Just about all my friends are boiling with anger. They are furious because the United States chose not to surrender to Iraq, the leader of the fascist ring of countries that almost every day threatens to destroy our nation - and will, if it can, no matter how long it takes or how many human beings are killed.
Fascists? Yes, fascists. They detest being called anything but romantic, warrior-like names - militants, jihadists, soldiers of Allah. But what they do and how they do it copy the tactics of the fascists in power in Europe from the '20s through the end of World War II. To call these modern imitators anything else escapes the fascist realities of what they believe and how they fight.

They kill all who worship other than in the ways of their religion or branch of it. They kill all who speak or act other than in obedience to the dictators who have seized power over the people. Any word of criticism about religion is taken as blasphemy, punishable by death. They use torture on every part of the bodies of their victims, with an obviously sick fascination for mutilation of genitals, male and female.

And exactly like their predecessor fascists, they mark particular peoples for elimination - Jews, as usual, and now Americans because their lives center on what the murderers most loathe: freedom of expression and intellect.

I know from my own experience that not all members of Islam befoul themselves and their religion by accepting the horrors of what is done in the name of God. For seven years, I was assigned as a reporter at the UN, and then for four more on the India-Pakistan subcontinent. At the UN, I never heard a word of anti-Semitism (except by diplomats from the microphone).

I knew that the people I met on the subcontinent were not born with hatred of other religions. My sons learned tolerance and, more important, respect for Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam and other religions.

But in a short time, they came to know that their Muslim and Hindu neighbors fought with each other, decade after decade.

I believe that Hindu-Muslim hatred is largely the doing of hysterical, self-seeking politicians and clerics. But there is another powerful poison - the around-the-clock hate propaganda carried by radio and TV in Pakistan, India and the Middle East.

Years after I left foreign reporting and became an editor in New York, two journalists I had known in India turned my blood cold and sickened my soul by pouring out the details of a Hindu-Muslim riot that was raging then, with roots dating back hundreds of years.

The next morning, I flew to Bombay, center of the riot-murders, trying to find out why neighbors killed neighbors and adults knifed children to death. I listened for days and never learned anything real, just phantoms of ancient hatreds.

Now I try to find out why my friends who hate President Bush seek to destroy him because he led the country into war against the ugliest of living dictators. Sometimes I just ask a few questions: Was there anything about Saddam Hussein that pleased you or made you willing to take up life in Iraq? If you come from a free country or are a Jew who comes from anywhere, do you think you could have survived for long in Iraq? Do you think it is possible that Saddam was preparing for war against the U.S. - and still is?

Have you read the statements of experienced nuclear inspectors that Saddam had been working on nuclear and biological warfare for years - and had used chemical weapons against Kurds, who died in agony from those weapons?

After repeated Iraqi aggression against neighbors, a decade of Iraqi work on weapons of mass destruction and a total refusal of Iraq to comply with any of the UN sanctions designed to make it less dangerous, what effective steps short of military action were left for a President to use?

If the answer to any one question stirs fear in your heart, who owes America an apology, the President or you?
-AM Rosenthal
www.NYDailyNews.com