US genocide comparable to Nazis

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2011
US genocide comparable to Nazis

Re: "History shows who has the moral right", Letters, October 12.

Because my critics can’t dispute the arguments I make, they make up arguments I never made and dispute them instead. I never said, as Andy Leitner claims, that the Jews had no historical connection to Palestine. What I did say was that in 1920 “only about 10 per cent of the Palestinians [those in the territory of Palestine] were Jews, and the Zionists (outsiders) had no moral right to ask for a country in that area of the world”. That is not the same as saying the Jews don’t have the right to exist anywhere.
 He also resents me comparing America’s history of genocide to the Nazi Holocaust. If he would do his own research, he would see that the genocide committed against the Native Americans was on a par with what the Nazis did.
 I think most readers are tired of people who smear all critics of Israel – including Jewish ones such as myself – as being Jew-haters.
Eric Bahrt
Pattaya