November/December 1994, Pages 3, 92-94

Letters to the Editor

Letters to the editor are selected, edited and abridged on the basis of relevance, accuracy, taste and available space. The editors do not have facilities to respond to individual letters, or to clear in advance published letters, as edited, with the writers.

A Congressional Clarification

A letter I wrote that appeared in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs [Other People's Mail, April/May 1994] needs to be clarified, corrected, and updated with regard to the killings at the Hebron mosque.

My original letter was based on testimony from soldiers guarding the Tomb of the Patriarchs on the day Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Palestinians. The soldiers testified that they were under orders not to stop a Jewish gunman until after the submachine gun clip was empty. Naturally I felt that such an order violated the moral obligation that compels all people, especially security guards, to prevent murder and violence when they have the capacity to do so.

The Shamgar Commission, which investigated the tragedy, concluded that Baruch Goldstein acted alone and that while security measures were lax at the holy site, there was no complicity from other soldiers or officials of the Israel Defense Force. The commission also revealed that the soldiers at the tomb had either misunderstood or not followed the existing protocol and should not have waited to apprehend Goldstein. I fully accept the Shamgar Commission's findings.

Israel handled the Hebron massacre as any democracy should. Prime Minister Rabin launched a full, impartial and independent investigation and he repudiated the act in the strongest terms possible. I commend the Israeli government for this and other dramatic steps it has taken to stand up to terror and violence and advance the cause of peace.

Thank you again for including us in your prayers.

Congressman James P. Moran (D-VA), Washington, DC

The congressman's last sentence refers to the messages of support from his many admirers for his daughter, who is gravely ill with a brain tumor.

Bad Book Review

Every author knows that a bad book review is just part of the business. It goes with the territory. But there's a difference between a bad book review and one that steps over the line into personal vituperation. And there's a difference between a bad book review and one that makes its claims based on misquotes, half-quotes, and personal attacks.

One such review appeared in The Washington Post on Aug. 7. It purports to show that I made "factual errors" in my book, A Fire In Zion. This is the most damaging claim that can ever be made against a journalist. It goes to the heart of the way a journalist makes his living. Are the claims made by Mr. Garfinkle against my book, A Fire In Zion, true? Judge for yourself. I have included Garfinkle's review, and my response.

None of us deserve to be judged by those who are unqualified, unprofessional, or uninformed. The solution to this problem is really very simple. Those who judge our work must be held to the same standard that we are: they must be able to substantiate their charges.

Mark Perry, Arlington, VA

We have printed in "Other People's Mail" on page 76 the addendum to your letter to Washington Post Book World editor Nina King containing point-by-point responses to the Washington Post review of your book, A Fire In Zion, by Adam Garfinkle, director of the Middle East Council of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and book review editor of Orbis, a quarterly journal published by that institute. This is the same organization from which emerged this year the Middle East Forum, which publishes the Middle East Quarterly, edited by Daniel Pipes.

That exercise resembles the birth of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It originally spun off from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel's Washington, D.C. lobby. The Washington Institute was founded by then AIPAC staff member and Australian citizen Martin Indyk, with funding provided by AIPAC board member Barbi Weinberg. It then became the springboard which propelled Indyk into the position of Clinton White House adviser on Middle East policy. Putting space between the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Middle East Forum seems similarly designed to confuse the public about the pro-Israel bias of each.

It certainly doesn't fool book review editors of The Washington Post, however. They seem to draw purposely upon such tried-and-true pro-Israel writers for reviews of books touching upon the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

The Washington Post Book World's review of The Passionate Attachment: America's Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present by the late George Ball and his son, Douglas, was a similar diatribe against the authors, with no indication in the text that reviewer and veteran apologist for Israel Walter Laqueur had read the book at all. The Post has yet to review former Congressman Paul Findley's second book on the subject, Deliberate Deceptions, published in 1993, although his first book on the U.S. and Israel, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby, probably had the highest sales of any book ever published on the subject. All of the other books mentioned are available from the AET Book Club catalog (page 95 in this issue). We expect to have our own review of your book in our January issue and to have your book in our catalog at that time.

