Editor:

The calumny and racism of “Bloody October for innocent Jewish citizens in Israel,” Beth Isern’s guest commentary in the Oct. 23 issue of The Colorado Statesman, would be breathtaking were it not so utterly typical. It is clear throughout that only the Jewish citizens of Palestine/Israel are real for her; only they are human, only they exist. Absent altogether from her account are any Palestinians (other than as subhuman demons to put her preferred order of beings under threat).In her second paragraph, she calls the tragic recent violence “unprovoked,” erasing nearly seven decades of occupation, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and sustained military and civilian violence against the Palestinian people. In her third paragraph, she gives statistics of (some of!) the dead, the injured, and the traumatized. It is clear from the numbers she cites that she is quoting exclusively Jewish Israeli casualty numbers. One could scarcely ask for a clearer example of colonialist ideology and its attendant racism.

“Saying the names” of the Jewish Israeli victims of horrific attacks, as Isern repeatedly does, is an effective and legitimate rhetorical strategy. Suffering and death are suffering and death, and all of it is to be deplored, grieved, and proclaimed to an all-too-often indifferent world. But Ali Dawabsheh, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, and the over 2,200 Gazans (including over 500 children) slaughtered during and since the deceitfully named “Protective Edge” all had names, lives, hopes, flesh and blood, too!

Isern is actually to be thanked for mentioning Netanyahu, who only last week attempted to blame the Holocaust on a pathetic Palestinian racist cleric, filling persons of conscience worldwide with deserved disgust. The indefensibility of this brutal, insatiable, apartheid regime — and of continued U.S. support of it — thus becomes clearer every day.

Terry Burnsed, Ph.D.Coloradans for Justice in PalestineDenver