Thursday, January 18, 2007 Older Editions

Wheels speaker responds to 'dangerous language'

By Mazin Qumsiyeh
Wheels of Justice

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) engaged in defamatory and dangerous language in challenging the right of teachers who invited us to Andover. Briefly:

1) Needlessly describing those you disagree with as "anti-Semitic" cheapens and mocks the memory of all those who suffered because of their religion. We presented eyewitness accounts and non-violent resistance to occupations in Iraq and Palestine. Some of our eyewitness speakers are Jewish and even Holocaust survivors (80-year-old Hedy Epstein).

2) We are also not "anti-Israel" since we believe in the rights of all people and believe human rights results in a win-win situation to all. Many Jews and Israelis take stronger positions than us (e.g. see books by Giladi, Shahak, Pappe, Halper, Mezvinsky). Israeli artists declared that: "If the state of Israel aspires to perceive itself as a democracy, it should abandon once and for all, any legal and ideological foundation of religious, ethnic, and demographic discrimination. The state of Israel should strive to become the state of all its citizens. We call for the annulment of all laws that make Israel an apartheid state, including the Jewish law of return in its present form."

3) The ADL collected information on Arab- and African-Americans active in the movement against apartheid South Africa, and settled a case out of court (agreeing to pay an undisclosed amount).

Congressman Paul Findley's book They Dare to Speak Out provides a good introduction to these and other methods of silencing debate. The attacks on President Jimmy Carter for his latest book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, like the unfair vocal attacks by a minority on Andover teachers who invited us, are symptomatic.

4) There is the mistaken notion that political Zionism serves Jewish interests or represents Jews (this is challenged by Jewish historians like Lenni Brenner and Norman Finkelstein).

5) We have spent more than $400 billion of our taxes to occupy Iraq for control of oil and other Zionist plans to reshape the Middle East, and more than $1 trillion to support the Israeli government (highest recipient of aid, getting more than Africa as a continent). In the last four years, we lost 650,000 Iraqis, 3,000 Americans, several thousand Palestinians and Lebanese, and several hundred Israelis. It is a serious subject deserving of serious debate based on facts (rather than hurling insults). Our speakers (including me) are willing to engage in civil public dialogues.

The school principal said at the public meeting: "If we can't make peace here, how do we expect them to make peace there?" Our Web site contains more information on what we really stand for such as our position on violence.

Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh is a Christian Palestinian American and coordinator for the Wheels of Justice bus tour.