[Marxism] more on NY Times' demonization of Hamas/Palestinians

[dbachmozart at aol.com]

other letters to the Times on their article on Palestinian attitudes towards Israelis --

 


To the ombudsman:

 

I have no doubt that Steven Erlanger is aware of the facts I sketch in barest outline in my letter to the editors below. Those who have corresponded with him (as I did at one point) have implored him to write about the continuous stream of injustices and atrocities heaped by Israel's leadership, the IDF, and extremist settlers on the West Bank and Gaza. No doubt he, like me, has read Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine  which demonstrates conclusively that top leaders including the father of the country, Ben Gurion, and Yigal Allon, conceived Plan Dalet under which the majority of Palestinian Arabs were forced out by systematic acts of terror. Peace offers by Arabs that as much as hint that Israel should honor UN Resolution 242 and discuss permanent borders, have all been rejected by Israel and the US – always with the smiling public face of a "peace process" that never gets to the nitty-gritty of "permanent status" talks. Now Israel, through its decimation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza, is finishing up what 1948 started. Meantime the old propaganda about denial of "Israel's right to exist" gets churned out in regular dollops to an ignorant American public. We now face a possible air war against Iran – intimately connected with all the hasbarah  meant to "prep" the American public to accept that the evil Hamas (like the evil Hezbollah) is fed and nourished by Iran, hence Iran must go. An article like Erlanger's yesterday is reprehensible not only for rationalizing Israel's ongoing destruction of Palestinian society, but for prepping Americans to accept an act of aggressive war whose terrible consequences one cannot begin to imagine. 

 



 

 

To the editors: 

 

The mind boggles at Erlanger's one-sided slam at Hamas. With stunning disregard for Israel's history of ethnic-cleansing; its forty years of occupation; its policies of closure, blockade, and collective punishment; its transformation of all Palestinian living centers into Bantustans; its long and sordid history of settler vigilantism and IDF vandalism (this last reported not only by Palestinians but by IDF members of the whistle-blowing "Breaking the Silence"); its virulent anti-Arab racism, regularly reported in polls since at least the 1980s, Erlanger opines that Hamas is sowing attitudes that "will make a sustainable peace extremely difficult." The New York Times has exceeded even its own typical one-sidedness in this shockingly biased article.