I bet it is an automated response. To check it I am going to send him a positive email.

Man alive these folks need to get their heads out of their asses and use a roll of charmin to clean out their ears.

Amazing.

Link to the Arab News site and then click on the Cartoon icon on the left sidebar. That'll give you a good feel for what they really want.

I wrote to the big jerk and was less polite than you, but less rude than I wanted to be. Has anyone heard about Stanley Cohen suing Bush and Powell for war crimes on behalf of Hamas and Hezbollah? I hate Stanley Cohen; he makes Steven Rose look angelic by comparison. And besides that, lawyers have a bad enough name without Stanley Cohen's dubious contributions. Not that I'm defending lawyers in general. Most of them already have reserved seats in hell. Stanley Cohen has a whole room to himself.

Dear Professor Rose,

I've just had the pleasure of reading your piece in the Arab News. However, your letter leaves me moderately puzzled. Here, on the one hand, we have a person with a long list of concurrent academic appointments. And, on the other hand, we have the very same person writing an essay that, if not entirely filled with bilge, is certainly leaking logical nonsense at more than a steady drip. For your edification—though with your impressive list of concurrent academic appointments, I can't imagine how such a one as you could possibly be edified--I am taking valuable time (in this case, mine) to point out some of the flaws in your reasoning—or maybe it is merely flawed writing. Who, after all, can say?

You write, "…today a suicide bomber, tomorrow an Israeli strike on Palestinians with helicopters, missiles and tanks."

Did you, Professor Rose, mean to imply that the Palestinians have helicopters, missiles, and tanks? If so, wouldn't strikes be justified? And if you did not mean to imply it, then why did you? Perhaps the long list of concurrent academic appointments was blocking the light on your keyboard.

You write, "Ariel Sharon refuses to negotiate while 'violence' (i.e. Palestinian resistance) continues."

Your placing the word violence in quotation marks may not be a logical error, but it certainly reveals what might be a nasty disability regarding operational definitions. If shooting sleeping children in the head is not violence, then what exactly would be examples of the concept violence? Next thing you know, someone will show a slide of a sarcoma cell, and you will call it "a cell."

I ought also to mention that your labeling shooting sleeping children in the head as "resistance" is yet another problem of logic which one does not ordinarily expect of Professors holding so many concurrent academic appointments. For, you appear to fail to understand that an act can be both violence and resistance. So, in future, don’t feel obliged to use only the definition that suits your argument.

You write, "Yet every rational person knows that the only prospect of a just and lasting peace lies in Israel’s recognition of the legitimacy of a Palestinian state and the Arab world’s acceptance of a secure Israel behind its 1967 borders."

Now, really, Sir, just how many rational persons did you interview? In fact, how many persons in total did you interview to arrive at your conclusion about all rational persons? Or, perhaps this was merely some sort of canny rhetorical device—not to be taken literally. If so, then why should one take it at all, asks the puzzled reader? One also wonder why you would use the lame "everyone knows" rhetorical device, anyway. Why not just come out and say what you mean?

We now come to a few paragraphs that are among the saddest I have read in recent months. I refer to the paragraphs about apartheid, moratoria, and other multisyllabic words which, as a professor holding so many concurrent academic appointments, you no doubt understand very well. My point is that the paragraphs do ramble more than a little. They leave the reader with a distinct impression that he has entered the Hundred Acre Woods.—that, in a word, you have not thought through what you may want to say, but chose instead to meander about for awhile hoping to sustain readers' attention. Where, we ask, are the incisive propositions, the tight logical interconnections, the inescapable conclusions? They are nowhere to be found. The reader is left wondering if the writer has simply slapped together a load of ideological twaddle into a fairly infected load. But who after all can say?

You write, "If the supporters of the Israeli government cannot distinguish between being opposed to Israeli state policy and being anti-Semitic, it is scarcely surprising that real anti-Semites conflate the two."

Here you make another logical error. I believe it is called ad hominem. Your statement follows your comment about nasty emails written to boycott advocates, accusing them of anti-semitism. You now commit exactly the same error, do you not?

I could go on, but in all honesty I am bored. Your letter ends with neither bang nor whimper. It ends more like something written by someone with a long list of concurrent academic appointments.

I am British. I have massive sympathy for the Jews, with regards to atrocities in the War.

But when Isreal steals palestinian land, kills palestinian civilians, occupies their territories and supresses their country, they are committing similar offences as the Nazis. On a smaller scale I will concede.

It deeply saddens me that Jews have not learnt the racial tolerance they rightly demanded after the war.

PS Educated views Mr Yaaron Benashev, eloquently put.