LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 2- October 2009

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

 

Dear Sir:

Thanks for the journalistic diversity and honesty displayed in your September issue with the publication of contrasting accounts of Jews in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Herbert Piekow’s “My friend Ursula—the Jew from Shanghai,” a heartrending account of atrocities inflicted on Jews in the 30’s and 40’s, evokes compassion and sympathy from any sensitive reader. No fair-minded person would dare to deny or belittle the personal horrors and hell endured by Ursula and her family, not to mention the tortures and deaths of countless other Holocaust victims.

In dramatic and ironic contrast is Jim Muir’s masterful and revealing piece, “The Microcosm of a Nation or the Curious Case of Elie Wiesel.”

Muir raises a painful question which angers many who refuse to acknowledge the ugly reality that exists in the Middle East today: is there a distinction between Hitler’s treatment of the Jews and Israelis’ treatment of Palestinians? The details may differ, but the hatred, injustice, dispossession, and humiliation are gruesome in their similarities. The abused have indeed become the abusers.

How sadly ironic that the iconic peace laureate Wiesel remains stoically silent, unwilling to condemn the present conditions inflicted on the Palestinians by the State of Israel.

Your magazine’s willingness to provide an open forum for information which some circles would prefer to suppress is both courageous and admirable. Thank you!

James Ewing

Raul Ramirez #68

San Juan Cosala

387-761-0068