A memorable success

December 31, 2002

Dear Sir,

This year I would like to thank those people, companies and unions who supported our Prison Fellowship Bermuda 'Angel Tree Project 2002'.

It was another great success as we were able to make the day memorable for over 60 children of inmates this year.

However nothing moved me more than a letter from our brother in Romania who have adopted the Angel Tree programme in their country this year. He writes:

"Dearest Brothers & Sisters in Christ Jesus!

Prison Fellowship in Romania has accomplished one of its most successful and useful projects 'A PERSON IN PRISON AND ITS ROLE AS PARENT' who has as its goal to keep a permanent contact between parent (father or mother) and the neglected children at home affected by crime, poverty and loneliness.

"During this year we were able to transport more than 120 children from very long distances to the prison and back home. It has been the first time in Romania that prisoners' children were able to see their beloved ones. From our research 50 percent of the prisoners are getting separated during the first year of their sentence and children are the first victim of their parents' separation."

Here in Bermuda we have run the 'Angel Tree Project' with the generous support of the Bermudian public. With the donations that we received, our volunteers go out on their own time to purchase Christmas gifts for our prisoners' children after being advised what their parent indicates what each child needs or would like to have.

These gifts from their parents keep the child from feeling neglected and our volunteers enjoy that feeling of Christmas Joy when they deliver these gifts. They are not always toys since their needs for the necessaries of life are greater.

Five interesting questions are always raised:

1. HOW TO TELL THEM WHY I AM IN PRISON?

2. HOW TO TELL THEM WHERE I AM?

3. HOW TO TELL THEM OF MY HARD PROBLEMS?

4. HOW TO TELL THEM WHEN WE CAN BE TOGETHER AGAIN?

5. HOW TO TELL THEM MY SIN, MY ARREST & MY PUNISHMENT?

Romania sent me a child's drawing depicting the situation. I enclose it and you can use if you can.

Yours in Christ,

CHARLES VAUCROSSON

CHAIRMAN PRISON FELLOWSHIP BERMUDA

Put emotion aside

December 28, 2002

Dear Sir,

I, along with many other people, am totally at a loss to understand the decision to seek associate membership of Caricom. Surely it is a decision based more on emotion and seeking to associate with "people who look like us", than on common sense and sound judgment. Don't get me wrong. I would be happy to associate with Timbuktu if it were in Bermuda's best interests, but I am unable to understand how associating with the Caribbean is in our best interests. Before anybody rushes to judgment and accuses me of being biased against the Caribbean, let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. I have been to Barbados three times and also visited seven other islands and look forward to many more visits. I love the Caribbean, but I am able to put that emotion aside when assessing what is best for Bermuda.

Bermuda has tried to distance itself from the Caribbean for many years, for good reason. Our thriving international business is based on having a first class business environment with a superior reputation that satisfies all international regulations. Unfortunately the same is not true of some Caribbean Islands. To be associated with such lower standards can only have a very detrimental effect on Bermuda. Similarly Bermuda's tourism industry is based on a superior product, for which we can charge a higher price. Bermuda's hotels can certainly not survive on Caribbean room rates, e.g. $150 per night, when Bermuda's rates are more like $400-500 per night.

Why are we throwing away the very same thing that we have spent the last 30 years fighting for? Without differentiation we cannot survive !

Furthermore Bermuda currently enjoys the privilege of negotiating directly with Washington on issues that affect us. A privilege that is almost beyond belief, and has taken a considerable amount of effort to obtain. A country of 60,000 people negotiating with the most powerful nation on earth takes some believing. However, how long will that privilege last if we become part of Caricom? Won't the United States take the opportunity to deal with us as a member of the Caribbean community, rather than respect us as an almost independent country that has strategic importance, as is currently the case ?

Please let's stop this nonsense before it's too late. Let your MP know how you feel.

CONFUSED

Hamilton Parish

Learn to buckle up

January 6, 2003

Dear Sir,

I would like to know if Bermudians have a new game out called "Defy the Law".

