Disorder at the border
Regarding “Border officer in serious condition after shot during Gaza riots” (August 22), first let’s pray for his full recovery with no long-term brain damage.
Seeing the video showing the terrorists trying to take his rifle and the terrorist shooting the border guard, to me is equal to watching the videos from the airport in Kabul: the terrorists are winning. We must ask questions, especially if I am correct reading past articles, that there is or should be clear zone of approximately 500 meters from the new wall looking west that the Palestinians should not cross. In the video, they are standing right against the wall.
The IDF is definitely not doing their job of protecting our soldiers and us and in my opinion certain high-ranking officers and politicians need to be reprimanded, and whatever evaluation is taken from this incident needs to be published by your paper.
The above is written by an ex-combat soldier.
MURRAY JOSEPHKiryat Motzkin
Regarding “Regional mediators trying to avert another Gaza-Israel flare up” (August 15), it must be stressed that the Gaza Strip has two borders; Israel and Egypt. Rafah is the Gaza-Egypt border crossing. It is open for traffic 12 hours per day, six days per week.
Gaza is blockaded by both Israel and Egypt to prevent weapons getting to Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists. In 2010, the United Nations declared the blockade to be both legal and appropriate.
Egypt is not doing a particularly good job. How did Hamas get the thousands of Iranian-supplied rockets it fired into Israel this May (with thousands more stockpiled)? El Arish, Egypt, which has a port and an airport, is only 30 miles from Gaza and the Rafah gate. There are also a number of illegal tunnels dug by Hamas that are not monitored by any legal authority. Egyptian border security is woefully ineffective.
In summary, Gaza is not reliant only on Israel for access to the outside world.
LEN BENNETT
Ottawa, On.
No Afghan plan
Douglas Bloomfield (“Takeaways from the getaway,” August 19) downplays the Biden administration’s utter ineptitude (more accurately, criminal negligence) in the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Reasonable people can differ on whether the US should have entirely disengaged militarily. What is beyond question is that the disastrous manner in which this was accomplished (Bloomfield calls it simply a “botched pullout”) was humiliating in the extreme and massively destructive to America’s authority in the world.
Bloomfield lauds Biden’s “the buck stops with me” statement, but Biden took no real responsibility. In that same embarrassing speech he blamed Donald Trump, the intelligence community and the Afghan army for his failure. (Remember that the Afghans lost more than 25 times as many men as did the US during the war. The Afghan army disintegrated when the US withdrew without warning, in the process ceasing all air support for the fighters.)
Biden later asserted that there was nothing that could have been done differently, a statement that one commentator described as “breathtakingly arrogant and disturbingly delusional.” He displays no real understanding of the stunning incompetence of his senior advisers or the terrible setback the US has suffered. Both he and those around him evince a shocking lack of long-term thinking, resulting in an absence of even rudimentary strategic planning. Had the same scenario played out during a Trump presidency, Democrats would be demanding his immediate resignation while preparing a third impeachment.
Bloomfield says little about the terrible impact this conspicuous weakness and incompetence will have on America’s standing in the world. No doubt Russia, China and Iran will seize this opportunity to strengthen their own positions and openly challenge the US. The Taliban and allied terrorist groups will benefit from the massive amounts of armament inexplicably left behind by the retreating Americans. As for America’s allies, without any plan to protect them from slaughter Biden abandoned over 15,000 American citizens and many thousands of Afghans who had cast their lot with the American military. There is no reason why he wouldn’t carry out parallel betrayals vis-à-vis Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine and more.
Bloomfield is correct that the women and girls in Afghanistan face a gruesome future. The first female vice president, Kamala Harris, who claimed to have been at the center of the decision to remove all US troops, has been totally silent on this issue. Perhaps she recognizes that any association with this administration’s surrender would be a huge detriment to her future political aspirations.
Many have spoken of the obvious similarity to the infamous departure from the US Embassy in Saigon in the waning days of the Vietnam War. The closer analogy is the Iran hostage crisis when 52 Americans were held for 444 days. Biden has delivered to the Taliban many thousands of American and Afghan hostages. Their blood will be on his hands.
