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.
‘Druze Leader: Iran Testing Israeli Military, Syria Reasserting Influence’
Further to Aaron Klein’s report (“Druze Leader: Iran Testing Israeli Military, Syria Reasserting Influence,” Israel at War, July 27), it appears that as Yogi Berra once said, “it’s deja vu all over again!”
A generation ago it was said that the Syrians were prepared to fight the Israelis to the last Egyptian. Today it appears that Iran and Syria are willing to fight the Israelis until the last Lebanese citizen is displaced from his destroyed home.
IRA SOHN
New York, N.Y.
‘Drain North Korea’
As Mr. Liu notes in his article, China has clearly demonstrated that it is either incapable or unwilling to exert meaningful pressure on North Korea, whether to help other nations contain its threat or to aid the millions who suffer under Kim Jong Il’s dictatorship [“Drain North Korea,” Opinion, July 25, 2006].
This should surprise no one. China has an appalling human rights record, making it highly unlikely that it would develop a sudden humanitarian concern for refugees. Whatever Beijing may tell the West, it naturally will continue to support a neighbor with the same political blood as itself — authoritarian Communism. Without China’s no-matter-what backup, Kim Jung Il’s regime would have fallen long ago.
The time has come for concerned nations to seek other partners and means of dealing with North Korea. To continue to look to China for help is, as it is said in East Asia, is like seeking medicine from a devil.
ABBY LEE
Press Officer
Taipei Economic & Cultural Office
‘Weighty Moral Games’
Re: “Weighty Moral Games” [Opinion, July 24, 2006], President George W. Bush has stated moral objection to the federal funding of important biomedical research employing the use of embryonic human stem cells because this would amount to supporting the “murder” — his spokesman’s word — of unborn human beings. That rationale is easily resolvable by employing another expression he has often used to explain his position on the matter: “potential human life.”
The fertilized human embryos to be used in this research would be drawn, not from a population of candidate embryos for the work but, instead, from a very large lot of them especially designated to be destroyed in the normal periodic procedures already routinely in use. Such embryos could thus not be construed to constitute “potential human life” because, by specified definition, they would have no potential — particularly, not “life” — other than that given them by being employed in the research. This may seem to be a fine, “verbal distinction,” but it would be incontrovertibly true.
JOHN OSMUNDSEN
New York, N.Y.
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