Letters
DEAR EDITORS: I've been intending to send some money to support AGENDA. Noam Chomsky's The Big Picture" (JUNE 1987) stimulated me to do it now. Keep up the good work. Thanks, Stewart Marquis ANN ARBOR
Please renew our subscription to AGENDA for another year. We want to encourage the kinds of stories and information reported in AGENDA-and nowhere else. Ed Vandenburg Vicki Vandenburg ANN ARBOR
WE OBJECT!
In the June issue of AGENDA appeared an article by Alan Wald eulogizing Benjamin Linder, the young volunteer killed in Nicaragua last April by the contras. Most of the piece focuses, appropriately, on the ideals displayed by Linder and the lessons which can be learned from his life: humanitarianism, internationalism, and a quest for social justice. There are two very disturbing paragraphs, however, in which Wald abruptly shitts the focus away from the ideals exemplified by Linder, and in the process ends up betraying them. Wald states that "Ben was a member of New Jewish Agenda and Hebrew prayers were said at his funeral . . . Yet it is no secret that the Israeli state plays a despicable role on the side of the oppressors in Central America, South Africa, and the Middle East. As is to be expected, Linder's murderers in the Reagan Administration- such as Elliot Abrams - are enthusiastic defenders of Israeli policy." The Mourners' Kaddish, an Aramaic prayer, was said at Linder's funeral because he was Jewish, not because of his membership in any organization or any connections to "the Israeli state." Moreover, it is not clear what Israeli policy has to do with the prayers said at Linder's funeral, even if they had been in Hebrew. Undoubtedly, most of the funeral service was conducted in Spanish, yet Wald neither mentions that nor condemns Pinochet's Chile on the basis of it; that would be absurd. (There may have even been some prayers in English, and we all know where that is spoken.) And there seems to be no reason for singling Abrams out of a cast of characters which includes Schultz, Casey Kirkpatrick, McFariane, Poindexter, North, Secord, Singlaub, et. al., aside from his one distinguishing feature: his Jewish name. Wald compounds the confusion when he goes on to introduce the Klaus Barbie trial into the scenario, and attempts to use it, unbelievably, to attack the Jewish community: "It is not unlikely that some elements in the Jewish community will use the emotions generated by the Barbie trial to increase support for Israeli nationalism and expansionism." Apart from the fact that Wald is unable to cite any cases of the use of the trial for such purposes, it is difficult to see the relevance of either the Barbie trial or the potential (imagined?) misuse of it to the life of Benjamin Linder. That Linder chose internationalism over nationalism, as Wald goes on to say, could be illustrated much more clearly and directly without reference to either Barbie, Israel, or the Jewish community. The inclusion of these gratuitous remarks calls into question Wald's real agenda. His attempt to make his point by juxtaposing Linder's life with the hypothetical actions of the Jewish community smacks of the "good Jew/bad Jew" comparison used to rationalize anti-Semitism, or more generally, racism of all stripes for ages. How can we account for such offensive statements from a supposedly progressive person in an otherwise laudable eulogy for a dedicated humanitarian? It appears that Wald has allowed the strength of his convictions to overwhelm his powers of reason. In using the tragedy of Benjamin Linder's death as on occasion for Israel-bashing and Jew-baiting, he has violated the values he claims to be propounding: humanitarianism, internationalism, and social justice. We find this profoundly regrettable.
David C. Gurk
endorsed by the Ann Arbor Chapter of New Jewish Agenda
June 25, 1987