Letters to the Editor: The Record misrepresents Middle East situation

BY

Re: “Former PLO Terrorist Blames Muslim Fanaticism, Not Israel” Nov 11, 2004:

Thanks for your highly informative piece about Walid Shoebat’s speech on the Harvard campus. Based on your excellent front-page reporting, which made The Record look like a credible paper rather than, say, a mouthpiece for the HLS Alliance for Israel, I learned the following:

1. All Palestinians are murderous, Holocaust-denying, sadistic, fanatical, anti-Semitic terrorists. They throw rocks at Jewish passers-by, cheer wildly when innocent Jews are killed, and so lack common decency that they even curse a Jewish doctor who saves their lives. Obviously, it is the Palestinians’ irrationality (nay, insanity), and not any real grievance like an ongoing brutal occupation, that makes them fight against Zionist forces.

2. Israelis are without fault. I was relieved to learn that “lone actors such as Baruch Goldstein” are the only Israelis responsible for violence and that their acts are always met with “Israeli reaction of outrage and concomitant censure.” I was obviously mistaken in believing that a highly- trained modern military force like the IDF ever humiliates or violently attacks civilians in occupied territories with utter impunity.

3. There are no points of view on the Palestinian issue other than the one presented by Harvard Law School Alliance for Israel. Because if there were, then a paper like The Record would certainly have alluded to them somewhere in the article.

4. There are no organizations on campus, in the Boston area, or in the entire country, which support Palestinian rights and disagree with Mr. Shoebat’s views. Surely, if such organizations existed, they would’ve been quoted by the Record somewhere in the piece.

5. To land on the front page of The Record, all one needs is a series of partisan quotes from a shady character with absolutely no credibility on any issue. By stringing quotes together without context, then the line between speaker’s opinion and actual fact is magically blurred.

I would like to thank The Record and Adina Levine for both teaching me about journalistic integrity and contributing to my understanding of the Mid-East conflict.

Kaveh Shahrooz, 2L