Everyone has his or her take on the Middle East, and everyone employs certain facts to back them up. This is the nature of political dialogue. There are also those who use absolutely false claims for their political agenda, as Mr. Fouda does (‘Israeli government speaker no human rights activist,’ Sept. 19, pg. 6). This type of distortion is what Fouda himself warns us of with his reference to George Orwell’s ‘1984’.
It is the stubborn, narrow-minded approach Fouda takes that is helping to obstruct the chance for peace in Israel. He gives a little literature lesson at the beginning of his letter, for which I am grateful to have been his student, in which he writes about George Orwell ‘altering the words’ in order to ‘change the way that others perceive’ a piece of information. Fouda goes on to say, ‘when this principle is employed with sinister political intentions, the result can be a complete inversion of morality.’
To begin the next paragraph, he writes, ‘With that in mind, I attended a lecture on Tuesday by Natan Sharansky.’ With that in mind! If that was in his mind when he went to the lecture, what did Mr. Fouda hope to take out of it? Obviously he was not going in with an open mind to hear one of the great human rights advocates of our time. Rather, he was looking for ways to see how he can play with his words and be the one who truly inverts Sharansky’s overall message in order to help his own cause.
For example, Mr. Fouda, you write about the ‘massacre’ in the Jenin Refugee Camp, ‘which was universally condemned by real human rights activists as a brutal exercise in collective punishment.’ From where are you getting these lies? I’m glad to see that BU’s creative writing department is thriving, but how dare you attempt to sell these words as fact!
This ‘massacre’ to which you refer has been universally accepted to have no bearing of such a horrendous title. Despite the initial claims by several Palestinian Authority spokesmen that thousands of Palestinians were murdered, the official Palestinian body count as reported by Kadoura Mousa Kadoura, the director of Yasir Arafat’s Fatah movement for the northern West Bank, was 56. Later, it was also discovered that the vast majority of those Palestinians killed were armed combatants who were firing upon Israeli soldiers. It is no wonder that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s report on Aug. 1, 2002, refutes the fallacious claims of a massacre in Jenin.
For those who are unaware, more suicide bombers have come out of Jenin than any other place in the world. Any other country faced with the same situation that as Israel would have bombed Jenin from the air, in order to cut down on its own casualties. Israel, however, which is held to a higher moral standard by the rest of the world as well as itself, went door to door looking for the terrorists in order to keep the Palestinian casualty count to a minimum. As a result, 23 Israeli soldiers were killed by Palestinian combatants. So, yes, while you write things that are simply not true, Sharansky’s statement that ‘Israel displays more sensitivity to human life than any other country’ is, in fact, justifiable.
Please, Mr. Fouda, all that I ask from you is for an apology to Mr. Sharansky, a human rights activist. He spent nine years in prison so that people like you and me can openly express our views in a democratic and free society without having to fear our basic liberties will be compromised.
Aaron Kaplowitz COM ’06