Editor,
Each and every day, $10 million of our tax dollars go to Israel in "foreign aid," which is more than the budgets of the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Forest Service - agencies that save American lives. We now can clearly see how Israel chooses to spend that money - dropping expensive made-in-America bombs and missiles on the civilian population of Lebanon.
Any leader, especially one like President Bush who professes to be a champion of human rights and Christianity, should be calling for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon, a sovereign nation where the bulk of the casualties are civilian. Unconditional support for any ally is wrong, unethical and immoral, especially when that ally is committing war crimes as Israel did in Jenin, Lebanon, in 1982. I don't even have to mention the 30,000 civilians of Iraq killed in our bogus quest to disarm them of those invisible "weapons of mass destruction."
Hezbollah is a sworn enemy of Israel, but this hatred runs both ways and goes all the way back to 1948 when the U.S. and England arbitrarily decided to give the land of a poor people - the Palestinians - to the Jews. The creation of Israel in 1948 and the sudden displacement of all those Palestinians ignited the fuse of today's violence in the Middle East, and until that original problem is rectified, I believe it will continue for hundreds of years. Again, this is a problem created by our government with our tax dollars.
Nobody denies that the Jews have suffered immensely as far back as biblical times, but giving them someone else's country to live in as their own was just as wrong as what we did to the American Indians. The Palestinians have been punished, oppressed and killed for trying to repel the imposition of Israel. Both peoples deserve to have their own sovereign nation.
Based on our fear and our ignorance of the original problem, we continue to finance war crimes. Neither Hezbollah nor Iraq had anything to do with Sept. 11, 2001, and perhaps current terrorism was created by years of exploitive U.S. foreign policy. Only Israeli and American interests have been the targets of terrorism, and this should speak for itself.
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Israel certainly has the right to defend itself from attack but not by killing civilians. Anyone who kills innocent women and children is a war criminal. Precision-guided missiles and bombs do not kill civilians on a daily basis. Israel must pay for the reconstruction of Lebanon and compensate the families of civilians who were killed.
It's time we all examine the root problems of the Middle East instead of letting George Bush and associates try to kill all who disagree. None of their children were sent into harm's way to kill or be killed. Democracy is supposed to be fair and objective, and a democracy imposed is anything but. I am one American citizen who is fed up with these war crimes, allowed with a wink from America and a nod by Israel.
Bruce A. Gorcyca
Daily Lobo reader
