Hi Mr. Ettefagh:

I read your article and a few answers to it. As usual, respondents are divided along racial/ethnic lines. What is the use? People, old and young, educated and less educated, men and women are so full of hate and blind to the facts that it is sometimes disheartening to even bother talking to them. I believe that "man" stills lives in caves--some call them ocean-view homes or mansions, but I still call them caves; because he has "caveman's" mentality. He is afraid of predators, including his own kind. Who ever designed/created/big-banged our universe did a pretty f---ed up job.

Kam[-Korder]

The writer suggests that zionism is racism and that all groups deserve a chance to interact with one another.

We have seen positive interactions b/w Israel, Egypt, Jordan. A majority of Lebanese would welcome peace and normalization with Israel. Unfortunately, their country has been hijacked by Islamofascists supported by Iran and Syria.

How do you think Nasrallah wants to interact? on April 9, 2000,
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared, "The Jews invented the
legend of the Nazi atrocities," and argued, "Anyone who reads the Koran and the holy writings of the monotheistic religions sees what they did to the prophets, and what acts of madness and slaughter the Jews carried out throughout history... Anyone who reads these texts cannot think of co-existence with them, of peace with them, or about accepting their presence, not only in Palestine of 1948 but even in a small village in Palestine, because they are a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment."

The only interaction Nasrallah and the other Islamofascists are interested in is the destruction of Israel and the killing of all the Jews. Asking Israel to try and work with Hezbollah is like working with the Nazis. They must be destroyed, there is no other way. It is kill or be killed -- that is all they understand and will accept.

Is the current war a war of religion or of philosophy. We have throughout history used religion as the scape goat for the strained rational of tyrants and their ignorant followers who have been manipulated and indoctrinated into blind faith. Is religion the cause of the current crisis in the Middle East or is it the failure, inability of certain cultural leaders to accept change. We are beyond the point of arguing the legitimacy of Israel and the lip service given to the Palestinian state, which most Arab States ignored before the creation of Israel anyway. It is time to move forward. However some states wrongly believe that it must continue the old rhetoric and support the radicals as a means of mainting control over their own citizens in the name of a pure culture. Cut the rhetoric at the top and watch the people at the bottom start to get along.
Wars are not started by the people who fight them, the little guy, they are started by the Governments and the Governors who do not fight them.

I know one fact and it is this : wars are fought by militarily superior powers and they will find all sort of reasons to justify it.
The weak have the choice, to either go under slavery like my ancestors did in India when it was colonised by the British or fight it out like the Red Indians and be all killed.

I know one fact and it is this : wars are fought by militarily superior powers and they will find all sort of reasons to justify it.
The weak have the choice, to either go under slavery like my ancestors did in India when it was colonised by the British or fight it out like the Red Indians and be all killed.

I know one fact and it is this : wars are fought by militarily superior powers and they will find all sort of reasons to justify it.
The weak have the choice, to either go under slavery like my ancestors did in India when it was colonised by the British or fight it out like the Red Indians and be all killed.

"A blitz on Palestinians or Lebanese in reaction to kidnappings by admittedly belligerent parties . . . ."

This reference to "admittedly belligerent parties" exposes the hypoocritical mind-set that keeps the Middle East cauldron boiling. Hamas and Hezbollah claim to be belligerents vis-a-vis Israel, in the sense of international law, until the moment that they are treated as such by Israel and subjected to full-scale warfare by the Israeli military. The sad fact is that Hamas and Hezbollah themselves are fighting full-scale warfare, bringing to bear all the military power they can muster against Israel. They exercise restraint only to the degree that they believe it will serve their ends--the destruction of Israel. If they had the means to render 500,000 or more Israelis homeless, or exterminate them outright, they would do so in the blink of an eye. The leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah have demonstrated clearly, for all the world to see, that they have succumbed to the temptations of war even as they gained civil authority in the Palestinian Authority and the Lebanese government. They are cowards, falsely wringing their hands over the suffering they have brought down upon the Palestinian Arabs and the Lebanese. They have reaffirmed the definition of war of the late Father Daniel Berrigan: War is a coward's escape from the problems of peace.

Well, now we know the party line in Tehran.

Perhaps Mr. Ettefagh will favor us next with an explanation of what Israel has ever done to Iran to earn the hostility of its government and the continual Iranian subsidies sent to a terrorist group on Israel's northern border. He might also share with us his theories as to what the Iranian people gain from their government's expensive policy of encouraging conflict in the eastern Mediterranean.

I would have thought that some of the tens of thousands of victims of the Bam earthquake in 2003, or the hundreds of thousands of Iranians now at risk from another one, might appreciate seeing some of the money their government spends on Hezbollah spent for their benefit instead. Perhaps the Iranian people are endowed with a unique capacity for self-sacrifice. Or perhaps their government doesn't care about them. Mr. Ettefagh is a worldly and sophisticated man, so I'll rely on him to clarify this great mystery.