To the editor:

In a Nov. 24 letter titled “Unfair portrayal,” Melanie Schnebelen asked what the Palestinian attacks against Israel should be called. Ms. Schnebelen, those attacks are vicious, cold-blooded acts of murder, and it is astonishing that anyone could mistake them as anything but.

If terrorism is the Palestinians’ way of “fighting back,” as Ms. Schnebelen puts it, for what are they fighting? To regain the freedom restaurant patrons took from them? To lift themselves from the oppression brought by schoolchildren and the elderly? How can the targeting and murder of innocent people going about their daily business advance the Palestinians’ desires for freedom and a nation of their own?

Obviously, the answer is that they cannot, but freedom and statehood have never been goals of the Palestinians. They have turned down every offer for a state of their own. They support a government in which one’s right to life is subject to Yasser Arafat’s whim. They praise terrorist attacks against Israel, even to the point of glorifying terrorists as examples for their children to follow. They claim that they fight for their liberation, but their actions establish the very opposite.

Peace in the Middle East will never be achieved until the Palestinians and their terrorist sponsors free themselves from a culture that promotes martyrdom and death for a culture that promotes human life and individual rights. Anyone who can even remotely equate a murderer who blows up little children with a freedom fighter should evaluate which side he is on.

Darren Cauthon,

Lawrence