In his letter to the editor (April 6), [Jonah Zern] describes a close-minded Israeli consulate officer hanging up on him rather than heeding his intellectual argument against current Israeli policy. [Zern], with his best Easy Bay liberal intentions, may fail to realize that his own mind is not entirely open.The current state of Israeli affairs is not neces- sarily the result of narrowly defined media-hype history. Pundits may not care to admit it, but the current conflict is nothing but another stage of a thousand-year Crusade.The Arab-Islamic world once controlled a vast empire, expanding across three continents, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Currently, that same shrunken empire sees itself surrounded by a cadre of "others" -- Hindu India to its east, Communist China and post-Soviet Russia to its north, Christian Europe to its west, and, most egregious, Jewish Israel on its west bank. Cornered, the Arab-Islamic world is, understandably, afraid.Current mid-east violence, the tit-for-tat attacks between Israeli and Palestinian pawns, is a mere manifestation of a larger chess match, a cold war between Arab and American oil-producing interests.Undoubtedly, Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians, and Lebanese would all prefer living in peace. But mid-east peace threatens Arab-Islamic oil interests -- Iran and Iraq, in particular -- and these states, among others, support the peace- disrupting terrorist tactics of Hamas and Hezbollah.
For [Zern] to blame Israeli pawns for the cold-war strategies of two veiled chess masters is a grave misunderstanding. Rather than rally against Israel and its effort to protect itself, Zern might position himself in the UC Berkeley library, research the history the media denies him, and discover for himself that he, too, is simply a pawn in a larger rhetorical war.
