Correspondence

...Doidge explains why the meeting went forward, albeit delayed by a few hours for diplomatic "distance" between the violence and the meeting with the perpetrator...

...Further, to claim that radically evil personalities such as Hitler and Arafat cast a spell over people of conscience could absolve Germans under Hitler and Arab Palestinians under Arafat from any responsibility for crimes carried out under the direction of their leaders...

...Neo-Nazis and radical Communists made the penetration of Europe by Palestinian terrorism possible during the period of the Munich Massacre...

...The only solution will be to force a peace on the Palestinians, while the United States tells the surrounding nations to deal with it in no uncertain terms...

...AMY LAURA HALL Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics Duke Divinity School Durham, NC AMBLING TOWARD IDIOCY REGARDING DAVID BROOKS's otherwise superb "Among the Bour-geoisophobes" (April 15), I would like to offer a few words in defense of the "conservative pessimism" that contends that "the solid capitalist values America once possessed have been corrupted by intellectual currents coming out of the universities...

...They will have no choice but to accept it, especially if punctuated by a regime about to take action in Iraq...

...what I question is the virtue of many of our putative leaders...

...Unfortunately, that will not stop the progression of what Damon Lynch and others have started...

...Arafat's conflation of Christian and Islamic anti-Zionism has resulted in the broad spectrum of hostility towards Israel manifested by the united Nations...

...If this thesis were ever accepted, it could provide an alibi for those who fail to resist genocide and those who fail to bring mass murderers to justice...

...The reason seems to be that the Israelis have stepped out of the role that has been assigned to the Jews by these wise people...

...Conscience imposes a check on lying and ruthlessness with which the psychopath is unencumbered...

...Arafat's genius has been demonstrated in his ability to exploit the antipathy of mutually antagonistic ideologies towards Zionism and the Jewish people and to unite those divergent forces under the banner of the Palestinian cause...

...Arafat has also been an astute observer of the Kulturkampf of world Jewry, especially in Israel between religious and secular, left and right...

...Brooks accuses those of us who worry about the state of our culture of lacking faith in the virtue of the American people, a people whose character, he says, was vindicated by the heroism displayed during and in the wake of the events of September 11...

...SUSAN REED Carlsbad, CA PSYCHOLOGY HAS ENOUGH of a challenge treating individual pathology...

...The understanding of Arafat's career can be found only by the study of the entire history of his reign as the father of international terrorism and the analysis of the techniques of propaganda he has developed and applied with enormous skill...

...Damon Lynch can have what's left...

...The medical-industrial complex has many insidious roots...

...Arafat has provided the world with the first postmodern religion by constructing the demonization of Israel from the teachings of other religions and ideologies...

...As the Framers recognized, for a liberal democracy to survive, it would have to regularly produce a class of highly educated men and (now we rightfully recognize) women who possess a deep understanding of Christian, classical, and liberal virtues, to conduct our affairs in accordance with the lessons of the history of our civilia-tion...

...At this point, the future of Cincinnati is bleak...

...The president should have the courage to direct the State Department to change course and help the Israelis defend themselves...

...THE APRIL 22 PARODY featuring the amended version of President Bush’s address to the joint session of Congress was outstanding...

...The Lynch-led effort to boycott public, revenue-generating events continues, though it is unclear what further actions the city could possibly take to appease the boycotters, short of direct cash payments...

...I read the article the very day that Colin Powell met with Yasser Arafat, despite the very recent homicide bombing near a Jerusalem market that killed 6 and wounded close to 80—a perfect example of the "brazen" and "relentless" evil about which Doidge writes...

...The stories of the Famine, the Troubles, the Black and Tans, are abundant, but I'm still waiting for an NPR feature on the growing Irish economy and how the E.U...

...JACK MCARDLE Gibsonia, PA SUBCONSCIOUS COUP NORMAN DOIDGE's "Evil's Advantage Over Conscience" (April 15) is exactly right...

...Afterwards, the Europeans will, as Benjamin Netanyahu has said, "have a lot to answer for...

...to “Let’s Roll (Over...

...Despite, however, the article's pinpointing the dynamic that causes otherwise sophisticated and determined leaders to provide a man like Arafat with endless second chances, it does nothing to mitigate my dismay at the Bush administration's falling victim to Arafat's spell...

...What conservatives recognize, which Brooks inexplicably, given his grasp of the views of those he calls the "ethereal bourgeiosophobes," does not, is that control of the most important bastions of culture, particularly the elite universities, by those who hate liberal democracy will lead to a dangerous scarcity of men and women prepared to lead the nation...

