November 16, 2006
Israeli-Palestinian Confederation; CAIR; Borat; Elections; More JewQ questions
Follow JewishJournal.com on 
(Page 3 - Previous Page)
Come back in a year or however long you could endure the situation of being under attack every day of your life and write those words again, if you could.Leno Sislin
Via e-mail
Norman Finkelstein
The Jewish Journal published Josef Avesar, who writes about his plan for a confederation of Palestinian and Israeli entities, while insisting it's not a one-state solution ("Mideast Solution: A Confederation," Nov. 3).
I'm not writing to counter his arguments, although I find them ridiculous. I'm writing to alert the editors of The Jewish Journal and the readers of this piece that at the end there was mentioned a symposium on this subject that was held earlier this month. One of the speakers was professor Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University. This professor is a known Holocaust denier who has spoken highly of David Irving.
One Web site described him as "the most openly anti-Semitic Jew on the planet. DePaul employs Finkelstein as assistant professor in political science, this after Finkelstein got fired from two New York-area adjunct teaching jobs (at NYU and Hunter College) because of his pseudo-scholarship and fraudulent rantings against Jews and Israel.
Finkelstein is a disciple of Holocaust denier David Irving and claims Irving is an authoritative historian. Finkelstein refers to the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis as the "Six Million" in quotation marks and says that nearly every Holocaust survivor is a fraud and a thief and a liar. (Finkelstein's own parents are Holocaust survivors, and Finkelstein has long tried to capitalize on this as a way to legitimize his own anti-Semitism.) The psychiatry department at DePaul might have interesting things to say about this.
Finkelstein routinely libels Holocaust survivor, philosopher and writer Elie Wiesel in scurrilous terms. Finkelstein is the star on every Holocaust denial neo-Nazi Web site on earth, serving as the "Jew who proved there was never any Holocaust."
He has been denounced as a fraud and anti-Semite by Alan Dershowitz, historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Dennis Prager, professor Omer Bartov, the World Jewish Congress and just about everyone else on earth, gentile or Jew. The New York Times compared Finkelstein's book to the old czarist forgery, "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
Clearly, the fact that this Holocaust denier spoke at a symposium on this subject clarifies the goals of this "confederation." But what concerns me greatly is that The Jewish Journal chose to publish this editorial tainted by association with Norman Finkelstein, and that The Journal also advertised this symposium and even linked to it.
Don't you have enough submissions from an array of political perspectives without association with anti-Semitic professors who espouse Holocaust denial? You have certainly moved one step closer to the cancellation of my subscription, as well.
David Louis
Los Angeles
Absurd Comparison
You are certainly entitled to the anti-Iraq War position you maintain. Yet the cartoon (Nov. 3) noting "More U.S. Deaths in Iraq Than in the 9/11 W.T.C. Attack" makes a truly absurd comparison, requiring a consummate ignorance of history.
Using that logic, one can only reach the truly ridiculous conclusion that as soon as British military deaths in Europe equaled the loss of life within England during the Blitz of World War II, Britain should have brought home its troops. Or the U.S. should simply have ceased fighting Japan as soon as American military deaths in the Pacific equaled the death toll at Pearl Harbor. Or, had those neo-con Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto not have had the audacity of that uprising (1943), all would have been OK.
In the Al Qaeda screed of Sept. 30, Ayman al-Zawahiri called on the pope and all Christians to convert to Islam. If we cease to fight, will Islamists end their goal of world dominion?
The common -- and wrong -- analysis of the argument in the editorial cartoon is that if you stop fighting a totalitarian enemy who has sworn to destroy you, that your enemy will therefore cease its efforts.
Thomas Jefferson astutely noted that democracy can survive only with educated, well-informed citizens. Otherwise, propaganda and misstatements of fact will be accepted.
A newspaper can be a source of education or a vehicle to disseminate diatribe and assure ignorance. Your approach certainly, and sadly, affirms Jefferson's analysis.
Fred Korr
Los Angeles
Upside-Down Vision
M.J. Rosenberg dismisses Israeli Nobel laureate Robert Aumann's timely description of Israel being too easily fatigued in its fight for survival as being an "upside-down Zionist vision" ("Israelis, Palestinians Deserve U.S./Euro Push for Peace," Oct. 27), but this is simply a case of shooting the messenger.
Rather, it is Rosenberg who is giving his readers an upside-down vision by continuing to suggest that there is a genuinely moderate Palestinian leadership with whom Israel should be urged by Washington to pursue negotiations.
The Palestinian Authority's Mahmoud Abbas, who pretends before Western audiences that he recognizes Israel, said in a recent Arabic television interview that neither Fatah nor Hamas need to recognize Israel (Al-Arabiya [Dubai] and PA TV, Oct. 3, translation courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch).
Abbas consistently fails to denounce the acts of Palestinian terrorists, but this month he condemned as a "heinous massacre" the killing by Israel of seven Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Popular Resistance Committees terrorist group -- just the sort of people he is obliged by the Oslo agreements and the 2003 "roadmap" peace plan to arrest and jail but hasn't.
But then, he is not likely to arrest terrorists he has hailed as "heroes fighting for freedom" (The Age [Melbourne], Jan. 3, 2005). Nor has he ended the incitement to hatred and murder in the PA-controlled media, mosques, schools and youth camps which feed terrorism.
