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Sir: I did not, as Melanie Phillips claims, ‘rubbish’ anyone in my review of Global Jihad. I offered a measured but critical response to Dr Sookhdeo’s analysis of Islam and terrorism.
Phillips claims I justify Palestinian terrorism, but provides no evidence. In addition, citing a 2002 article of mine on contemporary anti-Semitism, she omits to mention that right after the part she quotes, I also describe how ‘European culture has a history of anti-Semitism’ partly rooted in ‘the shameful teachings of many in the Church’.
It is a shame if there cannot be disagreement on important issues without recourse to slurs and disingenuously selective quotations.
Ben White
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Sir: Melanie Phillips accuses me of insinuating that the Jews were ‘people who are instructed by their religion to be violent, treacherous and imperialist’. This would, if I had said or meant it, be a thoroughly disgraceful piece of anti-Semitism. But anyone who reads my piece will see that it was actually a paraphrase of Dr Sookhdeo’s attitude to Muslims.
Andrew Brown
Editor, Belief, the Guardian, London N1
Going postal
Sir: Having worked since 2006 as a postman in Amsterdam, I agree with David Jones (Letters, 7 March) that the privatisation of the Dutch postal service has certainly affected the quality of that service. The objective of the postal service was to deliver post, for instance to Mr Jones. But since we are now a business, we have shareholders and the need to be profitable, thus the emphasis is placed on the profitable part of the business: shifting household advertising properly known as junk mail. The service part of the post is now (for TNT) an inconvenient leftover from the old days. Mr Jones is, however, incorrect about the ending of deliveries on Mondays. I cover several miles delivering a tiny amount of mail, so I suspect that there is some interpretation of the law of averages that explains his absence of post on Mondays.
The privatisation of the post is not yet quite complete. From 1 April we will have a competitive postal market, with two other companies delivering mail. With letter volume diminishing because of email (as we keep being told), I am left wondering why the same shrinking service needs to be split three ways? Sorry, Mr Jones, your suffering is not over.
Simon Ferdinando
Amsterdam, Holland
Not Picasso’s words
Sir: It’s too bad that Andrew Lambirth closes his review of the National Gallery’s Picasso exhibition (Arts, 7 March) with words (‘I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time’) which Picasso never spoke.
The fake quotation comes from an ‘interview’ with Picasso, written by Giovanni Papini and published in 1951. In it this ex-Futurist and former fascist imagines Picasso ‘confessing’ to being a fraud and a con man who cynically exploited ‘the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries’ with ‘all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques’ so as to attain ‘sales, gains, fortune, riches’. Although regularly denounced by Picasso scholars, this piece of nonsense continues to resurface, kept alive in part by lazy writers who don’t do their research.
Richard Dean
Whitstable, Kent
A useful uncle
Sir: Lest we lose ourselves in wholehearted admiration for Gail Trimble’s outstanding contribution to the Corpus Christi University Challenge team (The Spectator’s Notes, 7 March), history records that the quizmasters are no intellectual slouches, either.
University Challenge’s first Grand Inquisitor, Bamber Gascoigne, who had been a scholar at Eton, went up for interview at King’s, Cambridge, in 1953 and was asked what books he had read during the past year. To his dismay he could not recollect a single one. What did he do in the holidays? He hunted. Anything else? Well, he did a bit of shooting. King’s did not offer him a place. So he applied next to Magdalene. The Master opened the interview by asking him whether by any chance he was related to an old friend of his, Sir Julian Gascoigne. ‘He is my uncle, sir.’ ‘Splendid! Splendid!’ enthused the Master. ‘Mr Gascoigne, we look forward to seeing you here next October.’ The Master’s perception was handsomely rewarded when, three years later, Mr Gascoigne gained a double first in English.
Robert Triggs
Oxford
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