RON Shambley and Stuart A Chapman reply to my letter with intemperate hostility which avoids the argument I was making.

Basically, though I do not believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God, I firmly believe in the ethic that he taught.

That means that I believe that all people everywhere have an absolute equality of being, and that therefore one's primary duty is not to the state in which one was born, but to all people everywhere: British lives are no more or less important than the lives of anyone else.

As it stands at present, the West, led by the US, acts on the assumption that it is especially wicked for terrorists to destroy British lives, but quite acceptable for the West to destroy the lives of (usually) non-white people by the cartload by the vicious bombing of countries which have no air force, so that millions of people can be killed.

That I called terrorist war and gave several examples of what I meant.

The Korean war was the first of such wars.

The American General Curtis Le May said of that war: "We killed over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million from their homes."

Each of those million Koreans was just as humanly important as each of the 22 people killed in Manchester or the seven killed in London on Saturday.

As WH Auden profoundly said in one of his poems: "Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return".

The non-white peoples we kill don't believe they deserve to be killed and some of then are likely to take revenge on us.

Thus 9/11 was motivated in part at least by revenge for Hiroshima.

I knew this immediately, though I had no evidence, but the evidence was sent to me by an academic attached to the University of Sussex in the form of two interviews with Bin Laden.

What struck me forcibly was Bin Laden's awareness that Hiroshima exhibited Western racism, as the victims were non white.

If we genuinely want to combat the terrorist threat to this country, then we should model ourselves on the Republic of Ireland — Ireland fights no terrorist wars, has no nuclear weapons, and is not a member of the NATO nuclear alliance.

That is why Dublin is safer to live in than Manchester or London.

Malcolm Pittock

St James Avenue

Bolton