People of Faith CT

by Sadanand Nanjundiah
New Britain Herald
January 26, 2009

It is a shame that Daniel Kline ("Never apologize for defending yourself," The Herald, Jan. 17) finds nothing wrong with Israel’s three-week assault on the beleaguered, beseiged Palestinians of Gaza. Even worse, he calls any criticism of Israel’s barbaric spree of killing and destruction of over 1,300 Palestinians "anti-Semitic". This is a standard ploy of the powerful Israel lobby to squelch debate on the Israel-Palestinian conflict that reflects unfavorably on their patron.

While across the world the appalling Israeli bombardment of Gaza — that did not spare schools, hospitals, mosques or residences — was recognized as a clear violation of the Geneva conventions, the U.S. Congress voted to give unqualified support to Israel’s actions. In the House, the roll call (on a resolution that was even more one-sided than the one in the Senate) was 390 yes, 5 no and 22 "present" (usually taken to mean the representative wanted to register opposition to the measure without voting "no").

Our elected officials, U.S. Rep. Christopher Murphy and the rest of the Democratic Congressional delegation from Connecticut, are out of step with people in the U.S. who realize that unqualified and unrestrained American support for Israel — military, economic, diplomatic — is undeserved and immoral.

U.S. taxpayers have provided an average of $3 billion dollars to Israel since the 1970s. This belligerent country has received more foreign aid than the rest of the world combined.

Our silence at Israel’s actions is complicity. Israel, a nation which evokes the Holocaust to justify its own existence, is inflicting a misery and suffering on the Palestinians that is eerily reminiscent of what the Nazis perpetrated on the Jews in Europe. The grotesque irony of this situation should not be lost. Israel has been compared to apartheid South Africa in its savage behavior towards the Palestinians by even Bishop Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s peace activist and Nobel laureate.

It is time for American media, elected officials and decent people to recognize the repulsive behavior of this violent rogue state. It needs to be exposed, excoriated and opposed, not coddled and condoned.