Madam, - Having in her previous letter replaced rational debate with defamation - her despicable reference to "Kristallnacht" which, if anything, debases the memory of Jewish suffering - Val Mulkerns now attempts to flatter me by reference to her "admiration" for my music and by presumptuously referring to me as her "friend" (April 11th).
Just as my friends include no Holocaust deniers, neither do they include those who deny the crimes committed against the Palestinian people by the Israeli rogue state. Neither denial is historically tenable or morally acceptable.
To refer to the dispossession of the helpless Palestinian people and the subsequent occupation of their lands by the world's fourth most powerful army as some kind of stand-off between "warring tribes" is like describing a brutal rape as a lovers' tiff. - Yours, etc,
RAYMOND DEANE, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin.