On April 24 and 25, the Jewish Student Union observed Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Memorial Day, by reading names of victims continuously for 24 hours. As a student who supports genocide awareness, I was pleased to see that the event was so important to the University that the Emerald put an article about it on the front page (“Tale of survival on a day of remembrance,” ODE April 25). Then I looked inside the newspaper and was shocked to see Ed Oser’s article entitled “Member of Christian group recounts recent trip to Israel” (ODE April 25), about Matt Chandler’s group, the Christians Peacemaker Teams.
In the article Chandler criticized the Israeli government and specifically the Jews who live in Judea and Samaria, better known in America as the West Bank, for what he saw as egregious abuse of Palestinians. Chandler was offended as a “Christian for Peace” that Israel requires Palestinians to check in at the border and even went so far as comparing the settlers to members of the Ku Klux Klan.
I probably would have laughed at the irony of a Christian comparing Jews to the Christian supremacy group known as the Ku Klux Klan, on a day when we commemorate the Vatican-sanctioned genocide of six million Jews, if I had not found Chandler’s comments so unfounded and offensive. I thought that
Christian and Jewish relations had improved since the Holocaust, but I see Mr. Chandler’s views as being in line with a long-standing Christian tradition of anti-Semitism.
Chandler says that “many Jews around the world would be ashamed to be represented by these settlers,” but I have spent more than six months of my life in Israel on three trips and have had relations with a number of settler families. The settlers are not blood-thirsty, anti-non-Jews, who wish to see Palestinian suffering but instead they are scared Jews constantly surrounded by inhospitable neighbors. I have yet to read about a group of settlers bombing Palestinian civilians or committing other such terrorist actions against their neighbors. As to Mr. Chandler’s assertion that Israel has no right to require border checks of Palestinians, he needs to realize that Palestinians are constantly attacking Israeli civilians, and border checks are the most humane way of prevention.
Border checks protect Israelis; Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Israeli border checks stopped Palestinian terrorists from bringing more than half a ton of explosives into Gaza. The settlers have very little political power right now as evidenced by the Israeli government’s kicking the settlers out of their homes in Gaza and other Jewish settlements in Judea.
The current Palestinian government is ruled by Hamas, a terrorist organization that still has not recognized the Jews’ right to live in Israel. During the Holocaust no country offered Jewish refugees asylum. The Jews who survived Nazi extermination realized that their only hope was to create a state that would always allow Jews a place to run in our historic homeland. Despite Mr. Chandler’s anti-Zionist attitude, I believe that many Christians today recognize the validity of the great Christian minister the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words to an anti-Zionist colleague, “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism” (King, Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend). King was a Christian who knew that one lesson of the Holocaust was that Israel is necessary for Jewish survival.
Matt Peterson is a University student
Christian group member made false assertions about Israel
Daily Emerald
May 11, 2006
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