Madam, - I refer to your Editorial in Thursday's edition and to your earlier reporting on the tabling by Ireland of a UN resolution concerning anti-Semitism.
I wish to clarify that this is a new initiative, involving a separate, free-standing resolution. It is, therefore, separate and distinct from the long-standing annual practice by which Ireland has introduced a draft resolution in the humanitarian, or third, committee of the UN General Assembly that condemns all forms of religious intolerance.
The new draft resolution, with its rejection of anti-Semitism, accords with the consistent position of the Government and, indeed, of successive Irish Governments. - Yours, etc.,
DERMOT BRANGAN, Press Counsellor, Department of Foreign Affairs, Dublin 2.
Madam, - The claim in Thursday's Editorial that anti-Semitism can be "tackled" by a "just settlement" of Israel's conflict with the Palestinians implies that anti-Semitism is, in essence, anti-Zionism - that antipathy towards Jews in the diaspora derives from hatred of the Jewish state.
This is dangerous folly. The creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza will not assuage the fury of the world's anti-Semites but merely leave them with one less stick with which to beat the Jews.
Hatred of the Jewish people existed long before the advent of Zionism and the establishment of the Jewish state; indeed, Theodore Herzl was moved to found the Zionist movement after witnessing the frenzied Jew-hatred surrounding the Dreyfus affair and the first waves of Jewish immigration to what is now Israel consisted of refugees from Czarist persecution and pogroms.
Israel is not the cause of anti-Semitism but its consequence. - Yours, etc.,
SEAN GANNON, Irish Friends of Israel, Charlotte Quay Dock, Dublin 4.
