In today's (8/15/01) edition of the Washington Post, National Journal Editor and Post columnist Michael Kelly urges Israel to "unleash an overwhelming force" against the Palestinians, "go right ahead and escalate the violence" and "destroy, kill, capture and expel the armed Palestinian forces." There are so many distortions and outrages in Kelly's column that no one should have any trouble composing original letters to the Post condemning it. The letter sent by ADC to the Post is included below along with the text of Kelly's column. Please be aware that there is no point in sending a newspaper multiple copies of the same letter, so please compose a brief note of your own. However, the point should be strongly made that, as ADC's letter points out, when Palestinians express similar sentiments, the United States demands their arrest and Israel places them on hit lists and send its death squads to execute them. Please write to the Post, and tell them that this irresponsible incitement is unacceptable from a paper that purports to maintain minimal standards from its columnists.

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Please send a brief letter to the editor of the Post

Email: <letters@washpost.com>

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TEXT OF LETTER TO WASHINGTON POST FROM ADC COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR HUSSEIN IBISH:

To the Editor:

Michael Kelly claims that the Intifada has been taking place "in Israel" rather than in territories under Israeli military occupation ("Mideast Myths Exploded," 8/15/01). This fiction is required to arrive at the conclusion that "the Palestinians are the aggressor," not Israel's massive army of invasion, conquest and occupation that has imposed 34 years of ongoing hell on the Palestinian people. Instead of urging Israel to comply with international law and end the occupation, Kelly indulges in shameless incitement, urging Israel to "go right ahead and escalate the violence" and "destroy, kill, capture and expel the armed Palestinian forces." Can one imagine the Post, or any other mainstream American newspaper, printing a column that calls for Palestinians, in order to gain their independence and freedom from foreign occupation, to "go right ahead and escalate the violence" and "destroy, kill, capture and expel" Israeli soldiers and settlers? When Palestinians speak like this, the United States demands their arrest and Israel places them on hit lists and send its death squads to execute them. This is without doubt the most irresponsible column to have appeared in the Post in many years.

Yours, Hussein Ibish Communications Director American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

TEXT OF KELLY'S COLUMN:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12316-2001Aug14.html

Mideast Myths Exploded By Michael Kelly Wednesday, August 15, 2001; Page A19

The events of the past 11 months in Israel have been remarkably clarifying. When the Palestinians, on the pretext of a visit by Ariel Sharon to Jerusalem's Temple Mount, began the second intifada last fall, it was still possible for the aggressively delusional to pretend that the Israelis and the Palestinians equally desired a workable peace. That belief shattered under repeated, murderous attacks on Israelis that clearly occurred with at least the tacit blessing of the Palestinian leadership.

Now the other great founding myth of the peace process is also dead. This is the great falsehood of relative morality. For decades, the European left has maintained that the Palestinians held a morally superior position to the Israelis: They were an illegally subjugated people who were striking back in what may have been violent but were also appropriate ways. The claim of Palestinian moral superiority ended when the world saw Palestinians cheer in the street a young man holding up hands red with the blood of an Israeli soldier beaten to death, or perhaps it was when Palestinians stomped two boys, one a U.S. citizen, to death in a cave, or perhaps it was some other moment of gross and gleeful murder.

What remained -- the left's final feeble resort -- was a claim of moral equivalency: The Palestinians might be engaged in terrible acts but so too were the Israelis. Both sides were killing; indeed, the Israelis, with their better arms and soldiers, had killed far more than had the Palestinians.

Now this too has gasped its last breath. It is not possible to pretend any more that there is anything like a moral equivalency at work in this conflict. The facts are indisputable.

One: The Palestinians are the aggressor; they started the conflict, and they purposely drive it forward with fresh killing on almost a daily basis. Two: The Palestinians regard this second intifada not as a sporadically violent protest movement but as a war, with the clear strategic aim of forcing a scared and emotionally exhausted Israel to surrender on terms that would threaten Israel's viability. Three: As a tactic in this strategy, the Palestinians will not fight Israeli forces directly but instead have concentrated their efforts on murdering Israeli civilians. The greater the number, the more pathetically vulnerable the victims -- disco-goers, women and children in a pizza restaurant -- the better. Four: Israel has acted defensively in this conflict; and while Israeli forces accidentally killed Palestinian civilians, their planned lethal attacks have all been aimed only at Palestinian military and terror-group leaders.

Since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, Palestinian terrorists have killed more than 400 Israelis. In June a bomber killed 21 teenagers at a Tel Aviv disco; last week, a bomber killed 15 and maimed as many as a hundred in a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem; three days later, another suicide-bomber wounded 20 persons at another restaurant.

After the Sbarro bombing, Secretary of State Colin Powell, astonishingly, lectured the Israelis in the language of the literally exploded idea of moral equivalency. "I hope that both sides will act with restraint," Powell said. "They both have to do everything they can to restrain the violence, restrain the provocation and the counter-response to the provocation."

This official U.S. policy statement is beyond stupid. It is immoral, hypocritical, obscene. It is indefensible. Israel is at war with an enemy that declines, in its shrewdness and its cowardice, to fight Israel's soldiers but is instead murdering its civilians, its women and children.

This enemy promises, credibly, more murders. In the face of this, in the aftermath of an attack expressly and successfully designed to blow children to bits, how dare a smug, safe-in-his-bed American secretary of state urge "restraint" by "both sides?" How does the secretary imagine his own country would respond to such a "provocation" as the Sbarro mass murder? (His own country bombed Serbia to its knees for killing ethnic Albanians in distant Kosovo, let alone Americans on American soil.)

And when you get down to it, why, exactly, should Israel continue to exercise restraint? Why shouldn't it go right ahead and escalate the violence? The only point to waging war is to win. Israel is at war, and losing. It can win only by fighting the war on its terms, unleashing an overwhelming force (gosh, just what is called for in the Powell Doctrine) to destroy, kill, capture and expel the armed Palestinian forces that have declared war on Israel.

So far, Israel has indeed chosen to practice restraint. But, at this point, it has every moral right to abandon that policy and to engage in the war on terms more advantageous to military victory. This is a matter for Israel, at war, to decide one way or the other. Whether Secretary Powell purses his lips or not.