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