Clarion Ledger · Jackson, Mississippi · 17 August 1989

CP-1989-010

Raps creation of Israel, ‘genocide of Palestine’

Earnest Ouverture, Vicksburg

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Transcribed from the clipping

“The saddest story of our times is the continued idiocy of United States policy in the Middle East. The Israeli government sponsors the kidnapping of a Moslem leader and commits murder in the process. Then the oppressed freedom-fighters execute a U.S. captive they are holding. And what is this country’s response?

‘But the Bush administration made clear Monday it did not hold Israel responsible for Higgins’ reported execution.’ (The Clarion-Ledger, Aug. 1). When a nation’s ‘friends’ in a war-zone seek to manipulate events to ensnare it in the morass of perpetual crisis, it is time for that nation to drop such false ‘friends.’

Israel was established in 1948. Yet in all the years before and after that incredible piece of political magic — the appearance of Israel and the disappearance of Palestine — only two U.S. presidents have shown any wisdom and backbone in formulating this country’s policy. Roosevelt said no to the founding of the state of Israel.

And Eisenhower told Israel to get out of Suez in 1956. Since then, the moral and political idiots have ruled from the White House. The real problem lies in this and other nations’ support for a quasi-insane and immoral policy toward Palestine/Israel.

Men and women of one religious persuasion, though natives of Moscow, Paris, London, Buenos Aires, Boise and New York, are granted rights of citizenship and ownership of all the land of Israel. Yet men and women of a different faith are denied those same rights, even then they are born in Jerusalem, Nablus or Nazareth.

Meanwhile, what is the Mississippi delegation to Congress doing in making the local citizens’ desires known to the government? They’re doing just what you would expect senators and representatives from the poorest and most backward of the 50 states to do — either be quiet and fall in line or just ignore the true sentiments of their constituents.

Check the recent actions of Sen. Trent Lott and U.S. Reps. Mike Espy and Sonny Montgomery as examples. Future generations — if there will be any future for us — will look back on our era and condemn us as the vacuous moralists and war criminals that we are.

And it will all be due to our blind spot and support for the great crime of our century — the creation of Israel and the genocide of Palestine.”

Context added by this archive

A reader in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1989, whose argument runs through his own state’s congressional delegation. The paper put the word in the headline, in quotation marks.

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