Letters: The 14-year-old suicide bomber

Teenage suicide bomber was a victim of religious abuse

Sir: I hope that your article on the 14-year-old Afghan suicide bomber (10 June) has been read carefully by those desperate to claim Islamic terrorism is really about politics and not religion. This boy was told to die because it was what God wanted, not because it was what a political movement wanted, or what his country wanted.

His potential victims' offence? That they were fighting against Muslims (not Afghans). This boy is from Pakistan, so he wasn't putting his life on the line for his nation or for a political cause, but for his religion. What about the people who taught him such actions were virtuous and praiseworthy; who forced him to do as they said? Mullahs, Islamic religious leaders, not politicians, not campaigners.

And they were reaping the harvest of a whole childhood of religious indoctrination, during which this boy was taught that violence in support of Islam is good because it is God's will, that God looks with favour on martyrs, and that mullahs are able to declare God's absolute will.

Any religion that indoctrinates its young to believe that it is not only acceptable but actively a virtue to believe as absolute truth claims that cannot be substantiated by evidence, to accept as truth something that has merely been asserted on the basis of authority and tradition, is guilty of abusing its children, just as these mullahs are.

Paula Kirby

Inverness

Irish 'No' would be a tragedy for Europe

Sir: It will be a tragedy if the Irish people dismiss the Lisbon Treaty in their referendum. Though the treaty has not been approved by referendums elsewhere, elected governments which have voted it through have acted responsibly to move forward the European ideal.

However flawed and incomplete, the Lisbon Treaty represents significant progress on the road to a closer Europe. It would be unfair if a small handful of European citizens were able to block that progress now. Indeed, it would be totally undemocratic, especially if the vote is close, that Irish voters should hold the power to overturn the wishes of the other 500 million of us, most of whom have already assented to the treaty via our elected representatives.

Ireland has done particularly well out of EU membership this past 30 years, in which the country was transformed from a poor rural backwater into a dynamic modern state with one of the highest standards of living in the Union. If the result is a "No" and the treaty is lost, the Irish will not be quickly forgiven by the vast majority of Europeans, who will see the vote as a perverse act of spite to wreck an important step in the development of Europe.

Chris Payne

Plesidy, France

Sir: I found your leading article on the Irish referendum (9 June) fair, moderate, balanced and respectful to the Irish voters until I got to the penultimate paragraph when it became muddled, obsessed and fanatical. How do I know? Well, it is evident when you start to use words such as "muddled", "obsessive" and "fanatical" about those who are campaigning for a "No" vote.

You may not agree with them, but there are serious reasons to be worried. I do not agree with all their arguments but, for example, I find it compelling that the trajectory of Lisbon is to push Ireland (and other neutral members) into a situation where they may have to accept joint EU military action. Such a scenario is positively unhelpful to the Union.

There are real issues that the citizens of Europe need to be discussing and all of the other states are trying to avoid them. At least Ireland is having this debate because of the mandatory referendum. A "No" vote will not damage the Union and may even strengthen it, because these issues will need to be addressed, and then we may find wider identification with and ownership of the EU project by the people of Europe.

Clem McCartney

Limavady, Northern Ireland

Draw back from attack on Iran

Sir: A Downing Street delegation will today (12 June) call on Gordon Brown to use his time with George Bush next week to warn the President against military intervention in Iran. A letter handed in by a cross-party group of parliamentarians to the Prime Minister argues that an attack on Iran in the absence of evidence of a nuclear weaponisation programme would be in breach of international law and would be as unconscionable and misjudged as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

An attack on Iran during the remaining 220 days of the Bush presidency would have the bonus for the neo-Conservatives of greatly increasing the likelihood of a McCain presidency. The call from the delegation echoes the conclusions of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in their March report that "a military attack against Iran would be unlikely to succeed and could provoke an extremely violent backlash across the region".