The ALA Censorship Saga

Contrary to the impression conveyed by Adam L. Chandler in the Sept./Oct. 1994 issue, David Williams was not censured because of "pro-Israel," "hard-line Zionist," or American Library Association "McCarthyite" pressure. He was rebuked for uncivil and unprofessional personal actions. I trust most Washington Report readers would acknowledge two middle-of-the-night phone calls involving epithets like "Jew-Den-RAT" to be anti-Semitic. Mark Rosenzweig received such calls from David Williams. Similarly, Williams sent messages to another Social Responsibilities Round Table member excoriating her for not voting on his behalf even though she was not eligible to vote at SRRT Action Council meetings. He further reprimanded her for not vocally supporting him, claiming that such inaction violated her own political principles!

Williams stated before several witnesses in San Francisco during ALA's 1992 convention that persons must be religious in order to qualify as Jews, a "test" that would disqualify Karl Marx, I. F. Stone and Emma Goldman, among others.

Williams repeatedly alleges that Mark Rosenzweig lost his job at the New York Public Library because he "organized a panel discussion on Palestinian culture," yet Mark denies that this activity was the sole or even major reason for his dismissal. I emphatically did not "decline to discuss" any matter with Williams, as charged by Chandler. I was asked following the San Francisco Conference not to upset Williams by pursuing my concerns about his intimidating, ad hominem tactics. A friend of his made that request, fearing that Williams was already in a precarious mental state. Later, following a series of hectoring and frequently insulting letters, I did write him, explaining the bases for my silence and disgust, and indicating that I didn't want anything more to do with him. Others apparently reached the same conclusions either earlier or subsequently.

Williams has also been reckless with allegations. He incessantly faults the ADL for not agreeing to debate "Israeli censorship," although it's perfectly obvious that they wouldn't accept an invitation to debate within a context that puts them at a disadvantage from the start. I now believe that such "invitations" were callous, deliberate acts to make political points. Similarly, while pro-Likud groups doubtless tried to influence ALA members, what factual basis is there for charging these organizations with "mobilizing hundreds of Jewish librarians from New York and elsewhere to pack the annual membership meeting"? Did Williams count "hundreds of Jewish librarians" attending the membership meetings? Apart from name-tags, how would he—or anyone else—accurately separate Jewish from non-Jewish librarians? Why mention "New York" except to invoke a basically negative stereotype? This is Jew-bashing, which should be no more acceptable than Arab-bashing.

Finally, while it should not be necessary to say this, I will: Neither I, nor—to my knowledge—the other two SRRT members who drafted the censure motion had been approached or pressured by ALA leaders or ADL or Hadassah to rebuke Williams. We did so because Williams' personal behavior demanded it.

Sanford Berman, Minnetonka, MN

We've edited three lines out of your letter and substituted "uncivil and unprofessional personal actions" and "personal behavior" which, we think, summarize fairly your allegations. To save our readers from rushing to their word processors to set you and us straight on one item in your letter, we suggest that the "anti-Semitic" phrase you interpreted as "Jew-Den-RAT" was a reference to "Judenrat," the Jewish community councils in Germany which, in vain attempts to appease the Nazis during Hitler's rule, became unwitting accomplices in the European Holocaust by making available to German officials lists of Jewish residents and even helping those officials to assemble their "quotas" of Jewish residents for shipments to what turned out to be forced labor and/or death camps, thus greatly facilitating the infamous "final solution," in which perhaps half of Europe's Jewish population perished between 1938 and 1945. Accusations of appeasement, we trust you would acknowledge, are not "anti-Semitic."

More on the ALA Resolution

As one of the crafters of the original resolution passed by the American Library Association (ALA) condemning censorship in Israel and the occupied territories, I feel I must respond to Adam Chandler's account of the anti-censorship campaign in ALA and its aftermath.

Mr. Chandler's article first of all gives the impression that the fight for ALA to take a position with regard to Israeli censorship was carried out single-handedly by Mr. Williams and proceeded according to his agenda and on the basis of his politics. This was far from the case. There was a significant group of librarians—Sanford Berman, Al Kagan, Zoia Horn, the late John Swan, Herb Biblo, Stephen Stillwell, Elaine Harger and myself among them—who, both with Williams and independently, were out there on the front lines, speaking, arguing, writing, lobbying, organizing meetings, many of us under frequent attack for our stand on a question of principle. True, for none of the others was the campaign the single-minded personal obsession that it was for Williams. But that these people, insofar as they appear at all in your account, appear only in the role of enemies of Mr. Williams, and not as advocates of Palestinian rights and opponents of Israeli censorship, is completely dishonest and reprehensible.

