Matters Of Fact

Sent to the Boston Globe January 29, 2025: Dear Editor: Reading the article "For Palestinians returning north, elation and despair" (Wednesday, January 29, 2025), I can't help but think of an important lesson it contains. When you choose a government made up of barbaric genocidal terrorist thugs and that government turns most of the homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and UNRWA facilities into armories, including tens of thousands of rockets, builds an extensive network of subterranean terror tunnels underneath civilian structures and with entrances into many of them, turns the civilians into human shields, repeatedly launches rockets and other terror attacks against a peaceful, democratic, sovereign neighbor and then launches a barbaric attack, beheading babies and burning them in ovens, gang raping innocent young women before murdering them and then bringing their dead, half-naked bodies back as hostages and parading them before cheering crowds, that sovereign neighbor t...

 Dear Editor: In her pillorying of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, most recently in her article "A disservice to the Jewish people," she blames him for what she calls "inexcusable" Israeli behavior. She's wrong about her "facts" and unjustified in her opinions. She refers to "10 months of Israeli bombardment that's killed over 39,000 people." It's been more than two months since the United Nations - no friend of Israel - recognized that Hamas had grossly inflated the number of deaths of women and children, yet Rutgers continues to use Hamas' totally unreliable figures. She also ignores the fact that the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths, at roughly 1 to 1 and possibly significantly lower, barely 1/9 of the wartime norm of nearly 9 to 1 expected by the United Nations itself. She ignores the fact that, until Benny Gantz recently left Israel's war cabinet, it was that war cabinet, not Netanyahu, that determined Isr...

Dear editor: On July 27, Hezbollah launched an Iranian-supplied rocket from southern Lebanon, murdering 12 children and teenagers playing soccer in the Israeli town of Majdal Shams. According to the August 3 article, "Hezbollah forces resume steady rocket, artillery fire against Israel," UNIFIL, the United Nations "peacekeeping force" in Lebanon, told Reuters it "had not investigated the incident" because the Israeli town "is outside its mandated area of operation. The rocket was fired from the Lebanese town of Chebaa. Like thousands of other rockets Hezbollah has fired at Israel since October 7, it was fired from south of the Litani River. UNIFIL was expanded and strengthened after the war Hezbollah started in 2006 and given the mandate to ensure no armed militias, including Hezbollah, had any presence south of the Litani River in southern Lebanon. This was to be a prelude to the official Lebanese army being the only armed force in all of Lebanon. To...

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: I am distressed by what was revealed by Bernie Sanders' op-ed, "No more US complicity with Netanyahu's war machine in Gaza." It revealed that a long-time United States Senator could be incredibly ignorant. Putting aside the fact that Israel currently has but one brigade in Gaza, which hardly comprises a "war machine," it's not Netanyahu's war and it's not against the Palestinian Arab people. The Israeli army has been doing what a united Israeli public demands, knowing that not succeeding in what President Biden himself acknowledged must be done - destroying Hamas - would be a disaster for Israel. An not just for Israel. If Israel doesn't succeed in destroying Hamas, it will be a disaster for America and for the entire democratic world, a disaster which might be impossible to overcome. Israel is fighting a just and necessary war against evil and, contrary to the misinformation spread by Sanders, it is fighting it in a highly mor...

To the editor: It's just over six months since Hamas, along with other terror groups and thousands of ordinary Gaza civilians, perpetrated the worst slaughter of Jews since the Shoah. Polls in November showed 98% of the Arabs in the Palestinian Authority and Gaza felt more proud of their Palestinian identity thanks to that atrocity. Israel had no alternative but to defend its citizens to prevent Hamas from carrying out its promise to repeat that slaughter "again and again." Despite the vile nature of its enemy, Israel has done more than any other army in history to prevent unnecessary harm to the civilians in Gaza, few of whom are actually innocent. My first thought, reading the headline "I'm Jewish, and I've covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them" of Peter Maass' April 9 commentary was that it's pretty clear he's hallucinating. This was confirmed "again and again" by the content of his misguided article, but he really went...

To the editor: In the April 4 article "Keeping heat on Biden over Gaza," Senator Elizabeth Warren is quoted as saying "This is not about politics. This is about doing what's right." Unfortunately, she has things backwards. That's how it should be, but lately it's been all about politics and not about doing what's right. President Biden has to stop trying to get the votes of the pathological Israel-haters. He needs to stop looking for excuses to criticize Israel. He needs to help put an end to the tragedy in Gaza by standing solidly with Israel as it works to effectively eliminate Hamas and the other terror groups which have been busy strengthening themselves, repressing the people and continually attacking Israelis ever since Israel completely left Gaza in 2005. Instead of relentlessly criticizing Israel, he should be recognizing our democratic friend has done more than any other country in history to minimize civilian casualties and its efforts have...

This was sent to the Washington Post on February 2. To the editor: For years, every time the Palestinian Arabs rejected peace, increased terror attacks or launched yet another war, Israel was pressured to make more concessions, rewarding Palestinian perfidy and leading to more violence and pushing peace further away. Rather than learning from those deadly mistakes, in his February 2 column, "The U.S. tacks hard toward a Mideast 'moment of truth,'" David Ignatius pushes for doubling down on them. Not even mentioned was the role the Biden Administration's pandering to the head of the snake, Iran, had in leading to Hamas' October 7 massacre. That slaughter, in which Fatah also participated, should have made it obvious even to those to whom it wasn't before that pushing for a Palestinian state prior to a fundamental change in Palestinian Arab society was insane. Sincerely, Alan Stein