HEZBOLLAH’S THE
MURDERER —
IN ISRAEL AND IN LEBANON

I am concerned
about your editorial comment regarding Israel (“Cease Fire,” Urban Journal, July 26). I
posit a very unlikely hypothetical: Al Qaeda is
lodged in homes and office buildings in Niagara Falls, Canada. With no apparent cause, they have crossed
the RainbowBridge and seized two US Border Patrol officers and
dragged them across the border, killing eight others in the process. When the US crossed the border to retrieve them they
launched a rocket attack on Niagara Falls, Buffalo, and Rochester.

Just how happy
would our citizens be if we did not try to stop the attacks with the excuse
that civilians would be hurt and killed by our attempts to stop it? We would
not tolerate it.

Israel responded to attacks on its soldiers followed by indiscriminate rocket
attacks on its civilian population. The very nature of low-tech, inaccurate missiles
is that there is no concern about where they land or who is killed. Israel is using precision weapons attempting to
hit military targets that are intentionally imbedded in a civilian population
to cause just the kind of backlash your editorial represents.

Failure to wipe out
the source is to agree to live next to a ticking time bomb. Hezbollah and its
backers have made no secret of their goal: it is the destruction of Israel and pushing any surviving Jews into the
sea. So long as they have one rocket, they will bide their time waiting for the
most painful moment to use it.

A cease fire must
be monitored by some impartial international force. There has never been such a
force. The UN in the guise of UNFIL has monitored the importation and hiding of
over 12,000 missiles and the building of major underground bunkers by a known
terrorist organization in Lebanon, Hezbollah, over the past 6 years. The head
of the UN condemned Israel for the death of four UN soldiers and THEN
called for an investigation. What is to investigate? The condemnation has been
issued. For all we know, the UN outpost was on top of a Hezbollah outpost. They
hide behind school children and hospitals and mosques. Why not the UN?

Israel cannot trust any international agency with its survival. It has a
history of having those very organizations help the enemy and then vanish the
moment they are supposed to prevent the attack. Read your history of 1967. The
UN and the US provided a buffer between Israel and Egypt. Egypt said “leave,” and they were gone in a week.

There is an
international force guarding the Erez crossing from Egypt into Gaza to prevent the importation of weapons into Gaza. Within a week after setting it up, the
Israelis witnessed the guards turning a blind eye to weapons crossing into Gaza.

A cease fire is a
chance for Hezbollah to rearm. Without continual pressure on ports and the
airport and the roads from Syria, vast caravans of weapons will flow from Iran through northern Iraq into Syria for distribution to the hidden Hezbollah
fighters. The weapons are already in Syria awaiting a breather so they can move.

I was recently in Nahariya, a lovely beach resort community not more than 10
miles south of Lebanon. The hotels are closed, the beaches are deserted, and the people are
living in their safe rooms. Every building, every home has one. The hotel we were
in had a wonderful play room in the basement outfitted with a great assortment
of kids’ playground equipment and a heavy blast door and ventilators.

Israel has lived with the threat and the reality of attack since its founding
58 years ago. The Arab world attacked on the day of the creation of the state
and told its people to leave so they could kill everyone indiscriminately and
they would be able to return in a week. They did not succeed then, and they
made no provision for the refugees they created, and thus we have the displaced
Palestinians 58 years later.

I hate the death of
innocent people, all innocent people. Hezbollah is the murderer in Israel and in Lebanon. We in the US have more to fear from Hezbollah today than
from Al Qaeda. They have no regard for human life and
will hide behind their mothers’ skirts while firing rockets into Israeli towns
and villages.

Paul Goldberg, East
Avenue, Rochester

AUTHORITY SECRETS

For decades, the Monroe County Water Authority was required
to hold hearings on water rates and other consequential matters. But in the
1970s, when Republicans controlled both houses of the State Legislature, Assemblymember Don Cook of Henrietta introduced legislation
exempting the authority from public scrutiny. (The legislation required the
authority to routinely report — but not publicly — to another agency, the
State Department of Transportation.)

At the time, the Democrat and Chronicleconsidered it too routine to report, but I wrote it for the old
weekly, the Rochester Patriot.

So we arrive at the present. While assessing and spending
millions in public funds, the Water Authority does not report publicly.

With the State Legislature politically divided, I doubt that
the Water Authority, now staffed and led by Republican appointees, will again
be required to report to the public.

Unless, that is, Eliot Spitzer’s expected gubernatorial
victory carries over into the State Senate, and the Democrats take over there.

Mitchell Kaidy, Crittenden Road,
Rochester

SAVING BABIES

Lorie Banker was one of my son’s nurses eight years ago in
the Strong Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (“Present Tense,” July 19). Born at 24
weeks and weighing just over 1.5 pounds, our baby had the dubious distinction
of being the smallest and one of the sickest babies born at Strong that month.

During the four months our son was in the hospital, during
the seemingly endless hours each day I spent sitting next to his incubator, I
became very attached to his team of nurses and
developed enormous respect for their skills, knowledge, and compassion. While
the physicians who supervised and made all the decisions about our baby’s care
would see him during rounds for a few minutes, it was the nurses who were at
his incubator side literally every minute of every day.

Now our son is a completely healthy, happy, intelligent,
wonderful 8-year-old boy. I will be forever grateful to Lorie and to all the
nurses who cared for my baby and who, frankly, cared for me, too, during what
were the longest, scariest, hardest days of my life.

Thank you for highlighting the extremely important and very
difficult work they do. Anne Merideth, Brighton

WRITING TO CITY

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North Goodman Street, Rochester14607.

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This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2006.