While driving into work this morning I was behind a silver RAV4 on Harbour Road and the lady who was driving did not have on her seat belt (which has been the law since January 1) and her young child was sitting in the front seat without a seat belt and also against the law.

I started to look at other cars and all the way into town I did not see another car with the people with seat belts on.

Do these people not realise that if they are driving at 25 mph and a car comes around the corner at 30 mph and they crash into each other it is just like driving into a wall at 55 mph; just think what that poor child in the front seat will look like after - if still alive.

A young child standing in the back looking between the two front seats will hit the windscreen like a bullet.

Please let's get sensible and put on our seat belts to save the lives of ourselves and our children.

Please be good role models and teach our children how to not break the law and not it is all right to break the law and then to get mad at them when they get a bike and get caught for breaking the law.

Be a good role model and not a bad one.

SEAT BELT USER

Somerset

Shorto weaves Mideast myth

January 6, 2003

Dear Sir,

Mr. Shorto makes a characteristic remark in his opinion piece:

"For Israel and the West, the answer to the question of Palestinian reform is therefore not to be found in pressure on Arafat to transform the Palestinian Authority. It can only come from fostering an acceptance among Palestinian citizens that it is not Israel, the United States or the West that is responsible for their desperate condition. Mr. Arafat has betrayed them. It is a suggestion that has begun to have great resonance with the Palestinians."

This has been a typical western view for a very long time. And it is wrong in several ways. First of all, it is difficult to understand why the west feels it has any right to dictate to Palestinians how their leader should lead. But as Mr. Shorto infers, the west and Israel have assumed moral superiority, which considering Israel's behaviour, is confounding and bizarre.

Mr. Shorto's solution, which is a commonly held opinion these days, is that Palestinians should accept that the west is not responsible for their predicament. He says that Arafat has betrayed them and that they are now becoming aware of this. This is incorrect.

Palestinians have been aware that Arafat was betraying them for about a decade or more. This is not news to them. They would be glad to form a new government but of course Israel has confounded every attempt to arrive at a peaceful transfer of power. There is a very good reason for this. Arafat serves Israeli purposes. He is incompetent as leader but a great prevaricator and morbidly corrupt. The longer he stays in power, the worse the Palestinian position will be.

The Palestinians population is under occupation. Their houses are bombed or stolen, their land is taken from them, four of their universities were closed in the last week. How does the west or Israel expect them to have elections? Voting in Palestine (where ever that is) would be like trying to make a credit card transaction in Chad.

The most remarkable opinion, but again very common, of Mr. Shorto's is that Palestinians should accept that the United States, the west and their colonial artefact, Israel, are not responsible for what has happened to them.

That it is (am I reading this right?) Arafat who did it, and that it is their responsibility to fix Mr. Arafat. Those silly Palestinians. They have failed to realise that the people who supported this ethnocratic state called Israel and built it without the consent of the people who lived in that land, these people who tacitly supported the broad expropriation of property justified by anecdotal evidence from an old and discredited book, were in fact friends all along and only wanted what was best for Palestine.

Does this make sense?

In response I would like to tell another return story. Abu Nidal died this year. Certainly no one mourned his passing. He was a terrorist plain and simple. But have a little sympathy for the devil here.

This is a quote from an article that appeared in the New York Times Sunday before last. It describes Nidal's home coming: The al-Banna family fled Jaffa when Jewish-Arab fighting consumed the country in 1948, ending up in Nablus. By one account, he returned to visit Jaffa shortly after Israel occupied the West Bank in June, 1967. Did he look at the house from across the street? Did the owners let him in? The definition of a nightmare: your enemy in your home, wearing black combat boots.

The writer takes the classic western perspective. The Israelis had the right to live where they were even though the house belonged to someone else. If the owner returned, this was some kind of trespass. But the fact is that if Nidal had visited this house he would have been in his own home taken from his family many years before.

The irony of this is apparently lost on the New York Times and indeed the State Department.

But seriously what would you do, dear Editor, if this was how you returned to your childhood home? Would you ever entertain the supercilious hectoring from your dispossessors?

Would the thought of picking up a gun not cross your mind? Right, you'd fight like hell.

JOHN ZUILL

Pembroke