LETTER: Concerned about West Bank twinning

Creil and Marl I can understand, but Palestine’s West Bank! It is because we are showing support for the oppressed people in that area will no doubt be the reply.

OK, if oppression is the council’s yardstick for twinning, why isn’t Pendle twinned with towns in North Korea, Tibet, Burma and Zimbabwe?

Oh, and let’s also hear their support for the Sahrawi people in the Western Sahara, the Christians in Egypt and the Sudan and girls in Pakistan who get shot for daring to go to school.

One councillor says: “If by twinning with the West Bank we can make one child’s life, on either side a little bit better, then I am prepared to support it.” Noble words indeed, but the same children’s lives would immediately be made a whole lot better if Hamas stopped lobbing rockets indiscriminately into Israel.

Also, both Palestinian children’s and adults’ lives would be a whole lot safer if Hamas did not deliberately store these rockets and other weapons in highly populated areas.

But there again, nothing furthers Hamas’s cause than the sight of bloodied bodies, particularly if they are children’s, being lifted from the wreckage of a building that has been destroyed by a targeted Israeli retaliatory missile. The sad fact is that Hamas does not want peace. How can it when its avowed acclaim and also that of its main supplier of arms and money, Iran, is to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

G. METCALFE

Smith Street, Nelson