EFRAIM A. COHENRetired US diplomat Zichron Yaakov
In my May 29 letter I wrote, “The planned withdrawal of all US and European troops from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021 will probably allow the Taliban to reconquer Afghanistan and... establish terrorist organizations devoted to attacking the United States. “We lost almost 2,400 Americans and spent over $2 trillion in Afghanistan during the past 20 years.
The Taliban and their allied Muslim terrorist organizations now have a vast base of operations to plan and support terrorist attacks against the world, the economic base of an entire country to finance their terrorist plots and activities, and large amounts of advanced American military equipment.
We have outfitted an enemy with our military equipment they can use against us. As Afghanistan borders Iran to the west, I am sure Iran will be acquiring some of our modern military equipment and technology from Afghanistan for future use.
We should install disabling software in the computer modules in the equipment we provide foreign countries so we can electronically disable the equipment if it falls into adversarial hands.
As soon as our diplomats, other US citizens and our military are out of Afghanistan we should inform the Taliban we are prepared to launch a pinpointed missile campaign and special operations against specific personnel and structures to thwart any Taliban attacks against the United States.
DONALD MOSKOWITZLondonderry NH
The US withdrawal from Afghanistan has given the country on a silver platter to the Taliban. We should also remember that the Taliban enjoy a good relationship with China. China might augment its economic and military might with a power strategy that includes Afghanistan in its Belt and Road initiative to break through the cocoon of US encirclement, to constrain the rise of India and foster industrialization to export a variety of goods to international markets. This is also be a blow to Uighurs who endure severe persecution. Time to stand up for freedom of speech, liberty, human rights and social justice.
DR MUNJED FARID AL QUTOB London, UK
Elementary, my dear Inbar
Regarding “The battle against antisemitism should be a secondary concern” (August 20), it’s hard to believe that a president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security would write that those serving in organizations devoted to combating antisemitism are “wasting” their time and money. My sister leads a group of young people who battle antisemitism on campuses across the United States. She has made wearing a kipah and expressing love for Israel a reality on many campuses. She doesn’t always succeed, but she succeeds enough to make a difference.
To be sure, many of the Jews in Poland felt as Efraim Inbar feels, that trying to stem the wave of antisemitism is fruitless. The result is well known. Had there been Jewish organizations at the level we have them today, had there been Jews in government at the level we have them today, had people been willing to go out and protest, make waves, use their influence as they do today, who knows if we would have owned the word “Holocaust” today. Time and again we’ve seen that counter-pressure often works. Doing nothing has a history of not working.
I just buried my 97-year-old mother who survived Auschwitz. For the last 30 years of her life she spoke in schools across the United States, warning about doing nothing, telling the young people she met to fight against antisemitism. I don’t think she spent those years in vain. And, quite honestly, I think she would have called Efraim Inbar and given him a piece of her mind.
YAACOV PETERESEILProprietor, Sherlocks Hats
Professor Inbar’s article was intriguing and disquieting. The logic of his pathological diagnosis is hard to dispute and his prescription – “Patient, heal thyself” – is hard to deny.
But I was left disquieted because there is a fatal flaw in his approach. It is true as he says that uncountable time and treasure has been spent by Jews in trying to cure the disease, to little avail. It is true that fighting legal and diplomatic attacks against Jewish rights and memory may be counter-productive from a realpolitik perspective.
However he has missed the big point in all this. The battle is about changing thousands of years of the Jews’ victim-mentality, of accepting a divinely ordained and cruel fate at the hands of our neighbors. No. No more. We aren’t going to take it anymore.
When he was accused of pursuing a pointless policy doomed to failure and exhorted to cease (make it a secondary concern), Winston Churchill explained that his stand was based on the effect on his own cause, not on that of his enemies: “There are rules against that sort of thing. And to break those rules would be fatal to our own honor, without which we could neither hope nor deserve to win this hard war.”
The struggle against Jew-hatred is not primarily about curing others, but about curing ourselves.
