In Tarek Fouda’s letter on Friday (‘Israeli government speaker is no human rights activist,’ Sept. 19, pg. 6), he claims to be concerned about those who distort terms to change the way information is perceived. But Fouda himself not only abuses terms, but he also provides false information.
Fouda accuses Israeli government representative Natan Sharansky, who spoke at BU last week, of surrounding himself in ‘political buzzwords like freedom and human rights.’ But he fails to mention that Israel is the beacon of freedom and human rights in the Middle East. Israel is one of few places in the Middle East where Arab women can vote. No where else in the Middle East are minorities, homosexuals, women and other groups given the equality and freedom that they are given in Israel. Fouda tries to paint Israel as a human rights violator against the Palestinians, but that claim doesn’t seem to hold up when considering a group of homosexual Palestinians went to Israel to take refuge from being tortured for their sexual orientation. It doesn’t seem to hold up that after suicide attacks in Israel, Hadassah hospital treats both the victims and the perpetrators, giving health care to all without discrimination. In Israel, freedom and human rights aren’t political buzzwords they are the foundations of society.
Fouda not only provides a distorted reality of human rights in the Middle East, but he abuses many other ‘buzzwords.’ For example, he accuses Israel of terrorism. Terrorism is the deliberate use of terror against civilians to achieve your goal. According to Boston Globe reports, in the violence since September 2000, 71 percent of Israelis killed have been innocent civilians, compared with 18 percent of the Palestinians killed. Especially when considering that close to 80 percent of attempted attacks on Israel are thwarted by Israel’s security forces, I think it’s clear which side is deliberately terrorizing civilians. Israel is a democracy faced with 3 years of terror and is defending itself by targeting terrorists. Anyone who claims otherwise is distorting the facts, and anyone who flips the term terrorist around and places it on Israel is abusing the language, something Fouda accuses an Israeli representative of doing.
However, the most telltale sign that Fouda falsely describes the situation was his citing of the operation in Jenin. Fouda calls the operation a massacre, when every study of the operation has concluded that the initial massacre claim was completely false. It was only given that association because the Palestinians initially claimed that thousands of people were killed and a hospital was bombed, both of which never happened. Yet Fouda accuses an Israeli government representative, not Palestinian representatives, of diluting the meaning of terms.
In Jenin, a known hotbed of terrorist activity, Israel decided to risk the lives of its soldiers and send them house to house instead of bombing the area from the air in order to minimize civilian casualties. Of the 52 Palestinians killed, at least 44 are known to have orchestrated terrorist attacks. 23 Israeli soldiers lost their lives in the mission. Instead of discussing what really happened in Jenin, Fouda talks about two children who were unfortunately killed in order to get us to sympathize with his side. If that’s not a case of ‘the importance of word choice in developing people’s consciousness of reality’ the very thing Fouda is complaining about in his letter then I don’t know what is. Fouda’s letter was full of lies and misleading statements, and I hope that everyone who read it recognized the hypocrisy it contained.
Tracy Fogel CAS ’04
The writer is secretary of BU Students for Israel.