Before the invasion of Iraq, MPs supported Blair's policies in the mistaken belief that he was using his special relationship with the Bush administration to lessen the possibility of war. We now know that this was not the case. Mr Brown has the chance to succeed where Blair failed: to curb Mr Bush's appetite for military action and to promote a diplomatic resolution to an increasingly dangerous situation. It may even help boost the Prime Minister's flagging poll ratings.

Stefan Simanowitz

Chair, Westminster Committee on Iran, London NW3

Sir: Here is the breakdown for ownership of nuclear weapons so far: USA 10,000; Russia 16,000; UK 834; China 400; France 350; Israel 150; India 75; Pakistan 50; North Korea 1; Iran 0. I never was any good at maths, so can anybody explain to me why Europe and the USA are planning even more sanctions against Iran, who don't have any, while the rest of us have so many?

M Classey

Hanworth, Middlesex

Long history of Jews in the Middle East

Sir: P J Stewart (letters, 11 June) claims: "There was never any mass migration of Arabic speaking Jews [in 1948] or in any other year." He says Yemenite Jews "left in bewilderment", Moroccan Jews were mainly "contented", and Algerian Jews left for France at independence in 1962.

As a Jew of Moroccan/Russian descent, I have to conclude that the letter-writer is either woefully ignorant or wilfully compliant in the revisionist history of the Jew in Arab lands. After the United Nations General Assembly partition plan in 1947, the rights and the security of Jews in Arab lands came under legal and physical assault. The rise of Pan-Arabism and independence in many Arab states resulted in a multi-state organised campaign against Zionism.

In Syria in 1947, anti-Jewish pogroms struck in Aleppo; of the 10,000 Jews who lived there 7,000 fled. Anti-Jewish riots erupted in Aden and Yemen; in Libya, Jews were expelled or their citizenship revoked, and in Algeria, the state authorities issued several anti-Jewish laws causing nearly all of the 160,000 Algerian Jews to flee the country. About 800,000 Jews were forced to flee their ancestral Arab homelands.

Successive Arab states and western left/liberal elites have a shared interest in eroding Judeo-Arabic culture, because this revisionism presents the Jews as alien to the Middle East, and as colonialists, thus denying the nationhood of the Jew.

Yet in reality, Jews and Arabs have a long, entwined and shared history. Indigenous Jews have been a continual presence for 2,500 years in the Middle East, including Israel and North Africa. They were there before the birth of Islam, yet people continue to misinterpret and misunderstand the strange history of the Jewish people. We have been expelled from almost every country we have ever lived in, a wandering nation destined to roam the earth for thousands of years, from country to country, continent to continent, sometimes tolerated, mainly persecuted.

So when the Arab states expelled their indigenous Jewish population a few years after six million Jewish men, women and children were incinerated in the crematoria of Christian Europe, these Jews from Arab lands were absorbed mainly into the land of Israel. Where else did the world expect them to go?

Sara Cohen

Hove, East Sussex

Schools once knew the secret of spelling

Sir: I would like to make two points about English spelling (letters, 11 June). First, my mother, a working-class child, born in 1918, could spell any word correctly, in spite of being educated only to the age of 14. They had spelling lessons in those days and the intricacies of English orthography were drummed into children. It is called hard work, but it works.

Second, my own children, educated in the 1970s, learnt to read rapidly and fluently with that fabulous and now extinct system called ITA. They moved effortlessly on to "normal" spelling. Much of the problem with literacy nowadays is that something that is unfashionable is required: it is called effort.

Cyril Mitchell

Dumfries

Sir: I was amazed by Philip Hensher's justification of traditional English spelling on the grounds that it's good for our children to learn things that are difficult and pointless (9 June). I hated it myself, and I hate having to put my children through it too.

" 'I passed through all that myself, and I am determined my son shall pass through it as I have done,' " wrote Sydney Smith about public schools, "and away goes his bleating progeny to the tyranny." Fortunately, English spelling does at last appear to be being reformed, though perhaps not in a way of which Mr Hensher might approve. Thank God for the internet.

