SMARTERTIMES.COM WEST
Re: George Neumayr’s Gunning for Bill Simon:

Excellent article on the Chron’s biased approach regarding the Governor’s race.
Regards,
— Jim Sparkmen, editor
ChronWatch.com

WHOSE BLINDNESS?
Re: John Corry’s A Conservative Blind Spot:

I was a bit surprised at the content of John Corry’s article today. Some points are taken as well founded, but there were many that lacked credibility. Most glaringly is the assertion that the IDF’s military responses to the Palestinian attacks have not worked. Whether or not Palestinian resolve has increased, as asserted, the results are drastically different. As I recall, without providing hard numbers (as I would like to do, but don’t have the time) there has not been anywhere near the number of suicide attacks since the defensive began. Prior to the IDF response, attacks occurred almost daily. Now, it’s been days since any attacks.

Key Palestinian killers have been captured and killed. The obvious response to this would be that new ones would rise in their place. We should let time tell that. In the meantime, capture and kill is the appropriate method to disrupt the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure. The offensive has resulted in the capture of PLO munitions and the destruction of at least one bomb making facility where 30 bomb belts were found, ready to go. Ten suicide bombers have been intercepted by the IDF.

In short, a military solution works. Barak offered Arafat 97% of the “occupied territories” in Fall, 2000, and he refused. That was the ultimate political solution, and the Palestinian response was the current Intifada, which Israel finally responded to in the West Bank.

Finally, when the world is “right” and in agreement, we should be wary. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights is hardly respectable — isn’t Syria a member?

Cordially,
— Nathan Moore

John Corry quotes Haaretz as saying that “Everyone knows that if not for the settlements, it would have long since been possible to reach an agreement with the Palestinians.” While adding that he’s “not sure about the “everyone knows” part of that,” he seems to agree. I’m surprised to hear Corry say this. If the events of the last few months have done nothing else, I thought for sure they had laid bare for all to see the essential truth about the Palestinians’ position — this is not a dispute about a few acres of land on the West Bank. This is a war against the existence of Israel, as it has been since 1948. Since 1967 the Arabs have done a masterful job at clouding the issue, and making many in the West believe that the real dispute is over the “Occupied Territories,” but of course, if that is really the only issue, what was the source of Arab hostility prior to 1967?

You can’t negotiate over your own right to existence. The fact is that there has never been any possibility of a true “agreement with the Palestinians,” other than one which the Palestinians would view as a temporary expedient on the road to their ultimate goal of the extinction of Israel. Corry looks at the current situation and concludes that only a political solution can end the fighting. I would say that only a thorough military defeat that cures the Palestinians of their belief that they can eliminate Israel will ever create the conditions for that political solution. As with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, they must be defeated militarily before there can be any hope of the Palestinians accepting “a world that is not the way you may wish it to be, but the way it actually is,” i.e., a world that contains a permanent Israel.
— Steven Bleiberg

I literally gasped when I found John Corry advising his readers to refrain from holding the “liberalism” of the Israeli daily Ha’aretz against it, and citing its Op-Ed content as a reliable reference whose credibility, he would have the reader suppose, is buttressed by the fact that Arab terror bombs went off outside its offices.

Great Scot! I am a fluent speaker, reader and writer of Hebrew. I was a subscriber, for a while, of Ha’aretz (native Hebrew version!) during the years I lived in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel.

To characterize Ha’aretz as “liberal” is, shall we say, a stunning, breathtaking, heart-stopping, blood-curdling understatement. “Flaming, off-the-charts, psychopath- delusional” is more like it. Mr. Corry might as well refer his readers to the Village Voice, or perhaps Pravda. The bias, the awful Leftist world-view built in to everything the paper prints would make even Brent Bozell gasp, and make Peter Jennings feel this small.

It could be that, like Mr. Arafat, Ha’aretz speaks in one voice to its vehemently left-wing Israeli audience, in Hebrew, and in another to its international, English-speaking audience. I wouldn’t know — I don’t read the English edition.

If so, Mr. Corry (a man I have recognized for years as a solid,
perceptive conservative) has, simply, been had.
— Paul Kotik
Plantation, FL

So the way the world is, per John Corry, that absent the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a political solution to the war in the Middle East could be reached. Even in light of the following:

1. 90% of the land which comprised the original Palestinian Mandate is what is now Jordan, which slaughtered thousands of Palestinians.

2. In 1948, 1956, and 1967, when the West Bank and Gaza were parts of Jordan and Egypt, respectively, Israel was attacked by Arab armies, defeated them, and occupies these territories to buffer themselves from Arab hate.

3. Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups have, in there very charters, the destruction of Israel as their ultimate purpose; as does the PLO and Arafat. Not the return of the occupied territories, but the death of every Jew.

