Letters: Deportation policy

One of the thousands of non-British "criminals" being removed from the country by the Home Office is John Amiri, awaiting deportation at Haslar Detention Centre. The date he has been given is 6 January.

John fled here from Afghanistan six years ago as a child of 15. Two years ago, in desperation following the failure of his application for asylum, he tried to leave the country using a false passport, the result is a "criminal" record. He was granted bail on a £20,000 surety put up by a member of the public.

Since then John has attended Lewes college, gained GCSEs in maths, physics and chemistry, passed the first year of a A-level course with a "Student of the Term" award and was due to begin exams on 7 January. He wants to be an engineer and I have no doubt that he would have succeeded. All this has been at no expense to the public since he has been supported, both socially and educationally, by a sponsor who recognised his unique character and ability.

There is no place for John in Afghanistan, as anyone who has any real knowledge of the country and his case should know. Within the last few days, while in detention, he has been threatened by a Taliban supporter because his declared religion is "none".

The reply from the Home Office to my letter of support states that they cannot discuss his case since they must protect the "privacy of the individual" I am hugely relieved to know that the Home Office wishes to protect his privacy but not his life.

Judy Russell

Hastings

The things Israel could have done

In the final paragraph of his article about Gaza (3 January) Howard Jacobson says that "Israel could not have done other than it is doing" Well, this is simply not so.

In recent times it could have lifted the Gaza blockade in return for the five-month halt to Hamas rocket attacks. It didn't. In decades past, it could have treated the Palestinians as having equal rights in their own land and could have complied with UN resolutions. Instead it set out to colonise and annex what was left of Palestine after the 1967 war, to steal land and water resources and to drive Palestinians, into the equivalent of Bantustans and reservations.

It could have encouraged a stable Palestinian leadership to emerge by dealing honestly with secular leaders such as Arafat. Instead it set out to divide the resistance by sabotaging that leadership, opening the doors wide to the religious extremism of Hezbollah and Hamas.

Israel could have learned from the British experience of a negotiated peace in Northern Ireland. Instead the Zionist Jews of Israel admitted to learning a lot from their persecution under Nazism. The most important lesson: might is right; the second, the bigger the lie the more likely it is to be believed; the third, as Jacobson points out, nobody is going to come to the aid of the victims.

This is why I, and other "ill-taught simpletons", write letters to the editor and attend demonstrations; not to wear our hearts on our sleeves, Mr Jacobson, but to let those victims know that they are not alone. I think perhaps that German Jews in the 1930s also appreciated these small tokens of solidarity by ordinary people.

Harry Perry

Leicester

Here is a question for all those demonstrating on behalf of the Palestinians: which Palestinians do you support? The "moderate" Palestinians of the Fatah-controlled Palestine Authority, with which Israel is in negotiations based on a two-state solution, or the extremist Hamas Palestinians that control the Gaza Strip?

Hamas has been labelled a terrorist organisation by the UN, the EU and the US, and has refused to recognise the existence of Israel. Not only did it take control of Gaza by an illegal coup in which many Fatah operatives were killed and injured, but during the current conflict, according to Khaled Abu Toameh, the Jerusalem Post's Arab Affairs correspondent, Hamas has murdered 35 Fatah prisoners and "knee-capped" or mutilated 75 more detainees.

So let's be clear: there is a vast difference between supporting the Palestine Authority and supporting Hamas in Gaza. The former wants a negotiated settlement with Israel while the latter wants to destroy Israel and then start a world-wide Caliphate. Take your pick.

Jack Cohen

Netanya, Israel

Mary Dejevsky (30 December) calls for sympathy for Israel, a legitimate state living in fear and insecurity. If so, it has only itself to blame. Claiming that its legitimacy derives from its origins in a UN resolution 60 years ago, she ignores the fact that under the British mandate the original inhabitants of Palestine were denied any real choice in the matter.

I was in Israel in the early Sixties, before the June war. The settlers in the kibbutz I worked in had a racist attitude to the local Arab villagers, stealing their produce and denying them a "free market". Being armed to the teeth, the kibbutzniks could get away with it, as have Jewish settlers ever since.

No wonder they live in fear, surrounded by so many resentful cries for vengeance from Hamas.

Nick Howard

Sheffield

School makes teachers ill

No wonder so many teachers are off sick (letters, 2 January). Every primary teacher is exposed to the contagious diseases of about 30 families every day. A secondary teacher can come into contact with well over 100 children a day, some days 250, depending on timetabling.

Often, with both parents working, children are being sent to school when possibly both they and the teachers, would benefit from the child staying at home. "Catching something from the children" is one aspect of absenteeism, but the stress of teaching in schools today is something that must take its toll on some.

I hope that the Tories are not going to embark on one of their "trashing teachers" campaigns, as they did in the 1970s and 1980s when they claimed through a series of anecdotes that teachers were lazy and as a result they introduced their "directed time initiative" (DTI). Because of their lack of any real understanding of the total commitment of most teachers, the DTI was counter-productive, among other things drastically reducing out-of-school activities and attendance at LEA meetings to discuss new educational initiatives, unless directed by the headteacher.

