RUTHFULLY YOURS

Background.  A group calling itself the “Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign” had intended to place anti-Israel advertisements on the side of buses in King County.  When a counter-campaign was launched, the bus company refused to allow the posters. Ed Mast, a long term campaigner for “Palestinian rights” wrote an article in the Seattle Times in which he complained about how his group’s “freedom of speech” had been violated.

Victor Sharpe sent a letter to the Seattle Times, to challenge the opinions of Ed Mast. The newspaper did not publish it, but we reproduce his letter in full here.

Dear Editor,

Edward Mast has a towering hatred for Israel. It is a pathology replete with blood libels that have absolutely no basis in truth. His words are dredged from Arab mythology, which he gleefully accepts as fact. His mind is made up and all horrors committed by an Arab and Muslim world he so clearly adores are rendered merely as inconvenient truths and to be hidden or ignored.

His first lie is regarding the number of Arab casualties in Gaza after Israel was finally, after eight long years of enduring Hamas missile attacks upon its civilians, forced to end the Palestinian aggression in Operation Cast Lead. The vast number of those killed in Gaza were not civiliansas Mast states: they were Palestinian terrorists belonging to Hamas and Islamic jihad. Hamas itself admitted this very fact. The admission by Fathi Hamad, Hamas spokesman, that Israel’s figures were correct and those originally offered by Palestinian groups were false exposes the rush to judgment against Israel that has stained the so-called “human rights” community so often in the past.

Despite thousands of telephone calls by Israel to local Arabs and the dropping of thousands more leaflets warning the population of the impending campaign to root out the terrorists among them, the civilians killed were predominately human shields, which Hamas thugs employed as an odious but typical tactic. That is a crime against humanity, which Mast and his cronies would never admit to. From the beginning of 2010, Hamas continued to fire hundreds more rockets and mortars into Israeli farms and villages in an unprovoked aggression against women and children.

But for those who are not blinded by hatred towards embattled Israel, you should know that the total number of missiles Hamas and Islamic jihad have launched since 2005, when the Jewish state gave Gaza to the Palestinian Arabs– an historical and unprecedented concession – has reached over twelve thousand. Yes. 12,000! The mostly Muslim Arab inhabitants of Gaza (Hamas has driven out most Christians) have proven to the world that they are incapable of creating a viable and democratic state, and still are unwilling to live in peace with Israel?

The Israel haters in Seattle presumably don’t know this, or if they do, they don’t care. After all, these are inconvenient truths and the truth plays no part in their lexicon of hate. In the last three months of 2010 a total of 40 rockets or mortars were fired. This is considerably more than in the previous 3 months. And daily missile and mortar attacks on Israeli civilians continue in 2011.

But little, if any, news of these continuing Arab outrages appear in the mostly left leaning international and national mainstream media. However, when Israel is finally provoked beyond endurance by Muslim Arab aggression and retaliates, banner headlines are the order of the day in the very same media: Double standards and hypocrisy writ large.Israel responds towards each act of Hamas aggression, not like Hamas by targeting civilians but by hitting the gangs launching the missiles, or by bombing the smuggling tunnels used by the Palestinian terrorists to bring in ever more sophisticated and lethal weapons.

The United States has sent millions of tax payer dollars to prop up the corrupt Palestinian Authority, which provides little or no accounting to where the money ends up. But much of it finds its way into Gaza, which helps purchase more advanced weapons. Mr. Mast ignores this fact but spews more nonsense regarding the so-called Goldstone report. This grotesquely biased report was conducted by the immoral United Nations Human Rights Council, which has among its leading members the likes of Sudan, Libya, Syria, Iran, North Korea and a rogues gallery of the worst human rights abusers and despotic regimes on the face of the planet. But Mr. Mast adores those miscreants because, like him, they hate the embattled democratic Jewish state. The so-called UN Human Rights Council spends most of its time ignoring the worldwide human rights abuses (much of it in the Arab and Muslim world) but piles on one biased and baseless anti-Israel resolution after another.

Former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, had already stated this fact saying: “I am afraid the resolutions are not balanced. This is unfortunately a practice by the Council: adopting resolutions guided not by human rights but by politics. This is very regrettable.” The late Golda Meier also spoke of what is so tragic and regrettable when she told Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat, after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, that, “…we can forgive you for killing our boys, but we can never forgive you for making our boys have to kill yours.”

Oh, and by the way, Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust denying leader of the Palestinian Authority, has declared repeatedly that no Jews will ever be allowed to live in a Palestinian state. They will be the subject of ethnic cleansing. That is Apartheid, Arab style, a crime Edward Mast so loves to falsely accuse Israel of.And let us remember, even if Edward Mast is incapable of accepting the fact, there has never in all of recorded history ever existed a sovereign Arab state called Palestine.

There are too many falsehoods about Israel dredged up by Edward Mast, but let us see him protest for once at the hideous record of human rights abuses so prevalent within Arab and Muslim societies and, especially among those Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. How about the despicable slaughter of Christians by Muslims in Iraq and Egypt? How about the criminal vandalism and desecration by Palestinian Muslims against Jewish holy places, such as the tomb of the biblical Jewish figure, Joseph? How about the atrocious treatment of women within Palestinian and Muslim Arab society? Let us see whether Mast would condemn the wanton destruction by the Palestinian Muslim Waqf of ancient Jewish and Christian artifacts on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. A crime of hideous proportions against history itself.

Finally, will Edward Mast ever come to his senses and no longer support the so-called Palestinian Arabs, right or wrong?

Victor Sharpe