Dear Senator John McCain,


I have followed your career fairly closely over the years, often with pride. So, here's my dilemma.


Coming home from work recently, I heard on the news that James Baker III has endorsed your candidacy. The problem emerges from your end of this story. Please read these excerpts from a Jason Maoz article on May 12,

While many are taking Barack Obama to task for ties to Black anti-Semites, Baker is cut from this same mold.

2006 in JewishPress.com:


McCain told Haaretz that as president, he would "micromanage" US policy toward Israel... would dispatch "the smartest guy I know" to the region....


Asked who that "smartest guy" might be, McCain responded: "Brent Scowcroft, or James Baker, though I know that you in Israel don't like Baker."


McCain... indicated Israel would be expected to "defend itself and keep evacuating." Asked whether that meant "movement toward the June 4, 1967 armistice lines, with minor modifications," McCain "nodded in the affirmative."


Before dealing with this, there's something even more troublesome. Imagine the response if you appointed someone to a high position who openly stated, "F**** the Blacks, they don't vote for us anyway," and who referred to Black employees and colleagues as his "Black boys."


Nauseating, disastrous thought; not so?


Baker has said those very things about Jews.


While many are taking Barack Obama to task for ties to Black anti-Semites, Baker is cut from this same mold.


While distancing yourself from the New York Times allegations regarding lobbyists, is it wise to embrace the man who most epitomizes the Big Oil-Arab potentate petrodollar lobby in America, James Baker III? Baker's law firm represents Arab interests and has made gazillions of dollars from them. His law partner is US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and his firm represents the latter against American 9/11 victims.


As President George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State, Baker promised Saddam Hussein's Syrian Arab twin butcher, Hafez al-Assad, total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights - without consulting Israel.


The Golan was won by Israel after repeated Syrian attacks against the country launched from those Heights. It was ruled by different peoples, including Jews, throughout history. Indeed, before some imperialist trading after World War I between the British and the French, the Heights were to be part of the Mandate of Palestine. Nations who repeatedly attack neighbors have often lost those lands from which they launched aggression.


Let's return to your expectation for Israel to return to its 1949, nine-mile wide, armistice line existence - the one which requires a magnifying glass to find it on a map.


As a naval aviator, you were shot down defending America's interests thousands of miles away. Recall that America has acquired territories and bases as a result of past wars fought all over the world. Not to mention America's own southwest (in the president's and your own neck of the woods), which used to be Mexico.


Israel is not three thousand miles wide, as America is, does not have a population of some three hundred million, and is not separated from its enemies by two vast oceans. The wars Israel is forced to fight are not about projecting influence or protecting interests thousands of miles away, but are fought for its very survival right in its

America has acquired territories and bases as a result of past wars fought all over the world.

own backyard - on land Jews have lived on for thousands of years.


While it's now become proper for you and others to speak of the al-Qaeda bogeyman, long before the latter existed, other Arab organizations like it were disemboweling Jewish kids and deliberately attacking them right in their own homes and schools. You apparently expect Israel to once again expose itself this way.


Neither the alleged good cop Fatah of Mahmoud Abbas's latter day, neck-tied Arafatians, nor the bad cops of Hamas accept a Jewish (as in Polish, Danish, etc.) State of Israel. See their websites and textbooks, hear their imams, and listen to what both tell their own people.


Israel was promised after the 1967 War that it would not be expected to return to the 'Auschwitz armistice lines.' The final draft of UN Security Council Resolution 242 called for "secure and recognized borders" to replace those lines.


Here's what President Ronald Reagan, whom you and Baker supposedly admire, had to say about this on September 1, 1982: "In the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely 10-miles wide... the bulk of Israel's population within artillery range of hostile armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again."


In 1988, Secretary of State George Shultz declared, "Israel will never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders."


As Ambassador Dore Gold and others continued to point out, right after hostilities subsided, President Lyndon Johnson summarized the situation on June 19, 1967: "A return to the situation on June 4 (the day before outbreak of war) was not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities. He then called for "new recognized boundaries that would provide security against terror, destruction, and war."


Here's a brief excerpt from a document General Earle Wheeler of the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared for Secretary of Defense McNamara on June 29, 1967: "...Israel would require retention of some captured Arab territory to provide militarily defensible borders."


Keep in mind that in 1967, in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"), Israel took these lands in a defensive war from an illegal occupant -Transjordan, which renamed itself "Jordan" after its 1949 illegal acquisition of non-apportioned lands of the original Mandate west of the Jordan River. Jews as well as Arabs were legally entitled to live on those lands. Jews have thousands of years of history connecting them to these lands; they owned property and lived there up until their massacres by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s.


Recall that Transjordan was itself created by the Brits in 1922 on some 80% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine. The proposed 22nd Arab state will therefore be the Arabs second one in Palestine. Additionally, many, if not most, of the Arabs themselves were newcomers, pouring in - as The Records of the Permanent Mandates Commission and other documentation show - from Syria, Egypt and elsewhere in the region.


Surely, as a military man who asserts America's right to fight all around the world, your position regarding minuscule Israel's right to some semblance of defensible borders is a source of serious confusion.

Your position regarding minuscule Israel's right to some semblance of defensible borders is a source of serious confusion.



Regardless of its total withdrawal from Gaza over two years ago, Israel has been attacked daily - Sderot bearing most of the brunt. This is precisely what Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and so forth can look forward to if Israel bows to others' pressure. Would America led by President McCain expose itself this way? If not, then why bully Israel?


Arafat's hand-picked chief lieutenant, "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas, heads an organization with at least as much blood on its hands as Hamas has. He simply sweet talks an all-too-willingly gullible West better. Billions of dollars are at stake, and Yasser Arafat's foreign bank accounts are legendary.


The coming presidential election promises to be a close one. There are many qualified folks who are not tainted the way Baker and his ilk are. All it will take is for folks upset with the above (many besides Jews are) to stay home on the day of the vote to assure a Republican defeat.


Some, if not many, of those who will not vote for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, also will not vote for John McCain. And that, in my opinion, would be a shame.