To commenter Ed Toner
Reader comment on item: The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Israeli Attack on the U.S. Spy Ship

Submitted by David Wolf (United States), Nov 7, 2002 at 23:22

Your comment on the possession of WMDs by Israel is glaringly ignorant (perhaps intentionally so) of the most elemental and indispensible difference between Israel and Iraq -- that is, that Israel has never declared any intent to use any weapons (not so much as a handgun) in an aggressive manner against the US and its allies. Much less has Israel ever threatened to use any weapons against its neighbors in an unprovoked instance, in contrast to Iraq's press continually exhorting Iraqis to resist Jews and Zionists with every violent means available.

Do you not see the differences between two cultures -- one that has been made war upon by its neighbors continually for over 50 years, and another which exhorts its children in their own schoolbooks to hate and murder (yes Ed, murder!) members of the other (Infidel) culture? These are the facts as they truly exist, Ed.

Is it because of the Liberty incident that you appear to have given Israel as a nation a "life sentence" as an enemy of right-thinking Americans? I might remind you that in every war the US has fought alongside various allies, there have been friendly-fire incidents that have claimed the lives of allied combatants on both sides.

Do you have the same obvious and undying scorn for England, Canada, or France? From what logic I can distill from your comments, the Canadians should always regard the US on the same footing as Iraq, or Al-Qaeda -- our military is responsible for the deaths of Canadian soldiers, after all. Similarly, we have WMDs and the means to deliver them. Should we declare war on ourselves? Besides, what leads you to believe that Iraq lacks the means to deliver weapons -- is it the the close alliance with North Korea, or the various and sundry deals with Leonid Kuchma/Belarus? To me, and most other people, those proven relationships would contradict what you hold as fact.

Sarcasm aside, the Liberty incident is a particularly tragic example of what can go wrong in a combat action, but you seem naive about the nature of geopolitics when you compare Israel to Iraq...

How do you feel about the US' close alliance with Great Britain, Ed? Did you know that a long time ago, our forefathers had to violently overthrow British colonial rule? Curiously enough, in spite of British colonial rule of the US, a great many Americans regard the British with friendship rather than scorning them for having taken the lives of some of our countrymen so long ago. If they were Jews, would you still hold it against them? Your mindset is perfectly indicative of the subtle bigotry that enables the clouding of national debate vis-a-vis the situation in the mideast -- as long as people like you cleave to their personal distaste for Israel/Jews, we will never be able to convincingly reveal the specious basis for our continued relations with the hostile Arab world. If you could open your mind a bit more, you could see that the Liberty incident was just that -- a terrible, regrettable incident. It was not, nor is it now an emblem of the character of Jews in general, nor of the Israeli government. The enemy is Islamists, not Israel .

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