Presidential Evil Not Presidential Courage

Letter to the Editor of the Boston Globe

Dear Editor:

According to Rich Barlow's review of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989 ("Looking back at presidential courage and folly," Boston Globe, May 29, 2007), the author Michael Beshloss finds that "Truman's recognition of Israel in the election year of 1948 was marbled with political calculation, but in the end it was principle -- his longstanding admiration for Wilsonian human rights and his belief that a Jewish state, after the Holocaust, was a logical extension -- that guided his decision."

Such analysis is questionable. In 1947 the Holocaust had not yet clouded American ethical judgment as it did after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and application of Wilsonian principles would have meant rejecting Zionism as an affront to the concept of democratic self-determination. Zionists may wish it otherwise, but Truman supported the theft of Palestine by racist Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazi colonists purely as an opportunistic tactic to gain victory over Dewey at the sacrifice of the native population of Palestine.

Even if Truman's decision had been brave, it was still completely evil as a matter of ethics, and it has gradually poisoned US foreign policy and domestic politics to the point that a political clique, whose primary loyalty lies with Zionism, has manipulated the US government into invading and occupying Iraq to the benefit of the State of Israel and to the detriment of America. In the end Truman may have created the necessary conditions for the possibly permanent harm that George W. Bush's presidency has done to American democracy.

Joachim Martillo

Mattapan, MA 02126-2813

Original Boston Globe article: http://tinyurl.com/3y3k8v

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