Metro - free Dublin morning paper
Hi,
I am writing to inform you that I do not intend to read your news paper any more. I don't know if you are interested in such news or not.
Today, Friday 23rd of December, I again read an article which referred to a terrorist who targets Jews as a "militant". Then I noticed that your news paper is one of many that has special words reserved for terrorists who kill Jews.
I don't want special treatment for Jews in the press, neither in the positive way nor the negative. A criminal who kills civilians on purpose to facilitate political changes (or simply to remove as many of a kind from the earth as possible) is a _terrorist_, regardless of who his victims are.
I do not need to read that those who kill my friends are merely "militants", as if they had attempted to attack a military installation rather than a kindergarten or restaurant. It doesn't feel right. It shows more contempt for human life than I can take in the morning.
I would also like to inform you that a Jordanian terrorist who enters Iraq to kill dozens of Iraqi Shi'ites in a mosque is also a _terrorist_, not an insurgent. An insurgent would be an Iraqi attacking an occupying force, not a foreigner attacking Iraqis for their faith (the terrorists are Sunni Muslims, their victims are Shia Muslims). If a foreigner came to Ireland to blow himself up in a church no news paper would call him an insurgent either. I don't see why Iraqi Shi'ite victims are different in any way.
On a last note, I would just like to mention that 35,000 people have been killed since and including the invasion in Iraq, most of them by "insurgents" and members of the former "Republican Guard". The number of 100,000 killed by Americans is an invention and no news paper should report it as fact or quote anybody without setting the record straight. You owe your readers the truth. You are a news paper.
The simple fact is that since the invasion fewer Iraqis have died every year than before. The mass graves have been found (I hadn't seen such ghastly images since I read the Yellow Star). Bodies do not just disappear unless you have expensive installations to burn thousands of them. I doubt the Americans have such installations. It wouldn't be in their interest to kill more people than Saddam.
I can only assume that if more people knew this, there would be less support for Saddam and the "insurgents". Iraqi Shi'ites and Kurds have been pleading the west to see their side for several years now, but very few people feel a need to feel their pain.
Have a nice day.
Andrew Brehm