Please send letters for the website, clearly marked FORUM, to Julia Dawson at: julia.dawson@emap.com or The Architectural Review, Greater London House, Hampstead Road, London NW1 7EJ, England. View from Ramallah reaction SIR: I just got your May 2002 issue. I read the article on Ramallah by Mr Kay, ‘the Jew who describes himself as such only if questioned by an antisemite’. Yes, I totally agree with him, war is horrible. People do outrageous things in wartime, things that they would not normally do if war has not taken away from them the thin layer that civilization has bestowed on our souls. I feel compassion for every one of the persons described in Mr Kay’s account, and the many of them whose plights have not been tracked in his account or anybody else’s. Then I go to the previous issues I got since September 1994. I try to find accounts of the terrible things that have happened in the world in the past months, years, that would merit a dramatic comment such as the one you published. I find an article on the discussions architects are holding in the aftermath of 11 September, mainly on the aesthetical side of the event. Nothing else of the daily atrocities committed by human beings against human beings in the entire world. I find your decision to publish that particular article entirely geared to revive the old idea that the Jews are the guilty ones of all that is wrong in the world.The aim of such option is just too obvious, it even tries to hide itself behind the 'righteous Jew'. The comparison with Auschwitz casts stronger light on such perversity. Today, when Israel is besieged by evil forces from within, when hundreds of millions of people endorse the call of fundamentalism to kill the Jews, when the drench of judeophobia emerges again from all the corners of Europe and South America, when there is little way to reverse the fanatical hatred of the Jew and when the media has suffocated any attempt to regard the Middle East as a two-fold reality, you decide to give tribune to the description of this terrible and unfortunate piece of Jewish history in a magazine apparently devoted to architecture. Yours etc MIRYAM SINGER Santiago de Chile