LETTERS: October 9-15, 2009

Palin-Ahmadinejad Parallel

I read Marty Kaplan’s column “I Want to Know What Happens Next” (Oct. 2) holding my breath, because you never, never have a kind or good word about anybody on the right. I can accept your right to do that, even though it turns my stomach. But when I got to the last paragraph, where you put Sarah Palin and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the same sentence, that’s when I really gagged. What’s she ever done to you for you to be so hateful?

So I ask the famous question: Have you no shame? The answer: obviously no!

T. Puskin
via e-mail

As a family counselor, teacher of adult education, author of books and articles, I think Marty Kaplan’s columns are a voice of sanity in an asylum of ignorance.  The Jewish community should be grateful that his lucid outside-the-box thinking is available to us.

Helen Colton
Los Angeles

Fast for Gaza

In response to Tom Tugend’s article “L.A. Rabbis Join Fast for Gaza” (Sept. 25), I have a better suggestion: fast for Israel.

The U.N.-commissioned ultra-biased Goldstone report — blaming both Israel and Hamas for war crimes and human rights violations but saving its strongest denunciation for the Israeli army, not distinguishing the attacker from the attacked — is laughable in the extreme. Where was the Goldstone report during the many years of Hamas’ daily missile bombardment of Sderot and its environs?

As to Rabbi Brant Rosen and his comrades, I am ashamed of them as a Jew for their convoluted sympathy for an organization and its people whose stated sole raison d’être is the destruction of the Jewish people. For shame!
                                                       
                                                       
Charles P. Lefkowitz
Rancho Palos Verdes

Who Killed the Biodiesel Car?

As usual, Rob Eshman’s editorial (Oct. 2) on the demise of biofuel is topical and relevant to the Jewish Community. Using biofuel in his VW as his part in not buying Arab-backed fuel is commendable.

Although the current ban on legal biofuel can be considered a setback in overcoming what President George W. Bush called “our addiction to foreign oil,” Eshman and others opposed to the use of foreign (Arab) oil should be looking forward instead of backward. While one door to a non-fossil fuel source has closed, many more are opening.

I was privileged to have been a member of the Gas-to-Electric.com team that converted a stock Ford Ranger from gasoline to electric in less than 30 days under contract to the “green” City of Santa Monica. This vehicle, displayed at the recent Alt Car Expo in Santa Monica, will serve as a prototype for green fleet vehicles that will enable municipalities and others to reduce their carbon footprint. This was only one of a host of vehicles on display — including Chevy’s plug-in hybrid Volt, which claims 40 miles on electric power and “triple-digit mpg” numbers after that. According to the GM rep, the Volt will be in showrooms November 2010 without fail. The venerable Prius was prominent, as well as other more exotic and esoteric but promising non-petroleum based vehicles such as Prius plug-in conversions as well as fuel cell, hydrogen, CNG and other highly efficient mpg vehicles.

Non-carbon based, renewable sources of electric power that can be used to charge electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles are coming on line almost daily, including a plethora of solar voltaic energy, solar thermal technology led by Israel’s Solel, wind energy, bio-mass, as well as electric vehicle battery-exchange technology pioneered by Israeli Shai Aghassi’s Project Better Place.

I agree that we should bring biodiesel back as a viable automotive fuel, as well as support those who run their diesel on used cooking oil. However, we need to support those agencies, advocacy groups and politicians that continue to support the evolution of technologies intended to help us overcome our fossil-fuel addiction.

Keep up the fight, Rob.

Ralph Krongold
Kagel Canyon

What we need is a complete cutoff of Islamic oil throughout the western world. How do you do that? You restart the domestic oil producing business in this country, pumping everywhere, with tax breaks for wildcatters, building oil wells everywhere we can get to it. We could conceivably stop buying Arab oil within 18 months from today. Then we call on American ingenuity to come up with a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Enlist every possible research lab in the country to come up with something different and useful. Give it a 10-year limit. 

If the evil that is emerging in that part of the world has no money on which to build, then it will crawl back under the rock from which it came.

Larry Hart
via e-mail

Stanley Chais

In the article “Will the Real Stanley Chais Please Stand Up?” (Oct. 2), Tom Tugend asks all the right questions and gives a comprehensive list of the recipients of Mr. Chais’ charitable contributions. One question, however, still begs an answer: How much of his donations, and of other donor’s money, did the recipients funnel back into Mr. Chais’ feeder fund — money on which he collected up to 25 percent commission and which, as we now know, ended up with Mr. Madoff?

Zenon Neumark
Los Angeles

Public School Mitzvah

I was appalled to see the platform The Jewish Journal gave to Steve Zimmer and his made up mitzvah of “convincing middle-class parents to send their children to public schools” (Sept. 25).

Let us be very clear, it is mitzvah to give your child a Jewish education; it is a choice to send them to a public school. That choice is up to each parent; let us not pretend or promote that it is a mitzvah to send your child to a public school.

The greatest gift my parents gave to each of their three children was the gift of a Jewish day school education. It was a struggle, but they did it. It is because of our Jewish day school education that we have our strong Jewish identity and knowledge.

It is my desire to give our son the same gift of a rigorous academic and strong Jewish education in a Jewish day school environment. It is not an easy choice, we do not live in a McMansion or go on lavish vacations. This is our investment and so far we are earning a great return and outperforming the market.

Please let us not confuse Mr. Zimmer’s intent with increasing LAUSD student enrollment and career success with a mitzvah.

Leora Raikin
West Hills

Loving Luntz

No, of course you can’t hate Frank Luntz (“Loving Luntz,” Sept. 25), the professional liar and instigator of near riots at “town-hall” meetings. Heck, as you so artfully put it, “he is so damn clever.”

I like your logic here. Allow me to expand on it: Goebbels was clever. David Irving could be considered clever. I’m sure you’d agree that Ahmadinejad is clever.

Jon Merritt
Los Angeles

Rob Eshman was way too kind to Frank Luntz, concluding that he can’t hate Luntz because “he is so damn clever.”  Clever?  Digging deeper into Luntz’s work, I’d use words like devious, immoral, evil. I’ve never met Frank Luntz, and like Eshman, I do not hate him. But I sure as hell hate what he does. 

Barry Gold
Los Angeles

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