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MER READERS SPEAK UP ABOUT U.S. POLICIES
 
MORE IRAQI CHILDREN HAVE ALREADY DIED BECAUSE OF SANCTIONS
THAN JAPANESE BECAUSE OF THE ATOMIC BOMB AND BOSNIANS
BECAUSE OF ETHNIC CLEANSING COMBINED

[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

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LET'S MAKE ISRAEL THE 51ST STATE THEN

    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

 

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