August/September 1991, Page 39

Other People's Mail

Some letters by or to other people are as informative for our readers as anything we might write ourselves.

Delayed Citation for USS Liberty

To The Washington Post, June 17, 1991

This year the annual reunion of the USS Liberty Veterans Association took place in Washington, DC. The June 8th banquet on the 24th anniversary of the Israeli attack on the US Navy intelligence-gathering ship coincided with the huge Desert Storm victory parade in Washington.

Even before the dinner I noticed an air of quiet satisfaction among the 190 survivors, families and well-wishers attending. For the first time ever, the survivors had been received at the White House by Chief of Staff John Sununu and Foreign Policy Advisor General Brent Scowcroft. And there was still better to come.

Former skipper Capt. William McGonagle, father figure of this extended family bound by ties of common suffering and a persistent struggle for a congressional investigation of Israeli motives for the attack, was there, wearing the Congressional Medal of Honor awarded him, almost surreptitiously, years ago. And so was Admiral Thomas Moorer, chief of Naval operations, 1967-1969, saying emphatically, "I get damn mad whenever anyone kills Americans."

Former Congressman Paul Findley (R-IL) read with great satisfaction a resolution by Illinois Governor James Edgars praising the crew and specifying unmistakably that the attackers were Israelis. James Ennes, Liberty officer and author of Assault on the Liberty, now in its fifth printing, received a plaque for his work on behalf of the association.

Then the surprise of the evening. Admiral Thomas Brooks, Chief of Naval Intelligence, was introduced. Acting on instructions conveyed the day before, he read a presidential unit citation for the crew, the highest award a military unit can earn. It recounted their heroism in saving the lightly armed intelligence ship against assault by stronger forces, "foreign" planes, helicopters, and ships. It cited the 34 killed and 171 wounded. This was a deeply emotional experience for everyone present.

At the end of the citation, however, came a shock. It was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and dated 1968! This citation had been kept hidden for 23 years from the crew, their families, and their fellow citizens. Why, why?

Disappointment set in as we realized that LBJ's citation did not mention Israel as the perpetrator of the ambush. That explains the secrecy.

Emotion welled up again as the association president, Commander George Golden, called forward 13 crew members and bestowed Purple Hearts just granted to them for wounds suffered in 1967. And it continued with the solemn roll call of the 34 shipmates killed in action, to the toll of the ship's bell and a following prayer.

Former Congressman Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey (R-CA) pointed out the contrast between the Desert Storm parade that same day, and the long silence regarding the Liberty, when that one ship suffered combat casualties comparable to the combat casualties sustained by US forces in Desert Storm.

A few days after the banquet, I looked in Clark Clifford's Counsel to the President, just published, and found his lame confession about LBJ and the Liberty affair, pp. 445-7. The whole text is important ' but the crux is: "It was impossible that the Liberty could have been mistaken for the Egyptian ship ... as the Israelis had suggested publicly and privately in their effort to excuse the attack. " Clifford states that in his still classified report to LBJ he "recommended that the Israeli government should be held completely responsible, and Israeli military personnel involved should be punished. "

This nasty secret has been like a festering boil which has finally erupted. We have been continually deceived, manipulated, gulled and fleeced on behalf of Israel—and the manipulation and fleecing still go on through AIPAC and its collaborators.

George Bogardus, Bethesda, MD

(Mr. Bogardus is a retired US foreign service officer.)

Raw Truth About Zionism

To The Washington Times, July 12, 1991

Alan Keyes' "Mideast Peace Misjudgments " itself seriously misjudges some profound realities about the Middle East and about Israel. These misjudgments are persistent, indeed perennial, in US news and political circles, but on that account have been no less detrimental to the formulation or execution of an effective US Mideast policy.

Mr. Keyes seeks to perpetuate the wholly irrational (and factually indefensible) canard that the 1975 United Nations resolution on Zionism and racism was an attack on the existence of the state of Israel, and thereforeas a matter of reflex non-thinking unacceptable to the United States.

The Nov. 10, 1975 resolution was based on a 1963 resolution that had declared "any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous. " It then found "that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination."

Now, no one who values American political and moral principles—surely including Mr. Keyes—could take issue with a forthright rejection of racism. The United Nations stated in 1975—as it had on numerous occasions—as a matter of principle that government may not discriminate on the basis of racial, religious, or ethnic identity. The United States of America very much proclaims precisely this philosophy.

The problem arises with the meaning of modern "Zionism. " Yet anyone with even just a passing knowledge of the Middle East—and of Zionism as practiced in Israel—understands that in Israel non-Jews are second-class citizens, that an entire panoply of rights, privileges and programs are reserved exclusively for Jews, that native non-Jews, because they are not Jews, are systematically excluded from all manner of things, from jobs in defense-related industry (one-third the Israeli economy), to buying land, to the social and educational benefits of the national foundation, to residing in the city of Tel Aviv.

In the occupied territories, a native Palestinian may not drill a well on his own land. Reprisals against family members of those who resist Israeli authority—from the sealing or blowing up of their homes to the destruction of their patrimonies and livelihoods, such as cutting down 500-year-old olive trees—are standard Israeli army practice. There is no habeas corpus; in fact, there is no Bill of Rights in Israel. Much is made of the occasional slap on the wrist to an Israeli soldier, or illegal settler, who gets Israel a fleeting moment of bad international press. But these are exceptions. The rule is that the army can and does what is pleases to suppress Palestinian resistance.