4. During the Gulf War, in which Israel was not involved, Iraq lobbed Scud missiles into Israeli neighborhoods, killing innocent civilians of a nation not participating in the conflict.

5. Arafat was offered 95% of the land he wanted for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Camp David talks in 2000, and refused.

In light of the above, and the facts that Arafat has broken every single accord, treaty, cease-fire, and agreement he has ever signed with terror and murder, that every day, media in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and other Islamic nations spew the vilest blasphemy about Israel and the Jews, call them pigs and monkeys, that Arab children are paraded about with mock grenades and explosive belts, and effete, “morally superior” Europe is wracked with anti-Semitic violence — despite all that, Corry would have Israel withdraw, stop the very same defense it has mounted against this hatred as has the U.S., and sit at a table with those who despise them and wish them dead. No, Mr. Corry, there comes a time when the real world is one where Israel must defeat its sworn enemies, not one where, after still another “peace process,” they are asked by diplomats to suffer more Palestinian violence in silence.

Respectfully,
— Bob Cavalli
Richmond, VA

John Corry quotes Haaretz as asking, “What is the terrorist infrastructure when anyone can become a suicide bomber?” and states that such a question is “sensible”? Surely Mr. Corry doesn’t think that Palestinians, with an average income of less than $1,700 in the year 2000 (when the Palestinian Authority launched its ongoing “intifada”), simply walk out of their houses and blow themselves up, unaided. Estimates on the cost of these bombs range from $150 to $2,000 to make, and that’s not factoring in the training and indoctrination courses that many of the bombers are led through by the terrorist leaders in the weeks leading up to the bombing.

If there is no clearly defined, terrorist infrastructure in Palestinian controlled areas, Mr. Corry, why have the suicide bombings (the “successful” ones, anyway) come to a complete halt since Israel moved into the West Bank?

Sadly, Mr. Corry includes Israel and conservative American pundits in his blame for the recent shocking displays of the “return” (ha!) of European anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately for Mr. Corry’s contention, these people, just as they displayed in the 1930s, have the exact same worldview as they have had for centuries, and they are the only ones to blame for their typically pathetic actions and words. Luckily, for truly oppressed people across the world, Israel has a friend in American conservatives just as Britain was lucky to have a friend in American conservatives the last time Europe dissolved into an anti-Semitic wasteland. Hopefully the U.S. won’t be needed to save the world again this time around, but, of course, it likely will be. At least this time we have a wonderful friend in Israel that will be their with us… even as “enlightened” Europe cowers in the background.
— Mike Dunlap
New York, NY

John Corry’s 4/23 rejection of anything but a political solution to Israel’s problems makes two critical mistakes:

(1) His dismissal of settlements as a mistake ignores the relative inability of any Israeli government to stop free Jews from making homes anywhere they can defend (particularly in Judea, their traditional homeland).

(2) Corry says military methods do not stop suicide bombers. Does he think C-3 or C-4 grows on trees? How many untrained teenagers will be crushed under tank treads before the undertaking loses allure?

There has seldom been peace in human history without the stimulus of the sword.
— Bill Heuisler
Tucson, AZ

There are only military solutions when an enemy wants to destroy you. Peace comes after you have thoroughly defeated them. Israel should, as should the U.S., ignore the moral and intellectually repugnant U.N. and Western European elites and destroy the Islamic fascists around the world. That will safeguard the U.S. and defeating the corrupt Islamic regimes will offer the only hope for a peaceful Middle East.
— Michael Brody

If law and order had been imposed on Palestine, it would be a prosperous part of Israel, living in peace with her neighbors. As long as you have lawlessness and disorder, you have a fertile ground for the hatred and bizarre definitions of peace that result in Arafat getting a peace prize!

Wise up. Simplistic, left-wing pacifist solutions sound good, but they just don’t work.
— Lamar Johnson
Beaverton, OR

NEW VOICES
Re: George Neumayr’s Savage Times:

While Dick Riordan’s views are perhaps not distinguishable from those of the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times, he still has what it takes to create an interesting alternative to the dominant daily: bags of money and a willingness to bring in writers and editors like Matt Welch, Ken Layne, and Tim Blair. Those voices will define the paper, and they have been consistently sharp in criticizing the Times at mattwelch.com, kenlayne.com, and laexaminer.com. Neumayr should check them out.
— Gregory S. Taylor
Northwestern University School of Law,
Chicago, IL
g-taylor@law.northwestern.edu

THE ART OF DIPLOMACY
Re: Lawrence Henry’s The Bush-Powell Conundrum:

Thank you. It’s reassuring to learn I’m not the only one that considers the post of Sec. of State to be something more than that of a shouting bully.
— Charles Conrardy

SPRINGS IN HER STEP
Re: The Prowler’s Cuomo’s Crackup:

Oh, I so looooove to see Liberals crack up!!!
— Ruth Lindemann
Colorado Springs, CO