Monthly Archives: November 2023

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by Reid Fitzsimons

The Gaza Strip is a piece of land in the Southwest corner of Israel mostly occupied by Muslim Arabs. It was under the control of Egypt until the “Six-Day War” in 1967, when Israel defeated the surrounding hostile Arab countries. In subsequent agreements and accords, Israel agreed to give up control of both Gaza and the area usually called The West Bank, and in 2005 Israel completely withdrew from Gaza, giving autonomy to people referred to as Palestinians. In the subsequent two years, a group called Hamas, dedicated to the annihilation of Israel, wrested control of Gaza from another group- Fatah- that had agreed to the idea of peaceful co-existence with Israel, in a conflict sometimes referred to as the Palestinian Civil War. Hamas has long been classified as a terrorist organization, yet has the legitimacy of being the established government of Gaza, beating out Fatah in elections in 2006 44 to 41%; no elections have been held since. On Oct. 7th of this year, well-armed Palestinians (reasonably called terrorists) attacked Israel at the direction of Hamas, and a slaughter of over 1,000 Israeli civilians ensued.

A Brief History of an Enormously Complex Situation

The first issue is: who exactly are the Palestinians? My historical understanding is that they were basically hapless Arabs who found themselves living in an area contested for centuries, a land controlled by empire after empire, especially the Muslim Ottomans into the modern era. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after WW1, decisions about the area called Palestine (from the Biblical Philistines) were made by an array of international bodies and powerful countries- especially Britain- often with conflicting interests. Post WW2, in light of the Holocaust, the newly created UN came up with a division of the the area called Palestine, about half to be Jewish and half Arab. When the British, who maintained a modicum of peace, bailed out on May 14th, 1948, the independent nation of Israel was declared within the boundaries set forth by the UN, and on May 15th it was attacked on all sides by Arab/Muslim controlled countries (a war the Arabs thought would be “A parade without any risks" and last about 2 weeks, considering their combined militaries had vastly superior armament).

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by Reid Fitzsimons

Susquehanna County is a rural part of Northeast Pennsylvania that voted about 70% for Trump in the 2020 election: not the land of "embracing diversity" and all the other meaningless racist and progressive drivel associated with the Democrat party. So several months ago, when suspicion emerged that the local library system was going to change its book lending policy to allow minors to borrow items without their parent's knowledge, there was discontent. This took the form of mass attendance at library board meetings and associated defensiveness from the library establishment, lots of charges and counter-charges, and Letters to the Editor of the local paper, several submitted by me. Below is a recent one I composed, which hopefully is self-explanatory. In this case I went a step further and actually contacted the library director, wanting to separate the facts from emotion, which proved interesting.

To the Editor:

I would like to offer some analysis on the letter from Bernard Remakus that appeared in the Nov. 1st issue of the Transcript and concerned the controversy over library policy; he made several arguments in favor of the establishment powers, so to speak, all varying from ill-considered to specious. Perhaps the most obvious of the latter is the statement, “For parents who want to know everything their children are reading, the board has allowed them to do so by having their children register with the library on the same library cards their parents use.” The disingenuousness of this false anodyne places it in the realm of absurd: would the board somehow forcibly prohibit linking parent’s cards with their kid’s (* see below)?

Dr. Remakus offers us a placating and saccharine line, “Society is, and has always been, built on the family….” followed by lecturing parents that they, “Also have the responsibility to engender trust and respect in their children, and engage in constructive and educational dialogue with their children about what is appropriate to read and what may become more appropriate to read at some later time,” then insultingly concludes, “For parents who implicitly trust their children or, for any other reason, don't feel the need to supervise their reading preferences, the board has allowed their children to access books with a library card of their own.”

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