Back up opinions with some facts

To the editor:

(re: “DSA question not anti-Semitic,” Aug. 27)

In a recent letter to the editor of The Riverdale Press, the writer claims the Democratic Socialists of New York support BDS — boycott-divestments-sanctions — of the Jewish homeland because it is an “apartheid” state.

In my opinion, the author is severely mistaken. The writer offers no facts to support this charge.

In this Goebbels-like mantra, if a lie is repeated enough, it eventually is accepted as the truth. It seems to me this disingenuous remark to deny that such lies against the Jewish homeland are not anti-Semitic when Israel is clearly a democratic nation. All citizens have an equal right to vote.

The Arab coalition is the third-largest group in the Israeli parliament. Arab students are represented in universities in similar proportions as they are a proportion of the nation’s population, and public facilities are equally available to all.

How can it be denied that BDS supporters are not anti-Semitic? An apt expression for such individuals (including self-loathing Jews) is that “if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you can be sure it’s a duck.”

I sincerely urge those who seek to delegitimize the Jewish state to reconsider. Historically, harm inflicted on the Jews may begin with them, but never ends there.

Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust during World War II, but by the end of the war, 50 million were dead.

Theodore Fettman

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