‘Doomsday’ outrage

C MATHEY “Doomsday path a reality for Israel”, (Weekend Argus Saturday, October 31) is not a bona fide contributor.

He is a conspiracy kook who writes on websites which glorify and excuse Hitler and the Nazis. In websites such as www.germancross.com (now closed down) and www. vanguardnewsnetwork.com (which is still up) he and his fellow anti-Semites deny the Holocaust ever happened (“Treblinka is a joke”), tell you Hitler was a nice guy who was misunderstood (“he loved children and animals and never wanted war), that 9/11 was the work of the CIA and the Israelis, and all the other trash such people propagate for the consumption of the uneducated and unaware.

True to form, Mathey repeats in his letter a quote falsely attributed to Ilya Ehrenburg which was invented in the book The Myth of German Villainy by Brenton L Bradberry, another antiSemite Nazi apologist. That book is one of many crude attempts to sanitise Hitler and blame the Allies, the Jews and the Russians for the Nazi atrocities. Ehrenburg was a poet, journalist and a prominent member of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee. Far from being a follower of Stalin, Ehrenburg exposed him as a corrupt dicta- tor in his book The Thaw. A quick Google reveals the nature of CM Mathey, whose ulterior motive is to disseminate hate speech under the cloak of fair comment.

■■■ I OBJECT to the headline “Doomsday path a reality for Israel”. I take umbrage at the so-called facts used by C Mathey of Bellville to distort the situation in the Middle East.

Mathey writes about Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg. My understanding of Ehrenburg is that he was a confused writer constantly changing his ideas.

As Yevtushenko said, Ehrenburg “taught us all how to survive”. A life full of changes and contradictions surely was his. But perhaps Ehrenburg himself described it best in his memoirs: “If within a lifetime a man changes his skin an infinite number of times, almost as often as his suits, he still does not change his heart; he has but one.”

Mathey states inter alia that Ehrenburg is especially revered in Israel; that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was quoted in 1982 as saying “we are Judeo-Nazis and why not?”, and that he said “the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it”. I would like to know the source of these comments or accusations?

I don’t think the newspaper should print such anti-Semitic comments.

Mathey ends his report saying that in his view the clock is ticking for Israel and that no amount of armament will stop it. My view on this letter is that it is purporting to draw conclusions from questionable facts.