LETTERS
Why don't Witnesses protest Palestinian evils?
Regarding "Hiller's Market gets support from shoppers: Members of Jewish community counter protest against support of Israel" (July 19): On one hand, Hiller's and the Ann Arbor Jewish community owe thanks - peculiar as it may seem - to the ubiquitous pickets of Jewish Witnesses for Peace. Demonstrating near synagogues, at cultural events, and near Arborland to attempt to dissuade people from shopping at Hiller's, not only greatly spurs support for Israel, but is a boon to Hiller's business.
As usual, the actions of the Witnesses for Peace have backfired.
Conversely, remarks like anti-Israel demonstrator Blaine Coleman's that the pickets "are horrified at how Israel is massacring the occupied people of Palestine and what's happening to Palestine today is the same thing that happened to the Jews in Europe in the '30s" are outrageous. What the Nazis did to the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s was calculated dehumanization, brutalization and genocide on an unparalleled scale. To equate Israel's acting in self-defense with Nazi atrocities, demonstrates utter ignorance of history and blatant distortion. It's an obscene and spurious comparison.
Terrorists in Israel and elsewhere, however, who deliberately target innocent civilians, promote the principal aim of the Nazis: annihilation of the Jewish people. The Witnesses for Peace, in not condemning these savage acts or the hatred of Jews widely propagated in Palestinian controlled territories, reveal their cynical moral cowardice.
Elliot H. Gertel, Ann Arbor