...I attended President Bush's recent press conference on bioethics and was struck by the contrast between Bush's "incurable optimism" and his call for us to question our obsession with medical advance...

...In the last few weeks, our marching orders seem to have changed from “Let’s Roll...

...First, under the guidance of the Soviets, he set out to split the Zionist camp, and later, after he had the time to assess the depth of these divisions, he concentrated considerable resources on what he termed the "internal front...

...Conscience also assumes, unconsciously, that the other party operates from the same moral platform...

...This universalization of anti-Zionism has provided its rationalization as the categorical imperative of the majority...

...The Israelis have the courage to do what they have to do, but they need help from their able allies...

...Therefore putting history on the couch can lead to some bizarre conclusions...

...Against such an overwhelming consensus all but the most courageous must submit...

...By the concentration of all of the sources of animosity towards Israel, Arafat has universalized anti-Zionism (and anti-Semitism) and made himself its universal symbol...

...To an extent, this victimhood mantle has been placed on the Irish also...

...A brutal fact of the liberal society rightly celebrated by Brooks is that a people happily engaged in the pursuit of the good things of life is often disengaged from the day to day affairs of governance...

...It is the clearest explanation I have seen in short form of how a psychopath/sociopath manipulates those with a conscience...

...Jews are supposed to be victims...

...He has united the Arab world by means of this demonization, since each strand of hatred is now identical under his leadership...

...And Arafat has represented himself as the sinister messiah of this global moral apparatus...

...Thus he has been able to utilize the fierce domestic hatreds in Israel to render Israel less able to mount a united strategy against their nemesis...

...This is in addition to the black on black violence that has gone unabated for the last year...

...is trying to bring it down...

...one need only look to the events of September 11, in which our nation needlessly suffered a terrible blow because those who led our country in the decade prior to the attack lacked the wisdom and judgment to comprehend the evil that opposes us and the foresight and courage to defend us against it...

...That will give the desert dictators more to worry about than the 3 million Palestinians...

...The people who want real progress will leave, because there is no other choice...

...Countless documentaries about the Holocaust on PBS, the History Channel, etc., reaffirm this almost weekly...

...Norman Doidge in his reductionist attempt to explain the success of Yasser Arafat, "Evil's Advantage Over Conscience," argues that "while conscience allows us to understand ordinary crimes, it actually blinds us before the extraordinary ones...

...We need more analyses like Cohen's on this topic...

...Rather it is his all too willing accomplice...

...MICHAEL A. BROWN Cincinnati, OH VICTIMS NO MORE DAVID GELERNTER's "Europe to Israel—Drop Dead" (April 22) should be required reading for the State Department peace-process facilitators...

...Correspondence DOUBLESPEAK ERIC COHEN rightly presses us to see the connection between our culturally cultivated desire for efficiency and entertainment and our celebration of the "promise" of genomics ("New Genetics, Old Quandaries," April 22...

...MORTON MANILLA Toronto, Canada LET’S (NOT) ROLL...

...In the past week alone, there have been notable examples of random violence directed at whites driving through predominantly black neighborhoods, complete with racial slurs...

...If Brooks is right that "we had better be able to articulate, not least to ourselves, who we are, why we arouse such passions, and why we are absolutely right to defend ourselves," then we had also better reform the institutions that must produce the men and women who will teach us these lessons...

...The world is not passive in relation to Arafat's power, as Norman Doidge maintains...

...The "moderate" Arab states will not put pressure on Arafat...

...There will be no negotiated peace with the Palestinian Authority because it doesn't want peace...

...It needs one slight revision, though...

...Speaking for this conservative, I have never doubted the virtue of the American people...

...The media, the European Union, and the United Nations, as Gelernter intimates, will never understand the Israelis' point of view...

...ANDREW C. SPIROPOULOS Oklahoma City University School of Law Oklahoma City, OK CINCINNATI—IT'S A RIOT I JUST FINISHED Heather Mac Donald's "Appeasing the Race Hustlers" (April 22) on race politics in Cincinnati...

...The majority decides what is right and thereby defines conscience...

...When the Jewish state takes in the survivors of this European barbarism and actually defends itself against its murderous Arab neighbors, hackles are raised, "Zionism is Racism" resolutions are passed, and human rights groups are shocked...

...This assumption, of course, is false...

...I am not sure if it was a rhetorically apt move on his part—an attempt to pull us in and then turn us around—or a symptom of his reluctance to question market-driven medicine...

...As someone who lives and works in Cincinnati, I am thrilled that someone has noticed what is happening here...

...JEFF MINTER Overland Park, KS...