From: Ismail Zayid
To: CBC, The National
Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2001 11:37 PM
Subject: Rex Murphy's Defence of Israeli Racism

Rex Murphy, in his "opinion", today, on the the issue of Israeli racism at the World Conference Against Racism, indulges liberally in re-writing the context of the debate on Israeli racist practices against Palestinians and its own Muslim and Christian citizens. He brings in the tragic history of the Nazi crimes of genocide against the Jews and the Holocaust. For one thing Israel is being accused of racist practices and not genocide. For another, it was not the Palestinians who committed that genocide and should not be required to atone for the Nazi crimes and be uprooted from their homeland and dispossessed of their land. Similarly, the suffering to which the Jews were subjected does not give them a license to practice the crimes committed against an innocent people. The distinguished British historian Professor Arnold Toynbee answered this point accurately in a lecture at McGill University, in 1961, when he told his largely Jewish audience: " The Jewish treatment of the Arabs in 1948 was as morally indefensible as the slaughter by the Nazis of six million Jews....The most tragic thing in human life is when people who have suffered imposed suffering in their turn."
 
As to Israeli racist practises against the Palestinians, I'll let the late Professor Israel Shahak, who was a Holocaust survivor and Chairperson of the Israeli League for Civil and Human Rights, tell it as it is: " It is my considered opinion that the state of Israel is a racist state in the full meaning of this term. In this state people are discriminated against in the most permanent and 'legal' way and in the most important areas of life, only because of their origin. This racist discrimination began in Zionism and is carried out today mainly in cooperation with the institutions of the Zionist movement".
 
Israeli laws of discrimination against its own non-Jewish citizens are wide and varied, but I will leave it at that.
 
Rex Murphy's eloquence is usually compelling but it behooves him to look at the facts before he becomes another mouthpiece for U.S. and Zionist dictates.
 
Yours sincerely
Ismail zayid, MD.
Tel; 902.429.9100
http://izayid.tripod.com