Myopic teacher education graduate student Stephen Pearson, writing for the misnamed Students for Justice in Palestine and Israel, clearly needs to take a few history courses. I say his group is misnamed because its actual desire, made clear in Mr. Pearson’s Feb. 7 letter to the editor, is to impose injustice, not justice, in Israel.
Because Israel, the world’s only Jewish nation, gives some preferential treatment to Jews, Pearson criticizes its government for being a “regime that advances and protects the dominance of a certain ethnic group,” as if there was something wrong with that, as if every one of Israel’s enemies hasn’t been doing for centuries exactly what Pearson’s group criticizes Israel for doing, and worse.
Why is Mr. Pearson’s group concerned with what they see as injustice, but only by Israel? If favoring one group is unjust, why not also criticize the many Muslim countries in the same region? Get Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria, Yemen, and let’s not forget the government of a future Palestinian state, to abandon Islamic favoritism (that’s not an exhaustive list). If favoring one group is unjust, why not advocate the removal of Christian symbols from the national flags of Denmark, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom (that’s not an exhaustive list)? If favoring one group is unjust, why not ask the governments of Christiansburg, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; San Diego, California; and Corpus Christie, Texas, to change the names of their cities (that’s not an exhaustive list)?
Or if they’d like to start a bit closer to home, try getting the Athens County Board of Elections to remove the quote from Christian scripture from its prominent position on its office wall. Get the Athens County Commissioners to remove their Church Directory from the courthouse wall. Get the City of Athens to stop supporting local Christian organizations such as Salvation Army and Habitat for Humanity. Get Christmas trees and other Christian holiday decorations out of government buildings. Get every public school in Ohio that has a portrait of Jesus in an exalted place to remove all such portraits.
Once Pearson’s group has accomplished any of the above, I’ll listen to his argument about how Israel’s Jewish citizens should be sent back to where they came from: the extermination camps of World War II, internal exile in Siberia, or returned to those many Muslim countries that provided them with plentiful motivation to emigrate in the first place (that’s not an exhaustive list).
Some people seem quite eager to criticize Israel for what so many others also do, remaining silent about the even worse, much worse, transgressions of those others. We Jews have a word for such people: bigots.
Eliot Kalman is an Athens resident.
