The Spectator

Sensible scares Sir: To be fair to the scaremongers (Another Voice, 19 July), at least some of the scares mentioned by Matthew Parris (al-Qa’eda, HIV) seem less frightening in retrospect not because they were always insubstantial but because the threats were taken seriously and action was taken to counter them. If the fuss over the threat of Aids in Britain now seems excessive, might that not be because it changed people’s behaviour? In other words, there is some social value to scaremongering from the press and public agencies. Robert Bargery London E1 Saint Pius XII? Sir: Pope Pius XII was described by Golda Meir, the then Israeli foreign minister, as ‘a true friend of the Jewish people’ at the time of the Pontiff’s death in 1958.

...here are some posts made over the weekend on Spectator.co.uk: Matthew d'Ancona claims that the latest Batman film is brilliantly dark. Fraser Nelson presents a guide to Glasgow East, and highlights new statistics which show that four out of every five drug addicts are on welfare. James Forsyth suggests that Brown will take a pounding during the summer recess, and identifies Alistair Darling's interview with the Times as "the start of a new chapter in British politics".  Clive Davis celebrates Melody Gardot. And Americano wonders whether Obama can seal the deal this week.

Rod for our backs Sir: Each week, Rod Liddle’s column reminds me of the little girl of whom it was written that she hiked up her skirt to show she wasn’t wearing knickers. In the absence of a parent, or in Mr Liddle’s case an editor, one can only look away in embarrassment. So usually I have a quick look at the first paragraph and turn the page. Last week (Liddle Britain, 12 July) he compared a fat woman with ‘26 Ethiopians, if you put them in a blender, added some bleach’ etc… and her food with ‘an approximation of Shami Chakrabarti’s face’. I glanced at his last sentence in which Mr Liddle suggested fat people should be kicked. I suppose this includes Winston Churchill.

A pariah writes Sir: I dealt for 30 years with hundreds of Muslims, at first in Mr Doyle’s organisation, so I am not ‘ignorant’ of Islam (as he claims, Letters, 5 July), which seeks to conquer this world, not the next, politically. If he disagrees, he should consult Islam’s most ‘moderate’ authorities like Yusuf Qaradawi, all of whom boast that (as Doyle writes I noted), ‘Islam... is trying to take over the globe.’ As one could not be a Muslim absent this goal, the distinction Ms McCartney draws between ‘fundamentalist’ and moderate Muslims is absurd: history shows what all Muslims endorse. As I wrote: ‘After his [Mohammed’s] death in 632, Muslim armies poured out of the Arabian peninsula...

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.