Witness to Israeli army using violence
I’m responding to Matt Cutler’s June 21 letter (“Anti-Israel letter full of inaccuracies”). I’m filmmaker from Albany, I lived and filmed in Hebron, Palestine for part of two years.
Concerning the issue of a colonial endeavor, ”From its inception, Zionism was both a nascent national movement and a colonial enterprise in search of a metropolitan sponsor” Rashid Khalidi.
Of the two massacres in Hebron, one in 1929 and the other in 1994. In 1929, 64 Jews were killed, it was caused by a rumor that Jews in Jerusalem were going to control the Temple Mount.
The rumor spread to Hebron, where Jews and Arabs had been living together peacefully.
According to Rabbi Kaplan, who was studying at the Yeshiva, many Jews were hidden by the local Arabs.
In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a fanatical Zionist entered the Abraham mosque in Hebron, killed 29 Palestinians and wounded over 100.
The killing and arrests of innocent civilians is a daily occurrence in Palestine.
I filmed a family whose unarmed father was killed by Israeli soldiers. I interviewed a woman whose 65-year-old husband was killed sleeping in his bed. The last time I was there, a young girl was murdered at a checkpoint because an Israeli soldier thought she was reaching for a knife in her bag.
As far as the use of human shields, according to the October 6, 2005 Guardian, “The Israeli high court yesterday ruled that the army’s long-standing practice of using Palestinian civilians as human shields in combat is illegal under international law.”
Ellie Bernstein
Albany
Placement of ad and article inappropriate
I’m contacting you about the very nicely written article by staff reporter Jeff Wilkin, that appeared on the front page of The Daily Gazette’s Sunday June 16 edition, regarding two local priests serving the Schenectady community.
With anticipation I then turned to page 8 to finish reading the wonderful story, only to discover at the bottom half of the page, an ad notice by a New York City law firm soliciting business related to the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse fiasco.
For the record, nothing disappoints or disgusts me more than the poor and inadequate way the church has been handling this situation.
However it was insensitive to place that ad on the same page where you had printed great stories about these two local men who have been committed to their priestly/deacon vocation for many years, and on Father’s Day no less.
It certainly appears that the layout editor and staff was asleep-at-the-wheel and The Daily Gazette should be ashamed at this lack of professionalism.
You can and should be doing a better job.
Richard S. Zazycki
Rotterdam
EDITOR’S NOTE: The circumstance the writer describes was purely coincidental. The copy editors who edit and lay out the newspaper at night do so with limited if any knowledge of the content of advertisements. Ads are placed on the page after all editorial content is placed. Similarly, the editorial staff doesn’t coordinate with the advertising staff in order to allow advertisers to request placement of their ads next to specific editorial content.
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Categories: Letters to the Editor, Opinion
