Madam, - Kenneth Baker of the Embassy of Israel (May 2nd) has virulently attacked the Palestinian Delegate General Hikmat Ajjuri for something that he never wrote.
Dr Ajjuri did not "compare the scale of death in concentration camps" to the scale of devastation being wreaked by Israel in the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies (Opinion Analysis, May 18th). He compared the place that the Holocaust holds in Jewish memory to that which the Nakbah (which Mr Baker shamefully places in quotation marks) holds in the memory of Palestinians.
Mr Baker should study the website of the Holocaust Educational Trust which quotes the declaration issued by the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in January 2000: "With humanity still scarred by genocide, anti-Semitism, ethnic cleansing, racism, xenophobia and other expressions of hatred and discrimination, we share a solemn responsibility to fight against these evils. . .and to reaffirm humanity's common aspiration for a democratic and tolerant society, free of the evils of prejudice and other forms of bigotry." In seeking to isolate the Holocaust from all other examples of barbarism and by seeking to negate the Nakbah, Mr Baker is controverting these principles.
Israel is indeed a state based on "ethnic cleansing, racism, xenophobia and other expressions of hatred and discrimination", and it is people like Mr Baker who are debasing the memory of the Holocaust by enlisting it to defend such practices. - Yours, etc,
RAYMOND DEANE, Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Dame Street, Dublin 2.