matches legislation was unworkable. The willingness of these MSPs to back this definition of anti-Semitism becomes even more baffling in that context.

Robert Menzies,

2 Burnbrae Gardens, Falkirk.

JEREMY Corbyn taking part in a peace and reconciliation ceremony in Tunisia where wreaths were laid at graves of Palestinians, some civilians, some terrorists, is seen as outrageous (“Corbyn: I was present at ceremony for Palestinian group”, The Herald, August 14).

Months earlier in June 2014 UK (Conservative) Foreign Minister Hugh Robertson and Tony Blair laid wreaths at the funeral of Ariel Sharon. He was a member of the Haganah Zionist paramilitary group which carried out massacres of Palestinian civilians during the 1948 war. As an Israeli military officer he led the massacre of the entire population of the Jordanian village of Qibya in 1953. An Israeli government inquiry found that as Defence Minister, Sharon had personal responsibility for allowing the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982, in which the Israeli military allowed far right Lebanese Christian militias to enter Palestinian refugee camps after PLO fighters had left during a ceasefire. Thousands of civilians including women, children and old people were murdered. In 2002 he was Israel’s Prime Minister during Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Israeli human rights group B’TSelem found that Israeli troops bulldozed houses knowing civilians were still inside them, targeted and killed unarmed civilians and ambulance crews.

How can commemorating, meeting and even arming Israelis who murdered civilians be fine, but commemorating Palestinians committing the same crime, even as part of a peace process, outrageous?

Duncan McFarlane,

Beanshields, Braidwood, Carluke.