Letters to the Editor, November 2, 2003

I read you article entitled “General Boykin and the Pentagon’s Power to Punish” with great interest. US Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin does not represent the majority view of educated, thinking Americans. I wish, more so than any Muslim, that he be removed from his position in the Pentagon. His message only serves to spread hate and misunderstanding when what we need is just the opposite.

I must also note, however, that both the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family do not represent the average educated, thinking American’s opinion on a variety of topics-including General Boykin’s right to espouse his personal views while in the public eye, wearing his uniform. Every religion has its extremists. Your article has highlighted three in America’s Christian Community.

Please let your readers know that most Christians are a loving people and recognize and appreciate Abraham’s special role in Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

Gordon Wescoat

The Fed and its Interest Rate

Why, with such a growth (7.2% the highest since 1984), would the FED keep the rate at 1% (the lowest since 1958)?

Seems illogical, but with data readily available to everybody you can prove that today the expected growth by the FED for Q4/Q3 is not 4% but -2.5%

Sincerely Yours,

Shalom Patrick Hamou

The Sharon Wall is a Python

You refer to the "Security" wall Israel is constructing in the West Bank as

an apartheid wall. While in the immediate future it may be simply a means to

divide and punish, it is clear that the long-term goal is much worse. This

fence will be used to slowly surround and strangle the Palestinian People. This

means of a slow, suffocating death suggests that this fence should be known as

Sharon's Python, anything less disregards the murderous structure that it is.

Bob Paz

Tucson AZ

Editor: You're absolutely right. It's a suffocating Python.

I hope one day, when Peace Forces defeat Sharon and his supporters, the Wall be used for paintings that document the 55 years of Palestinian suffering. I have a dream that artists from all over the world come to paint for peace. Who knows? It could be sooner than we think.

Two unanswered awkward questions concerning war, life and death in Palestine and Israel

According to Dr Alfred Lilienthal in his book The Zionist Connection, "The Jewish population of Palestine [what is now Israel and the occupied territories, the West Bank and Gaza] at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 was a mere 7 percent of the 700 000 inhabitants. The rest were Muslim and Christian Arabs…At the time of the (US-dominated UN) partition vote in 1947 there were only 650 000 Jews in Palestine while there were 1,3 million indigenous Palestinian Arabs, either Christian or Muslim. Under the partition plan, 56 % of Palestine was given for a Zionist state to people who constituted 33 % of the population and owned about 6 % [six percent] of the land… These UN figures have never been in dispute…

The 1947 demographic make-up of Palestine, two-thirds Arab and but one-third Jewish, necessitated an abnormal sovereignty and an abnormal nationalism.." In the 1967 Six Day War, Israel violently occupied the sole remaining two fragments of Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza, and has been building Jewish settlements in these areas almost continuously, in spite of and contrary to countless UN resolutions. This violent dispossession of the Palestinian people, has involved not only the confiscation of their land and their homes, buildings and olive groves. It has also included right up to the present day the most brutal and racist oppression involving killings of children, torturing, detention without trial, assassination of leaders, collective punishments and general iron-fisted Nazi-like repressive measures that make Saddam Hussein look quite civilized in comparison. We might expect the international Jewish community, which is so sensitive to any kind of ethnic discrimination in European countries, to be magnanimous in their understanding of the plight and dispossession of the Palestinian people, and generous in their offers of compensation for all the endless suffering, death and destruction. The question is, why is this compensation never mentioned in the media? Why are US taxpayers still expected to pick up the tab for this violently racist colonial outpost which in no way provides any strategic value to the US, but rather the exact opposite, as demonstrated in the US-British attack on Iraq which makes no use of Israel as a Middle Eastern springboard?

For the sake of consistency, we might ask two questions which are presently unasked and unanswered by the [coincidentally heavily Jewish-controlled] US media:

• When will Israel be threatened with 'regime change'? And when will Tel Aviv be subjected to the kind of 'shock and awe' bombing experienced by Baghdad? and

• Just when will the international Jewish community step in and finally provide all the billions of dollars of compensation which are obviously owed to the impoverished Palestinians, not only for lives lost and buildings demolished, inconvenience and pain and suffering but a fair rental for the occupation of their country for half a century?

Jason Collett

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).