ANTHONY LUDERRosh Pina
Preventive ounce avoids troublesome
I couldn’t help but chortle at a recent story on the difficulties facing the newly formed budget whose final paragraph alluded to a new law that requires banks to provide advance notice of insufficient funds before bouncing a check. Customers who receive such a notice will have up to two and a half hours prior to the end of the banking day – the window of opportunity, in other words, is open no more than a crack – to deposit the amount needed to cover the check.
How much will this “humanitarian” gesture cost the customer? Banks in Israel will not tell you the time of day unless a charge can be applied to the effort required for responding. While this new law might help both the writer and recipient of a check in danger of being returned, it is the bank that ultimately benefits. A charge is applied to the warning that is issued; if the account is made whole within the allotted time the bank avoids the hassle that comes with bounced checks; if it is not, the bank adds a returned check charge to the one already levied. Their bank’s revenue balance grows in either case, and, in addition, they come out looking like somebody’s best friend.
United Torah Judaism’s Yaakov Asher initiated this law, which is a little strange. My guess is that a large segment of the haredi community is experiencing a growth in the number of checks being bounced, and Asher wants to give his constituents some assistance by providing a bit of wiggle room. That the rest of the county might, too, find this law helpful is, well, thumbs up.
The law appears to apply, for now anyway, only to checks. I suspect if it proves to have the desired and expected results, it will be extended to standing orders where tuition remittances, gym membership payments and ongoing charity contributions might be in jeopardy of being bounced back. This law may just be something everyone – coalition and opposition alike - can be proud of. And if the banks stand to reap more profit in the long run, so be it. That their hands are reaching a bit deeper into our pockets is, I guess, a small price to pay for something that is potentially beneficial for everybody.
BARRY NEWMANGinot Shomron
Baby steps
I was pleased for Transportation Minister Merav Michaeli to read of the advent of her child, but I was saddened when I read in “Merav Michaeli has baby via surrogate in the US” (August 22) a description of what has been her mindset during the 54 years of her life that preceded this event.
”It is known that I did not intend to make babies,” she says, and (before the baby) they had “such wonderful lives.” Michaeli claims, “It is wrong to expect women to have children” and that they “can have satisfying lives without having kids.” As if that is not enough, she also claims, “Having a child doesn’t change anything about what I believe regarding the inequality that makes motherhood a burden for women” and “You can be a complete woman without being a mother.”
I wonder whether she will change her opinion of life when she fully enters into the fascinating world of watching and helping a newborn child make its way into world and re-experiencing the refreshing emotion of a child’s first steps and the first time her baby will call her “Ima.”
Will she then continue to glorify the self-centered egoistic lifestyle that she has apparently been advocating these last 54 years ?
LAURENCE BECKERJerusalem
Not so sure about the shore
As someone who grew up at the Jersey shore (in Long Branch) and attended Lakewood Hebrew Day School for eight years, I must take exception to the description of Lakewood as a Jersey Shore city in “Orthodox areas are among fastest growing around NY” (August 22).
I do not know the exact distance, but Lakewood is clearly too far inland to be considered a seaside community. That notwithstanding, it is a wonderful locale, quite worthy of the attention your article provides.
MICHAEL D. HIRSCHTzur Yitzhak
Ben and Jerry’s: Sour berries
I found Ben and Jerry’s complaint about the “hate” directed at them for their reprehensible boycott of Jews in Judea and Samaria to be particularly ironic (Ben & Jerry’s condemns backlash over Israel boycott,” August 20). It doesn’t seem to have occurred to these “woke” buffoons that they are reaping what they sowed.
When your company allies itself with centuries of antisemitic economic discrimination against Jews, there are going to be consequences. When your company donates money to a think tank (the Oakland Institute) which financially supports an NGO (Badil) advocating the end of the world’s only Jewish state, there are going to be consequences. When your company takes actions reminiscent of Nazi boycotts of Jews during the 1930s, there are going to be consequences.
Ben and Jerry’s support of anti-Jewish hatred has evoked justifiably angry responses. If they had an ounce of sense, they would look in the mirror and question the actions they took that generated the reactions they don’t like. Too bad they are too busy discriminating against Jews to bother.
DANIEL H. TRIGOBOFF, PH.D.Williamsville, New York