Ominous echoes

The recent Paris conference (“World ministers in Paris endorse two-state solution,” January 16) has ominous echoes of the conference held in Munich in 1938.

At that time, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain commented that the Czechoslovak crisis was “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” His attitude to Jews was no less condescending, as he wrote regarding Kristallnacht: “No doubt the Jews aren’t a lovable people; I don’t care about them myself, but that is not sufficient to explain the pogrom.”

“Peace in our time,” as Chamberlain declared after Munich, is an unlikely outcome of the Paris conference. As the philosopher George Santayana put it, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

MARTIN D. STERN

Salford, UK

That we should have to be concerned in this day and age over the growth of antisemitism and it’s anti-Zionist by-product is troubling indeed. Yet should we not be shouting mea culpa?

It was Edmund Burke who stated, with some veracity, that the one thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Indeed, that is just what Israel and world Jewry have been doing in the face of the artful, insidious and sophisticated propaganda campaign mounted by our enemies. The result is what we currently have to fight in international forums, sadly, with little chance to overturn the hostility or turn back the clock.

What has been achieved in the arena of public opinion by the enemies of Jews and Israel has been because we Jews did not strangle the weeds of misinformation, untruths and halftruths when they first began to sprout some 50 years ago. We just watched them grow into the monster they are today.

LEILA CUMBER

London