It pains me again to no end to have to strike out at a paper I love, respect and need for my edification and connection to the issues that directly impact our local community. Your news hole is by no …
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[Ed. note: This My View is in response to Doug Rogers' My View, "We have a problem," at https://riverreporter.com/stories/we-have-a-problem,155781]
It pains me again to no end to have to strike out at a paper I love, respect and need for my edification and connection to the issues that directly impact our local community. Your news hole is by no means large enough to properly, read comprehensively, address such a complex international issue.
The writer in his inventory of invective conveniently ignores the significance of the Hamas calumny and infamy of October 7, 2023. The brutal, indescribable slaughter by Hamas of 1,200 innocent souls, among them many who rescued countless Gaza residents from illness and disease; the taking of 250 hostages; the hundreds of miles of tunnels serving as a battleground for their terrorist incursions and deadly attacks against innocent Israelis; the rape of women; the butchering of babies; the arson inflicted on border Kibbutzim, towns and communities; the greatest atrocities committed against the Jewish people since the horrors of the Holocaust; the support of more than 75 percent of Gazan Palestinians for these heinous acts of bare barbarism; rocket attacks against Israel from hospitals, mosques, churches and schools; and the use of children as human shields, directly placing youngsters in harm’s way within would-be war zones—and the list goes on—left Israel with no choice but to pursue all and every necessary means to finally eradicate Gaza’s evil empire.
War, especially a war against an incontrovertible existential threat to the Israeli, and by obvious extension the Jewish people—even when fought according to a code of ethics unique to the Israel Defense Forces, and without parallel anywhere else in the world—is messy and tragic. But what self-respecting and responsible nation would suffer such cruelty and remain as sitting ducks?
Our paper has once again carried one man’s screed, ignorance and dishonesty and worse of all, his gratuitous use of the term “genocide.”
As a parent and relative of Israeli soldiers and as a lifelong Religious Zionist, I stand appalled by the various conflations and half truths espoused by this dreadful drivel. He knows not what he says. He is at best prejudiced against Israel and at worst an intractable foe.
Please feel free to once again share my views and exception to this misinformation. I cannot remain silent, as silence is acquiesence, and I owe it to all caring human beings to restate the facts in the face of your writer’s fictions.
Respectfully shared in friendship and hope for peace to conquer the baseless hatred that engulfs Hamas,
Rabbi Lawrence S. Zierler is the president and CEO of Sayva Associates, an elder-care practice based in Sullivan County. He has served as a pulpit rabbi, hospital and hospice chaplain, Jewish educator and communal executive.
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DKR
In his response to my essay, Rabbi Ziegler has accused me of ignorance and dishonesty. And yet he is asserting easily and repeatedly debunked lies about what happened on October 7th, 2023. There were no butchered babies(1) and no victims or forensic evidence have ever been produced to substantiate the charge of systemic **** by Hamas(2, 3). Yet these and other lies are endlessly promoted on our discredited national media.
This would be an argument about points of fact, but it raises a larger question as to what is the purpose of these lies in exaggerating what happened on October 7th. War is messy and tragic, so terrible things undoubtedly happened on that day. So why embellish what did happen with these particular fabrications?
The image created in the mind of a casual listener or reader, of a child coming to harm, or a woman violated, paints a picture of a group of people who would do such a thing as super-evil. With this dehumanization, by designating a certain group, in this case Palestinians/terrorists/Hamas as super-evil, it gives permission to view whatever happens to these people, no matter how terrible, as them getting what they deserve. This is precisely the loop of dehumanization leading to a license to commit atrocities, that Israeli and Zionist society are currently trapped in, to the peril of us all.
Since we know now that these are lies, no beheaded babies, no systemic ****, perhaps it’s time to consider that Palestinians are actually not super-evil. Indee they are people like the rest of us who have lives and feelings and loved ones, and maybe it’s time to respect those lives, emotions, and families, like we would expect for ourselves.
It is also outrageous to throw up the dubious number of 1200 innocent Israelis killed, as outweighing in importance, the tens of thousands of dead, and the oceans of cruelty and suffering that Israel has inflicted on the people of Gaza in response. The official number of Israelis killed that day is 1,139(4). Of these 373 were Israeli soldiers, not innocent civilians. We also know now that the Hannibal Directive, the IDF order to prioritize stopping hostages being taken, even at the cost of their lives, was given on that day(5), meaning Israelis were killing their own people. Knowing that Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships were engaged in free fire activity all day, with little distinction as to who they were killing, all of the images we saw soon after of bombed and burned out cars and houses, far beyond the firepower of the self-equipped resistance forces, can credibly be attributed to friendly fire by the IDF. So a number of people were killed that day, a large number of them innocent civilians, but it is unknown whether they were killed by Hamas or the IDF.
Once the lies surrounding these events are striped away, the justification that this is an extraordinary enemy requiring an extraordinary response becomes weaker. Maybe Hamas is just another group of fighters for a cause, as have existed all over the world, throughout history.
However one feels about Hamas, nothing they have done justifies ten months of relentless terrorist bombing, constantly uprooting the civilian population, the withholding of food and water to the point of famine, the destruction of water and sewage facilities, the destruction of the civilian healthcare system, the attacks on hospitals and the massacres that ensued, the hostage taking of doctors and healthcare workers, the torture camps, the destruction of all the universities, the destruction of schools, the bombing of ambulances, the ripping up of streets, the destruction of farmland, the desecration of graves, the destruction of ancient churches and mosques, the killing of journalists, the killing of aid workers, the killing of tens of thousands of children, the killing of tens of thousands of women, the massacres of people waiting for food, the massacres of kids playing soccer, the withholding of anesthesia in aid shipments, the bombing of people in tents, the summary executions, the mass detentions, the rapes.
These are all crimes that have been thoroughly documented and are not going away.
My appeal is that we come to recognize the demon that dehumanization of the other represents. It is an open door to racism. It can’t be lost on any of us that this was the chief weapon of Nazi Germany, the dehumanization of Jewish and other victims, which they used to give themselves license to set the world on fire and commit all levels of depravity. American society resorts to this dehumanization whenever we concoct a reason to fight a war in a far off place where people look different than us. We are all susceptible to this evil.
The virus of dehumanization has occurred throughout history, but it always represents a problem that requires a great upheaval to overcome. If we can recognize that dehumanization is taking place then we stand a better chance of minimizing the upheaval. Treating other people with respect and honoring equal rights, fundamental American values, are the only ways we can all live together in this world.
Doug Rogers
(1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/22/biden-yet-again-says-hamas-beheaded-babies-has-new-evidence-emerged/
(2) https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-ny-times-investigation-mass-****-hamas-falls-apart
(3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TApiok-KiRc
(4) https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231215-israel-social-security-data-reveals-true-picture-of-oct-7-deaths
(5) https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-07-07/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-ordered-hannibal-directive-on-october-7-to-prevent-hamas-taking-soldiers-captive/00000190-89a2-d776-a3b1-fdbe45520000
Sunday, August 4 Report this