David Williams was censured by the ALA's Social Responsibilities Round Table—of which all but one of the above mentioned group were active members—for unprofessional behavior, utter disregard for the opinions of his colleagues in SRRT and even on his own Israeli Censorship/Palestinian Libraries Task Force on how to frame the issue effectively for ALA; for an ill-disguised ideological sectarianism on the "Jewish Question"; and—most proximately—for an egregious incident of insulting and threatening phone calls to a colleague (myself) at 3 a.m. one morning.

We rejected Williams' program of carrying out general political agitation and propaganda activity in ALA against Zionism tout court rather than developing concrete consensus-based work on the relevant library, educational/cultural issues involving Palestinian rights. At the same time we rejected his strategy of campaigning at constantly escalating levels, with unmodulated urgency and with increasingly strident and abusive rhetoric, a style of work completely inappropriate and counterproductive in a professional association.

These strategies effectively made Williams the center of controversy and garnered him much publicity, but they also tended to make him, rather than Palestinian rights, the issue. His approach was ultimately rejected by almost all of us who worked on the issue in ALA as dangerous and destructive. Williams lost what personal support he had because, despite warnings, he continued to associate the campaign—a collective endeavor—with his own singular perspective.

For the record, I remain as convinced as ever about the correctness of our having raised the issue within ALA of the role of censorship and cultural suppression in the illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and of having made the Association go on record against this policy. The subsequent revocation of that resolution, while unfortunate, does not, however—despite your article's allegation—mean that the ALA now stands "foursquare in favor of Israeli censorship" if for no other reason than that there is a standing ALA resolution condemning censorship in all the Mideast.

The work of the now-dissolved, single issue Israeli Censorship/Palestinian Libraries Task Force has, by decision of the SRRT Action Council, devolved upon the multi-issue International Responsibilities Task Force, which I chair, as one of the important issues which it will continue to monitor and act on in positive ways as the new situation in Israel/Palestine develops. There is no basis to the claims that SRRT, or individuals like myself, have backed down on the principled stance we took leading to the passage of the original anti-censorship resolution.

Mark Rosenzweig, La Guardia, NY

No one knows better than we how hard our correspondent, Adam Chandler, worked to provide objective coverage of what turned out to be an extremely emotional and highly personalized series of events, as do virtually all endeavors to judge Israel by the same standards routinely applied to other nations or, at least, to other nations that are major recipients of U.S. military and economic aid. If our account slighted the valuable contributions of some of the other participants, or minimized the personal infighting in hopes of using our limited space to focus on the results, we regret the former and accept full responsibility for the latter. Your letter (which we have abridged) and the one above it may help to round out the account from the perspectives of those other participants.

Courageous Charley Reese

If space permits, I would like very much for you to print my short letter that appeared in the Orlando Sentinel of 30 August 1994.

It is almost impossible to get in anything even vaguely critical of Israel and I can't believe my good luck. Perhaps their regular letter screener is on vacation in Israel or was given a job by Clinton in Washington?

The only reason we subscribe to the Sentinel is that our favorite columnist, Charley Reese, works for the paper. Charley is the only person employed by the organization who has the courage to be truthful and honest about the ill treatment Israel metes out to the Palestinians. My wife and I deeply admire him for it.

Keep up the fine work you are doing.

Ted Byrd, Merritt Island, FL

We had to choose between your letter to us and your letter to the Sentinel and we chose the former because it gives us a chance to elaborate on your complimentary remarks about Sentinel columnist Charley Reese. He wasn't always so enlightened about Israel but, as he has recounted in his columns, he was challenged by a Palestinian reader to do a little research on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. When he did so, he saw the light. We began to reprint some of those wonderful columns and, guess what? Suddenly his syndicate doubled the cost, putting them out of our price range. Maybe that's what the hypothetical editor you cite did before joining the Clinton administration.

Does Shahak Cross the Line?

