OPINION:
Leave it to Sen. Chuck Schumer to try and improve his street creds with progressives by threatening Israel (“Senate Democrats back BDS anti-Israel movement with filibuster of Mideast partnership bill,” Web, Jan. 8). American-Israeli interests should not be made into a partisan issue. Mr. Schumer is sending the wrong message to the new Congress.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement promotes itself as a grassroots movement. It is anything but. It is a well-funded, anti-Semitic organization dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. The cries of BDS supporters have nothing to do with downtrodden Palestinians. If they have cared about the Arab refugees since 1948, why have they allowed them to fester in fetid refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria for all these years?
Israeli Arabs are the only free Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa. The Arab List is the third-largest group in the Knesset and an Arab sits on Israel’s Supreme Court. Israeli hospitals and universities serve everyone. Arab women are equal under the law to their male family members. In Israel, gays are not thrown off buildings, as they are in Gaza.
Large numbers of Arabs migrated to Palestine in the 1920s and ’30s at the urging of Haj Amin al Husseini, Hitler’s ally, to thwart the Zionist enterprise and for work. To call an Arab a Palestinian was an insult. Only Jews were Palestinians.
It was in 1964, when the KGB and Egypt founded the PLO, that the myth of “historic Palestine” was created.
The original Arab mistake was to not welcome the hard-working Jews, who drained the malarial swamps and made the deserts bloom. What progress could have been brought to a region still wallowing in poverty and tribal hostilities?
BDS is one aspect of Islamic-supremacist ideology. It is part of the rapid spread of Islam across the West. It is being pumped into the supple minds of our young university students.
BDS should be shunned.
LEN BENNETT
Deerfield Beach, Fla.
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