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)

Israel is not at heart of Mideast unrest

The Iraq Study Group perpetuates the myth that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the cause of the unrest in the Middle East. But they do not address the role that Islamist extremists played in the region in the past, and continue doing so now.

Consider these facts: A thousand Iraqi Muslims are killed each week by their brothers in Islam. Is Israel to blame? Millions of Iraqis and Iranians, both countries being Muslim, were "martyred" in the war between those two countries. Was it a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? And did Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait as part of an Israeli conspiracy?

The Egyptians dispatched an army to fight in Yemen's civil war in the 1960s, and used poison gas on fellow Muslims. Israel again? Hafez Assad, the previous ruler of Syria, slaughtered tens of thousands of his fellow countrymen in Hama in 1982, and so did Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Is it the fault of Israel?

When bands of Mexican bandits raided the southern United States, we invaded Mexico in order to ensure a safe border. So what is Israel to do when a terrorist militia, armed and trained by Iran and Syria and represented in the Lebanese government, starts hostilities and aims rockets at population centers?

The Islamic teachings promulgated by the Saudi-Wahabi-sponsored preachers teaches intolerance and hatred to those not strictly Muslim. It encourages murder by promising homicide bombers a place in paradise (and rewards to the families through so-called Muslim charities). I am not a scholar of Islam, but where are the voices of their moderate believers?


December 20, 2006

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