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Shandaken Doesn't Need Saving

To the Editor:
Crossroads Ventures' Dean Gitter complains in the May issue ["Dean Gitter: The Catskills' Last Resort?"] that he's having "trouble with a highly vocal, highly organized group of people primarily made up of folks who have moved up here within the last 10 years."

That's the pot calling the kettle black. Especially when Gitter is the "highly-organized" one, having or so corporations, investors, consultants, contractors, spokespersons, and law firms working for him, to impose his 600-acre golf-hotel-condo sprawl on the ecologically fragile Catskills watershed.

The sole group I'm aware of that's opposed to Gitter's sprawl is the grassroots Catskill Heritage Alliance (www.catskillheritage.org). That's ten or so organizations for Gitter to one for the people. Apparently, only Gitter is allowed to be "highly-organized."

How does Gitter know who came here in the last 10 years? Is he the regional record-keeper? Is the cut-off for the troubling people 10 years, while everyone else is non-troubling and acquiescent?

New York state rejected Gitter's $300 million Draft Environmental Impact Statement as long on self-promotion and short on ecological and traffic-congestion studies. Is New York state, therefore, "trouble"?
Gitter claims that his speculation will provide hundreds of full and part-time jobs. Sure. At seven dollars an hour it should only take a few years to save up for the million-dollar homes and condos that his scheme provides.

Gitter claims that he's been "actively involved in environmental organizations for years," yet his environmentalism starts by clear-cutting five hundred trees off a mountaintop and replacing them with ornamental shrubs.

A 600-acre, luxury hotels, condos, homes, tourist-shops, restaurants, golf-courses sprawl cannot but worsen droughts, strain power resources, and detrimentally spike traffic and air pollution.
Gitter's investment is embroidered in the sanguine terms of a Marshall Plan, except that the people of Shandaken haven't asked for his help and don't need saving-except from the scheme itself.

—Bob Miller, Shandaken
aristofenes@hotmail.com

A Time for Self-Defense

To the Editor:
Ms. Shields (Room for a View, May) is right. She is complicit with oppressors: her friends the Jihadi Muslims and Hamas-PLO that explicitly have stated they want to destroy the Jewish people, Israel, and the USA. Just check out any of their Web sites. They murdered on September 11 and kill Jews and everyone not like them on trains in India, by kidnappings in the Philippines and Pakistan, in the Olympics, in schools, in stores, in Buenos Aires, in Paris, on hijacked planes, in Djerba, at Seders. They destroy Hindu-Afghan icons and grossly oppress women in every nation they despoil. I have never met one Jew anywhere, not one Israeli that wanted to "oppress" the Arabs. Five million Israelis are "oppressing" 500 million jihadis? Where is it OK in Judaism that one finds sick sentimentalism for those who want to murder their own people? Ms. Shields, you can stop being complicit with oppression by defending your people in their time of great distress. The Jihadi oppressors are counting on your looking the other way when they perpetrate their crimes, as the Nazis did in 1941. There is certainly a time for peace, and always a time for self-defense.

—Harv Hilowitz, Stone Ridge

Shields: A Rush to Judgment?

To the Editor:

Sarah Shields, in a moving letter (May, 2002) to her rabbi father, voices very genuine concerns about violence and oppression in the Middle East. But in her rush to place most of the blame on the Israelis and in her call for withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza she pays no attention to the fact that the so-called occupied territory (territory technically cannot be occupied if it has never had an established, recognized sovereignty) was taken by Israel in 1967 in a war for her very survival against a coalition of aggressive Arab states determined to drive the "Zionist entity" into the sea. Nor does she pay any attention to the fact that Israel has for nearly the entire 35 years of her presence in the West Bank and Gaza been willing to trade land for peace. Indeed, she pays no attention to the fact that Israel has traded land for peace-with Egypt in 1979-and that much more recently the Jewish state was fully in the process of doing the same with the Palestinian Authority. She also pays no attention to the fact that international understandings and UN resolutions call for withdrawal from justifiably conquered territory when and only when it is secure for the victors to do so. It should also be pointed out that giving control of land to the Palestinian Authority has resulted, tragically, in less security for Israel, not more. In return for land there has been, instead of peace, a rash of murderous suicide-bombings.

I agree that the increase of Jewish settlements in the territory proposed for a Palestinian state was in most cases a mistake and retrograde. I also agree that the need for continued Israeli military presence in the Palestinian areas has led to corruption among the soldiers and persistent humiliation of the Palestinians. But what makes Shields' one-sided attack on Israel (she repeats, for example, the unproven and unprovable canard that Israeli soldiers purposefully target civilians) so distressing is that, like too many others, including the European Union, and the so-called international peace activists, she implies that the recent Israeli operation in Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin is an aggression and not an act of self defense. I am startled (but not ultimately surprised) that she focuses so much attention on the alleged Israeli "overreaction" which has unfortunately claimed the lives of some innocent civilians, and not on the consciously designed murders of masses of Jews that elicited the Israeli response. It is good that she doesn't want to be complicit in acts of subjugation and barbarism. But where was her voice when Arafat, at Camp David and again at Taba, rejected the most generous land for peace deal the Israelis ever offered; and where was her voice in the aftermath of that rejection when egregiously inhumane acts of terror were perpetrated at bus stops, pizza parlors, and Passover seders, against innocent Israeli men, women, and children?

—Gerald Sorin, Distinguished Professor of History
Director of the Jewish Studies Program, SUNY New Paltz

Symbols of Real Peace

To the Editor:

In the May edition of Chronogram on page 15, there was a photograph of Rabbi Yisroel Weiss and a Palestinian representative offering "signs of peace" during the April 20 March on Washington. In fact, in the photo, Rabbi Weiss' hand is indeed raised in the "V" for peace symbol. The Palestinian representative's hand was clearly raised in a fist. Until both can stand in front of their own people, and each other, offering the symbols and the promise of real peace, there won't be any.

—Kathryn Conroy

The Limited Education of Sarah Shields

To the Editor:

Sarah Shields-I fear there are things that your father has left out of your limited education. The poor Palestinians had ample opportunity to live in peace if they wished. First in 1947 and then again at Camp David with Clinton and Barak. They are the ones who chose occupation, by waging war, and terrorist campaigns against Jews. Arabs who chose to live in Israel and work side by side as Israelis were not occupied or downtrodden as their militant brothers who chose the territories as a breeding ground for raising children to murder innocent civilians merely because they are Jews.

Did your father ever tell you about the "world's sense of right" as it stood by watching the Holocaust without a thought to all the injustices done to the Jews? This International Law that has you so enthralled was devoid of a conscience when all the Arab countries attacked Israel again and again.

Sure the Arabs in the territories have it bad, but it's because their leadership will not allow them to see that the olive branches offered them by Israel time and time again are roads to peaceful (if not loving) coexistence.

I can understand the Chassidic belief regarding the Messiah in relation to the land of Israel (although I disagree), but to stand with Palestinians who commit mass murder of children, not during combat, but in discos and restaurants and buses is disgusting and makes them no better than the murderers.

Talk about being used. You have opted to turn your back on your people, not because they are terrorists, but because they have finally ceased to be the underdog. There are those Jews who only are proud of Israel when they are being murdered, when they are the underdog. But, let Israel finally defend itself, and secure its citizens and all of a sudden they become the bully.

No Sarah, it is not the Israelis, but rather Arafat who deserves your wrath. For he is the one who has rebuffed the Israeli government when they have tried and tried to give the Palestinians what they want (within reason) and have offered much for peace.

—Rochelle Marshall, Monroe