• I WOULD like to try to knock on the head the fallacy repeated by Robert Sutherland Smith (It seems we now have more than one definition of anti-Semitism, October 5) that the British invented concentration camps during the Boer War.

The only thing those camps contributed to the Nazi camps was the name. German camps were quite different.

Nor were the camps of the Boer War actually new; for example, the US had a similar policy in the Indian wars. The Americans called theirs “reservations”.

Nor was the criticism of British policy in South Africa by rival European colonialists anything to do with Britain being a democracy. After all, Britain, France and the Netherlands all committed atrocities in their colonies when they were democracies.

What shocked our fellow Europeans was that it was white people, other white settler colonialists in fact, on the receiving end.

In contrast when, in the same part of the world less than five years later, Germany committed its first genocide, against the Herero people in South West Africa, nobody in Europe was bothered. They were only Africans being killed.

JOHN WILSON, NW3