Urging Strafford County delegates to support nursing home: Letters
Urging Strafford County delegates to support nursing home
Dec. 6 — To the Editor:
I am really hoping the county’s delegates of state representatives will finally approve the proposed Strafford County nursing home. To follow the process and watch it being rejected is terrifying for all involved. Residents, employees, all deserve a much needed new home. Riverside Rest Home has had the reputation of not being a "Taj Mahal" but a place where the residents are loved and well cared for. New Hampshire has a high number of Baby Boomers, and we should be honored to give them a beautiful, state-of-the-art home to rest in.
Kathy Sessler
Strafford
Why hasn't Israel defeated Hamas?
Dec. 2 — To the Editor:
Before the Oct. 7 attack, Israel had nearly 150,000 active-duty members in its military. After the attack it called up 350,000 reservists giving it 500,000 men and women in uniform to attack Hamas’s 30 to 40,000 fighters. It has been seven weeks and Hamas has not been eliminated or largely degraded. How can this be? Israel has war planes, tanks and armored vehicles that Hamas does not. It is better armed, well trained and claims to know where Hamas has its tunnels and control centers. So why hasn’t it defeated Hamas?
The answer is evident from Israel’s actions. Instead of going into the tunnels where Hamas’s fighters are living Israel’s bombs have destroyed the half of Gaza City and many residences in the south of the country. They cut off electricity fuel, food and water from Gaza. Without water, electricity or fuel to run generators Hospitals stopped functioning causing many deaths that should have been saved. Israel then invaded the hospitals and ordered everyone to leave without provided any transportation to the injured any place they could be treated. They ordered the one million residents of Gaza City to leave and go to the southern portion of Gaza. These acts are war crimes.
As of Dec. 1, Israel’s bombs and shells have killed 71 journalists, more than 100 employees of United Nations agencies, 200 medical workers plus hundreds of their family members. It has killed over 14,000 Gazans including 5,300 children. Of those killed 60% were women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Thus far, Israel has displaced 1.7 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents. After forcing Gazans to move south, Israel began bombing and shelling southern Gaza. As of December 1, it has ordered those in the south to move to Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. This can only be to force Gazans out of Gaza and into Egypt.
If Israel had gone into the tunnels and eliminated Hamas’s military wing, I do not believe America would have stood by and allowed this massive destruction of the civilian residences and the displacement of so many. Thus, Israel talks about eliminating Hamas, but concentrates on giving Gazans no safe place to live.
Israelis may not care today about these war crimes, but there may come a day when those in Israel’s government or military are arrested when they travel to a European country that has pledged to send war criminals to the International Court of Justice where there are no statute of limitations and people have been prosecuted decades after committing their crimes.
Jews in America may also pay a price for supporting Israel’s actions and calling criticism of Israel antisemitic. Associating Judaism with the actions of Israel is dangerous. Since the presidency of Donald Trump white nationalists have become very public and are openly supported by some Republican members of Congress. What happens when white nationalists can say if Jews think it is OK to do this to others it must be OK to do it to them. Christian countries were responsible for the Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms in eastern Europe and the Holocaust. Antisemitism has long existed in Christian countries. This is why Israel needs to exist, but not act in ways which endangers the diaspora.
Walter Hamilton
Portsmouth
Only surrender by Hamas will lead to peace
Dec. 11 — To the Editor:
In his latest apologetics, Robert Azzi states “there is no room for any support or excuse for any of Hamas’ war crimes. They are happening because Schumer, Biden, Netanyahu, and Hamas’ leaders” - followed by a long list of excuses for Hamas’s war crimes. If he believes there are no excuses, he should stop making them.
Azzi quotes Nelson Mandela, who advocated for Palestinian rights, but he did so calling for a 2 state solution, which for myriad reasons in the intervening years, has failed. He fails to note that at that time, Israel’s leaders were also in favor of a two state solution. Hamas was not.
Here’s another doozey of a quote from Mr. Azzi’s recent trope. “protests which appear in some cases as some sort of embrace of Hamas and its goal of the elimination of all Jews and the state of Israel.”
Appear?!? Some sort of ?!? People are marching in the streets and on campuses chanting “Intifada Now;” I have seen the footage. That is an explicit call for violence against Jews and that is overt support for Hamas’s goals. I have heard Palestinian American academics on the radio saying that what happened October 7 was legitimate armed resistance, Israelis getting what they deserved. Does that not make me sit up in my chair?
I have written before that I personally am appalled by the suffering of the Palestinian non-combatants. I acknowledge that Israel should have done far more to provide safe havens to which they could flee, without weapons. We as Jews are held to a higher ethical standard than any other nation in the world, and I welcome that. Consider, however, that Hamas has placed its military positions in schools, mosques, hospitals and residential zones making civilian deaths unavoidable, thousands of martyrs to be used as political pawns in a global chess match while their leaders sit safely in Beirut and Doha. The Israeli soldiers who are doing the actual fighting are not responsible for that. They are mostly reservists called upon to protect their families, and that’s what they are doing.
Many in the streets and at the UN are calling for an immediate cease fire, which would leave in place the Hamas’s war fighting capability. Do not mistake that for peace. The immediate path toward ending the violence is for Hamas fighters to come out from the tunnels and surrender; for Hamas to lay down its arms. Only then can we address the humanitarian disaster, discuss peace and Palestinian rights.
Jeffrey Cooper
Portsmouth
The rich keep getting richer due to US tax policy
Dec. 11 — To the Editor:
I was flabbergasted to read USA TODAY writer Daniel de Visé’s article entitled “Top 1% richer than entire middle class” in the Dec. 11 Foster's, not because the headline was a surprise (it wasn’t), but because of his stunning statement: “Why the rich keep getting richer, compared to everyone else, is a topic of recurring debate among economists.” This was followed by the equally mind-blowing statement by Scott Hoyt of Moody’s Analytics: “If there were a good answer to that question, I think the policymakers in Washington would be all over it to fix it.”
Are you kidding me? These people are either ignorant, complicit in the ongoing impoverishment of America, or just plain obtuse. The reason all the wealth is flowing upwards, to the detriment of everyone else, can be explained in two words: tax policy.
It began with the Reagan tax cuts in the 80s that primarily benefitted the wealthy, Wall Street, and big corporations. The Clinton years were marked by a budget surplus (mostly due to the internet revolution) and we began to pay down the national debt. Then George W. Bush came along and, instead of continuing that responsible fiscal policy, enacted another big tax cut that mostly benefitted the wealthy. That was followed by the massive Trump tax cut that again went almost exclusively to the top. These irresponsible tax cuts added trillions to the national debt. Instead of the promised “trickle down,” we were slapped with a huge “trickle up” that hollowed out the middle class.
During the 1950s and early 60s, the top marginal tax rate was 91% and the middle class (and the economy) was thriving. Now the top rate is 37%, and the middle class is shrinking. Meanwhile, the ultra-wealthy can afford attorneys to find loopholes that often allow them to pay much less than the top rate. They can also buy politicians (mostly Republicans) that will happily lower their taxes even more. In recent years, billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk literally paid zero in federal income tax.
So to claim that economists are scratching their heads over how income inequality could be so bad is beyond ridiculous. And to have someone like Hoyt claim that, if only politicians could figure out why, they’d hurry up and fix it is equally absurd. Politicians (again, mostly Republicans) don’t want to fix it because it helps make them and their rich buddies richer.
Sloppy journalism like Visé’s and gaslighting by supposed “thinkers” like Hoyt are part of the reason this country is in the fiscal mess it is in.
Jim Mastro
Dover
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Urging Strafford County delegates to support nursing home: Letters