John Major then bleated about the reduction of school cricket teams (and, by implication, other sports teams that would normally play on Saturdays), school playing-fields were soon declared redundant and the beneficiaries of this were the property developers, who no doubt were then in a better position to subscribe to Tory coffers.

DAVID SELBY

Winchester, Hampshire

Your report about "answering back" was deeply depressing ("Male teachers face more bad behaviour by pupils", 29 December). That this positive indicator of quality learning was achieved by only 20 per cent of male teachers and 30 per cent of female teachers (Warwick University study) demonstrates the miserable poverty and sterility of the "delivery" model of teaching increasingly imposed by an educationally illiterate government.

Confident teachers working in good schools knew that individual and group interaction between teacher, pupils and the subject matter is essential. The goodwill of pupils will be taken for granted in classrooms where pupils are taught to be respectful and co-operative but also articulate and assertive. I was lucky enough to spend a large proportion of my career teaching in excellent comprehensive schools where such high-quality learning was commonplace.

The reason for its rarity in present classrooms is not because of a lack of discipline on the part of pupils but a consequence of disastrous political meddling in education by free-market ideologues. Replacing the wisdom of the the 1944 Education Act with the crass marketisation of schools resulting from the 1988 Baker Act is the ultimate cause of the pedagogic folly that has led to "answering back" being regarded as a symptom of disruption, rather than the ultimate aim of all good schooling.

Roger Titcombe

Ulverston, Cumbria

Ireland in the Second World War

There is another side to the story of Irish lighthouses continuing to operate during the Second World War (letters, 23 December). We had a close friend, now dead, who was a pilot in Sunderland flying boats of RAF Coastal Command. A typical patrol over the eastern Atlantic might last for 12 hours, nearly all of it at low altitude to spot enemy submarines.

As the aircraft headed eastward towards the end of a patrol, the navigator would only have a hazy idea of their position, especially on a dark overcast night. At this point, the most valuable navigation aids were a stopwatch and a list of Irish lighthouses. When the first of them came into sight, its on-off periods would be timed and the location identified. It was then possible to set a course for Belfast Lough, where they were based.

James F Barnes

Ledbury, Herefordshire

Andrew Buncombe and Omar Waraich demonstrate the Pakistan Prime Minister's "inexperience" by citing that he said that the Second World War was started by a non-state actor ("From crisis to crisis: Zardari's Pakistan", 27 December).

The Second World War started at various dates. For the USA, it was started in December 1941 by a militarist government. But the war had started considerably earlier in Pakistan's neighbour, China. There was war from 1931, completely unrestrained from 1937, provoked by a Kwantung army that was out of control of the Tokyo government but able to attract public support.

Roger Macy

Tunbridge Wells, Kent

An antidote to fundamentalism

Victoria Clark is most persuasive ("The scientific face behind terror", 18 December) in linking exclusively scientific education and religious fundamentalism. May I put the case for humanities education having the opposite effect?

Engagement with the great historic texts exploring the human condition, such as the Bible, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, the Mahabharata, Plato's Socratic dialogues, the Qu'ran, the Therevada, or the Thousand and One Nights provides a remedy to the denial of complexity so characteristic of fundamentalism. Immersion in the riches they offer makes clear that each, understood in its own context, provides a unique but not exclusive wisdom.

Let us support humanities education not as an elegant appurtenance, but as the basis for humane and nuanced thought.

Bruce J Reid

Lichfield, Staffordshire

Father of railways

Like Handel's Messiah, Stephenson's Rocket is not preceded by the definite article (letters, 31 December). And Rocket, which won the Rainhill Trials in 1829, was not George Stephenson's locomotive, but his son Robert's.

David Hindley

Corbridge, Northumberland

Biblical evolution

Maurice Hill is wrong to suggest that evolution disproves the truth of the Bible (letters, 3 January). The creation stories in Genesis are clearly myths rather than scientific accounts of the origins of the universe. They are not "true" in a literal sense, but they could be imaginative ways of pointing to a greater truth, that God is the ultimate creator of the universe and has a purpose for it. This belief is compatible with evolutionary theory and is the view of most Christians in this country, including a number of leading scientists.

Mark Stubbs

Luton

Disorderly feasts

Frank Campbell (letter, 3 January) accuses the consumer god of not understanding correct liturgical sequence. The liturgical order of feast days is remiss at this time of the year. Although the Gospel of St Matthew records the visit of the Magi before the account of the slaughter of the innocents, the sequence of these commemorations is reversed, with the Feast of the Holy Innocents being celebrated on 28 December and the Feast of the Epiphany being 6 January. Does anyone know why?

Christine Ollis

CRAWLEY, West Sussex

Leave me out

Over the years I have been to three "gentlemen's" clubs as a guest, but far from being full of "gentlemen", I have found them to be full of boring and rather rude old farts. I subscribe to the theory that such clubs exist so that wives can be free of their boring, if rich, spouses of an evening, thus providing an extremely useful social function. In being blackballed, Luke Johnson has, in my opinion, had a lucky escape ("We don't like the look of you, Garrick Club tells C4 chief", 3 January).

Robert Senecal

London, WC1

Cheerful recession

The recession will bring less money for eating, drinking and driving. Our major national issues include obesity, binge-drinking and carbon emissions. Who said recession had to be a bad thing?

Ben Havard

Saxmundham, Suffolk