I refer to the letters by Dr Alijah Gordon No Jew-bashing, only quarters out to smear M'sia (May 13) and Charles Moreira A flawed argument on Palestine (May 18).

Moreira resurrects the hackneyed Cold War anti-colonialist rhetoric of old leftists linking the theme to Zionism which he considers a fascist and imperialist ideology similar to Nazism!

The United Nations General Assembly did adopt a resolution equating Zionism with racism in 1975. This was during the height of the Cold War when the Soviet Union aligned with friendly Third World countries including Arab states to carry out an anti-Israel campaign.

But since then almost all the former non-Arab supporters of the resolution have apologised and reversed their positions. When the General Assembly repealed the resolution in 1991, only some Arab and Muslim states, as well as Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam were opposed.

Put simply, Zionism is the national movement for the return of Jews to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel which existed 2,000 years ago. To say Zionism is racism is to fly in the face of the fact that about one million Muslim and Christian Arabs and other minority groups are given democratic representation and freedom to practise their own religions. If Israel is a racist state how do we account for the existence of black Jews and its rescue of almost 42,000 members of the ancient Ethiopian Jewish community from conflicts in Africa?

All of us respect Martin Luther King for his life-long campaign against racism. When a student approached him to attack Zionism, he responded: "When people criticise Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism."

Moreira recommends eight websites for readers to "gain a better understanding about the Palestinian issue." They are all pro-Palestinian Arab sites! I would suggest he visit a website with a different viewpoint, for example, US-Israel.org , to get a balanced view first. Unfortunately, it is hard to get such a view in our local media and sometimes even in the Western media!

An example of one-sided reporting is the so-called Jenin "massacre" last month. Did it happen? In his determination to nail Israel, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, ordered an investigation but disbanded his committee within days — fortunately for him because there was emerging evidence that the entire massacre story was fiction.

Even the Palestinian Authority has admitted there was no massacre in Jenin. They now claim that 56 Palestinians died in Jenin, the majority of whom were combatants. Yet one month ago, Palestinian spokespersons such as Saeb Erekat spoke first of 3,000 Palestinian dead, then of 500. The international media, especially the strident British media, accepted his figures without checking.

What would have been amusing, if not for the tragic conflict, was an attempt by the Palestinians to stage a funeral procession in the streets of Jenin for a "dead" man while propaganda cameras rolled.

An Israeli drone flying overhead caught this "corpse" clambering onto the hearse wrapping himself in a green blanket. But he couldn't keep his balance and kept falling off repeatedly. How many of us are even aware that this outright lie occurred? However, the video and still pictures can be found on this site .

Dr Alijah Gordon denies that the recent "Palestine and humanity" meeting at which Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and PAS leader Fadzil Noor spoke was a night of "Jew-bashing". I won't use an emotive term like "Jew-bashing" but it is evident from press reports that the views expressed were very one-sided. It is another milestone in a long tradition of one-sided views in the local print and broadcast media.

To say that we're not opposing the Jews but the Israeli government (the "Israeli-Zionist aggressor state" as Gordon puts it), i.e. we're not opposing the people but only their government, is standard operating procedure before demonising another country. Who selects the government in a democratic country like Israel?

I applauded Mahathir when he proposed to a recent meeting of Islamic states that suicide bombers should be considered terrorists but unfortunately his listeners were too blinded by their worldviews to accept his proposal. However, on the night of the Umno-PAS lectures he described Israel prime minister Ariel Sharon as "a human who is not human but an animal". Well, at least one Jew was thoroughly bashed that night!

Gordon parrots the usual Arab line that "Israel is the newcomer, created in 1947-48, carved out of the Palestinian homeland." This is a very selective reading of history. Where do you think the Jews lived over 2,000 years ago? In outer space? In actual fact, the previously arid region known as Palestine was virtually ignored even by the Arab world before the relatively recent events leading to the declaration of the present state of Israel.

Palestinian Arabs sold land to the Jews. Yasser Arafat was actually born and bred in Egypt. The truth of the matter is that Israel's prosperity in the midst of abject poverty inflamed its Arab neighbours.

In an op-ed piece entitled "The Core of Muslim Rage" ( New York Times , March 6, 2002), Thomas Friedman observes that when extremist "Hindus kill Muslims it's not a story when Saddam murders his own people it's not a story but when a small band of Israeli Jews kills Muslims it sparks rage."

He opines that the real reason for the obsessive hatred of Israel is the Arabs' inability to reconcile themselves with the fact that "a tiny Jewish state [could] amass so much military and economic power" when their own way of life is the "ideal path." Therfore this "fact" must be extinguished, according to the extremists.

In '' The Clash of Civilizations ,'' Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote: ''Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.'' Among the reasons cited by Huntington is his view that the youth boom in Arab lands, combined with economically stagnant societies, has left a legacy of alienation that aids and abets fundamentalism.

And what of us in Malaysia? What we can do as moderate Malaysians of all faiths is to help preserve our tolerant understanding of religion and avoid the pitfalls of extremism as experienced in the Arab world. Aping extremist Arab worldviews will not help us. After all the vociferous support our country has given to the Arab cause, what have the Arab nations done for us?

In my opinion the best recourse for the Arabs is to live peaceably alongside their Jewish neighbours and develop their lands together with a "prosper thy neighbour" policy. First Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra was indeed wise when he enunciated his "Happy Malaysia" policy. The only problem is when some group of people decides the only way they can be happy is to make some other group unhappy. That's why we have suicide bombers and other extremists.

Pragmatism is the way to face the economic challenges ahead of us. It's no use rehashing nightmares of a colonial past or living in dreams of a glorious future on empty stomachs. Economic stagnation will enhance obscurantism and lead us to an oppressive milieu much like the Dark Ages in Europe.