Letters to the Editor, September 21, 2003

As long as powerful Zionists in the U.S. government and media continue to control our Mid-East policies, I see little hope for the creation of a Palestinian State let alone freedom from terrorist attacks by the Israeli Occupation forces (IOF). Anyone in a position of influence here in the U.S. who dares to criticize Israel or actions of its supporters in the U.S. is quickly attacked by the Zionist community! We have seen what happened to MSNBC correspondent Ashleigh Banfield when she mentioned the amount of Zionist money flowing into the 2002 primary (brought back to the U.S. from covering the Israel Palestinian conflict)
Mr. Donahue who`s MSNBC show was canceled shortly after criticizing his guest former Israel Prime minister Barak.
Representative Jim Moran who pointed out correctly that we not be in this mess in Iraq if it were not for the Zionist support for the war. He was viciously attacked by Jewish members of Congress and even called upon to resign!
I see no answer to loosening The grip that Zionists have on our foreign policy in the Mid-East when our leaders are afraid to speak out against Zionist actions while being applauded for condemning the Palestinians.

Phil G. Hong Kong

Chicken or Egg Suicide Bombers

If the UN and Israel are serious about their call for the dismantlement of the infrastructure which supports terror operations in Palestine, they will end the 36 year old brutal occupation of Palestine by Israel.

Today the entire population of approximately 3.5 million Palestinians is entrapped, caged in by the Apartheid Wall, the electrified razor wire fence, roadblocks and checkpoints which make the country nearly impassible. Meanwhile superhighways that cut through the heart of Palestine are for Israelis only, while Palestinians are forced to use roads that have been made nearly impassable.

Over four thousand farmers are prevented from tending their land and are shot on sight if they try. Shops as well as apartment building are bulldozed, frequently with people still inside, the citizenry are under constant surveillance and terrorized by the Israeli Defense Forces. Water is severely rationed to Palestinians while illegal Israeli settlers water their lawns and fill their swimming pools. According to the UN, the average Palestinian has one meal a day and lives on $2 a day. In Nablus, an Apartheid walled in city of 200,000 which now survives on $1 per day or less, is continuously suffering under deadly military incursions and open fire attacks on its residents, ambulances and school children, according to eye witnesses.

These and a litany of other crimes against humanity should be examined as possible incitements that spawn the deadly rash of suicide bombers. The people who carry out these acts of violence have been provoked beyond despair. As they kill themselves they take innocent lives with them into the living hell Israel has created...a hell which is paid for by the billions each year with US tax dollars.

Genevieve Cora Fraser

Orange, Massachusetts, USA

They have not learned lessons of history

The Palestinians (with so many people willing to martyr themselves in
suicide attacks) have not seen Gandhi's peaceful means of stopping
repression as a viable alternative. The world would not tolerate Israeli
tanks running over peaceful protestors sitting in their way.

The Israelis on the other hand fail to grasp the lesson of Lebanon and the
Becca Valley. The city of Beirut fell from being the "Switzerland of the
East" because if exclude 500,000 desperate refugees from participation in
the economic system.

David Wright

It is not a question of looking for an excuse to prosecute the U.S.. A reply to Eric Mack

It is a plain fact that the U.S. invaded Iraq without the specific authority of the UN. The invasion was therefore unlawful and the appalling diplomatic, military and political mess in which the U.S. now finds itself, is entirely of its own making.

And yes, Mr. Mack, it is manfiestly clear that the Iraqis are infinitely worse off under the U.S. led CPA military regime than under Saddam. The U.S. and its allies have systematically turned Baghdad into another Kabul or Beirut. Not even the Russians would have been capable of such destructive incompetence as the CPA has been in Iraq.

And by what moral (let alone legal) authority has the U.S. intervened in Iraq? The U.S. has a long record of backing unsavoury military regimes throughout the world, including at one point, that of Saddam Hussein and at a time when the Saddam regime was just as brutal and horrible as over the decade leading up to its removal from power. Knowledge of Saddam's atrocious record is not a recent discovery. It was apparent even when Mr. Rumsfeld was trying to sell arms to Saddam in the eighties.

