I DO not doubt the sincerity of the impact Grant Frazer says Billy Graham had on his life (Letters, February 26). However Billy Graham was a massive vulgar fraud.

There was a Canadian contemporary of Billy Graham named Charles Templeton who did similar actions. Templeton lost his faith and went and explained why to Billy. He then asked Graham why he still believed, and the Rev’s response was to say “it’s too late to stop now, People expect preaching from me”.

Billy Graham was also an antisemite. On the Nixon tapes recorded in the Oval office, Graham can be heard agreeing with Richard Nixon that Jews have too much influence on the American media. Graham also boasts that he has convinced Jews he is their friend but that he really despises them. He agrees with Nixon that something needs to be done about reducing Jewish influence in the media.

In April 15, 1969, Billy Graham drafted a secret letter to Richard Nixon. This occurred after Graham met in Bangkok with missionaries from Vietnam. These men of God said that if the peace talks in Paris were to fail, Nixon should step up the war and bomb the dikes. Such an act, Graham wrote excitedly, “could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam”.

Graham lent his imprimatur to this recommendation. Thus the preacher was advocating a policy to the US Commander in Chief that on Nixon’s own estimate would have killed a million people.

Billy Graham was a phoney. A real-life Elmer Gantry.

Alan Hinnrichs
Dundee

ON the subject of Billy Graham’s death, I think I might go and dance on his grave.

It was not until my father’s funeral more than 30 years ago that I learned from his brothers that until he met the evangelist and discovered his god he had been a heavy drinker.

I was aware of a change from affability to dictatorial Christianity, I just didn’t know why.

Years of brutal indoctrination only ceased when I became big and bold enough to take his belt from him and warn him what I was going to do to him with it if he did not stop. This made me the atheist I have been ever since. I simply rejected the sheer hypocrisy of suffer the little children, but only if they bow to my god.

I wish he had stuck to the whisky and I wonder how many others shared my fate.

Les Hunter
Lanark

ANOTHER week and another item in your paper which is nothing more than the drip-drip effect of hatred towards a group of people – as Andrew Tickell likes to put it, a minority group – but this time it’s in the Long Letter section. From Peter Kerr, the retired lecturer, who previously wrote that “the right in Britain, under the guise of free speech and led by the Daily Mail, has systematically utilised their freedom to demonise and castigate whole sections of our population” (Letters, May 26).

So what does Peter call writing about Christianity and saying it is “represented by some of the most unscrupulous gangsters and fraudsters on the planet”? If that isn’t trying to demonise and castigate whole sections of our population I don’t know what is!

Scotland, not only in the past but in the present, is a much better country because of Christianity.

Take food banks as an example. How many of them do you find are run out of church buildings, run by Christian organisations, or run by volunteers from the local churches? You’d find that it’s virtually all of them. Yes, that really sounds like gangsters and fraudsters, doesn’t it!

Then you have toddler groups, soup lunches for the homeless (and students sometimes), recovery groups etc. Thousands of groups up and down the country whose purpose is to help those in need.

I find it shameful that The National, which in general is a reasonable paper, is printing such words. There is only one independence-supporting paper in Scotland and as such it has to cover a huge variety of the population.

Printing such articles and letters not only demeans the paper, it risks turning it into the polar opposite of the Daily Mail. And that’s certainly not a paper I’d be wishing to support.

Kenneth Sutherland
Livingston