When I see something that I don't like in a newspaper, I don't just sit there fulminating in anger, I write a courteous and constructive letter to the editor. Quite often, they get published, meaning that the thousands of people who read the original article also get to read my views - giving them something to think about, and hopefully changing some of their minds. I have such a letter in today's Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-criticism-of-israel...), responding to a letter (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/letters/letters-cable-v-murdoch-a-g...) about Christina Patterson's claim that she has been "smeared as an antisemite" (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/ch...) in the furore about an unpleasant article about Jews that she wrote in July (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/ch...). My letter reads:
I do not understand David Pollard's argument that it has clearly not been "a vintage year for the Wiesenthal anti-Semitic slur awards, if an obscure Lithuanian Holocaust denier and a moan from Christina Patterson ... have both made it into the Top 10 Slurs of the year" (letter, 27 December).
The Holocaust denier in question is an adviser to the Lithuanian Interior Ministry and wrote his offending words in Veidas, one of his country's most popular weeklies. By what measure is he "obscure"? Christina Patterson, meanwhile, wrote her "moan" not in some fringe publication, but in a newspaper so very mainstream as The Independent itself, which is precisely why it merits consideration for a Top 10 placing.
An anti-Semite is someone who has a generalised dislike of Jews. Ms Patterson denies being such a person; in which case, why did she write an article that gave the impression that she dislikes Judaism, Islam and the people who practice them?
As for her assertion ("How I was smeared as an anti-Semite", 23 December), by way of Hannah Arendt, that one can only hate individual "persons", and not "any people or collective" – if wishing made it so. Events in Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur surely prove that human beings are eminently capable of hating (and killing) each other not only as individuals, but also in the mass.
Ms Patterson wrote an article giving the (possibly mistaken) impression that she dislikes Jews and Muslims, and then blamed those who were offended for having taken offence. She reminds me of a saloon bar bore who drones on about immigration and then is surprised to be accused of racism.