Less beer please!

[Re: “Bike shorts, beer and Brazilian beats,” Andrea Zanin, Aug. 2] I was a participant in the 9th annual Friends for Life Bike Rally that arrived in Montreal last weekend. Upon arrival, I was pleased to see the coverage in your paper.

However, I was immediately dismayed at the caption in the lower corner of the article that reads “Heading for the beer.” I have participated in the Bike Rally for the past three years, not because of the beer but because of the cause. As someone who rarely drinks because of a family history, I was insulted at the generalization that was made about “the beer.” My only hope is that in any future articles you write, you stay focused on the main storyline. I feel that the line with the beer comment will be what people remember, rather than the effort we put forth for the HIV/AIDS cause.

>> Mike Smith

Anti-Semitism,
ethnic cleansing

[Re: Letters, Aug. 9] I would like to unequivocally call attention to this week’s letter by Carl Aboud, which is blatantly anti-Semitic. I also question your paper calling this letter “Challenging Weinstein,” calling attention to an obviously Jewish name. Aboud tries to paint all of the complex international political problems on select Jewish individuals and businesses in the West. Classic anti-Semitism, if you know any history. This calls attention to the fact that anti-Israel and anti-Semitic people are coming to Montreal from viciously anti-Semitic Middle Eastern countries.

Aboud is an example of this. I know my own history and the picture he paints is straight out of the forgeries of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—a Tsarist-era anti-Semitic tract—and other ill-educated fabrications. If the Mirror continues to print irresponsible pieces like Mr. Aboud’s, I will be forced to start a petition to remove advertising from your pages.

Funny, Israel is a normal country with families and a history going back thousands of years before countries like Iran, Iraq and others even existed. Try to figure that one out, Mr. Aboud.

>> J Wexler

[Re: Letter, Aug. 2]

The comments from Patrice Bombardier are sadly predictable, coming from the “Quebec intellectual well” that has been poisoned by the blinkered leftists who dominate the academic scene and francophone media. However, it’s one thing to have absorbed too well the lessons of his favourite teachers and columnists, but it’s quite another to out-and-out lie. 

The only ceasefire Hamas has ever supported is one where Israel would simply capitulate to all of Hamas’s demands. I don’t think too many of us would agree to collective suicide. And, to which Arab countries is he referring when he says they’ve “offered peace to Israel”? Only two Arab countries even recognise Israel’s existence, and there has never been a serious proposal from the Arab world offering peace and security to Israel in exchange for territorial concessions. Lastly, his purported statistics on villages burned to the ground, the torture of prisoners and the killing of Palestinian children are simply not supported by any reasonably impartial analysis. Maybe UNHRA and the Arab League promote and believe these oft-refuted canards, but not those of us who bother to look at both sides of the story.

The Palestinians are arguably one of the most beleaguered and dysfunctional “nations” on the face of this planet, but a mirror would probably be the best means of identifying the underlying cause.

>> Henry Roth

[Re: Letters, August 2]

Despite Ken Weinstein’s claim, the meaning of the term “ethnic cleansing” is perfectly well understood. It also remains entirely appropriate and applicable, not only to Israel’s past treatment of Palestinians but also to its current policy. Crude ethnic cleansing of the traditional variety was first used by Israel in the 1948 and 1967 wars through terror operations, such as the Deir Yassin massacre, and in combination with expulsions and threats of further violence, which terrified Palestinians into fleeing.

Today, such methods would be a PR disaster and have been shelved. Instead, the judicial arm of the state has kicked in to give ethnic cleansing a veneer of legality in the form of Israel’s so-called Law of Return. This Orwellian-named legislation enables Jews who have never set foot in Israel to “return” and receive instant citizenship, while the actual right of return of Palestinian refugees, who were born there and fled, is denied. Coupled with scores of other equally discriminatory regulations, the result is a deliberate and ongoing “thinning” of the Palestinian population with a converse “thickening” of the Jewish one. Zionists have other terms for it, but in the real world it’s called ethnic cleansing.

Just as white racists in Pretoria used to justify apartheid as necessary for a “white” South Africa, Jewish supremacists today justify ethnic cleansing in the name of a “Jewish state.” The more sophisticated apologists euphemistically call ethnic cleansing “Judaization,” or other more benign-sounding names. The average Joe-blow-Zionist simply hopes no one will notice, while the less-than-bright propagandists scream anti-Semitism and insist that Palestinians don’t really exist.

For more details, read Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s latest book, aptly called The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

>> John Dirlik

WE WELCOME LETTERS TO THE EDITOR!