Washington Report, January/February 2006, pages 77-78

Other People's Mail

Compiled by Kate Hilmy and Delinda Hanley

Some letters by or to other people are as informative for our readers as anything we might write ourselves.

The Middle East Shuttle

To The International Herald Tribune, Nov. 18, 2005

Condoleezza Rice’s involvement in the agreement to allow Palestinians to move in and out of the Gaza Strip is a positive development.

Another positive step the United States could take would be to provide funds for Israeli families willing to leave settlements on the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, on a voluntary basis. In other words, Washington could support the initiative of Amir Peretz, the new Labor Party leader.

At the same time, the United States should insist that the Israeli government end all financial incentives for luring Israeli citizens and Jews to the settlements from abroad. The United States should also prohibit the funding of such settlements by charities based in America. Last but not least, Washington should prohibit the import of goods produced in these settlements under trade agreements with Israel.

If the United States was willing to initiate steps along these lines it would receive the support of the European Union and contribute substantially to peace.

Ed Kelly, Szeged, Hungary

Syria Says 400 Mossad Agents in Lebanon

To The Daily Star, Nov. 29, 2005

This does not surprise me. Israel’s Mossad has spread its tentacles to nearly every nation in the world. Some have put the numbers as high as 5,000 to 7,000 such agents in the U.S. alone, where they hold American politicians hostage to their destructive policies and exercise tremendous influence over congressional and presidential polls.

Eileen Kuch, Hyattsville, MD

Israeli and Canadian Values

To Paul Martin, MP, Prime Minister, Ottawa, Nov. 22, 2005

We find your statement, before the Annual General Assembly of United Jewish Communities, that “Israel’s values are Canadian values,” stunning and totally unacceptable.

Israeli policies and practices are in complete violation of international law. Israel stands in defiance of scores of U.N. and Security Council resolutions. Israeli practices in the illegally occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories are in violation of virtually every article of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and thus defined by international law as war crimes. Israeli racist practices against its own Muslim and Christian citizens demonstrate clearly the most blatant forms of racism and discrimination. Many of their towns and villages, which have existed for centuries, are unrecognized and thus denied all health and educational facilities. Many Muslim and Christian citizens of Israel are labeled present absentees, and thus their land is expropriated. Where, except in the Zionist Lexicon, would you find such Orwellian definitions? Israeli laws are based on religious discrimination, where its non-Jewish citizens, Muslims and Christians, are denied rights and privileges available to Jewish citizens.

Are these, in your opinion, our Canadian values? If that is so, we are afraid you are devaluing our Canadian values. We, as Canadian citizens, believe that our Canadian values are honorable and do not deserve this offensive equation.

Ismail Zayid, M.D., President, Canada Palestine Association, Halifax, NS

Innocents as Targets

To The New York Times, Nov. 21, 2005

I share Thomas L. Friedman’s disgust with the growing cruelty of jihadist terrorism tactics. Killing innocent civilians at weddings and funerals is indeed despicable and a new low even for suicide bombers.

Unfortunately, though, one of the most depressing casualties of the war in Iraq has been American credibility. I have a hard time believing that the Arab street will stand for much finger-wagging from a country that has taken an alarmingly casual attitude toward the collateral human costs of a war whose justification sits on increasingly unstable ground.

Was it not American force that killed at least 40 participants in a wedding party in an Iraqi village on May 19, 2004?

And is it not our government officials who refuse to undertake even a cursory accounting of civilian deaths in Iraq?

Daniel B. Deckman, Mamaroneck, NY

Ravages of the Iraq War

To The New York Times, Nov. 8, 2005

Bob Herbert writes, “If the American public could see the carnage in Iraq the way television viewers saw the agony of New Orleans...this war would be over.” So why isn’t this war brought into our living rooms on the news every night the way it was during Vietnam?

Are the media afraid of upsetting this administration? Or (more frightening) are the media concerned that the horrors of war won’t increase their ratings?

Vivian Polak, New York, NY

Juxtaposition Tells Sad Tale

To Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Nov. 7, 2005

The juxtaposition of the two major headlines on the front page of the Thursday P-I was telling. “$41 million deficit for Seattle schools” and “Students roar against war.” Billions of dollars have gone to fund the war in Iraq. The strapped federal government passes unfunded mandates on to the states, shrinking the state’s budget for vital services, the most important being children’s education.

The wealth of this nation is used to kill and destroy. Not only Iraq’s children, but our children pay, not only with fewer educational opportunities, but some with their lives. They will pay for this war long after it is over. They will live in a country that has squandered its wealth on war and the war machine and is seen as a pariah.

I agree with the students’ sign at the rally Thursday, “Dollars for Students, not for Soldiers.”

Cindy Ann Cole, Seattle, WA

Young People Have a Choice

To Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Nov. 14, 2005

Sergio Chacon, the 16-year-old junior from Ingraham High School who skipped school to participate in the anti-war rally, told your reporter, “We can’t do much” (because they’re too young to vote), but I think in a massive group, we will be able to get our point across.”

