Problematic Headline
I am opposed to Hillary Clinton becoming our next president because of her private e-mail dealings and the Benghazi fiasco. She has failed to earn our trust. But I felt your Jan. 15 front-page headline – “Clinton Considered Secret Plans to Spark Palestinian Unrest, ‘Shame’ Israel” – was misleading. And the heading for the story jump on page 3 read, “Clinton’s Plan.” Was it ever her plan?
In the story itself we see these “plans” were nothing more than proposals from a misguided U.S. ambassador to Israel and a former State Department employee. There is no indication that Clinton ever gave the suggestions serious thought, and she certainly didn’t act on them.
That aside, I must ask, What right do these State Department functionaries have to dictate how Israel must deal with an enemy intent on removing Israel and Jews from that part of the world?
George Epstein
Los Angeles, CA
Anti-Israel Professoriate
Re “The Moral Vacuity of the Anti-Israel Professoriate” (op-ed, Jan. 15):
The National Women’s Studies Association’s vote to approve another academic boycott of Israel – because it “cannot overlook the injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights … ” – is the epitome of a nefarious act with purely evil intent being masqueraded as a noble deed.
Palestinians torture and execute their own people or selling land to Israelis. Israel, on the other had, does not even execute captured Arab terrorist murderers (which I think is a big mistake).
How broken does the NWSA’s moral compass have to be for it not to recognize Palestinian barbarity and Israeli magnanimity?
Allegations of Israeli sexual violence against Arab women are equally fictitious.
An Arab Muslim mother from northern Israel, Anet Haskia, with political aspirations, protested on Facebook the sexual harassment and torture of female activists in Egypt, telling Palestinian women they should take a close look and realize how humane their Jewish “enemies” really are:
“We are talking about the rape of Arab women in Egypt and other Arab states…. Jewish men do not rape Arab women and girls! It is Arab Muslim men who are raping you, so focus…on them and leave Israel alone.”
Even dedicated Israel haters know the IDF does not rape women.
Israeli soldier Hen Mazzig, during his travels to U.S. college campuses and high schools, was told by a leftist professor, “You IDF soldiers don’t rape Palestinians because Israelis are so racist and disgusted by them that you won’t touch them.”
The same absurd notion was promoted several years ago by a leftist Hebrew University graduate student with a history of denouncing Israel.
The NWSA has a reckless disregard for the truth and spews forth racist, hateful, and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Its message is a bold display of unabashed hypocrisy. Perhaps these academics would see the error of their ways if people contacted them at [email protected] to express differing viewpoints.
Josh Greenberger
Brooklyn, NY
Shunning Those We Should Be Helping
I know so many people were enthusiastic and excited about The Shabbos Project last fall, which involved inviting Jews with no religious background to experience Shabbos in an observant household.
I, on the other hand, was not excited about it. I think we are in the midst of a huge crisis in our communities with so many teens and young adults from frum families who were turned off for various reasons and are now not religious. (A situation eloquently addressed by Rabbi Eliyahu Safran in his Jan. 15 op-ed article “Upon Our Altars.”)
These kids did not just wake up one day and decide to stop believing in Hashem and in themselves. Something happened to them that started the process.