David Parkinson

York

Sir: Im wurid how chanjing speling and pungtuashon wil afect yor to crosswerds?

Nancy Henshaw

Bournemouth

Smoking does cause impotence

Sir: How can smokers help the economy by dying young (letters, 11 June)? Isn't it insane to state that smokers have reduced personal care costs and are less of a burden on the state and private pensions systems, resulting from their shortened lives?

Of the 300 people who die every day in the UK as a result of smoking, many are comparatively young. And apart from the agonising pain and grief experienced by smokers and non-smokers who are compelled to work in a smokey atmosphere or to mourn the untimely death of their loved relatives, hasn't it occurred to Mr Janikoun that smoking causes impotence?

For men in their 30s and 40s, smoking increases the risk of erectile dysfunction by about 50 per cent. Smoking can damage the blood vessels and cause them to degenerate: nicotine narrows the arteries that lead to the penis, reducing blood flow and the pressure of blood in the penis.

Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob

London SW5

Sir: As another non-smoker who nevertheless deplores the attitudes of virulent anti-smokers, I was not surprised to read that, having achieved their aim of banning smokers from public buildings, they are now complaining that smokers have the gall to smoke in their homes and outside bars (letters, 10 and 11 June).

Yet when some of us agitated for a designated small minority of bars, and private members' clubs, to be allowed to accommodate smokers indoors and away from the home, we were told this small liberty couldn't be legally, socially or philosophically granted. What ye sow . . ..

John Riches

Brighton

Stop extortion by rail companies

Sir: Mark Steel's welcome tirade against insidious ticket prices and restrictions (Comment, 11 June), tells only half the story. He was advised by National Rail Enquiries Press Office to book in advance to obtain cheaper fares. That would be fine if those tickets were always readily available: they are not. The companies "release" only so many, and will not reveal that number. It varies but is always very few.

I regularly journey from Birmingham to Oxenholme. I am able to choose, well in advance, off-peak times and days, but still find it difficult to obtain cheaper prices. I had resorted to travelling on the 05.30am, but now find cheaper tickets for that increasingly "not available". This is an eight-carriage Pendolino, which leaves Birmingham with a handful of passengers.

The rail regulator must investigate malpractice and end the extortion.

Martin Purdy

Birmingham

A matter of priorities

Sir: My right not to be blown up (report, 11 June) is greater than the right of a suspected terrorist not to be held for 42 days.

Stan Labovitch

Windsor, Berkshire

Ugly on-screen reality

Sir: So many programmes are fulfilling the need to see people put down and humiliated. The Independent asks who should be fired (10 June)? But why should anyone be fired? Sir Alan Sugar had two final contestants he liked. He had trouble choosing who was the better. But the point of the programme was that one contestant had to be told he was fired. Someone had to be put down. The Apprentice is a glorification of the worst of the capitalist free market, promoting greed and back-stabbing.

Karl Osborne

LONDON W4

A finger points...

Sir: "So, who would you fire?" (Front page, 10 June.) May I suggest that the first person whom you should fire is the staff member who approved the use of bad grammar in such a prominent place.

Geoff Foster

Welwyn, Hertfordshire

Scrums in the stands

Sir: Clive Goozee (letters, 5 June) says the Wasps versus Leicester Guinness Premiership final at Twickenham on 31 May set a world record crowd for a club rugby match. Presumably he means rugby union. The world record crowd for a rugby match was set when 107,558 turned out to watch the league clubs Melbourne Storm and St George Illawarra in the 1999 Australian Rugby League Grand Final in Sydney. In 1954, 102,569 spectators saw the Rugby League Challenge Cup Final replay between Halifax and Warrington at Bradford.

Michael O'Hare

Northwood, Middlesex

Isn't he a little hamlet?

Sir: The letters on amusing village names remind me of my favourite graffito. In south Lincolnshire, under the signpost "To Mavis Enderby and Old Bolinbroke" someone added "The gift of a son".

Neil Noble

Harrogate, North Yorkshire