Source of violence

A Letter to Burlington Free Press    August 13, 2001

        I am outraged with our government's inaction in the face of Israel's repeated extra-judicial killings. They are assassinations, pure and simple, and they set an extremely dangerous president for the conduct of international affairs. U.S. has the moral responsibility to challenge the Israeli government's use of this abhorrent practice, and we should do so unequivocally and at once.

        As a citizen whose taxes fund and ever more aggressive Israel the uses U.S. helicopter gunships and other war materiel to attack and besiege a civilian population, we must demand that our government immediately cooperate in dispatching international observers to protect the civilian population at risk, primarily Palestinians but also Israelis.

        We alone among the international community, as witnessed by our lonely votes in the U.N. Security Council, have turned a deaf ear to the moral imperatives of the situation, which daily grows more savage.

        I urge everyone who wants peace in the Middle East to contact the administration and Congress and demand that the U.S. - as cosponsor of the peace process and the primary sponsor of the Mitchell Commission - use its strong influence to implement the commission's recommendation to halt the expansion of Israeli settlements. After all, it is the occupation - hammered into place to protect these colonial outposts - that is the core of the problem and the root source of the violence.

KRISTIN PETERSON-ISHAQ

Essex