'Percentage Point' Minimizes Big Tax Hike

Editor, Times-Dispatch:

Del. Jennifer McClellan's defense of Gov. Tim Kaine's now-defunct transportation plan in the Commentary section is a good example of the fuzzy math that politicians often use to promote their causes. She refers to the governor's proposal as a "one-percentage-point increase" in the motor vehicle sales tax and in the retail sales tax in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. Doesn't sound like much of an increase in either instance, does it?

Accurate? Yes. Misleading? Even more so. That single percentage point terminology she uses translates into a proposed double-digit increase in both taxes. Used alone, "one percentage point" doesn't sound like much, but if it is accurately noted as a 33.3-percent increase -- as in the instance of the motor vehicle sales tax -- it comes across as enormous. Thank goodness that there are those in the General Assembly who know real mathematics from the fuzzy variation of it.

Del. Chris Peace had it right in his corresponding piece: "Kaine is asking taxpayers to stretch their already tight household budgets . . . to share more of their paychecks with VDOT." Regardless of whose math you're using, he hits the nail right on the head.

Keith W. Mitchell. Emporia.

Arab Warmongering Made Arabs Refugees

Editor, Times-Dispatch:

Letter-writer Mark W. Siegel ["Israel's Creation Carried High Cost"] says he would have opposed the U.N.'s 1947 plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. He asks, "How would Americans like it if millions of Native Americans . . . returned to their native land and demanded that the U.N. partition the U.S. to create their own country?"

This (a) concedes that in returning in large numbers to eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), the Jewish people -- some of whom had never left, others who had returned earlier -- were going back to their original homeland and were not colonialist invaders, and (b) the Arabs who moved to what would become Israel, many of them 19thand 20thcentury migrants attracted by the growing Zionist economy, were not an indigenous population "from time immemorial."

Further, why turn the clock back only to 1947? The League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine was awarded to Great Britain after the defeat of the Ottoman Turkish empire in World War I, well before the Holocaust, so that the Jewish national home could be recreated. It was to include land on both sides of the Jordan River. But in the early 1920s, Britain established Trans-Jordan, now Jordan, on three-fourths of Mandatory Palestine and barred Jews from settling there. So a big Arab state -- established to be free of Jews -- existed in Palestine 25 years before the 1947 partition plan.

Finally, the Arabs largely uprooted themselves. Contrary to Siegel, they were not "forced into U.N.-designated areas to make way for Jewish settlers." After rejecting partition, which would have given them a second state in what had been Mandatory Palestine, and then losing the 1948 war in which Palestinian Arab forces and the armies of five Arab countries attacked the new Jewish state, roughly 550,000 Arabs became refugees.

Had there been no Arab-instigated war, there would have been no Arab refugees. If Palestinian Arabs today were more interested in building a country in the West Bank and Gaza Strip than, in Siegel's words, "lamenting the creation of the Jewish state," they might have made something more of the 1993 Oslo accords, or not violently rejected the 2000 Camp David and 2001 Taba proposals.

Israel's creation restored the scattered, suppressed Jewish people to equality with all other peoples, not a "cost" but a necessity.

Eric Rozenman, Washington Director,

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. Washington, D.C.

Clinton Failed to Stop Osama bin Laden

Editor, Times-Dispatch:

Alex Coyner wrote in a recent letter, "The World Trade Center bombing during the Clinton years turns out to be a very enlightening episode in a Democratic administration and the actual terrorists were actually caught and punished."

Here is my fact: Osama bin Laden was linked to the original World Trade Center bombings that occurred on Feb. 26, 1993. If Bill Clinton actually "caught and punished" all that were involved, how did bin Laden finish the job on Sept. 11, 2001? And bin Laden has also been tied to the Oct. 12, 2000, USS Cole attack, as well as the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya.

All of these were during the Clinton years. Since 9/11, we have had no acts of terrorism carried out against us. After Feb. 26, 1993, acts of terrorism actually rose. If the Clinton administration had acted quickly, maybe we would not still be looking for bin Laden today.

John Dustin Fogg. Mechanicsville.

NAACP Is Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Editor, Times-Dispatch:

If the Chesterfield NAACP is seeking a racial skeleton in the county's electoral-system closet, it is peeking behind the wrong door. Chesterfield's voting process and its administrators harbor no racial bias.

No conspiracy or collusion existed to deny 299 people their right to vote in nine of 63 precincts last February. The ballot-shortage problem was logistical. Available printed ballots couldn't be sent to scattered locations before closing time.

Nationally the NAACP does good deeds for its constituents, but sometimes it shoots its own foot by conjurying up racial suspicion where no discrimination exists. It was not the Chesterfield Board of Elections or the registrar who threw out the hand-written ballots; it was the Virginia State Board of Elections. So about whom should the NAACP gripe to the feds? Its vendetta against dedicated public servants is a witch hunt, not a crime-scene investigation.

David L. Johnson. Richmond.