Column of ‘distortions’

Dear Editor,

The commentary headlined “Despite Sentiments, USS Liberty incident wasn’t Israeli Treachery”, by Rich Lowry, which appeared in the Times Observer on Dec. 30, is an affront to every U.S. veteran and indeed to all men and women of goodwill who value the truth. I read the article with revulsion. The author is the editor in chief of The National Review magazine. How a journalist could make so many egregious errors is cause for concern.

Let’s enumerate some of the lies and distortions.

First, Mr. Lowry claims the attack was an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. In fact the USS Liberty, AGTR-5 was clearly marked bow and stern with American markings and flew a five by eight feet and an American flag from the center yardarm as explained by Second Class Petty Officer Ernest A. Gallo, in his book “Liberty Injustices: A Survivor’s Account of American Bigotry.”

Israeli reconnaissance flights buzzed the Liberty at low level on over a half dozen occasions, according to crewmember notes as reported in James Scott’s book “The Attack on the Liberty.” As explained in Appendix I of Ensign James M. Ennes Jr.’s book “Assault on the Liberty,” the Liberty could not have been mistaken for the Egyptian supply ship El Quseir (which had been in the area). The El Quseir was less than half the size and had no elaborate antenna array and distinctive hull markings of Liberty.

The Liberty survivors publish a newsletter which can be accessed at www.USSLibertyVeterans.org. More information can be found at their website.

Neil Himber,

Youngsville

Repeating scary history

Dear Editor,

It’s kind of personal. My father fought in World War II. He fired a coastal battery artillery gun. What they hit, what he saw, who he killed, he never said. But his reliance on his cigarettes, I assume he had PTSD.

The way the Neo Nazis have become accepted in the United States today would disgust him, disappoint him, absolutely make his blood boil.

Today’s apparent Nazi leader in the United States is Nick Fuentes. He had cozied up to Trump. He has infiltrated MAGA. He no longer is persona non grata.

Fuentes hates non-Christians. Fuentes hates Jews. “When we take power, they need to be given the death penalty. Straight up.” Jews are “perpetrating the lies, (they are) the destruction of the country.”

Fuentes is a Christian. He faces the same two problems Hitler and the Nazis faced.

— Jesus preached peace and forgiveness.

— Jesus was a Jew.

The solution: Rewrite the Bible. You can’t change the words? You sure can. And the Nazis did.

The leader: Walter Grundmann. An early Nazi party member. In 1940 they published their new Bible: The Message of God.

Gone were the references to Jews. The Old Testament? Gone. References to Jesus’ Jewishness? Gone. References to Jesus’ message of peace? Gone. Jesus was a militant. Jesus was an Aryan soldier of dominance. He wasn’t a Jew at all.

The Jews? Quite simply, they were Jesus killers.

Paul’s letters? Gone. He was a Jew. Except for Romans 13, the oft misinterpreted and misquoted chapter that demands allegiance to the Government because they were appointed by God.

The opposition to Grundmann? That would be Martin Niemoeller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer paid for his opposition to the Nazi Bible with his life. He never would support the killing of 6 million Jews. But he was all in on mandatory conversion of every Jew to Christianity.

The question is: Who is Fuentes’ “Grundmann?” Who is going to re-write the Bible for him? Or is he simply going to use Grundmann’s Bible? Or has he already done it himself?

Fuentes already denies the holocaust — the death toll of Jews was greatly exagerated. He grudgingly accepted the 6 million number in a recent interview, but I’ll bet he doesn’t believe it.

This is dangerous territory we are allowing fellow Americans to dabble in. Denial. Lies. Deception. Power. Control.

We need to heed these quotes:

General Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Get it all on record now — get the films — get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

Dr. Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist who studied the Nazi leadership after WWII: (There) “are people who exist in every country of the world. Their personality patterns are not obscure. But they are people who have peculiar drives, people who want to be in power, and you say that they don’t exist here, and I would say that I am quite certain that there are people even in America who would willingly climb over the corpses of half of the American public if they could gain control of the other half, and these are the people who today are just talking — who are utilizing the rights of democracy in anti-democratic fashion.”

“After the war, the German people said, ‘We didn’t know there were concentration camps, didn’t know they were killing the Jews.’ They were silent. They were lying like hell.”

Becky Maness Poteat: The story is told of a church in Germany near the train tracks where trains took thousands to the death camps daily.

On Sundays when the trains passed, church members complained that they had to force themselves to blot out the cries of those in the trains by singing extra loudly.

They knew. The ash from the crematoriums settled on their homes nearby. The Germans knew.

James Spangler, OD,

Warren