Matt Peterson’s guest commentary piece in a recent issue of the Emerald is ridiculous ( “Christian group member made false assertions about Israel,” ODE, May 12). Peterson calls Matt Chandler’s criticisms of Israel “unfounded;” in fact, they are founded on Chandler’s own observations as an international observer in the West Bank. The only “false assertions” in the piece are Peterson’s own, like the implication that Palestinians are hostile and violent while Jewish settlers don’t commit terrorism or aggression.
The real point of Peterson’s piece seems to be to call Chandler, and by extension anybody with criticisms of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank (including a great number of secular Jews, like myself), anti-Semitic. Peterson has absolutely no right to make this claim, so he finds it necessary to say it a bit elliptically. Chandler’s position is “in line with a long-standing Christian tradition of anti-Semitism.” As for the rest of Israel’s critics, Peterson invokes Martin Luther King, Jr., opponent of injustice, segregation and violence, to make an accusation on his behalf: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism.”
First off, King never wrote any Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend that Peterson cites – the document has been revealed as an Internet hoax. The line Peterson quotes from King, “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism,” was apparently uttered by Dr. King at a speaking engagement at Harvard in 1968; however, it is of questionable origin and is certainly out of context.
After almost four decades of a violent occupation in violation of international law that has turned Palestine into a stifling prison colony for Palestinians, I doubt that Dr. King would assume today that all criticism of Israel is founded on anti-Semitism.
Daniel Sussman
University philosophy major