To #David G and #mac

Sorry to be the bearer of news you both don't like to hear - that appears to have given you both hissy fits.

I can only conclude your failure to criticise or take issue with any aspect of my article is due to the fact that the views expressed therein are incontrovertible - leaving you with no option but to take some cheap shots at the person who delivers the message.

You should vent your spleen at President Obama - not me - for the President making this profoundly important statement:

"Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state."

I know that this is a bitter pill for Jew-haters to swallow - but I am not gilding the lily - just telling it exactly as President Obama has spoken.

The equation is not that unfair - 57 Islamic states in the world and just one Jewish state.

The failure especially of the 21 Arab Islamic states (with two notable exceptions) to face up to what is required of them has been the major stumbling block to ending the Jewish-Arab conflict for the last 65 years.

With friends like you urging the Arabs to maintain the racist view that Jews are not entitled to reconstitute their national home in their biblical and legally sanctioned homeland - it is you who are putting your heads in the sand along with the Arab League in ensuring any hopes of a two-state solution will end up in the dust bin of history - as occurred in 1922,1937,1938,1947,1948-1967,2000 and 2008.

I think President Obama made it clear in Jerusalem that even he is not going to play along with this intransigence for much longer.

This is not gilding the lily - it is just telling it as I believe it is.

Singer, given that you are a man whose mind is a captive of his religious beliefs, I suppose you deserve our pity.

Then it is hard to feel pity for a group of people who have tyrannized and opressed a whole group of people who have done no wrong, ie, the Palestinians.

Your people, those in Israel, have engaged in monumental cruelty, a deliberate choice. They have head-shot children, allowed pregnant women to die at checkpoints, taken their houses and demolished them, tortured them, massacred them, called them subhumans, starved them, stolen their taxes, deprived them of freedom and medical supplies, used missiles and drones and tanks and Apache helicopters and warships against them, pulled up their olive trees, humiliated them, etc, yet you want us to praise them, give them a clean sheet!

If you could only see the Israelis as much of the world does, as a group of brutal religious fanatics and racists.

No amount of lily-gilding will change the reality of the Israelis. Only they can change and they will only do that if sanity and reality finds its way into their tiny, religiously deranged minds.

Dear David G.,

<<Singer, given that you are a man whose mind is a captive of his religious beliefs, I suppose you deserve our pity.>>

Singer's beliefs are anything but religious, his mind is captive of his nationalistic ambitions, hence he does not deserve our pity.
Judaism is not a religion, but a national movement, albeit sometimes tactically disguised as a religion. Had Singer taken that religious aspect of Judaism seriously, he would not have commented here on the Jewish Sabbath, contrary to the injunctions of that same book he is waving as "evidence" to owning the land of Israel. He would also remember that in that same book, the most prominent Jewish prophets cursed the Jewish people to be exiled for failing to follow the commandments of that book, which they still mostly don't follow.

Having said that, your long list as in "Your people, those in Israel, have engaged in monumental cruelty", is exaggerated, hence lacking in credibility. If would have benefited you to prepend the word 'some' before each statement: Yes, SOME Jews have done very bad things for which there is no excuse - and SOME Arabs too. This is a war and each coin has two faces.

<<If you could only see the Israelis as much of the world does, as a group of brutal religious fanatics and racists.>>

Israelis are hardly a group. The vast majority of them are simply citizens by default because they were born there, and living between a rock and a hard place, between Singer's Jews and groups of mad fundamentalist Muslims who would not allow anyone but themselves to live in their neighbourhood, or indeed on this whole planet if they had the power to kill/convert us all.

<<Only they can change and they will only do that if sanity and reality finds its way into their tiny, religiously deranged minds.>>

The first step towards change and sanity is acknowledging the existing reality. If someone has no 'religiously deranged mind' (never-mind 'tiny') to begin with (but rather a 'huge nationalistically-deranged mind'), how possibly can they get rid of it?

Yuyutsu, the link between extreme nationalism and religious extremists cannot be broken or arbitrarily dismissed.

The Israelis provide a case in point as do the Americans and the leaders of several radical Muslim nations.

The danger presented by the fusion between extreme nationalism and religion is the most dangerous mixture of all especially when nukes are in play.

You end up with a situation where a race of people consider themselves to be superior to all others and this belief is underpinned by the belief that some mythical god is on their side and will reward their abhorrent behavior! People who think this way consider that what they want, they should have!

The Israelis think that all of Palestine should be theirs and the Americans think that the whole world should be theirs! In both cases, military force is used to plunder and destroy.

Nationalism and extreme religious belief, if allowed to continue, will end our world.

It's just a matter of time!

Dear David G.,

<<Yuyutsu, the link between extreme nationalism and religious extremists cannot be broken or arbitrarily dismissed.>>

What doesn't exist cannot be broken!

Those nationalistic extremists are out there to trick you, and you, so it seems, have naively bought their stories. They are not religious, never were, they only pretend to be and they will find neither virgins nor sit and study Torah with Elijah in the Garden of Eden once they die.

Violence is the antithesis of religion. Such people who consider themselves to be superior to all others, ignore that divinity which is the common essence in each and every one of us, hence are not religious, they take the name of God, or Allah, in vain.