The same people who backed the torturers and Latin American death squads of Pinochet and others are now very much in charge again at the White House. The determination of the U.S. government to undermine the authority of the International Criminal Court for example, is entirely consistent with an administration presided over by a man whose grandfather bankrolled the Third Reich. And what does the U.S. propose to do about the continued acts of barbarism carried out against the Palestinian people by its Zionist proxies? Clearly, nothing.

Some 25,000 innocent civilians at least, so far, have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, as a result of the Bush administration's arrogance and stupidity. Internationally, the U.S. is now more isolated than ever. It is doubtful that the United States has ever been so much hated and despised throughout the world as it is now.

President Bush is right when he says that the forces of global terror must not be appeased. U.S. aggression will undoubtedly fail because justice demands no less. Democracy can only be established by consensus, not by coercion, at the point of a gun.

The U.S. must and eventually, will withdraw from Iraq, because its intervention is unwelcome there, by the Iraqis, its neigbours, and everyone else in the international community. The Quislings and cowards like Tony Blair that appeased and supported the Bush administration in its unlawful invasion and ham-fisted occupation of Iraq, will soon to be removed from office and the U.S. will then be even more isolated than it is now.

In the meantime, American and British personnel will continue to lose their lives so that Bush, Rumsfeld, Perle et al can pursue their lunatic fantasy of a U.S. dominated New World Order.

John Rhys-Burgess

Lyndon LaRouche

I'm asking you to please reconsider Lyndon LaRouche. His organization has a
history of attacking other peace seeking peoples in the US with brutal
attacks in the streets. He is a known racist ranter, he is not a real
economist and his organization is full of demagogery.
A little more about LaRouche (written by Michael Hudson):
I am somewhat of an expert on LaRouche, having gone around the country
before grand juries explaining his systematic credit-card and financial fraud.
His defense was that he did it all for Reagan and the CIA as a paid
agent to infiltrate the left and report on it to the right. He had his
reporters interview people on the left -- especially in Latin America and
foreign countries -- pretending to be anti-American and getting them to
"open up" to his publications. He then turned over the interviews to
whoever would buy them (his office offered them to me for a price). the CIA
could not have done such good profiling.
Also, Reagan's people planted LaRouche at press conferences to ask
outrageous questions, and to run in Democratic primaries denouncing the
other candidates -- all a dirty trick operation.
LaRouche apparently made millions. His followers DID end up
right-wingers working for Wall Street, e.g. David Goldman, Criton Zoakos,
etc. (He paid Mordecai Levy money to assassinate or harm Ramsey Clark and
myself, I'm told by Dennis King, who wrote a good biography of him that you
should read to see the kind of dirtry tricks the right plays on the left.)

Macdonald Stainsby.

Yet again, New Labour are behaving in a seemingly different though actually similar way to the Tories: the latter want a fully hereditary peerage; the former a fully appointed chamber--when there must be the full abolition of the Lords; monarchy; the complete honours system (including honorary university degrees, turned down by the great writer Joseph Conrad, along with his refusal of a knighthood); private hospitals and schools; first-class train and plane travel: we would all go first-class; and the rest of Britain's sinisterly archaic class systems of sanitized (thank god!) repression.

The Commons should be made fully proportional by annual elections: pure PR, bettering Israel's flawed (ins mores ways thans ones) Knesset structure; MPs should be paid the average wage/salary of their constituents, with expenses vetted by annually elected committees of the latter; and as many working-class people should be elected, with a high proportion from the ethnic community; more disabled people too.

Blair is moving us closer to a second-division America, that far-right capitalist state (just as reactionary under Bill 'lie-addict' Clinton as Bush) which keeps millions in grinding poverty, denies health care to millions, uses the death penalty against mostly innocent Black and Hispanic proletarians; while throwing millions (of dollars!) at corporate crooks, Hollywood and baseball stars.

Now, even a genuine liberal (Ralph Nader's US Green Party) revolution would be welcome in our slums . . . where many of us have more talent than most in their 'top jobs'--we, the often self-educated intellectual, industrial and agricultural proletariat, the planet's billions' cream of the bona fide Marxist crop.