In your Nov. 3 article "Forum explores reasons behind Mideast violence," Nick Davis said "the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East was on the agenda Thursday at a forum that informed U of M faculty and students of some of the reasons behind the current conflict."
What Davis failed to say is that this forum was one-sided and didn't include any speaker representing the Palestinian point of view. Bluma Zuckerbrot, Anti-Defamation League member, presented the Israeli official position of the events in the Holy Land. Though she claimed that she is not representing Israel, the audience is not that passive or ignorant to take her claim for granted.
The Anti-Defamation League that started from the idea of protecting Jews from hatred and racism, is now one of the first defenders of the Israeli government and all its actions in the Middle East, including severe human rights violations and even war crimes, according to Amnesty International's last week conclusion of its investigation (www.amnesty.org).
For 15 minutes, all Zuckerbrot did is blaming the Palestinians for the recent violence in the Holy Land. All she did was a series of accusations of Arafat and the Palestinians that they believe the only way to get what they want is through violence.
This is another way of dehumanizing, labeling and stereotyping the Palestinians. Unfortunately, there was not an equivalent 15-minute talk about the 200 Palestinians killed by the Israeli soldiers in just 5 weeks. There was no mention of the 4,000 Palestinians wounded -- mainly by live ammunition in the upper parts of their body. No mention of home demolitions, helicopter attacks on civilian houses and targets, the tanks that are surrounding the Palestinian cities and villages in a very strict siege. No mention of the Jewish settlers' terrorist attacks on the Palestinians cities and villages. There was no mention that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is the only existing military occupation in the whole world. There was no mention of the fact that Israel is the only "democracy" in the whole world that legalize torture under what the Israeli Supreme Court calls "moderate physical pressure" (Human Rights Watch; www.hrw.org).
I wonder how Bluma and other pro-Zionist Jewish intellectuals would react if we believe the German Nazis' claim that it was the Jews' fault that the Nazis had to burn them during the holocaust!
Well, if the Palestinian children, who have the right to protest against the occupation, are to be accused of violence, what is the crime that my 66-year-old father and my 58-year-old mother committed to deserve evacuating their home under the Israeli shelling of the local TV station behind their house in Hebron? I am sure Bluma is fine with all the lies she had to throw on the audience last week, because, simply, she doesn't have to wake up every morning, for the last five weeks, as I do, with the fear that her parents might have been killed while she was sleeping.
