Israel is the only country in the world that kills innocent civilians with the express approval and support of the United States government.

Our government appropriately condemns Hamas for its terror bombing. It should condemn Israel also.

Ironically, it is armaments that we supply which are utilized in Israel’s air strikes on civilians.

If Barack Obama accomplishes nothing else, he should, at the first opportunity, reverse this misguided policy. Support for the nation of Israel and its people need not encompass support for such inhumane tactics.

Joseph L. Gerken
Buffalo

On Saturday, December 27 the Israeli Air Force began massacring Palestinians in the densely populated Gaza Strip. Over 80 Israeli war planes and helicopter gunships dropped at least one hundred tons of bombs, killing 312 Palestinians and injuring over 1000. On Sunday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, “Relatives search among the bodies and the wounded in order to bring the dead quickly to burial. A mother whose three school-age children were killed, and are piled one on top of the other in the morgue, screams and then cries, screams again and then is silent.”

The hospitals in Gaza, which have been depleted by an ongoing blockade of Gaza, cannot treat all of the wounded. Palestinian hospital workers report that most of the wounded arrive “in pieces.” The Israeli blockade has also deprived Gazans of food, fuel, medicine, access to health care, employment and access to higher education.

The Israeli government and the U.S. administration justify this carnage and collective punishment as a response to Palestinian militants in Gaza firing homemade rockets across the border. In the last six months, there has been one Israeli death, on the day the air strikes began. We must demand that the U.S. government stop funding and justifying Israel’s war crimes and that Israel withdrawal immediately from Gaza and end its cruel blockade.

The media is a powerful mode of expression, whose job it is to deliver the truth to people around the world. Have you been comparing the media treatment of the “terrorist attacks” in Mumbai and the mass killings by the IDF in Gaza? It is chilling. There is little coverage of the events in Gaza, and what is shown is gruesomely biased and devoid of the horrific truth. I think the U.S. media and public has been conditioned that if the word “Hamas” supporter is attached to a human being, it means that person no longer deserves the right to live and “Islamic” is attached to a university, it no longer is a civilian institution. A decapitated Hamas supporter or Islamic University student is an acceptable consequence of an Israeli “defensive” action. We have to challenge this de-humanization to justify the killings.

Brooke Reynolds
Ithaca

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