I salute Sandy Tolan for having the temerity to give voice the long-muffled cry of Palstine. This issue has been suffocated for nearly 60 years as the United States, ever a sucker for "the Holy Land" and the consummation of "End Times" Christian Eschotology at the expense of Arabs now and Jews later (when Jesus finally shows up with the avenging host, etc., etc.) has created a new mythology for the Jewish people - and an old, never-ending grief for Palestinians.

That's right, that's what I said. When The Holocaust (as opposed to just any holocaust) was finally and fully brought to light the good christians and Jews of America, in league with the brand-new United Nations, chose the most vulnerable people in the most useless part of the planet and handed it over, with then still-colonial Great Britain's brilliant assistance, to start the clock ticking toward the Final Battle and, at the same time, to assuage international guilt over having allowed the first atrocity (the murder of millions of Jews, Polish people, Gypsies, homosexuals, and...well, the list is quite long, but only Polish homosexual Jews of Gypsy descent really get more than an asterisk in the Holocaust's list of victims)by allowing yet another atrocity - or catastrophe - to be committed against the Palestinian "wogs" about whom no one really gave a rat's ass anyway, even though Germany owed the debt and rightly ought to have given up a part of its Western partition to serve as a Jewish state, where it would have made sense on every level.

But, as one reader said, the A-rabs should "get over it" because this all happened almost 60 years ago. I've never heard anyone (with the possible exception of some frog-faced, red-necked Ku Kluxer, anyway) tell the Jews of the world to "get over it" because the holocaust took place more than 60 years ago. It's a close call. The Palestinians just didn't quite make the cut. A year or so earlier and I guess it would have mattered.

Now then: consider this, all apologists for the US, Great Britain, the otherwise useless UN, and all other whining, keening supporters of Zionism because it's....well..it's...uh...yep, that's right, because it only means something to Zionists and Fundamentalist Christians when you get right down to it, but a thing repeated often enough becomes true, even as Hitler's Big Lie took on a life of its own. So any one of you comfortable, overfed honkies sitting in your big-ass American house one day hears a knock at the front door and goes to see if it's the UPS guy only to discover it is the US, Great Britain, the UN and 600,000 random Jews on the front lawn, with the leader serving written notice that from here on out you and your family will be living not in your house but will now dwell out in the detached garage. All of you and any stuff you can fit in there with you. And if some of you get killed during the move, oh well.

But the outrage doesn't stop there. You endure the discomfort and the indignity and the simple wrongness of the garage for nearly 20 years and then, all of a sudden, the same group shows up again, only far more heavily armed, a lot fatter and with a lot more muscle, and tells you only the back corner of the garage can be used for your living purposes because, well, we got friends over for the next 40 years at least, and they need somewhere to keep their stuff.

I guess you wouldn't live each day in a state of Kafkaesque perplexity at best, and out and out rage at worst. Oh, no you wouldn't. You'd welcome this displacement based on some crusty Biblical/Talmudic documentation with open arms. I'm sure.

It's all in the perspective. And God help the crew that shows up at my door to deliver me that kind of news, because I'm an American and, for a limited time at least, still have the support of popular sentiment behind my right to remain in my house, undisturbed. But then again, I am an American. Not a "wog", not a "sand nigger", not a "camel Jockey", a "towel head", not something less than fully human. So far, anyway.

Of course, once Pat Robertson gives the JDL learns of my address all bets are off.