Dear Mr. Goldberg,

I just wanted to thank you for this and your many other wonderful columns. I am a 45-year-old Chicago-born child of Iranian immigrants who came to America in the 1950's. Though my father received a somewhat religious education in his youth, we are definitely NOT the militant variety of Muslims. I've become something of an anomaly lately, in that I'm the only Middle Eastern American of Islam heritage that I know of whose position on the Middle East conflict is entirely pro-Israel. To be blunt, though I once had more sympathy for them, I can't stand the Palestinians, and I think they will deserve their misery until they finally grow up. All of this despicable crap being floated about concerning the "Zionist lobby" and Jewish conspiracies has been making me gag with fear for the future, and rage at the irredeemable stupidity of supposedly enlightened leftist intellectuals in America and Europe who are helping to legitimize this talk.

With respect to Germany, however, I spent several months there in the summer of 2000, and that whole time the biggest running news story throughout the country was the threat posed by neo-Nazi "Rechtsextremismus". There had been a number of extremely ugly acts of violence committed, mainly in the East, against asylum seekers from a variety of Third World countries, including the murder of a man from Mozambique who was supporting not only his German wife and kids, but his relatives back home. Much of this racist violence was aimed at people coming from Muslim countries, and moreover, there has always been a feeling of resentment over the purported unwillingness of Turkish immigrants - and their German-born children - to integrate more completely into German society. I don't blame the Germans for resenting the separatist attitudes of some non-European immigrants, but I think that some of the subterranean yapping about Israel may be fueled by a renewed sense of shame over the way Muslim immigrants are regarded by many Germans.

Personally, I have never felt uncomfortable in Germany, including in the East, but I think the Germans are suffering from a severe case of moral inconsistency. Racist incidents against foreigners, and racist rhetoric against Israel, or Jews generally, seem to me to be fostered in that country more by a liberal wimpiness than any renewed aggressiveness on the part of Germans themselves. I sensed a genuinely spineless attitude in how they deal with the Skinheads, with people often describing them as "verirrte Kinder" instead of as brutal thugs who deserve a good whipping. I think this spinelessness carries over into how they confront (or refuse to confront) Muslim racists who commit anti-Jewish outrages. They seem to be joining in the anti-Israel invective more out of fear of Muslims-in-their-midst than out of genuine hatred of Jews. Whatever the motivations, however, I find their behavior shameful, and I think it provides a stark lesson in how a completely "pacifist" mentality fosters evil more than it prevents it.

WASHINGTON/BAGHDAD, 27 September — US warplanes struck Basra airport in southern Iraq and knocked out its radar yesterday, as Russia poured cold water on Washington’s efforts to win official UN backing for making war on Baghdad. Iraqi television said "US ravens of evil carried out another aggression at 00:45 a.m. (2045 GMT on Wednesday), targeting Basra international airport," in an attack a government spokesman called a "terrorist" act.

Nov. 21, '05.
Dear Sir, -- I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn for adults exclusively, & it always distresses me when I find that boys & girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean, sweet breath again this side of the grave.
Most honestly do I wish that I could say a softening word or two in defense of Huck's character since you wish it, but really, in my opinion, it is no better than those of Solomon, David, & the rest of the sacred brotherhood.
If there is an unexpurgated in the Children's Department, won't you please help that young woman remove Tom & Huck from that questionable companionship?
Sincerely yours,S. L. Clemens.
I shall not show your letter to any one -- it is safe with me.

The most pervasive censorship, of course, is the copyright law, which prevents all of us from using other people's creations. The concept is very logical, but the extent and application are almost arbitrary - the length of protected copyright has varied enormously and of course is the topic of constant debate between copyright owners and disseminators. Plagiarism as a crime makes sense but has to be weighed against the social benefits of wide dissemination. If an obscure writer creates a brilliant work but nobody reads it - and his work is then plagiarized by a writer whom everybody loves and reads, thereby informing and uplifting millions of people, then perhaps a greater social good has been performed, at least in the short run. In the long run, however, it could stifle creativity. In any event, copyright and plagiarism aren't black and white issues and the FFathers - and indeed the Romans - knew the stakes were high in formulating these laws.

Your column reminded me that one of the rare instances of the use of poison gas was by Nasser. In 1958, Nasser inspired Egypt and Syria to combine as one nation, the United Arab Republic (citizens were called, simply, Arabs, and it was to be the beginning of a universal Arab state). Yemen joined the UAR within a few months, and the name was changed to United Arab States. Officers in Yemen then rebelled and Egypt tried to put them down, without doubt using poison gas. This was a dirty, secret little war - it so happens that NANA had a very reliable reporter there (I believe former LA Times guy, who later went back to LA Times). Nobody paid much attention to it, but it went on for a few months. I tried to find a reference to this in google but no luck. World Almanac doesn't mention it, nor Columbia Encyclopedia, but I'm sure any standard history of Yemen would cover it, that is, the war - but the poison gas, maybe. The United Arab States broke up a couple of years later when Syria pulled out.