Pubs used to display little signs saying
No Politics No Religion, for very good reasons. Like any club, the VOC is a broad church and members are bound to have opposing views on various questions. The majority of discussions of the Israel-Palestine Question, especially on the internet, are usually doomed to degenerate into slanging matches between all kinds of people with various agendas, some of them rather unsavoury.
Comparisons between MAP and NORAID are invalid because MAP is a
bona fide charity, strenuously vetted for obvious reasons by the UK authorities and other Western security agencies, and NORAID is a proven terrorist front that has long-operated with the tacit and occasionally open approval of successive US administrations with their eye on the Irish-American vote.
I would be interested in seeing any evidence to which Ken Smith might be privy that MAP has links to or facilitates Palestinian terrorism in any way. I await a PM from him with interest. Of course, ultra-radical Zionist types of the kind who seem to have hijacked Israel and who claim to speak for World Jewry might contend that the very act, for instance, of reducing Palestinian infant mortality is tantamount to aiding Palestinian terrorist groups because the infants is question are tomorrow's terrorists.
According to such individuals, anyone who does not wholly support the total suppression of the Palestinian people is an anti-semite or Jew-hater, Palestinians being semites. Jews who object to Zionist policies and philosophies bearing disturbing similarities to those of the Nazis are "self-hating Jews". In other words, these extremists are as intransigent as some of the more radical Islamic militants causing all sorts of trouble at the moment.
Discussions about these factions are as futile as discussions with them...which is why the Israel-Palestine Question is not about to be solved anytime soon. Apart from this, there will always be external forces seeking to perpetuate the strife as a means of destabilising the Middle East for oil-related reasons. Nobody with vested interests in oil wants Western-style democracy in the region, least of all the sundry feudal monarchs and dictators doing the oilmen's bidding. And that, my friends, is why Israel is feared and loathed by the local potentates and also why the last thing the local Arabs want is a Palestinian state run along Western democratic lines like Israel.
Contrary, you see, to the image promoted of Palestinians in general as a bunch of baleful suicide bombers-in-waiting, the Palestinians are the most educated group of Arabs
per capita in the Arab world. It used to be the Lebanese, before decades of civil war and invasion wrecked the place, just as it was starting to resemble any other civilised Mediterranean country. You can't blame the people of Gaza for voting Hamas into power. It's the same kind of reaction that sees more and more Western Europeans voting for 'nationalist' parties in the face of increasingly oppressive European Union government.
Anyway, I don't come here for this kind of discussion and I'm sure most of you chaps don't either. Ken Smith is entitled to his opinions and I will defend his right to them to the last. However, I think he is entirely wrong about MAP. For a resumé of MAP's patrons and trustees, click here:
http://www.map-uk.org/about/trustees_and_patrons/ I am unaware of the special information to which Ken Smith is privy but I nevertheless find it hard to believe that canny figures like Helena Kennedy and David Steel would involve themselves in any organisation with verifiable links to terrorism.
So, let's leave this sort of topic outside because it usually acts as a green light to all sorts of loons and half-wits of the kind who ruin forum websites for a majority of people who just want to wind down and relax without being cornered and browbeaten by the kind of people one can avoid in real life but who are harder to avoid in cyberspace. After all, this part of the website is open to all-comers and we wouldn't want to give the impression that the VOC is a political club, would we? Debating this over a beer or three is one thing, but it leads nowhere good on the internet.
PK