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(04/22/10 4:00am)
To the editor,
In "Pappé's Questionable Content" (Mairghread Ryan, Spectrum, April 14), Professor Ernest Sternberg says that Professor Ilan Pappé's UB lecture on March 24 "bordered on hate speech." It's surprising to read this, since Professor Sternberg did not attend the lecture. (I did, and saw that he was not there.) Moreover, he seems not even to have heard a tape, for he says not one word about the lecture itself. Not just ordinary scholarly ethics, but the Torah itself, has some fairly sharp things to say about "bearing false witness."
And for such a short letter, Professor Sternberg produces a remarkable number of factual errors. The Arab Revolt began in 1936, not 1933. Israel ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians not just "in the context of a total war," but also in the five months before the Arab armies attacked in May 1948. And no reputable historian of any political persuasion claims any more that the Palestinians left their homes "on their own." The historical record reinforces what common sense would expect: that they left their homes because of violence and the threat of violence.
Professor Sternberg also engages in strategic misrepresentation. Indeed, it is true that "some" Palestinian refugees left Israeli-occupied Palestine during the Nakba, and that "all" Jewish refugees left the rest of Palestine. But surely the numbers of that "some" (750,000) and that "all" (well under 1% of that) are also worth noting.
In the future, I strongly encourage Professor Sternberg to speak more accurately, to attend the lectures he wishes to review, and to hear the speech he wishes to label "hate speech."
James Holstun
Professor
jholstun@buffalo.edu
(09/01/06 4:00am)
WBFO, a public radio station affiliated with the University at Buffalo, has decided that the university community and the city at large should not hear listener commentaries criticizing Israel's military invasions and occupations.
(02/08/06 5:00am)
In "Understanding the Bulldozer" (Feb. 1), Jeremy Burton argues, rightly enough, that other world leaders are guilty of far greater war crimes than is Ariel Sharon. But the Nuremberg Tribunal made it clear that "Others did it too!" is no excuse when it comes to war crimes, so Ariel Sharon's must be judged for themselves. Given that Burton admits these crimes, his statement that he stands behind Sharon is surprising.
(10/03/05 4:00am)
In his Sept. 26 letter ("Anti-Zionism comes from anti-Semitism"), Bryan Saltz says it is anti-Semitic to condemn Israel when other nations are guilty of far worse human rights violations. But why should we criticize only the foremost violators of human rights? By this principle, Salz should not criticize Palestinians for killing Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada, for Israelis, by their own admission, have killed many more Palestinian civilians. But of course, we can and should continue to criticize both.
(01/23/04 5:00am)
In his letter to the editor "Anti-Israel Letter Was Misleading, Misinformed," in the Jan. 21 issue, Eric Bokobza makes several errors. First, he seems not to know that Israel and Jordan divided Palestine between them in 1948 and that Palestinians on the West Bank did indeed suffer under and resist the Jordanian government, as they continue to resist the Israeli occupation. Jordanian oppression does not provide an alibi for Israeli oppression.