Israel's tunnel

When looking at the Middle East, there is no doubt that Israel is now more intransigent than it was under Prime Minister Rabin, but since the Palestinian Hamas openly admitted that they had placed bombs on buses in order to kill innocent men, women and children, and hence destroy the process, they are poorly placed to complain about the end result. What did they expect? The word of such people, like that of the IRA, isn't worth a lot and hence nobody now trusts them.

So before hotheads like Mr. Pienandoro rush into print, they should get their facts right. The Israelis have not just opened a tunnel under the Dome of the rock, or the Al Aqsa mosque. It has been there for a long time and thousands of tourists have been down it. This one included. It ran along outside the Islamic holy places, was very narrow, and could only be entered from near the Western Wall in the old Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. To facilitate the passage of visitors and to increase their safety in the event of an accident, the Israelis opened an exit into the Via Dolorosa, which is a prominent Christian site.

There is no insult to the Moslems, who could only have benefited from the increase in tourism, which provides employment for many. If any lack of communication was insensitive, it wasn't worth the death of even one single person. And it certainly was no crime.

If Mr. Pienandoro wants to see crime he should maybe look at Iraq which dropped poison gas on its Kurdish citizens. Or to Pakistan, whose extremists undertake such brave acts as blowing up cancer hospitals, when they take time off from their day job of being one of the world's biggest producers of heroin. To Libya, which plants bombs on civilian aircraft. Or to Algeria, where tens of thousands of innocent people have been killed by fundamentalists, who think they are much holier than everyone else. Thirty-five were recently killed in one day alone. It rated a couple of paragraphs and didn't elicit even a peep of protest by any writer to this paper. If men like the very able Mr. Alatas were to use his considerable talents to try to stop this continuing religious genocide, Indonesia could well get another Nobel Peace Prize.

As for the Taleban, I would suggest that Mr. Pienandoro asks his daughter if she would wish to have no education and no future. He might also ask his wife if she would wish to go into labor, with no doctor to hand, because men are forbidden to see her and women are forbidden to work. Maybe he should look at the satellite pictures of all the poppy fields under Taleban control from where they also ship huge amounts of heroin into the naive outer world. Quite how drug pushing relates to religious zealotry remains a mystery to me.

The West does not have an antipathy towards any religion, but its citizens do have the advantage of a free press and can perhaps see that, whatever Israel's errors, they pale into insignificance compared to many of those who seek to criticize it. I do not doubt that in the birth of any nation there are acts which both sides will prefer to forget. No doubt Mr. Arafat might prefer to forget that his men butchered little children at a place called Maalot not so long ago. Likewise Australia, most of South America, and indeed the United States probably wish to forget that their native peoples were killed like dogs by foreign immigrants -- and nobody sought permission from the survivors for the ongoing settlement. The reality is that the world can't undo its mistakes, it can only hope to learn how not to repeat them.

SEAN THOMSON

Dublin, Ireland