The Green Party’s Rupert Read has responded on his website to the recent controversy over his views. You can read his response here, but I’m not sure his words will placate everyone who has taken offence at his track record.
“I condemn any terrorist attacks on civilians,” he writes. Good. But in the following sentence, he describes the suicide bombers who have slaughtered civilians in response to the liberation of Iraq not as terrorists but as “militants”. A slip of the pen?
Seemingly not, because he goes on to write: “Israel’s military action in response to militant attacks is more often than not suffered by civilians and not Palestinian paramilitaries”. So here, the brutal terrorists of genocidal Hamas are merely “militants” and “paramilitaries”. In any case, his assertion is untrue: even many on the Palestinian side admit that most of those killed during Operation Cast Lead were terrorists and not civilians.
In search of credibility he says that his views on Iraq and terrorism are ‘no more than what Tony Benn has said’. Given Benn’s horrific views on Iraq, terrorism and Israel, he was an ill-advised choice of person for Read to seek respectability through. And what a strange comparison generally: the equivalent of a pub team footballer trying to put himself on par with Cristiano Ronaldo.
Read continues: “Like all Greens I am wholly aware of the particular suffering of the Jewish people through hundreds of years of European history and their being subject to a myriad of lies and prejudices culminating in the Holocaust.” Like all Greens? Not by any stretch of the imagination. It is a movement with a shameful history of members with very dark views in that area.
In conclusion, he writes: “I am innocent of the ‘charges’ that have been laid upon me by those seeking to gain short-term political advantage against the Green Party.” But many of the ‘charges’ that have been laid against him constituted merely quoting verbatim what he wrote in a national newspaper and on his own website. Has been misquoting himself? And does he deny making this comment about the Holocaust?
I am sure some people did jump on Read’s form to harm the Green Party during the Norwich North by-election – as he knows, politics is a tough arena. But most depressing of all is that it seems to be beyond him to realise that some of us took offence not because we care either way about the Green Party, but because we love Israel and because we are pleased to see the Iraqis having the chance to taste the freedom and democracy that we in Britain take for granted.
