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Also this issue: Don¹t Make Me Pull Over Postal Bees Blight Out |
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April 18-24, 2002
mailbag
(Re: News, "The Deer-Hunter Hunter," Pete Mazzaccaro, April 4)
The recently completed deer-killing operation in Fairmount Park was punctuated with deviousness, untruthfulness and recklessness.
During the third week of January, shooting did occur in the park behind homes on the 8200 block of Winthrop Street where Beverly Gay resides. And on March 8, government shooters were spotlighting on a small hill in the same area. The words "U.S. Government" were on the green truck's plate. They had been traveling the paths, all right, looking for deer as they went. So much for [Fairmount Park Commission chief of staff Barry] Bessler's promise to Gay to keep shooters away from that area.
Dead deer were also found on park trails by park users following the nights of shooting. One had a bullet hole in the head below an eye. During a conversation with a park police sergeant, I was told that the shooters weren't in the park the nights before the deer were found. I watched them each night in the park. Mysterious, for sure. Confounded even.
The Park Commission assured a safe operation. Bessler had spoken with me about the safety zone on Feb. 1. But there was no safety zone to speak of. Little did the public know that the government shooters scoured residential streets spotlighting for deer on many nights. One night, March 1, a shot rang out. I was nearby, watching them from a hidden location. A deer was shot about 10 feet from the curb.
This issue is also about trust, respect and propriety. It needs to be put under a microscope. All involved must be held accountable. The guidelines directing the killing operation must not be kept secret any longer. Enough.
Bridget Irons
Chestnut Hill
(Re: Arts, "Losing Faith," Toby Zinman, April 11)
I am so dismayed by Toby Zinman's review of Missing Link at the InterAct Theater Co. that I must write in protest. The play moved and challenged me so much that I sent messages to all my friends and colleagues and students about the show, and in response I've received countless notes thanking me for the recommendation. Missing Link is a searing, probing look at loss, love and vision that taps into the pulse of what it means to be human in a moment of tragedy -- but if you're looking for easy answers or sentimentality, you won't find them here, because the play and the direction of it are edgy, risk-taking and gutsy.
Based on a plane crash in 1996 and chosen for the season last spring, the play is uncannily prophetic in its dealings with terrorism, Muslim and Jewish tensions, and international crises as reflected in individual lives. And there are wonderfully hysterical moments with two Southern women who go on Virgin Mary sightings all over the United States!
I hope your readers will ignore Zinman's cynical, narrow, reductive review and check this incredible play out for themselves.
Elizabeth Thomas
Philadelphia
(Re: Slant section, April 11)
The historian Perry Anderson notes that "the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine is a clash between two nationalisms, a kind of which the last century has been full." Sharon Nader-Sloan's recent Slant, "Been Had," denies this historical fact and obfuscates the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Contrary to Nader-Sloan's description of deserts, swamps and Bedouin-strewn "wastelands," Ottoman and British-mandate-era Palestine had a large urban Arab population and a distinct civil society. This society possessed roots going back hundreds of years, including decades of coexistence with the Jewish minority. Neither should readers give credence to Nader-Sloan's cant about Arab homogeneity. Anyone interested in a serious treatment of this subject should consult Beshara Doumani's book Rediscovering Palestine (University of California Press, 1995), which describes a Palestinian Arab identity already present in the historical records of the Ottoman Empire.
Nader-Sloan asks, "What makes a separate people?" The shockingly simple answer is, "When a people define themselves so." In terms of language, religion, ethnicity and political beliefs, Arab Palestinians are far less diverse than the American colonists of the 1776 Revolution. Nader-Sloan argues that Palestinians "were never a separate people before the new state of Israel." But the lack of a Palestinian state in the past cannot obstruct the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people: Even the Founding Fathers could never have satisfied this condition! The United States is founded on the right to national self-determination. Would Nader-Sloan have condemned Americans to perpetual colonial government?
We appreciate City Paper's commitment to airing both sides of this difficult issue but ask that the paper -- and all its correspondents -- work hard to base dialogue in historical fact, and not political myth.
Matthew Hart
Karim Olaechea
Philadelphia
Rania Awwad's April 11 Slant, "Casualties of Conflict," offers a hugely distorted perspective on Israel's efforts to defend its civilian population from anti-Jewish terrorism directed by the Palestinian Authority, funded by Saudi Arabia and consciously tolerated by Europe. Yet Awwad's comments about Israel causing "a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions" and a "catastrophe" are unexpectedly revealing.
If the so-called "Palestinians" (before 1948, by the way, the term denoted Jews who lived in the land that would become Israel) and their impassioned supporters are so deeply upset by human suffering, then I wonder about the intriguing silence of the Islamic world, the European nations and "peace activists" regarding incidents that have exacted a far more grievous toll on human life.
Where was the condemnation of the calculated slaughter of 20,000 civilians in Hamma, Syria, in February 1982 by Hafez-al-Assad, the late father of that country's current dictator, Bashar? The brutal, random murders of thousands of innocent Muslims civilians in Algeria, by Muslim fundamentalists, throughout the 1980s? The forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian guest workers during the Gulf War by the autocracy of Kuwait? The Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, a horrific eight-year-long bloodletting which resulted in the deaths of nearly 1.5 million soldiers and civilians, in conditions akin to World War I trench warfare? The hundreds of deaths from violence between Hindus and Muslims in India just a few months ago? The untold civilians dead in Russia's anti-terrorist war in Chechnya?
What these episodes share is that they're cruelties committed by Muslims against other Moslems, or in Chechnya, suffered by Moslems. Given the silence about these and other innumerable, real atrocities, the animus of the "Palestinians" and their supporters against Israel is more than a little disingenuous and highly revealing. In the same way that the simple existence of a vibrant Jewish state infuriates some by refuting their values and prejudices, it's even worse when Jews dare to shatter an ancient stereotype by daring to take up arms in self-defense. That's why Israel draws the wrath of so many. It questions, refutes and demolishes the beliefs that people live by.
It's obvious that the "Palestinians," America's "moderate" petroleum-glutted Arab "allies" and their avant-garde cheering section are not at all upset about human suffering, so long as certain peoples are both the perpetrators and victims. Those kinds of "humanitarian crises" are taken for granted.
Michael Moskow
via e-mail
(Re: Pretzel Logic, "Blind Faith," Howard Altman, April 11)
Your juxtaposition of John Street with Giora Becher is truly reprehensible. Local politics versus the survival of a people do not make for easy or natural comparisons -- what imagination you have. Were buses blowing up every day on Market Street and children being slaughtered in pizza shops around town with frightening regularity, I wonder how your sympathies for the downtrodden would play? And I wonder what this country's reaction would be? (There may be, depressingly, two different answers to these questions.)
And a word about the downtrodden. They had it all -- a country of their own and the chance to negotiate for more. Why did they walk away from this? Is it not clear that a country was not their main objective -- that extermination was? By your distinguishing between this form of terrorism and 9/11 terrorism, rewarding the former and legitimizing it with political credibility, you just open the door for exporting suicide bombers worldwide.
And, regrettably, I think it will come to pass outside of the Middle East. But I would never be so presumptuous to encourage you to alter your position based on fear over principle. However, no matter how well-educated and intelligent you are, you have an obligation to do your homework and know your history. Knee-jerk, predictable class politics, the bending over backward to seek moral equivalency (where there is none), cannot obscure the barbarism that has been inflicted on a democratic people and their right to protect their citizens. Sharon may not be Ghandi, but Arafat would be Hitler if he could.
Steve Cohen
via e-mail
