By Andrew Smallwood
Although I have voted for the Democratic candidate for president for years I have always voted for you to represent Alaska in the Senate, and I have not been disappointed. I think you have done a magnificent job for our state.
I believe you to be an empathetic person who could be relied upon to tread, with great skill, the increasingly narrow path of decency in our divided nation. Whenever you came to Cordova you have shown in person what an engaged public figure should be like. You have been an inspiration besides being a gifted performer at Copper River Nouveau. For all this I thank you.
However, I believe that you and I, millions of our fellows, and our current president are engaged in a course of conduct that, when the smoke clears, will leave us and our nation disgraced.
I am 80 years old and grew up in East Africa where I saw plenty of very bad stuff done by my people, the colonial British, but I have never seen anything to approach the horrors we as a nation are inflicting on Gaza.
With respect, I refer you to two numbers that came from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv last Monday. He claims that his forces have killed some 12,000 Hamas fighters for the loss of 231 Israeli soldiers. Of these 197 were direct combat related deaths.
This imbalance, 12,000 to 197, should bring us all up short. Either he is gaslighting us or his war of self defense has turned into a slaughter. Since the Gazan’s have no navy or airforce or army, and their fighters are a ragtag group of poorly-trained boys and men using rockets made of sewer pipes and ancient Kalashnikovs and AK47s bought on the black market and smuggled in through tunnels, it is very likely that these numbers are correct.
You have consistently voted to resupply the Israelis. Bear in mind that Hamas has no source of resupply and I think you can see that, figuratively speaking, we and the Israelis are using a very big stick to beat a very small dog to death.
If that is so we must not, as a nation, be any longer complicit. President Joe Biden appears not to grasp the realities of this issue either because he is so deeply committed to the Israeli cause that he can no longer see that U.S. and Israeli interests have diverged or because he has been left behind by events. In either case we have all come to rely on voices of reason, such as yours, to stop this disgrace in its tracks.
