Columbia Missourian · Columbia, MO · 4 October 2001

CP-2001-052

Comparison with Israel is misguided

From EDWARD R. MOAD, Columbia

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Transcribed from the clipping

Unfortunately, our recovery, as Americans, from the horrific attacks on Sept. 11 has been marred by a small but vocal chorus of "see, I told you so" from Israel and its supporters in our country. Their premise is that the attack on the Twin Towers is "just like what Israelis have to live with every day." We are supposed to have something in common with them. They are wrong.

The magnitude of the Sept. 11 attacks was incomparable to Palestinians' acts of resistance against the illegal Israeli occupation. Also, the Sept. 11 attack was unprovoked. The Israelis, by contrast, have killed more than 600 Palestinians (nearly five times the number of Israelis killed) in just the last year in order to preserve their occupation.

One-quarter of these have been children, like Fares Odeh, a 13-year-old boy who was hunted down and shot through the throat for throwing rocks at Israeli tanks. Americans don't do that.

But the most important difference of all between America and Israel is that in America, great efforts have been made to protect innocent Muslim and Arab-Americans from misguided retaliations, harrassment and blame by association.

But if America were like Israel, our government would be demolishing whole neighborhoods of Arab homes and businesses as a form of "collective punishment" and arming and abetting vigilante groups to inflict violence against them. No. America is nothing like Israel. Thank God.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping.

Context added by this archive

A READER LETTER, not staff or wire copy. The credit line 'From EDWARD R. MOAD, Columbia' is the letters-page form; it is recorded in byline because the form requires a byline field, but this is not a journalist. No masthead, no folio, no printed date; date is label-only. There is no deck. THIS IS THE SHARPEST LANGUAGE IN THE WHOLE BATCH and it does not come from a reporter.

It is the only item in Batch D that uses 'illegal Israeli occupation', 'collective punishment', 'acts of resistance', and the only one that frames house demolition as something a government does to a people rather than a security measure.

Everything comparably direct elsewhere in the batch is inside quotation marks attributed to someone else; here the paper printed it as the writer's own argument. SPELLING AS PRINTED: 'harrassment' with a double r is the paper's error and is kept.

The letter prints 'Fares Odeh, a 13-year-old'; the Salt Lake Tribune on slide 70 calls the same boy 'Faris Odeh' and a few weeks short of 15, and the Los Angeles Times on this same slide calls him '15-year-old Fares Odeh'. Flag for Eva: the age and the spelling cannot both be right across these records, and this archive should not quietly harmonise them.

Cite this clipping

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