"Credible allegations" that Israel is no friend to America

Letter to the editor in today's paper.

ISRAEL: This doesn't look like friendship

In her denunciation (Open Forum, Dec. 17) of Irving Greenbaum's letter dealing with the Palestinians, Michelle Miller resorted to the adage, "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"

Here's another variant of that ancient maxim: With a friend like Israel, who needs enemies?

Outrageous? Consider the following:

1954: Israeli agents provocateurs firebomb U.S. Information Agency libraries in Egypt (the Lavon Affair).

1956: Israel invades the Sinai against the explicit wishes of the Eisenhower administration.

1960: Israel illegally obtains enriched uranium from an American source (the NUMEC Affair).

1967: Israel premeditatedly attacks the USS Liberty, a U.S. intelligence-gathering vessel operating in international waters, killing 34 Americans and wounding 171 others.

1968-1970: Israel uses American-supplied warplanes to severely damage the East Gohr Canal in Jordan, an irrigation project funded by tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

1982: Israel initiates a massive invasion of Lebanon, illegally using American-supplied weaponry in the process. Some 260 U.S. Marines are killed in Lebanon during Israel's occupation.

1985: Jonathan Jay Pollard supplies about 800,000 pages of classified American documents to Israel.

Ongoing activities: Support of Israel continues to extract enormous sums from the American taxpayer. In year 2004 dollars, direct foreign aid to Israel alone exceeds $250 billion — indirect costs have been estimated in the trillion-dollar range; Israel repeatedly ignores American end-user agreements and technology transfer contracts regarding weapons technology supplied to her; Israel cynically ignores United Nations' resolutions condemning her occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan, and East Jerusalem, areas to which she has no legal claim whatsoever. Then there are the credible allegations that Israeli security services were aware of the 9/11 plot but conveniently failed to alert American authorities.

Obviously, the notion that Israel is an American "friend" is wide open to discussion.

DAVE MORTON
Longmont

Even if it were true that Israel knew about 9/11 beforehand, it doesn't change the fact that it wasn't Israel who attacked us. It was Arab Muslim terrorists. Hullo?