Arab ‘Oneness’

G.H. Jansen’s lyrical paean to “Arab . . . emotional . . . sentimental oneness” (Opinion, Jan. 19) is naive and misleading in the extreme. From the murder of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat to the countless attempts to assassinate King Hussein of Jordan, King Hassan of Morocco, to the vicious killings among rival Palestine Liberation Organization factions, the current South Yemen civil war, to the oppression of Lebanese Arabs by Syria, Arab past and present history attests to the bloodcurdling feuds between Arabs everywhere.

Even more distressing is the fact that the many oil-rich Arab nations, while choking on their wealth, cynically let their displaced Palestinian “brethren” continue to wallow in their filthy, miserable camps after almost 40 years, when they could so easily rehabilitate them, as did Israel with the far greater numbers of Jews driven out of Arab countries in which they had lived for centuries.

Arab sentimental oneness? My foot!

HENRI TEMIANKA

Los Angeles