He is wrong. There is one very powerful thing young people can do to protest this war, something that most of us can’t do because of age: They can refuse to join the military. Bush and Co. can’t fight this war without willing warriors.

Nancy Hunn, Lake Forest Park, WA

An Unending Cycle

To San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 9, 2005

First, we arrested scores of suspects to be held for months or years, presumed guilty, without charge or trial. Later, it turned out, we used torture to elicit information and went on to outsource jobs as torturer and prison guard to allies in other countries.

Now, according to news reports and interviews broadcast on RAI (Italy), we have used chemical weapons (white phosphorus) not merely for illumination, but as a weapon in our assault upon Fallujah in November 2004.

Were these not the sort of actions that proved beyond doubt or argument that Saddam Hussain was a monster? What do they make us? What sort of America have we become?

Martha Doerr Toppin, Oakland, CA

The Iraq Discussion We Need

To The Washington Post, Nov. 29, 2005

As a fellow former Marine, Vietnam veteran and recipient of the Purple Heart, I applaud the decision of Rep. John P. Murtha (D-PA) to call for a withdrawal of American troops from a deadly fool’s errand in Iraq [front page, Nov. 18].

Like Mr. Murtha—and unlike the drum-beaters who seek to disparage him—I remember all too painfully how more than half of the 59,000 people whose names are on the Vietnam Memorial were killed during the five years that it took the “best and brightest” of that era to find political and diplomatic fig leaves big enough to hide the bankruptcy of their policies, to cover our nation’s retreat from their ill-conceived and misdirected crusade, and to insulate themselves from public accountability.

So, along with Mr. Murtha, I listen to the bellicose stay-the-course platitudes of this administration’s lapel-pin patriots and I wonder how many more of our nation’s heroes will needlessly sacrifice their lives, limbs, sanity and souls.

Igor Bobrowsky, Cedar Grove, NJ

Picture Tells the Story

To San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 22, 2005

The picture of President Bush tugging at a locked door trying to leave a press conference in Beijing is demonstrative of all his “exit plans.’’

He doesn’t have any.

Keith Quan, Oakland,CA

Fact of Debate Is Troubling

To Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Nov. 13, 2005

If we are truly a nation that purports to export and encourage democracy and freedom around the globe, then why has the vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney, openly asked the U.S. Senate to approve an exemption for the CIA so people held in captivity can be tortured legally?

And does the fact that there is even debate about this topic make anyone else wonder whether we, as a nation and a people, have wandered too far off the road?

I hope so. And I hope you will call your senators and your president and remind them that this is not who we are. And if torture seems like good democratic practice to our current leadership, then their whole theory of democracy is wrong.

Brett Dillahunt, Zillah, WA

Secret Prisons & Whistle-Blowing

To The New York Times, Nov. 11, 2005

The CIA’s request for a criminal investigation to determine who revealed the existence of secret United States prisons abroad (news article, Nov. 9) seems a blatant attempt to punish the whistle-blower.

Nevertheless, I hope that such an investigation takes place, so that whoever was responsible for the leak can be identified and honored as a hero.

We know from 20th-century history that governments too often cite threats to national security as an excuse to erode freedom and violate the most basic human rights.

The recent ceremonies honoring the late Rosa Parks, a hero of the civil rights movement, reminded us that it sometimes requires the breaking of minor laws to remedy major injustices.

The American prisons abroad, known as “black sites,” represent an attempt by the Bush administration to skirt established criminal law and hide the shameful and unlawful treatment of prisoners in United States custody.

When government itself is a lawbreaker, exposing its violations can only be considered an act of patriotism.

Rachelle Marshall, Stanford, CA

State of the Union

To San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 20, 2005

Terrorists don’t need to bother with the United States; our elected officials are doing the job for them.

Education, the environment and the economy are in shambles. The media is manipulated and silenced, corporations and religion run the country. States’ rights, the middle class and justice for all is dying. Our first responders and veterans are underfunded.

Am I in trouble for signing this?

Dorothy Cavaness, Half Moon Bay, CA

Roots of Violence in France

To The Independent, Nov. 9, 2005

I take great exception to your front page of Nov. 7, which certainly will not help your readers to understand the cause and nature of France’s present problems. Suggesting that “French Muslims banned from wearing headscarves in school” has anything to do with these problems merely shows how you fail to understand the notion of laïcité which is central to the French republican traditions and ideals.

All “ostentatious expressions” of religious affiliation are banned under the current regulations, not just young Muslims’ headscarves: Catholic crucifixes, Sikh headdresses and Jewish kippas are no more tolerated in French state schools than the headscarves are. You might also not be aware that such bans are not exclusively French: they are also in place in various German Länder, Hesse and Bavaria for example.

What is more, the young Muslim women who might feel aggrieved by this ban have absolutely nothing to do with the gangs of thugs who are currently setting fire to buses and primary schools in Paris and elsewhere. When they have protested, it has been with dignity, and within the law. They are very often the first victims of the violence which has become endemic in the quartiers.

Philippe Auclair, London, UK