[Op Ed in the DAILY CALIFORNIAN - 11/20/97]
When Jim Hoagland (Washington Post, 11/10/97) calls Saddam a 'telltale
heart beating loudly beneath the boards where America thought he had been
buried forever,' he is atypically honest or typically
ignorant. Most children know that Poe's 'The Telltale Heart' concerns
a psychotic who tortures and murders an old man, cuts out, and buries his
heart.
Hoagland's incompetent metaphor for Saddam becomes a metaphor for American
Iraq policy whose meaning may be seen in UN Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) report, December 1995, of the million Iraqis who have died as a result
of the U.S.-imposed sanctions, which even Hoagland's associates acknowledge
are aimed at a defenseless Iraqi population. 567,000 of them were
children in 1995.
Things are worse now.
Rick McDowell (Z, 11/97) cites Voices in the Wilderness, UNICEF, and World
Food Program that 27.5% of Iraq's 3 million children risk acute malnutrition.
More children have died of starvation, disease, and despair than the combined
toll of atomic bombs on Japan or Serbian ethnic cleansing that horrified
Americans not long ago. Where is such horror when it comes to Iraq?
How many 'good Americans' support efforts to bring aid to Somalia while
cheering each tightening of U.S. sanctions and the resulting slaughter
of the innocents?
Comparing Hussein to a Mafia don, Hoagland suggests that U.S. murder policy
is insufficient to safeguard "American interests" and restore "respect
for America", showing no more consciousness of absurd incongruity than
understanding of literature. He suggests that "an assault on the
Republican Guard units" that protect the Hussein regime "makes sense".
Strangely the UN doesn't appreciate the "sense" of condemning Hitler's
attack on sovereign Poland while cheering American attacks on sovereign
Iraq. Bill Clinton doesn't see "sense" either -- yet. Perhaps,
unlike Hoagland, Clinton understands Poe and recognizes a difference between
victims and psychotics.
Jonathan Christian Petty
Op Ed - THE DAILY CALIFORNIAN
Berkeley, CA - 11/18/97
Your November 16 editorial "Bibi has earned the cold shoulder" was an excellent
analysis of Israeli governmental duplicity and chicanery respecting the
present impasse over the Middle East peace process. That Prime Minister
Neanyahu is responsible goes without saying.
A reader of your editorial might be puzzled by the inference from the penultimate
paragraph that ending our more than $3 billion in military and economic
aid to Israel would constitute "abandoning
Israel."
Moreover, your suggestion that U.S. "ties" with Israel "are too close and
long-standing" to consider ending this subsidization of a first world country
is too absurd to be taken seriously.
The logic of your excellent editorial led to the proposition that America
must oblige Israeli politicians to end their dependency on their annual
"welfare check" from the American taxpayer. For some reason your editorial
failed to follow the logic of its own argument.
The truth of the matter is the world can now see very plainly the fruits
of Zionist ethnic racism and sectarian religious bigotry. One solution
might be for Israel to become America's 51st state. If Israel
were
to become America's 51st state, it would be obliged to treat everyone equally
under the American Constitution. It would then not be able to accord privileges
to Jews that are denied to other ethnic groups and religions.
And then, if that were to occur, it would only have two United States senators
and less than a dozen members of the House of Representatives fighting
for its interests instead of the 100 U.S. senators
and 438 members of the House that it now has.
Robert E. Nordlander
Menashe, Wisconsin
CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 11/20/97