Critical of the public Pinter

Your long paean to deceased playwright Harold Pinter [“Stilled Voices: Sardonic, Sexy,” by Charles McNulty, Dec. 27] mentioned that he was “truculent in his speeches” and railed against American foreign policy. You left out all the vicious, loathsome things he said about Israel, as well as America, perhaps in order not to speak ill of the dead.

But we should not forget that Pinter supported international boycotts of Israel, had stated that Israel was responsible for all the unrest in the world, stated that the one situation that outraged him above all else was the Israeli “injustice to the Palestinians,” and accused Israel of possessing and using weapons of mass destruction. He described America as “a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics” and stated “there is a vast Gulag going on in America.”

His plays may have some interest, but I certainly will not mourn him.

Carl Pearlston

Torrance