Jerusalem Post Letters to the Editor: Offensive Headline

Let’s allow our judicial system to do its job. Judgment will be rendered in a court of law, not in your newspaper.

By LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Letters (photo credit: REUTERS)
Letters
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Offensive headline
Your choice of words for the headline “Hebron shooter’s lawyer stomps out of court” (July 7) by Yonah Jeremy Bob is offensive.
Elor Azaria is, first and foremost, a soldier. He was involved in a shooting incident in Hebron; he should not be labeled the “Hebron shooter.”
Let’s allow our judicial system to do its job. Judgment will be rendered in a court of law, not in your newspaper.
AMY BODNER Jerusalem
Peculiar language
I find some of the language in “Will Gaza get a port?” (July 7) peculiar.
“Israel says the sea blockade is aimed to stop smuggling of weapons to Hamas, but Palestinians and their supporters view it as a collective punishment....”
Everyone – including the Palestinian Arabs – knows the sea blockade is aimed at stopping the smuggling of weapons to Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza, but the Palestinians and their supporters say otherwise because they know it’s good propaganda.
“But the initiative [for a port] is receiving a cold reception from both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, both of which doubt Israel is actually interested in alleviating the suffering of Gazans.” They might say they doubt it, but I doubt the writer is really capable of reading their minds. In reality, if Hamas and the PA were interested in improving the lives of Arabs in the Gaza Strip, it wouldn’t matter what they thought about Israel’s motives; they’d jump at any opportunity to help improve the lives of their people.
Obviously, the fact that they’re not jumping at this opportunity is strong evidence – as if additional evidence were really needed – that the Palestinian Arab leadership, both in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria, has little or no interest in the welfare of its people.
ALAN STEIN Netanya
Animal injustice
If aliens landed and announced that they were going to experiment on us in a bid to enhance their health, would we think it fair? If they argued that their superior intelligence gave them the right to experiment on us, would we agree? Of course we wouldn’t! We’d tell them in no uncertain terms that experimenting on us would be totally unfair and unjust, and that our lesser intelligence was irrelevant because our lives were as important to us as theirs were to them. And we’d be right, of course.
So why do we fail to recognize that experimenting on less intelligent animal species is equally unfair and unjust? Although it’s pleasing to learn that fewer primates are now being experimented on in Israeli research facilities (“Medical research on higher animals declines,” July 7), it’s dismaying to learn that an additional 18,000 mice are now being used.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Animal experimentation must surely be one of the greatest injustices of our time.
JENNY MOXHAM Monbulk, Australia
Cleaning at State
Your July 7 editorial “Housing sovereignty” begins: “The US State Department on Tuesday accused Israel....”
After the FBI’s blistering “non-indictment” of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s “extreme carelessness” in compromising the security of the United States while she was secretary of state, the State Department must cease its one-sided, biased and never-ending bashing of the democratic State of Israel! The State Department must clean up its own house first.
AVRAHAM FRIEDMAN Ganei Modi’in
You report that the State Department is accusing Israel of “systematically seizing Palestinian land” (“PM: A few Ma’aleh Adumim houses don’t prevent peace,” July 6).
With one word, Israel could counter-accuse the US for illegally appropriating vast territories with its Homestead Act, the US law that permitted settlers to claim as much land as they could farm while displacing the indigenous native Americans.
The word is “hypocrisy.”
GERSHON DALIN Modi’in
Filling in the blanks
The mysterious Shushani (or Shoshani, as it is sometimes spelled, and in the French, Chouchani) mentioned in Jacob Dolinger’s “Elie Wiesel’s masters” (Comment & Features, July 7) exerted a profound influence not only on Wiesel, but on Hebrew University’s emeritus professor of Jewish thought Shalom Rosenberg, as well as the late French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.
He also, at one time, had been hired to teach Talmud to the youthful Andre Neher, later professor of Jewish studies at the University of Strasbourg.
According to scholar Yael Levin, Shushani’s real name was Hillel Pearlman, and he had been a student of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook in Jaffa prior to the outbreak of World War I. After his sojourn in France, he wound up in Uruguay, where he died in 1968.
DAVID WILK Ma’aleh Adumim
Dream world
Terrorist Marwan Barghouti, leader of the second intifada and sitting in prison with five life sentences, is Gershon Baskin’s recommendation to Israelis as the most beneficial negotiating partner because he has majority support from his people (“My enemy’s leader,” Encountering Peace, July 7). I guess that means he has the support of terrorists.
Baskin really believes this, and that is what’s so disturbing. He offers excuses that Barghouti didn’t actually murder anyone with his own hands, and that he didn’t recognize the Israeli courts and therefore offered no defense. This is such a fine candidate to follow in the footsteps of Yasser Arafat and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas.
I just have to wonder: Does Baskin believe the same of Hitler? Hitler didn’t actually do the killing and gassing of Jews by himself.
He was also the choice of the German people. Maybe he, too, deserves some kind of pass.
These comparisons might sound quite disturbing, but just as disturbing is allowing this writer seven lines of self-praise at the end of a despicable column.
It’s time for Baskin to wake up from his dream world and join the rest of us in the real world.
JONATHAN SURASKY Ra’anana
Ya’alon at fault
We should not sleep so easily at night because we now know how dangerous Hamas’s tunnels are to Israel’s precarious existence, as you report in “Gazans with Hamas funds in shoes provide tunnel info” (July 6).
The latest revelation is that some tunnels go through mosques. What will it look like to the world when it sees headlines about us blowing them up? When Islamic State blows up mosques, it’s fine, but when Israel does it, we will be called cruel and inhumane. All of this is because calculated decisions were made by then-defense minister Moshe Ya’alon and others not to win Operation Protective Edge. So now we are faced with a bigger and more devastating war.
What kind of generals send soldiers into battle when they don’t plan to win the war? Why do they make it much harder for the average Israeli to face his future? What kind of people are we that we demand no accounting? TOBY WILLIG Jerusalem Poker farce Apropos reader Sidney Handel’s letter to the editor about Hezbollah’s 120,000 rockets and an Iranian nuclear bomb (“Far-seeing pol,” July 6), I couldn’t help but (uncomfortably) relate the situation to a three-handed poker game. Here we have Israel with a pair of deuces, feeling confident that Hezbollah, with kings full, and Iran, with a straight flush, will fold.
We have done it before and, with God’s help if need be, we will do it again.
LEONARD KAHN Zichron Ya’acov