As an Orthodox Jewish anti-Zionist activist, constantly called upon to defend my own anti-Zionism from charges of being anti-Semitic, I am particularly sensitive to any breaching of the border between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. In my opinion, the column of L. Humphrey Walz in your Sept./Oct. issue has transgressed that border in its uncritical reception of the work of Israel Shahak.

Shahak's selective citations are reminiscent of the practices of Christian antiSemites such as the author of The Dagger of the Faith or Eisenmenger's notorious Entdecktes Judentums. Historical Judaism has its ugly aspects. Many Jews over the centuries have been troubled by these, attempting to understand them historically and transcend them in various ways. Any religious group stretching back thousands of years can be subjected to a critique that will expose dark and unpleasant aspects, and there will always be members of any group that will celebrate and seek to enhance its ugliest expressions.

Christianity has a long tradition of violent rhetoric and murderous violence against non-Christians, whether Jews, Native Americans, or Bosnian Muslims. And the New Testament, Patristic literature, and Christian theology are full of rhetoric about "the Jews" that has supported this history.

Shahak knows this but, as a Jew, he prefers to engage a critique (which I sometimes agree with and generally feel is grossly exaggerated) of the racist aspects of his own people's cultural history. Were he to turn his attention to Christianity or to Islam, I am sure he would produce similar documents.

It therefore at least borders on the antiSemitic for Walz to point to an alleged call for "ethnic cleansing" by Jewish texts—which has not taken place on anything like the scale of past or present ethnic cleansings by Christians—at the same time and in the context of a protest against alleged Israeli "divisive, offensive calumnies against the New Testament, Jesus and Christianity." Even less is it appropriate to cite such "offensive calumnies" on the part of the "American Jewish establishment," which, for all its many political sins, has not made attacking Christianity an important part of its agenda. The Washington Report consistently and correctly criticizes those who "demonize" Islam by citing out of historical context its violent or triumphalist aspects. Some Jews do indeed reduce Christianity to a history of anti-Semitic violence, and they should also be denounced. The same critique should be directed as well at those who would demonize Judaism by reducing it to the least palatable of its historical responses to violent oppression.

Prof. Daniel Boyarin, Berkeley, CA

We have no problem with anything in your letter except what seems to us extremely loose use of the overworked term "anti-Semitic." You say similar charges can be made about Christianity or Islam. Does that make you "anti-Christian" or "anti-Muslim"? Of course not! So why does criticism of Israel, Zionism or Judaism merit the term "anti-Semitism"?

Facts are facts and though it is painful for Jews to read Dr. Shahak's book, as Dr. Edna Homa Hunt's review in this issue makes clear, and undoubtedly it is painful for many Christians to be reminded of the facts about Christianity you cite, there is no excuse for pinning ugly labels on those who remind us of the hard truths about humanity's tortuous and unfinished journey to civilized conduct. When we think of Judaism, we prefer to cite Hillel's explanation that its essence is in the injunction, "What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man: That is the whole Law; all the rest is interpretation," just as we prefer to think of Christianity as embodied in the admonition to "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." That said, it's equally important to recall how far short of such simple but exalted thought some Christians fell in creating the extermination camps of Europe and some Jews fell in the interrogation rooms in the occupied territories. We've all been exposed to extensive examination of aspects of Christian civilization that led to Auschwitz. We assume Shahak is trying to illuminate some aspects of Judaism, and Zionism, that led to Deir Yassin and Qibya, or perhaps even more pertinent in this context, the negative aspects of both Christianity and Judaism that led to Sabra-Shatila.

Religious Intolerance

M.M. Ali (WRMEA Sept./Oct. 1994) uses some tortuous reasoning to justify the treatment of Taslima Nasrin by Bangladesh. The truth is that all the monotheistic religions are or have been intolerant in religious matters. They all have preached and carried out holy wars sometime in their history. They are still doing so in many parts of the world.

To pretend that any monotheism preaches brotherly love only is pure rubbish. It might do so for those within the fold but it has always been death to the infidel. The Mosaic Law decreed death by stoning to the blasphemer. In Scotland, until the 18th century, blasphemy was punishable by death. It is still a statutory offense in England and many American states.

According to Deuteronomy 7:2, "And when the Lord thy God shall deliver [thy enemies] before thee, thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them." The Puritan John Mason cited the above passage as justification for the extermination of the Indians.

In the Qur'an the prescription for apostasy is death.

That Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasrin are guilty of the same crime is obvious. They are both "blasphemers."

Thein Wah, Ph.D., San Antonio, TX

Observations on Kashmir

As a Kashmiri, I find it necessary to take issue with some of the observations made by Hasan Zillur Rahim in his article "Moment of Truth in Kashmir" (Sept./Oct. 1994).

Rahim's statement "nobody had the right at the time of independence to choose to be independent. They had to accede to either India or Pakistan" is inaccurate. The purpose of independence was to allow for the people to choose their future. The Kashmiris were never given a chance to accede to either India or Pakistan because they were never given a chance to vote at the polls in a democratic and fair election.

The Kashmiris who have died over the last six years are labeled as a "growing militant movement." The mujahids who are fighting for the freedom of their people from oppression should not be dismissed as a "growing militant movement." They are fighting a war for freedom.

Rahim says that Kashmir is "another Bosnia in the making." I'm afraid that the Kashmir tragedy has existed for almost half a century and it is an historical blunder to call it "another Bosnia in the making." Human suffering at the hands of merciless killers remains inhuman even if it isn't publicized and broadcast by the Western media.

Rahim's suggestion to drag in the Dogras, Pandits and Buddhists as separate entities along with Kashmiri Muslims amounts to the shredding of Kashmir, which is a whole entity. Even as a device to get out of the continued gridlock Mr. Rahim's proposal is loaded with unwelcome consequences. One needs to keep in mind that Kashmir is not just any real estate up for auction or negotiation. It represents the aspirations of 13 million struggling souls. If Rahim's thinking spreads, Kashmir, like what we did with Palestine and what we are doing with Bosnia, will be cut up into pieces. I hope Mr. Rahim is not advocating a dismemberment of Kashmir. The solution to the crisis in Kashmir has existed since 1949. It is simple: Enact the 1948-49 U.N. resolutions calling for a plebiscite and let the people of Kashmir vote for their future.

Shakila A. Khan, Herndon, VA

We believe the writer's point was that if the plebiscite had been held as promised, it might have offered the people of Kashmir only a choice between accession to India or to Pakistan. Yet, given a third option, a majority of Kashmiris might instead opt for an independent sovereign state, affiliated with neither India nor Pakistan, in which the rights of all of Kashmir's minorities would be protected.

Arrogance or Naivet??

I must respond to the article "More Than Bosnia" in your June 1994 issue. You made some comments about "Desert Storm," as follows: "The international coalition organized by President George Bush under U.N. auspices was a classic case of collective defense...The U.S. had a role to play, played it, and the world was a safer place."

So, the emir is back on his throne, and everyone lives happily ever after, eh? How naive (or arrogant). You should know very well that "Desert Storm" was without question the stupidest war America ever fought. And you are actually proud of it? Shame on you. I will go to my grave condemning this war, as will millions of people throughout the world. The U.S. allied with some of the most corrupt regimes in the region in order to destroy the strongest, most nationalistic Arab state. The war was nothing more than high-tech mass murder. And the brutal embargo has been bleeding Iraq dry for over four years. The embargo does not promote human rights, democracy, or stability. The embargo only promotes death, disease, hunger and starvation. I am sorry, but how can I ever forgive America for this evil war? If "Desert Storm" is an example of your beloved "New World Order," then we are entering an era of untold brutality and inhumanity.

S. Shabaz, Washington, DC

The war began on Aug. 2, 1990 when Saddam Hussain's forces invaded Kuwait, only days after he had assured President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt that there would be no recourse to force to settle Iraq's dispute with Kuwait and only hours after Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, indicated to King Fahd, after a meeting with Sheikh Saad of Kuwait mediated by Saudi Arabia in Jeddah, that the issue was being settled peacefully. Wouldn't it therefore be fair to conclude that the rule of Saddam Hussain, whose wars first with Iran and then with most of the world, which are estimated to have cost all of the Arabs more than $600 billion (enough to buy, among many, many other things, a leading newspaper in every Western country, and anywhere else that the media are privately owned), and to have cost his own country of 18 million people perhaps half a million lives, has been a disaster for the Middle East, comparable, for example, to the Mongol invasions? In any case, our differences with you and some of the other contributors of letters to the editor in this issue illustrate our continuing success as an equal-opportunity offender.