On Thursday, June 20, 2002, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported on an arms trade fair going on in Paris this week. It turns out that Israel has risen to the world's tenth largest arms merchant and is taking business away from major US firms at the same show. The Israelis are desperate to raise cash this way since tourism in their country has been down for a year or so because of the Palestinian conflict.

We supplied much of the money and technology to help Israel develop this capability. And now, they are competing with us.

"The irony, experts say, is that tens of billions of U.S. tax dollars and transfers of American military technology helped create and nurture Israel's industry, in effect subsidizing a foreign competitor."

But that isn't the worst of it. Seems the Israelis will sell to anyone including our enemies. China is one of their big customers. Last year, when one of our spy planes was threatened by Chinese jets, collided with one of them, and ended up limping to a Chinese island where our boys were held for 11 days, those same Chinese fighters were armed with Israeli Python III missiles that were direct spin-offs of the Sidewinder missiles we gave Israel. Had they been given the order to shoot down our plane, our boys would have died by weapons we helped develop. Isn't that nice?

Don't you think the boys in Washington better clean up their own act before they start regulating guns for we the people???