To be sure, the 1975 UN resolution also carried some standard (for the United Nations) Third World, anti-Western and neo-Marxist cant. One example is its incorporation of the Organization of African Unity's declaration "that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin." That, however, is not what made the "American" ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, so apoplectic in 1975.

Rather, the resolution touched a raw truth which unthinking supporters of Israel in the United States have much preferred to ignore, both before and since, and not without help from most of the US media: Israel relies on a political philosophy incompatible with US political values. It starts not merely with the premise that Israel's very reason for existence is to provide a home to a certain race, but also that the state thus created must have a character specially suited to the members of that race. Indeed, friends of Israel are fond of calling it "the Jewish state."

Mr. Keyes is quite sloppy with his facts: The 1975 UN resolution did not, as he writes, "officially declare Israel's existence as a Jewish state to be a crime against humanity. " In fact, the word "Israel" does not even appear in the resolution. Nor is there any mention of a "crime against humanity. " Israel remains a member state of the United Nations—hardly consistent with Mr. Keyes' straw-man, reduce-to-the absurd rendition of the facts.

The resolution simply finds, in a factual way, that political Zionism is "a form of racism and racial discrimination. " What does Mr. Keyes have to say about the proposition?

Paul D. Molineaux, Washington, DC

(Mr. Molineaux is a retired US foreign service officer.)

You Can Look It Up

To The Appleton Post-Crescent, Dec. 4, 1990

Two topics which received a great deal of attention from a variety of sources in The Post-Crescent have been anti-Semitism and (anti-)Zionism. A few local "experts" are trying their hardest to convince the ill-informed general public that one could be anti-Zionist and at the same time not be anti-Semitic. It is, therefore, necessary to clearly define the terms and let the intelligent readers decide for themselves.

Anti-Semitism is a descriptive term coined in Germany by Wilhelm Marrih in 1879, referring to the anti-Jewish manifestations of the period, and to give Jew-hatred a more scientific-sounding name. The term and its derivatives refer specifically to hostility toward Jews and have no relevance to other Semitic groups. Arabs, who are a Semitic group, can indeed be (and many are) anti-Semitic. The most virulent anti-Semitic literature such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler's Mein Kampf are freely available and freely distributed in countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines anti-Semitism as "1. hostility toward Jews as a religious or racial minority group often accompanied by social, economic, and political discrimination compare racism; 2. opposition to Zionism: sympathy with opponents of the state of Israel. "

And the same dictionary defines Zionism as a "Jewish nationalist movement that has had as its goal the creation and support of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews ... (and) it is in many ways a continuation of the ancient nationalist attachment of the Jews and of the Jewish religion to the historical region of Palestine, where one of the hills of ancient Jerusalem was called Zion."

It is therefore quite obvious that those who piously claim not to be anti-Semites and yet deny the Jews their right for a homeland in the guise of being anti-Zionists, are nothing more than true anti-Semites.

Sam Pearlman, Neenah, WI

Webster Not Infallible

To The Appleton Post-Crescent, Dec. 5, 1990

It would appear that Sam Pearlman and Webster's Third New International Dictionary are doing everything in their power to make anti-Semitism a legitimate and respectable form of political and ideological discourse.

I must thank Mr. Pearlman for informing us about the power and strength of Zionism to even influence the publisher of a dictionary and thereby intimidate anti-Zionists into silence lest they be branded "anti-Semites. " That this form of thought-control succeeded with the Merriam-Webster Company is absolutely incredible. Nevertheless, just because the dictionary cited above states that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are synonymous does not make it so.

What are we to say about Jews who are anti-Zionists? Are they anti-Semites too? Noam Chomsky, Israel Shahak, Hannah Arendt, Lenni Brenner, Rabbi Elmer Berger, Cheryl Rubenberg, Roberta Feuerlicht, Alfred Lilienthal and Moshe Menuhin, father of violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin, are some names that come to mind.

Moreover, were the prominent American Jews who signed an anti-Zionist statement handed to President Woodrow Wilson by Congressman Julius Kahn on March 4, 1919 also anti-Semites? Two of the prominent signatories were Adolf S. Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, and Henry Morgenthau, Sr., former Ambassador to Turkey.

Please note that these American Jews were well aware of the racist character of Zionism and wanted nothing to do with it:

"Whether the Jews be regarded as a race' or a 'religion,' it is contrary to the democratic principles for which the world war was waged to found a nation on either or both of these bases.... A Jewish State involves fundamental limitations as to race and religion, else the term 'Jewish' means nothing....

"As to the future of Palestine, it is our fervent hope that what was once a 'promised land' for the Jews may become a 'land of promise' for all races and creeds.... We ask that Palestine be constituted as a free and independent state, to be governed under a democratic form of government, recognizing no distinctions of creed or race or ethnic descent.... We do not wish to see Palestine, either now or at any time in the future, organized as a Jewish State. " (The New York Times, Mar. 5, 1919) This is my position too. If this be anti-Semitism, make the most of it!

Robert E. Nordlander, Menasha, WI

So Look Again

To Mr. Robert E. Nordlander, Menasha, WI, Dec. 12,1990

Thank you very much for alerting us regarding the entry in Webster's Third New International Dictionary. We called the telephone number you gave us and reached the copy editor. He told us that the unabridged edition in which you found the entry is revised only once every 30 years, but that a new one is due to be published soon. Fortunately, in a more recent abridged edition, which we happen to have in our office, the second part of the definition, which equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, does not appear. It seems strange to us that the two terms would have been equated in the early 1960s by any official source. Rather, we suspect that someone added it later on, but that none of the senior editors picked up on it.

Laura Drake, Membership Coordinator, Council for the National Interest, Washington, DC