‘What Makes Terrorists Tick?’

This is in response to Eqbal Ahmad’s article (Editorial Pages, July 8), “Just What in the World Makes Terrorists Tick?”

The opinions presented in the piece are those of a fanatic, and the “facts” presented in support of those opinions are that famous trio of ideological dogma, lies, half-truths and distortions. Ahmad, writing on the motivations of terrorists, attempts to terrorize the truth. Despite your much appreciated policy of providing a forum for all shades of opinion on these pages, I am astonished that The Times would allow such an odious piece of propaganda the privilege of your presses.

Ahmad writes, about the Palestinians, “Twenty years later, they had gained little but refugee doles and a dozen U.N. resolutions. The world behaved as though Palestine had truly been a land without a people. In fact, much--most--of the ancient land of Palestine is what is now called Jordan. The truth is that the Arab world behaved as though the only place for Palestinians was the tiny part of former Palestine which is now Israel. And the truth is also that the political and economic freedoms of Palestinian Israelis are far superior to those enjoyed by the citizens of most Arab states. Do the citizens of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Libya, etc. etc. have the freedoms of speech and religion, and the right to vote for their leaders? They do not, and they never have had these rights.

Ahmad says that the battleship New Jersey “hurled car-sized bombs into the Muslim districts of Beirut . . .” This is first a too-cute attempt to make an artillery shell into a car bomb, thus laying the ground for asserting that a few shells fired at military targets (however poorly they were aimed) are the same as the car bombs that all factions in Lebanon, but especially the Muslims, have used against each other and against the United States. In fact the largest projectiles on the battleship are 16 inches in diameter and less than 3 feet long. I’ve never seen a car that small.

It is totally false and entirely misleading to say, as Ahmad does, that the United States came under attack (by the Shias) “only after Israel’s full-scale invasion of Lebanon in June, 1982,” and the U.S. Marine’s “perceptively pro-Israel, pro-Falangist deployment.” In fact, our Marines were part of an international peacekeeping force, invited in by the legally constituted government of Lebanon. The Israeli invasion was not full scale. There was no attempt to conquer the whole of Lebanon, but rather only to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization cancer that was eating its Lebanese host. The vast majority of Lebanese, Muslims and Christians alike, welcomed the departure of the PLO.

Ahmad equates “militant Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza” with the Nicaraguan contras . This is absurd, and only a fanatic would pretend it wasn’t. Without going into the long and tortured history of the West Bank, it’s enough to say that the actions of its Israeli citizens can in no way be equated with terrorism.

MARVIN WOLF

Huntington Beach