[Peace-discuss] Letter in Daily Illini

[David Green]

This letter appeared today in the DI, an adapted
version of that in the N-G last week. If you see a
hardcopy of the DI, check out the picture on the back
page of the first section of a George Bush statue
being pulled down in Vancouver, a la Saddam Hussein. I
have a feeling this picture will not be in the New
York Times.

Letter: Hypocritical condemnation
By The Daily Illini
Published: Wednesday, December 1, 2004 


In recent weeks, Jewish writers have hysterically
cried anti-Semitism against a satirical comic. Now
they condemn an otherwise well-informed response by
Joseph Danavi to Elie Dvorin's inflammatory dancing on
the grave of Yasser Arafat, in which Danavi repeated
an Internet hoax regarding Ariel Sharon. But
hypocritical and ignorant Jewish letter writers have
not condemned the Israeli lies regarding a U.N.
ambulance that were repeated by Dvorin and David
Johnson on the pages of the DI; nor have they
acknowledged that Ariel Sharon has the blood of
thousands of innocent Palestinians on his hands. He
requires no hoax to merit his status as a war
criminal. These writers have not questioned Dvorin's
hatemongering, genocidal conclusion: "The world is a
much better place without Arafat, and with any luck
the moral nations of the world will help send his
terrorist supporters to visit him permanently." Is
Dvorin referring to all Palestinians who supported
Arafat?

Arafat did not bring terrorism to the Middle East. It
was brought by the Zionist underground against British
sponsors of a Jewish national home in the 1940s. Two
of these terrorists became prime ministers. The
customary reference to Palestinian terrorism also
ignores the state terrorism of the Israeli Defense
Forces, generously supported by the U.S.

Arafat, regardless of his corruption, was not
rejectionist. His overtures toward a two-state
solution were met by Sharon's unprovoked invasion of
Lebanon in 1982, killing 20,000, the vast majority
innocent. Negotiations were rejected by Israel and the
U.S. until 1993, after which Israeli military
checkpoints were established that strangled the
Palestinian economy, while the illegal and apartheid
Jewish settler population doubled. The "generous
offer" of neo-colonial "Bantustans" at Camp David in
2000 was no improvement on Israel's brutal occupation
and was rightly rejected even by a leader who had time
and again sold out his own people.

David Green

University employee