Janet Albrechtson - ignorance

21 March 2007

Re a Janet Albrechton polemic:

I'm presently in southern Thailand where this week Islamists executed a minibus full of innocents including two children. 

Believe me, as a father, my sympathies do not run to the militants.

However there is a reason that Islamist violence is ballooning here, and it is the same reason Islamist violence is ballooning in the Middle East.

Nearly a century ago Thailand annexed three independent Muslim sultanates here, and since then their largely Muslim citizens have been treated less well than other Thais. That has expanded in recent times - for example in 2004 more than 60 young Muslim protesters were suffocated in Army trucks.

In the Middle East there has been a long history of oppression by Western powers. Saddam was not the first to poison gas the Kurds - Winston Churchill was. On 19 February, 1920, Churchill - Secretary for War and Air - wrote to a military commander re...

"...the provision of some kind of asphyxiating bombs calculated to cause disablement of some kind but not death...for use in preliminary operations against turbulent tribes."

And it was done. As was a US invasion in 2003 which has brought about Iraqi mortality of an estimated 655,000 - the population of Canberra multiplied by two.

The toppling of Iraq's moderate regime in 1953, and paving the way for Saddam. The propping up of corrupt, oppressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia's. The torture of Muslim prisoners. The threats to Iran. It goes on and on.

Your polemics regularly fail to cite the history of the modern world - other than that slim body of facts which bolsters your ideological position.

This factual ignorance raises the question of what you are doing writing for a national newspaper.