To the Editor (and potentially concerned others):

The column by customarily excellent activist Ray McGovern linking the American Civil Rights struggle to the addition of the "Audacity of Hope" ship to the flotilla to help break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, which is getting a lot of press these days, poses an insurmountable problem for me. I know the Civil Rights struggle well, through not only being involved in it but having written an award-winning book on it: The Healing of a Nation, which gained the same national award given a year earlier to Martin Luther King.

Out of an experience including my being a World War II veteran, while concerned with the plight of the Palestinians, in the case of Gaza my sympathy is overwhelmingly with the Israelis. Here way out of all proportion to its “sins” is this frightful new worldwide wave of antisemitism on the rise focused on Israel as the prime villain. Here is this tiny little enclave of democracy surrounded on all sides by Islamic extremists brought up from birth to hate it, not only proclaiming its destruction, but actually repeatedly having tried to demolish it in the past. And here we have Iran setting out to build the nuclear bombs---only one of which, as they herald, can wipe out Israel in a single burst! Plus repeated attacks by suicide bombers destroying Israeli mothers and children in schools and market places. Plus to top it off---in regard to the vaunted flotilla to bring justice to the Palistinians---an entity in Gaza not only controlled by Hamas, dedicated to destruction of Israel, but actively now, in day after day perpetual warfare, lobbing rockets across the border to blow up Israelis.

If you were an Israeli---knowing of the indifference of the world during the Holocaust---would you welcome the arrival of ships set in motion to end the Israel inspection of all ships headed for Gaza? Would you sit quietly and do nothing knowing that the Arab plan is for the ostensibly "good ships" to be followed by a stream of "bad ships" bearing more rockets, missiles, etc., regularly supplied by Iran, Hezbollah, with funding by Syria, wealthy Saudi Arabians, and misguided U.S. groups?

Or would you endorse the present mild, non-violent blockade that could mean life rather than death for yourself, your children, and your tiny embattled country?

Justice versus injustice? When will the thousands of well-intentioned progressives wake up to the fact they are being sucked and suckered into the new Islamic hate Israel ploy? When will they realize the "civil rights" cause for our time is to fight for the Israelis AND the Palestinians against the Arabian and other overlords who stay in power by fomenting rather than lessening hatred of the Jews.

David Loye is the author of widely respected books on the use of the brain and mind in prediction, political leadership, race relations, and is the developer of new theories of moral sensitivity and evolution.