MEMO's Senior Editor writes to The Spectator

In a blog on the Spectator magazine website, Martin Bright sought to discredit the Director of MEMO, Dr. Daud Abdullah in a post on Tuesday 15th December. The following is the response sent to the Editor of the Spectator:

Dear Editor,

I am writing in response to an item by Martin Bright; What on earth was Daud Abdullah doing on Chamnel 4 News? (15th December) Dr. Abdullah has too much self-respect to respond to Mr. Bright’s childish attempt to defame the individual rather than tackle the issue in question; the warrant issued against Tzipi Livni. When he talked about Daud Abdullah’s “serious baggage”, he could have – and should have, to be balanced – talked about Ms. Livni’s considerably more “serious baggage”: the daughter of parents who were active members of the infamous Zionist terrorist group Irgun, responsible for killing 91 people through bombing the King David Hotel in 1946 and killing 240 more (men, women and children) in the Deir Yaseen massacre in 1948; a member of Mossad and then, in this year’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza (surely not a “war” with only one army in the field) quite happy for Israel’s soldiers “to go wild”. At a conference I attended today, Professor Norman Finkelstein described Tzipi Livni as “a very boastful Nazi” in the aftermath of the invasion. That’s some serious baggage but, of course, Martin Bright has no intention to be balanced, he merely wished to try to discredit a serious academic who has more than refuted the charges he dredged up, in order to divert attention from the person who has real questions to answer concerning all of this: Israel’s ex-Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni.British journalism used to be respected around the world for its fairness; people like Martin Bright do the profession a disservice.

Yours,

Ibrahim Hewitt

Senior Editor