Seattle Times helping to tighten Israel’s noose

The Thursday headline of a full-page Seattle Times story refers to Israel’s “dirty little secret” [“Holocausts survivors’ poverty is Israel’s dirty little secret,” News, July 8]. On Friday, the headline over a Nicholas Kristof op-ed alludes to “ugly” Israel [“In Israel, the noble vs. the ugly,” Opinion, July 9]. As the international noose tightens around Israel’s throat, Seattle Times headline writers provide more than their fair share of the rope.

— Edward Alexander, Seattle

Don’t forget Holocaust survivors around the world

Rapidly aging Holocaust survivors are struggling in many parts of the world, not just Israel. Those in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are some of the poorest Jews on earth.

They have received a triple whammy of late. In addition to increased medical and other aging-related costs, they have been hit hard by decreased government benefits and services due to the weak economy worldwide. The economy is also affecting charitable dollars that are sent around the world to care for the aging Jewish population who rely on food baskets, prescription medicine, home visits and community centers paid for by Jewish communities in North America and Europe.

We urge individuals to be generous and help Holocaust survivors locally and around the world know that we will never forget the Holocaust, and we will never forget the Holocaust survivors.

— Richard Fruchter, president, Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, Mercer Island

A poor choice of art

It was bad enough that The Seattle Times chose to reprint a vicious opinion piece by Nicolas Kristof [“In Israel, the noble vs. the ugly,” Opinion, July 9] published in The New York Times the day before. The Seattle Times then made another, even worse choice — to embellish the text by adding a shocking graphic of a spray-painted Jewish star, dripping onto another prone Jewish star.

To me, a Jew, this graphic immediately evoked the graffitied synagogue walls and vandalized Jewish shop windows of Berlin in the 1930s. Opinion pieces such as Kristof’s are very one-sided and takes on the tragic conflict devastating the area since the Arabs refused to accept the UN’s resolution to establish Israel in 1947.

There are two sides to a political discussion about the history and causes of this ongoing conflict in a region in which Jews and Arabs have co-existed for thousands of years, although we rarely see these two sides in T Times. But The Times’ choice to illustrate this opinion piece with a defaced Jewish symbol also illustrates The Times’ own slant on the conflict as a whole and pushes the debate past the political into blatant anti-Semitism.

— Chaya Siegelbaum, Seattle