Ongoing violence by Hamas shares close connections

Editor, The Times:

Whatever the reasons Israeli soldiers had for boarding the vessels headed for Gaza, which left several dead and many injured, the international response was immediate and urgent —nothing like the relative silence that greeted the quieter reporting of Hamas leveling dozens of homes and beating men, women and children. [“Israeli raid brings broad condemnation,” page one, June 1.]

It was noted that the Israeli forces would deliver goods to Gaza and not seize them. What many forget is that Gaza is under control of Hamas, whose declared policy is the eradication of Israel. They have previously demonstrated their zeal in this regard with many months of rockets fired into Israeli civilian targets.

There is little question of the tragedy that loss of life in times of hostility brings even to the innocents of each party. Israel had prohibited such movement [of supplies to Gaza] as a matter of its own security. Whether this response was excessive or not is open to debate.

What is not open to debate is that the same nations now calling Israel to account for the action at sea seemed quite content to remain calm and quiet as Hamas militants beat men, women and children as they were driven from dozens of homes by their own government.

— Joseph Honick, Bainbridge Island

Why help?

When we asked the Israeli government to go slow on settlements, officials told us to pack sand.

Now they are in a very big jam over this awful flotilla raid and I am wondering why we should lift a finger —in the U.N. or elsewhere —to help them out this time.

— Charlie Blackman, Seattle

Aggressors posing as victims

The collection of Islamic suicide bombers and left-wing “activists” who made up the passenger list of the Turkish ship that tried to break the Israeli blockade of Iran’s puppet regime in Gaza calls to mind the French saying: “The more things change, the more they remain the same.”

Instead of the Nazi-Soviet alliance of 1939, which planned to subdue Europe and make its Jews into a pariah people, we now have the Red-Green alliance driving the U.N. into a massive propaganda war against the pariah state: Israel.

And now, as it was in 1939, the “useful fools” of liberalism are complicit in the masquerade of aggressors posing as victims.

— Edward Alexander, Seattle

Israel, North Korea in the same boat

I wonder how much comfort Israel gets in realizing that its assault on the Gaza-bound aid ship, which killed many people, puts it in the same moral “boat” —pun intended —as North Korea, which torpedoed a South Korean vessel.

Maybe is time that the international community did something about reining in the growing number of nuclear-capable rogue states such as these two.

— Bill O’Meara, Seattle