What Does Trump Have in Mind?
The question that should concern those of us dedicated to the security of Israel is what exactly does President Trump envisage as an Israeli-Palestinian peace?
During his campaign, Mr. Trump’s praise for Israel was unstinting. However, the delay in moving the embassy and his recent warm welcome to the White House of Mahmoud Abbas are troubling.
Nelson Marans
New York, NY
‘If It Talks Like A Duck…’
“The CUNY-Linda Sarsour Mess” (editorial, May 12) aptly describes the public debate over CUNY’s outrageous decision to choose Linda Sarsour as the keynote commencement speaker at NYU’s Graduate School of Public Health as a “public spectacle of Jewish guilt and self hate.”
How else to characterize the insistence of left-wing rabbis and activists that it is not anti-Semitic to support Palestinians such as Ms. Rasmea Odeh, who was responsible for the murder of Israeli civilians, and to glorify rock throwers who seek to harm or kill Israelis by calling them “a definition of courage”?
How else can we explain leftist Jews’ insistence that someone who supports the BDS movement, which seeks to destroy Israel’s economy and world standing, is not anti-Semitic?
New York City Councilman Brad Lander fails to grasp that opposing BDS means you support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, which has nothing to do with being anti-Muslim, while supporting BDS, a movement that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist as the world’s one Jewish state, has everything to do with being anti-Semitic.
Refusing to admit that it is anti-Semitic to deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and to condone those who show by their words and actions a desire to destroy Israel, is at best naive or wishful thinking. Just because you want something to be true doesn’t make it so. As the old saying goes, “If it talks like a duck, walks like a duck, and acts like a duck…”
Ettie Kryksman
Brooklyn, NY
CUNY’s Insensitivity
Your May 12 editorial on CUNY and Linda Sarsour was right on target. There are other negatives about Sarsour you didn’t mention, like the cruel and vulgar anti-feminist attack she made against Ayaan Hirsi-Ali and Brigitte Gabriel, both strong anti-Muslim voices.
Sarsour, who led the women’s march against President Trump, voices the belief that Zionists can’t be feminists. There is an endless list of reasons for CUNY to disinvite Sarsour as commencement speaker, but the Muslim dean of the Graduate School of Public Health, Ayman El-Mohandes, is unlikely to do that.
Another important reason for canceling Sarsour, and for changing the date of the commencement, is that it is scheduled for June 1, the second day of Shavuot, when Jews outside Israel go to synagogue to say Yizkor for the deceased. What happened to respect for Jews? Are they to miss their commencement in order to attend synagogue and observe their holiday, or are they to violate the holiday in order to be present at their commencement? When dates are juggled around endlessly because of Ramadan and other religious holidays, why do the Jews get shafted?
The anti-Semitism here stinks. The ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and other mainstream groups should speak out against this intolerable situation, as Americans for a Safe Israel/AFSI does and will continue to do.
Helen Freedman
Co-Executive Director
Americans for a Safe Israel/AFSI
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Cancel Sarsour
On behalf of the Rabbinical Alliance of America/Igud HaRabbonim (Igud/RAA) and our 1,100 member rabbis, I want to commend The Jewish Press for its May 12 editorial calling on the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health to rescind its invitation to Linda Sarsour to deliver the school’s commencement address.
Ms. Sarsour’s longstanding association with miscreants such as the infamous Rasmea Odeh, who had been convicted of murdering two college students in a 1969 supermarket bombing in Israel, is outrageous. As the saying goes, tell us who your friends are and we will tell you who you are.
We at the IGUD/RAA at our last monthly Rosh Chodesh meeting were honored with the presence of Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who spoke on the dangers of Sarsour and her brand of hate speech.
Igud/RAA Presidium Members Rabbi Yehoshua S. Hecht and Rabbi Yaakov Klass, on behalf of the Igud/RAA and in the presence of 100 prominent rabbis from the New York metro area, publicly supported the stance of Assemblyman Hikind. Further, through a vote of acclamation, the Igud/RAA called upon Governor Andrew Cuomo and the administration of CUNY to cancel Sarsour’s invitation to speak.
Chief among the Igud/RAA concerns is that if this travesty becomes reality, students attending the graduation will be forced to listen to a commencement speaker who will make a mockery of our first amendment rights and send an unhealthy message of discord and intolerance that breaks the multicultural fabric of New York City.
What further frustrates the Igud/RAA is that the commencement speaker’s role is to give graduates a charge to improve society, the country, and the world. Sarsour as a speaker will have the opposite effect, by sending a message that bigotry, hate, and anti-Semitism are still fashionable in 2017.
The Igud/RAA calls upon all decent peace-loving people, whether Jew, Christian, or Muslim, to contact Gov. Cuomo and the administration of CUNY and let them hear in a clear and unified voice that Sarsour should not be allowed to speak. By doing so we will send the message that we will not tolerate bigotry and blind hate.
Rabbi Mendy Mirocznik
Executive Vice-President
Rabbinical Alliance of America/Igud HoRabonim
