Matters Of Fact

To the editor: The mass insanity that now pervades the United Nations was on display once again on Friday, when by an overwhelming 143-9 vote, with 25 abstentions, the General Assembly "adopted a resolution declaring that Palestinians qualify for full-member status." According to the UN Charter, "Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states," where the word "other" refers to non-founding states. The Palestinian Authority is obviously neither peace-loving nor a state. Even Mahmoud Abbas, the lifelong terrorist whom the UN calls the "President of the State of Palestine," implicitly recognizes he is not the president of a state each time he describes what a future Palestinian state will look like. How far the United Nations has fallen from its founding ideals! Sincerely, Alan Stein Submitted to the Boston Globe May 11, 2024 ... and this was more than a week before the United Nations Security Council stood for a minute of...

To the editor: President Biden saying "There's the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos" (Biden eyes center on protests, May 3) was fine as far as it went, but he missed an opportunity to provide needed moral leadership. He should have pointed out the war in Gaza was started by Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups on October 7 with their barbaric terror attack, giving Israel no alternative to defending itself. He should have pointed out Israel has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid harming civilians and, unlike even America when fighting wars, has been expediting the delivery of food and other humanitarian aid to the very people it's defending itself against. President Biden should have pointed out the safety of Americans depends on Israel succeeding in this war against proxies of a brutal Iranian theocracy which also has a rallying cry "Death to America." Our president has a legal obligation to uphold the right of citizens, whether th...

To the editor: The Boston Globe has been running many articles about the so-called "Pro-Palestinian" protests on college and university campuses, but they all lack important context whose inclusion would completely change the false perception created by those articles. As repeatedly noted by John Spencer, America's foremost expert on urban warfare, the steps Israel's army has taken to minimize civilian casualties go beyond those taken by any other army in history and the proportion of civilian casualties in Gaza has actually been far less than in any comparable war. It is thus clear that those protesting Israel's actions and calling for a premature ceasefire - which would be a death sentence for the remaining hostages who haven't yet been murdered by Hamas and guarantee more atrocities, more death and more devastation in Gaza - are either grossly ignorant, anti-Israel, antisemitic or anti-American and likely fit in several of those categories. The moral and pr...

Dear Editor: One can only laugh at the report that Khalil al-Hayya, referred to as a top official of the barbaric Hamas terror group, said Hamas would disarm "if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders." That would be about as likely as it bringing back to life the babies it decapitated and incinerated on October 7. And don't the Palestinian Arabs claim there already exists an independent Palestinian state? Mahmoud Abbas calls himself the president of the "State of Palestine" and is recognized as such by most of the members of the United Nations, as well as the UN General Assembly. Would Hamas disarming even make a difference? Would Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah or any of the dozens of other Palestinian terror groups also disarm? Would Hezbollah send its 150,000 rockets back to Iran? Would the Houthis stop launching missiles at Israel? Would the Iranian mullahs stop leading chants of "Death to Israel" and "Death t...

Dear Editor: UN agencies have been claiming the people in Gaza are on the brink of starvation almost from the moment of Hamas' barbaric October 7 attack on Israel. In the article "Palestinians forced to flee from homes," which didn't mention they were fleeing because Hamas was launching attacks, including rockets, from their neighborhoods, the Geneva director of the World Food Programme is quoted as saying "We are getting closer by the day to a famine situation." Meanwhile, observers on the ground in Gaza have noticed "Gazans are throwing away the airdropped military meals" and vendors are taking what they've received free as "humanitarian aid" and selling it "for 1/4 the price they would be found in Israeli supermarkets!" Could that be one more reason the October 7 massacre has such strong support among Gazans? Given the food inflation in the United States, maybe we should brutally attack Israel and reap the benefits of plu...

Dear Editor and Mr. Cotter: I noticed a factual error and some curious language in the May 6 article "For protesters, networks of support," by Sean Cotter and Lila Hempel-Edgers and Alexa Coultoff, Globe Staff and Globe correspondents. I did not find emails for Ms. Hempel-Edgers and Ms. Coultoff on the Boston Globe website, so I would appreciate it if you would forward this message to them along with others on the Globe staff and any Globe correspondents who contributed to the article, since I obviously have no idea of who was responsible for error and curious language. The error was in the second paragraph, in which there was a reference to what was incorrectly called "Israel's retaliatory war." The war was started by Hamas with the massacre it perpetrated (along with PIJ, Fatah, other terror groups in Gaza and thousands of ordinary Gazans) on October 7. What Israel has done is a response to Hamas' opening attack, but cannot be called a retaliation. Curious...

To the editor: Barbara Jezioro's misguided letter, "U.S. must stop funding Netanyahu's war effort," should have been called "U.S. must strengthen Hamas so it can attain its genocidal goal." There is no such thing as "Netanyahu's war effort;" rather, the world's only Jewish state has been forced into an existential war to prevent Hamas from carrying out its promise to repeat its indescribably evil massacre of October 7 "again and again," a slaughter perpetrated - with assistance from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah, other terror groups and thousands of ordinary Gazans with funding and training provided by Qatar and Iran - in pursuit of its stated goal of the destruction of Israel and the murder of not just every Jew in Israel but in the entire world. To demand the United States stop assisting Israel in that just and necessary effort is effectively to demand America betray its ideals and abet Hamas and those other Palestinian Arab ...

Dear Editor: On October 7 an avowedly genocidal Palestinian Arab terror group perpetrated the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, committing atrocities that would have made most Nazis blush. America's foremost expert on urban warfare has determined that, during the war started with that barbaric attack, Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties than any other army in history. This is corroborated by the fact that while the United Nations recognizes the ratio of non-combatant to combatant deaths in modern warfare to be nearly 9 to 1, the ratio in Gaza was calculated to be no more than 1.2 to 1 even before Hamas admitted it didn't have firm documentation for a third of the deaths it was claiming. Yet the article "Hundreds attend pro-Palestinian protest at Yale" (April 21) quotes protesters calling on Yale to divest from "companies complicit in the ongoing genocide against Palestinians." This leads to the obvious question: Are those protester...

 Dear Editor: Re her article "Republicans Wanted a Crackdown on Israel’s Critics. Columbia Obliged," Michelle Goldberg apparently doesn't recognize the difference between cracking down on bigoted students vigorously supporting Hamas terrorists and calling for the destruction of democratic Israel - something they have the right to do and which hasn't been impeded - and cracking down on "students" for disrupting the operation of a university and making it unsafe for real students whose parents are spending nearly a hundred grand a year to give them an education. Sincerely, Alan Stein Sent to The New York Times April 20, 2024.