Dr Nicole Phillips has my sympathies. Her pain and suffering are apparent (Heilpern’s editorial, Echo Letters, Dec 23), but I’m guessing her doctorate isn’t in history. She manages to completely overlook the pain and suffering inflicted on the Palestinian people by Zionist ideology and the modern state of Israel, and characterises those who object to the infliction of such suffering as being ‘complicit in a jihadist war’.
Objectors of Jewish ethnicity she dismisses as ‘outliers’. I wonder if German people who objected to Nazi policies in the 1930s shared that label. I would like to remind Doctor Phillips of George Bernard Shaw’s aphorism: ‘Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress therefore depends upon unreasonable people,’ or in the doctor’s language, outliers.
For an outlier, or more humane perspective, might I suggest that the good doctor reads The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, by Miko Peled. It’s available in the local library system, where I believe other works by outliers are also available.
Doctor, my paternal grandparents were slaughtered at Auschwitz in 1945. Born in 1948, I never knew them, but I surmise that if they shared the kindness and compassion that characterised my father, they’d be turning in their graves at the atrocities being committed in their name. Surely, ‘never again’ only makes sense if it is applied universally.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
