Cummins unstuck
Sir: Rod Liddle (Liddle Britain, 28 June) is mistaken to suggest that only Guardian journalists objected to articles published in the Sunday Telegraph under the pseudonym Will Cummins. My Sunday Telegraph colleague Alasdair Palmer and I (both of whom have written frequently to attack Islamic fundamentalism and Islamist terrorism) protested strongly about them at the time, in the office and — in my own case — in print.
The main reason for our disquiet was that Mr Cummins had not, as Mr Liddle argues, ‘made it clear that his beef was with the ideology, not the people’. In fact he did the opposite, energetically denigrating all Muslims as one identikit, menacing group. In a piece entitled ‘Muslims are a threat to our way of life’, Cummins remarked that, ‘All Muslims, like all dogs, share certain characteristics.’ In response to my mention of the 7,000 Bosnian Muslims massacred in Srebrenica, he asserted that such ‘defeats’ were ‘more a tribute to their incompetence than their humanity’, while describing Britain’s Muslim population as ‘the cuckoo in its nest’ which was closer to ‘a detested kite’. Would Mr Liddle say of these remarks, as he did last week of Cummins’s views on Islam, that ‘the general gist seems pretty sound’?
Jenny McCartney
London N6
Sir: Short of scouting around the BNP’s website, it is hard to imagine a more ignorant collection of rants on Islam and Muslims than those penned by Harry Cummins. They certainly do not merit the congratulatory praise heaped on them by Rod Liddle.
If this sort of routine Islam-bashing is, as Liddle claims, becoming more common, then it is a terrifying prospect. Cummins tried to scare us into believing there is a world where Islam is an evil threat trying to take over the globe. This is the sort of language that, if taken seriously, could incite violence and conflict. Quite where Liddle found any compassion in this stream of invective remains a mystery.
Take the sheer nonsense of Cummins’s statement that the only indigenous Muslims come from Arabia. Nigerian and Indonesian Muslims and white Anglo-Saxon converts will be startled to discover that the only place where Muslims ‘are native’ is thousands of miles away in the sands of the Arabian peninsular. Just where does he think are Christians native?
To cap it all, Cummins believes that Christians are the ‘rightful owners’ of most Muslims lands and the Crusaders were merely trying to get their own lands back as if all the kings of Europe had some sort of real estate claim to the Near East. Debating the role of Islam and Muslims is one thing, but lauding such incendiary lunacy is quite another.
Chris Doyle
Director, Council for Arab-British Understanding, London EC4
Deeply exposed
Sir: In his review (Books, 14 June) of my book, Forgotten Voices of the Secret War: An Inside History of Special Operations During the Second World War, Andro Linklater bemoans the lack of space devoted to Operation Remorse and to the demise, in France, of the Prosper circuit. I agree with Mr Linklater that it would have been preferable to deal in more detail with Prosper and Remorse. However, it is important to understand why a book of this sort cannot describe in equal depth every aspect of SOE’s work.
The ‘Forgotten Voices’ series is reliant entirely on the recollections of survivors interviewed by the Imperial War Museum. But SOE losses were high, while many protagonists who survived the war did not live long enough to speak of what they did. Nor were all survivors inclined to share their memories, being constrained for a long time by the Official Secrets Act.
Mr Linklater also regrets that several illustrations are blurred. Unfortunately, agents working in enemy-occupied territory were rarely able to take quality photographs.
Roderick Bailey
Imperial War Museum, London SE1
Unarmed and dangerous
Sir: If Fraser Nelson’s insight (‘Very discretely, Cameron is writing his first Queen’s Speech’, 28 June) into what is being planned by the Conservatives is comprehensive, then it reveals a dangerous omission which should be unacceptable to any government and particularly a Conservative one: defence policy.
The defence of the realm, the unchallenged first duty of any government, has been shamefully and dangerously neglected by New Labour. All spending commitments should necessarily be secondary to those required for adequate defence and security.
That all three of our armed services are underfunded is now irrefutable as the unanimous pleas for more resources from the former chiefs of staff, other military experts, and now Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the current head of the Armed Services, attest. On present funding, we can no longer meet our current commitments, yet the world is clearly becoming more hostile and unstable.
The understandable and generally wise Conservative leadership policy of making no spending promises before achieving power must give way in the case of defence spending. The leadership must now promise adequate defence funding when it regains power — waiting is unacceptable — and meanwhile harass the government remorselessly to increase expenditure.
Allen Sykes
Leatherhead, Surrey
The point about Russia
Sir: Charlotte Hobson (Books, 28 June) obviously does not know Russia very well and does not like it. She did not read Jonathan Dimbleby’s book with due attention as she fails to understand its central point, which the author expresses with such brilliance: the mentality and the way of life of Russia were mutilated by Stalinist repression.
Hobson uses a lot of old-fashioned stereotypes. For example, she writes about Russia’s sense of insecurity born of invasions, an old communist propaganda thesis. But ask yourself who invaded Poland six times, three times in the 20th century alone? Who kept half of Europe under its heel for half a century?
Oleg Gordievsky
London WC1
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