‘Women Weapons’

Re: “Women Weapons,” Clara Beyler, Opinion, June 29, 2005. Ms.Beyler begins her article talking about Wafa Ibrahim al-Bass, a young Arab woman who “attempted to carry out an attack in a Beersheva hospital where she had been previously treated for severe burns, and possessed the required medical authorization to go for further treatments.”

Recently, I attended a C-Span filming in Washington, D.C., of a talk given by MK Dr. Arieh Eldad, former head of the burn unit at Hadassah hospital, and now in charge of the skin center in Israel. Dr. Eldad spoke about the horrible burns that Ms. Bass had suffered in her home, the inadequate treatment she had received in the PA hospital in Gaza, and the willingness of the Israelis to treat her for two years at Soroka Hospital in BeerSheva. He personally authorized 2.5 meters of skin to be given to her doctors for her treatment.

Despite the fact that this Arab woman, as with all Arab patients in Israeli hospitals, was treated with the same care and compassion that would have been given to a Jewish patient, her response was to carry 10 kilos of explosives in her underwear, filled with nails and screws, planning to blow herself up in the very unit in which she had been treated. The pass into the hospital, entitling her to follow-up treatments, would be used to enable her to accomplish her heinous plot. MK Dr. Eldad also told us that more than 50% of the patients he treated at Hadassah hospital were Arab patients. Where are the stories and reports about Israeli compassion and medical attention to the very people who are dedicated to their destruction?

HELEN FREEDMAN
Executive Director
Americans For a Safe Israel/AFSI
Manhattan

‘Weak Position’

If only Jacob Gershman’s remarkable story [“CUNY Faculty Union Finds Itself in a Weak Position,” Page 1, July 1, 2005] could be seen as a comical but harmless tale of out-of-touch professors trying to re-create in New York the modern-day equivalent of the 1968 Paris student uprising. Unfortunately, the PSC leadership also seems intent on undermining CUNY’s educational quality by hampering the university’s ability to attract first-class new faculty. It’s hard for CUNY to compete with other public universities – much less wealthy private colleges – when the union leaders’ decision to reallocate scarce heath-care funds to their political base of part-time employees means that we can no longer offer prospective new faculty any dental insurance or a standard prescription drug package. And, reflecting the PSC’s apparent desire to precipitate an illegal strike, the union has chosen to oppose all major initiatives of the administration, even nonfinancial measures (such as extending the tenure clock by two years, to bring CUNY in line with national norms and give untenured faculty more time to produce scholarship) that would increase CUNY’s appeal to the best of the recent Ph.D. market.

What have CUNY faculty members received in return? Consistent statements from union leaders that their radical political activism has improved their standing in the labor community. Yet the goal of the union is to look after the faculty’s well-being, not the personal clout of PSC leaders such as Barbara Bowen and Steve London. And, in any case, since the PSC has so often stood at odds with other labor organizations (the PSC opposed the war in Afghanistan, gave union dues to Lori Berenson, and refused to speak out against the British boycott of Israeli academics) it has become more of a pariah than an influential member of the national labor movement. CUNY faculty can surely do better.

ROBERT DAVID JOHNSON
Professor of history
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn

‘Officials Grapple’

Benny Avni’s article “U.N. Officials Grapple With How To Help Poorer Nations” [Foreign, June 28, 2005] misses the irony of G-8 nations ignoring democratic India while helping despotic African regimes. The World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2004 show that in India 359 million people were living on less than $1 a day in 2001 compared to 314 million in all of sub-Saharan Africa. Have Americans outsourced their compassion for a fellow democracy’s poor and needy? How long will American foreign-aid policy make poor and malnourished Indian girls wait before someone says: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus for Indians, too.”

ARUN KHANNA
Visiting professor of finance
College of Business Administration
Butler University
Indianapolis, Ind.

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