Letters to the Editor | 26 August 2006

Pakistan ‘supports terrorism’

From Sam Mukerji
Sir: Stephen Schwartz (‘Britain has a unique problem’, 19 August) brilliantly exposes the doctrinal poison coming to us from Pakistan. Over the 1980s and the 1990s there has been evidence to suggest that the radical Sunni community in the UK, US and Canada has funded terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir and that the government here has experienced great difficulty in restraining this activity. On the ground in Jammu and Kashmir, innocent shepherds have been slaughtered in their thousands, only because they were Hindus, in order to terrify the rest of the population and force them to run for the plains.

By describing the terrorism in Kashmir as a ‘freedom struggle’ following the Mumbai train blasts last month, Musharraf’s team have revealed once again that they are active supporters of terrorism and thus continue to see eye to eye with Mr bin Laden and the rest of his gang.
Sam Mukerji
Dundee, Scotland

From: Tony Carroll
Sir: Further to Stephen Schwartz’s piece, I suggest that British strategy in Ireland at the end of the 18th century offers some guidance. Then the repressive penal laws against Catholics resulted in the wealthier Irish sending their children to the Continent for their education, and indeed there were special seminaries for the Irish priesthood in Louvain, Paris and Salamanca. The revolutionary ideas they brought back were causing increasing concern. In a stroke of genius, the government established a Roman Catholic seminary (St Patrick’s College) in Maynooth, Co. Kildare, in 1795 and grant-aided it on an annual basis. Throughout the 19th century the loyalty of the Irish Catholic Church to the Crown continued to be remarkable, to the extent that Fenians and other revolutionaries were almost invariably excommunicated.