Why Blame Israel?
In response to Charles Held’s claim that Israel is to blame for occupying so-called Arab lands (Letters, “Ignorant Warmongering,” Oct. 29), I am compelled to counter with the actual truth. Here are just a few facts to consider:
Israel became a nation in 1312 BCE, two thousand years before the rise of Islam.
Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 BCE, the Jews have had dominion over the land for over one thousand years with a continuous presence in the land for 3300 years.
In 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews. Sixty-eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.
The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms.
The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is estimated to be the same.
Arab refugees were intentionally not absorbed or integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory. Out of the 100 million refugees since WWII, theirs is the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own peoples’ lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel, a country no larger than New Jersey.
The PLO’s Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. Israel has given the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them with weapons.
— Ira Chase, Charlotte
Honor The Past
Please, not the “don’t wallow in the past” sermon (“Go South, Young Man,” by David Walters, Oct. 29) again! You will not find many of us pining away for the old South or the ugliness and poverty that were part of it. Slavery notwithstanding, Southern heritage is really our collected family histories filled with stories that are our own, and whether they are myth or real they indelibly impress upon us who we are as Southerners in the land, and to us this is important.
While most of us welcome and embrace the new ideas that come with diversity, and understand that this is crucial for the region to grow and remain vibrant, what we don’t tolerate very well are people from other places trying to impose upon us a cultural homogeneity by telling us how we should celebrate our own history. Southern politicians may have fought for slavery and justified it by appealing to the innate loyalty the Scots-Irish had for land, family, and independence, but most Confederate soldiers did not pick up arms to fight for the right to own slaves, most did not own slaves, and hardly considered it the principal reason for going to war. The correspondences of my ancestors reveal that they were more frightened for the welfare of their families, their farms, and their personal freedoms being threatened by Northern armies.
Civil War re-enactments, family reunions, genealogy, Highland games, church homecomings, and endeavors to preserve our history can hardly be called brooding on the past. It is a remembering of who we are while we look to see where we are going. We honor our Civil War dead as patriots not because they fought for slavery, but because they fought for us. They are buried in our local churchyards and we will not dance upon their graves to appease anybody.
— Lee Hutchison, Charlotte
Tit For Tat
Thank you to Creative Loafing for covering every possible or conceivable angle of the Susan G. Komen Foundation controversy. I’m referring to the article, then the responses, and then last week another response from the local Komen organization, which was answered by the author of the original article, thus coming full circle. My only additional comment now is “Enough!” There are surely other issues out there that you guys could write about. I know you need to print official responses and all, but maybe both sides could chill out a little and give us poor readers a rest.
— Kevin Oliver, Charlotte
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2003.
