Letters to the Editor
shaunnarine
Published Letters: 106 Editor's Choice: 20
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out of context?
[Read the article: The Fix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dear Editor,
I turned to "The Fix" to read the article about Carrey calling Cruise "a big joke". I could not find the article. But, in scanning some of the letters, I see you received a letter complaining that you had misquoted Carrey about Cruise and suggesting that you either change the piece or get rid of it. Apparently, you got rid of it, but did not change the headline.
I find the complaint interesting because, just before I turned to the letters, I went to the article linked to "The Fix" on "Bungalowing Iraq". Many of the comments made in the article did, indeed, reflect the narcissism and stupidity of the leisure class. Some were rather more thoughtful. What I found curious was this: one of the quotations cited in "The Fix" is from a patron who is complaining about the media focus on Lindsay Lohan. Now, I may be wrong, but it seems to me that this quotation is misrepresented in "The Fix". It appears to me that the person quoted is implying that he finds the focus on people like Lohan to be foolish and disturbing when there are so many more important things going on in the world. That's certainly a sentiment with which I agree, yet "The Fix" lifted this statement out of its context and made it sound like the gentleman would rather talk about Lohan than Iraq.
May I suggest that you be much more careful in the use of these "soundbites"? As the earlier letter writer suggested, this seems more like tabloid journalism than something worthy of Salon.
Sincerely,
Shaun Narine
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martin luther king's statement on zionism
[Read the article: Inside America's powerful Israel lobby]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dear David (Sugarman),
I suspect that you were referring to MLK's famous "Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend". If I am mistaken about that assumption, please correct me. If you were referring to that letter, I believe that it has been revealed as a hoax.
A few months ago, I went searching for the letter on the internet. When I first read the letter, quite a while ago, I was struck by the fact that King did not mention the Palestinians at all, or even seem to be aware of their existence. My objective in looking for the letter was to illustrate how a Christian like King could be motivated by an extremely myopic and narrow religious worldview when discussing the Arab-Israeli crisis. In the course of that search, I discovered that King actually never wrote the letter. It was a fabrication. If you want the opinion of a respected Christian leader on the situation of the Palestinians, see the comments of Desmond Tutu, who has spoken about the obvious similarities between apartheid South Africa and modern Israel.
Anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Jewishness. Indeed, it is an enormous disservice to the Jewish people to equate the two. Personally, in principle, I do not have any objections to the nationalism of any group so long as that nationalism is not used to brutalize and subjugate other people. Since most nationalisms seem to get around to doing that at some point, I'm not a great fan of nationalism in general.
Sincerely,
Shaun Narine
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re: Martin Luther King quote
[Read the article: Inside America's powerful Israel lobby]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dear David,
I did a bit more digging (before your last letter, actually - I just did not have time to post) and I found the reference that you came up with. Apparently, however, even that reference is suspect. I've attached a link to a website here that argues that the claim that King made his statement at Harvard is 1968 is unlikely because the last time that King visited Harvard was in 1967. The origin of the quote is very fuzzy and the idea that it reflects King's actual sentiments is unclear. It seems that most of the idea that King equated anti-Zionism with anti-Jewishness is based on the introduction that he wrote for a book and people have, apparently, extrapolated from that.
For the record, I would not find it remarkable if King did equate anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish sentiment. However, that was in 1968 (or possibly 1967). At that time, most people outside the Middle East did not know that Palestinians existed, and I strongly suspect that King would have a very different view of these matters today, after decades of Palestinian-Israeli conflict and an increasing international awareness of the issues surrounding the conflict. Given that Palestinians today are suffering far worse discrimination than what African Americans were being subjected to in the 1960s American South, it would be difficult for King to simply overlook their situation.
As I said earlier, what struck me about the original fabricated letter was King's apparent obliviousness to the Palestinians. To me, this was interesting because there are so many examples, in the history of the development of Israel, of Christians being sympathetic to Jewish claims while being completely uncaring of the rights of the Palestinians. For example, Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Britain during and after WWI, was open to Zionist claims, in part, because he was so well-versed in his Bible. By contrast, to him the Arabs of Palestine were just little brown heathen people. This is one of those cases where the shared religious, cultural and racial identities of Christians and Jews worked to the enormous advantage of the Jewish nationalists.
Today, the issue of the Palestinians is the primary moral question surrounding Israel and it certainly could not be ignored by a man like King.
Here is the reference to a website that deals with this issue:
http://www.blacksandjews.com/Israel.MLK.html
I don't vouch for the content or subject matter of the website. It's just something I found on the web. It looks interesting, but I have not had a chance to check it out.
Sincerely,
Shaun Narine