From: Ismail Zayid
To: Macleans Magazine

Sent: Sunday, November 26, 2000 1:36 PM

Subject:Zionists, in their own words.

 

The Editor:
Maclean’s Magazine.
26 Nov. 2000

Dear Editor:

Barbara Amiel is at it again [ "Arabs, in their own words", Nov. 27]. In attempting to excuse her own racist statements against Arabs, she quotes statements by Arab journalists who are mostly directing their criticism at Zionism, its leaders and its powerful lobby. If she is concerned about racism, why did she not quote bigoted racist statements by Zionist leaders? I will help her with that.

It was Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s Prime Minister at the time, who described the Arabs as " two-legged animals". General Rafael Eitan, Israel’s former Chief of Staff, referred to the Arabs that they ‘scurry about like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Few weeks ago, Rabbi Yosef, spiritual leader of the Shas movement, described the Palestinians as "snakes". R.J Maxwell-Hyslop, M.P., reported on a meeting of the British Parliamentary delegation, in 1967, with the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Knesset in Israel. He stated that, on hearing of his reference to the Arabs, I asked:" Doctor Hacohen, I am profoundly shocked that you should speak of other human beings in terms similar to those in which Julius Streicher spoke of the Jews. Have you learned nothing? I shall remember his reply to my dying day. He smote the table with both hands and said: ‘but they are not human beings, they are not people, they are Arabs.’ ".

That is Zionism and racism, best summed up in the words of Professor Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and Chairman of Israeli League for Civil and Human Rights, who stated: " It is my considered opinion that the State of Israel is a racist state in the full meaning of this term."

Yours sincerely

Ismail Zayid, MD.