Letters to the Editor

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

Terrorists Take Hostages at School


Through the years, the community of nations has ignored it. Many Americans and certainly most Europeans refuse to accept it. By now it should be apparent to the unenlightened that the single most dangerous threat to world peace is Islamo-fascism [“Hundreds Seized In Terror Attack On Russ School,” Michael Mainville, Page One, September 2, 2004].


The other day, the world learned that radical Chechen Muslims were holding 200 children hostage in a Russian school. These “warriors” didn’t want to negotiate; they intended to intimidate, employing deadly force against the most innocent members of society.


Bodies are tossed out of windows, planes are blown out of the sky or piloted into buildings, buses are bombed, kidnappings, beheadings, summary executions, and ethnic cleansing takes place all in the name of what we’re told is a peaceful religion.


Their apologists inform us that these acts are the result of years of oppression. Nothing could be further from the truth.


These homicides are the result of nothing more than hatred for anything non-Islamic, espoused by radical clerics who hide in the shadows and spew their venom in mosques to people who are merely looking for direction in their lives.


Moderate Muslims must take the reins and cleanse radicalized members from their communities. Allow no safe haven for them. The rest of the world should employ similar methods.


In 10 years, we could be living in a peaceful world, bought and paid for with the lives of the young soldiers in our armed forces and the strength of people around the world determined to route out these snakes in the grass.


DAVID RICHARDS
Brooklyn



Dual Loyalty and the Jews


“Dual Loyalty and Larry Franklin” by Hillel Halkin, whom I’ve met and whose work I admire greatly, I think misses the point [Opinion,August 31, 2004].


He says that the “dual loyalty” charge, while often used as “an anti-Semitic canard,” makes American Jews painfully uncomfortable and should not be dismissed lightly.


This, Halkin asserts, is because the attachment to Israel by these Jews is equal to their attachment to America, more so than that of native-born Americans of Italian or Polish (or presumably French or German or any other non-American) ancestry to their country of their ancestors’ origin.


Thus the dual loyalty “charge” is uncomfortable because it is legitimate and real. But this I think begs the question. For it is not whether the charge is real or whether we are more committed to Israel than the Poles are to Poland or the Italians to Italy.


The main issue, in fact the only issue of consequence is our response to the charge. No other ethnic group has been so hypersensitive to this charge as the Jewish community.


When Italians are singled out as members of organized crime, the outcry is that of ethnic stereotyping, not that all Italians are going to be run out of the country on a rail. Not so the Jews.


The first whiff of the dual loyalty charge and we Jews are circling the wagons and defensively protesting our allegiance to America. It appears that 2,000 years of galut, of exile, has so reinforced the shtetl mentality that we are continually afraid of what the goyim will do or say.


It is interesting to contrast this hyper-defensive Jewish reaction with say the response of Muslim- American groups to the news of Muslims committing actual and heinous crimes against America.


When the 19 Muslim hijackers committed the atrocities of September 11, 2001, or when a Muslim-American soldier threw a hand grenade into the tent of his fellow soldiers killing and maiming them, the only protest of Muslim-American groups was that they are being unfairly stereotyped.


There was no collective hand wringing in the Muslim community. Imagine what would have been the American-Jewish response had American Jews or Israelis committed these unthinkable acts.


What gives these “dual loyalty” stories “legs” is our response to it. We should revel in our dual loyalty rather than shun it, since it is, as Mr. Halkin points out, to the benefit of both America and Israel. We love America. We love Israel. We’re Americans. We’re Jews. Live with it.


ALAN A. MAZUREK, M.D.
Great Neck, N.Y.
Dr. Mazurek is chairman of the Board of the Zionist Organization of America



‘NYC 2012’


I truly find no fault in Mayor Bloomberg’s visit to Athens – on behalf of New York City’s bid to host the games in 2012. However, I don’t want the Olympic committee in my back yard [“NYC 2012,” Editorial, August 20, 2004].


I detest them, almost as much as I do the United Nations, which I term the United Nasties.


I want the United Nasties out of Manhattan and America and I want to keep the biased, hypocritical Olympic hierarchy out of my city, and my country, too.


I well remember many former games, where communist and former communist countries were granted medals when the United Kingdom and America deserved same.


The horrendous treatment of Israel – recurring in various fashions – placed the final nail in the Olympic coffin in my viewpoint.


NANCY JOYCE JANCOURTZ
Brooklyn



Please address letters intended for publication to the Editor of The New York Sun. Letters may be sent by e-mail to editor@nysun.com, facsimile to 212-608-7348, or post to 105 Chambers Street, New York City 10007. Please include a return address and daytime telephone number. Letters may be edited.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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