Stoler's diatribe unwarranted

(Re: “Time to retire, Mr. Dinowitz,” Dec. 21)

To the Editor:

Adam Stoler’s letter, published in the Dec. 21 issue of The Riverdale Press says, in my opinion, more about Adam Stoler than it does about Assemblyman Dinowitz’s laudatory support of Israel’s right to defend itself against the savage assaults of Hamas, evil beings bent on terror. Hamas’ butchery and rape of infants, women and the elderly on Oct. 7 is indefensible; their slaughter of some 1400 innocent civilians, including the beheading of babies and the proud videotaping by Hamas of their barbarism, marks them as the descendants of Amalek, the Biblical embodiment of evil. And, as called for in the Bible (or Torah), such evil must be eradicated.

Both the United States and the European Union have rightly condemned Hamas as terrorists. Yet Mr. Stoler chooses to term a righteous effort to eradicate such evil once and for all as a “terrible war.” All war is terrible, especially where as here, the slaughter of innocents by Hamas was reminiscent of Pearl Harbor or the Blitzkreig against Poland, and, notably, it is equally punishable. Any less would simply encourage repetition and even greater savagery.

While there are those who righteously condemn all acts of hostility,  the use to which Mr. Stoler puts his seeming defense of Hamas is not, in my view, of that caliber.

To couple the death of innocents and even of aggressors with personal preferences in unrelated local partisan politics takes an approach to politics, to life and to death that I, for one, find disgusting and wholly inappropriate. 

Based on actual knowledge and experience over a period of decades in voluntary government and community service, I am persuaded that Jeffrey Dinowitz is an outstanding public servant who has done much to preserve the integrity and character of our community and the quality of life that we wish for ourselves and others.

But for the Assemblyman’s efforts to preserve the greenbelt and other natural resources, to increase the affordable housing stock, to support and expand public mass transit and the many other qualities and institutions that mark this corner of our city would all have long ago been eroded.

Mr. Stoler and others may disagree, and that is their right, one I respect. However, the witches brew that, in my opinion, Mr. Stoler concocts by injecting a human tragedy brought on by mindless depravity into local partisan political likes and dislikes is not just unseemly, it is unacceptable.

This nation and, yes, this city and community are in extremis. Lack of civility, irrationality and sheer brutality are evident wherever one looks these days. At a time of year when fellowship, good will and harmony should be the order of the day, paid protestors and antisemitic racists have emerged to shrilly excuse evil in demonstrations designed to disrupt, to antagonize and to spew baseless filth.

The vitriol they seek to peddle and the wholesale murders they seek to obfuscate or excuse really do not, as I see it, need the added invective of Mr. Stoler’s baseless misjoinder of human tragedy with local partisan politics. 

Charles Moerdler