A Policy of Murder

I thought that no atrocity could top the senseless slaughter of Innocent bus travelers by murderous Arab terrorists until I read the mindless letter by Alfred M. Lilienthal (April 8) that seeks to justify It. To say that the victims could have been other than Jews and that their fate would have been the same is surely speculative considering that the victims of that carnage were all Jews.

It requires a twisted mind to justify a policy of murder aimed solely at Innocent civilians, as Mr. Lilienthal does, but to base his advocacy on the poor living conditions in the refugee camps is to ignore the horrendous squandering of enormous amounts of money by the desert sheiks. Using Mr. Lilienthal's could-have^ would-have logic, if only a small fraction of that sum, or the monies donated so freely to the perpetrators of terror by the same oil monarchs, would have been diverted to benefit the refugees—that humanitarian problem could have been solved by resettlement. But that, of course, was not part 'of the Arab scheme .that sought to perpetuate the misery for political ends.

The final travesty is Mr. Lilienthal's assertion that Judaism is nothing but a religious grouping and advancing the interests of a "foreign" state paves the way for the' ultimate disaster. The fallacy of this argument is rather obvious to anyone even slightly acquainted with the Bible or Jewish history. It totally ignores the political nature of the Jewish kingdoms and the series of protracted wars waged by the Jewish people against the mightiest empires of their times—from the Babylonian through the Greek, Roman and British—to preserve and regain their political independence and freedom.

To argue, as Mr. Lilienthal does, that the American Jews do not have the right to advance their political arguments in behalf of their brethren is worse than advocating second-class citizenship for the Jewish community; it is denying it altogether.

April 8, 1978 (NYT)