Hanania again gets it wrong

Ray Hanania's recent column, headlined "U.S. must be fair to achieve peace in Middle East, " confuses two separate issues and repeats many of the false claims he made in his April 2 column. One must also take into consideration the similar item he wrote in the Jerusalem Post that same day headlined "Keeping Israel safe from Qatar".

He frames his column by stating that President Bush has proposed increasing aid to Israel and "has also proposed giving $20 billion to six Gulf Arab states including Saudi Arabia, our chief Arab ally in the war on terrorism."

He has it backward. Bush proposed the advanced arms to the Arab states, and the aid to Israel was proposed to offset the increased threat these sales posed to Israel. Israel wouldn't need any of these increased arms if we weren't giving some of our most advanced arms to countries officially at war with Israel.

Hanania, in his Jerusalem Post column, mocks the ability of the Gulf states to attack Israel from the Arabian Gulf. Israel may not be worried about Qatar directly attacking, but these arms could fall into the hands of Hamas or Hezbollah.

Hanania also has apparently never looked at a map or he would see that Saudi Arabia is barely five miles from Israel at its closest point, with air bases along that border. The advanced ships could be used to blockade the Israeli port of Eilat.

These weapons aren't just a danger to Israel. Look at the recent disclosure that 190,000 assault rifles that we supplied to the Iraqi army are now in insurgent hands being used to kill U.S. troops.

The militaries of these states are never going to be strong enough to defend against a concerted attack by Iran or Iraq without U.S. assistance. Look at how fast Kuwait, with all its American weapons, fell in 1990 to Iraq. The Saudi military is intentionally fragmented to protect against a military coup against the royal family. Al-Qaida is reported to already have infiltrated the Saudi military. These regimes are not totally stable, including Egypt, which could be taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood. In a few years U.S. troops could be battling against these very advanced arms.

Which leads to the point against the arms deal regarding the Saudis specifically. With allies like these who needs enemies? The Wall Street Journal and New York Times report that between 40 and 50 percent of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia. The Saudis refuse to stem the border flow of these terrorists. State-sponsored Wahabi imams preach terror acts in Iraq.

Finally, I want to respond to Hanania's claim that "terrorism does not have an ethnic face." Tell me, Mr. Hanania, how many Christian or Jewish suicide bombers have there been in the last year? The last five years? The last 10 years? They have been almost exclusively Muslim extremists. That is not American bigotry on the matter: that is plain fact.

Steven Peck

Riverwoods