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Oakland fails to
keep residents safe
(Editor’s note: A correction has been made to this letter. The property described is on 23rd Street in Oakland, not Richmond.)
We own property on 23rd Street in Oakland. My grandparents bought it about 1925. I grew up there. It was a lovely neighborhood in the 1940s and 50s. The freeway and BART destroyed that idyllic area.
Today it is even worse. The homeless have taken over. They have broken into our home, defecated on the porch, urinated on the side of the house, and stolen many items, most recently the garbage and recycle cans. There is garbage everywhere.
The first duty of government is to ensure the safety of its citizens. This area is not safe. Our current tenant has had enough and is moving, tired of being overwhelmed by the garbage and waste products of the homeless. Where is the health department in all of this? Unpicked garbage is home to rats, which are disease carriers.
This is a disgrace. Year after year the problems escalate.
Gerald Flaherty
Richmond
Hypocrisy taints
college Gaza protests
Re: “World refuses to acknowledge Oct. 7 atrocities” (Page A6, May 2).
We saw the pictures of the civilians injured and killed. We saw the hardship and privation the people suffered. What was the provocation? Russia had no justification for invading Ukraine.
We saw the pictures of the civilians injured and killed. We saw the hardship and privation the people suffered. What was the provocation? A barbaric attack. The rape and mutilation of Israeli women on Oct. 7, the brutal murder of civilians, and the kidnapping of men, women and children secreted in Gaza, and the list of atrocities goes on.
The student protesters against Israel claim social justice and humanitarian reasons as their cause. That is hypocrisy. Those students showed no concern for the people of Ukraine or for the people of Israel. Honesty and integrity demand those students protest for the release of the kidnapped Israeli civilians and the surrender of the combatants responsible for the atrocities.
Edward McCaskey
Dublin
When protests turn
violent, condemn them
“They said it” (Page B1, May 5).
Not even in the Bay Area were pro-Palestine protests peaceful, like incidents of violence at UC Berkeley.
Enough with the antisemitism. I am angry at pro-Palestine protesters at a Holocaust Memorial near Auschwitz, Poland. I know people whose relatives were killed in Poland during the Nazi era. I am a person with a disability and would have been killed as a useless person under the Nazis.
Both physical and verbal violence on college campuses are not freedom of speech and should be prosecuted and condemned by everyone.
Marianne Haas
Berkeley
Biden support aids
violence by Israel
President Biden’s outrageous remarks on Holocaust Remembrance Day, reported in this newspaper, describes the wave of campus protests against Israel’s slaughter of more than 35,000 Gazans as a “ferocious surge of antisemitism in America.” This followed Netanyahu’s speech on April 24 likening protesting American students to antisemitic mobs in Nazi Germany and proceeded the massive police crackdown on peaceful campus protest encampments that resulted in over 2,000 arrests nationwide.
Meanwhile, several days of provocations on the UCLA campus culminated in the April 24 assault on the protest encampment by thugs armed with clubs and iron bars, hurling explosive fireworks at UCLA students while the campus police looked on for five hours, doing nothing until the administration called in the Los Angeles police to arrest 200 protesters, but none of the “counter-protesters.”
As Biden declares “ironclad support for Israel,” he is encouraging Netanyahu-style fascist repression of our own American students. Shame on him.
Michael Dunlap
Oakland
