It's right to call the US Vice President what he is: an extremist

The National

a day ago

However, MSP Maggie Chapman describing JD Vance as a 'far-right extremist' pleased me, as many of her fellow representatives in Scotland seem too afraid to be honest about the MAGA administration. We risk normalising the terrifying human rights abuses and power grabs occurring in the USA.
Chapman is right to remind us that Vance has spread lies about Scotland's 'buffer zones' – safe access zones that keep anti-abortion protesters just 200 metres away from hospitals. The people of Scotland have not forgotten the appalling spectacle of aggressive men screaming at women outside the Glasgow Sandyford clinic, which provided counselling to rape survivors. We have also witnessed mobs of more than 100 anti-abortion protesters occupying the entire road across from the busy Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow.
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Buffer zone legislation had to be crafted from scratch, and many vulnerable women and patients suffered while it went through the lengthy consultation and legislative process. JD Vance attempted to frame this hard-won victory for women's rights as an attack on religious freedom.
As I have pointed out in The National previously, it is freedom from religion that remains an issue in Scotland.
As for extremism, the links between the anti-abortion movement and the far right are well known. The far right believes in and spreads 'white replacement' conspiracies, which claim the country is being infiltrated by non-white individuals with the goal of making white people a racial minority. A key tenet of this conspiracy is that women's rights are problematic and that access to birth control and abortion allows women to conspire with the 'replacement'.
A very recent example is Ukip leader Nick Tenconi, who this summer attempted to hold a 'mass deportation' march through Glasgow. I was not at all surprised to learn that Tenconi attended and was interviewed at the so-called March for Life – a key event for the anti-abortion movement – in London last year.
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Throughout history, the anti-abortion movement has been closely linked to the far right.
The Nazis banned abortions for German women to force them to breed Aryans for the Reich. Even high-ranking female Nazis had no right to their own bodies. The Jewish doctor Gisella Perl, who performed abortions to save the lives of other Jewish women while in concentration camps, wrote in her memoir that she even performed an abortion for Irma Grese, an SS woman. Grese, despite being a particularly brutal and cruel Nazi, had no right to end an unwanted pregnancy according to Nazi ideology.
The religious right may not like their close connection to the far right being pointed out, but that does not stop them from getting into bed with them.
Gemma Clark
Paisley
YET another Israeli air strike on a Palestinian designated safe tent area. This time killing a few-months-old baby and both the parents. Again under the pretext of dismantling Hamas. And what is the world doing about it, short of the usual platitudes? Absolutely nothing! NOTHING!! This is a bloody disgrace and disgusting response from any of the Western countries, the United Nations and any other country that hasn't laid a finger to help the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. Including that ridiculous, pretendy world leader Donald Trump. Any civilised government needs to look at itself and understand that its neglect of Palestine and those in support of Netanyahu should think hard about these Israeli atrocities that are being carried out every day, all day, non-stop.
Alan Magnus-Bennett
Fife