Letters: About that big van

Anti-Israel Van Driving Around San Diego

Editor, San Diego Jewish World

I stopped to do some shopping at the NorthPark Market – that’s it’s name, it isn’t in North Park– and I saw this truck pull in and park.  Looks like it’s sponsored by some faux Jewish group called Jewish Voice for Peace – e-mail   www.jvp-sandiego.org  and Palestine Advocacy Project www.PalestineAdvocacyProject.org    The driver told me it was paid for by a Jewish man in Los Angeles.  He said there is one truck like this in L.A. and one here in San Diego. Where else should I send it??

–Lana Fayman, San Diego

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Dear Lana,

The truck has been getting a lot of attention, that’s for sure.  U-T San Diego on Wednesday ran a commentary by Steve Kowit, a faculty member at Southwestern College, who is a member of the Jewish community, in which he tells about the truck.

Among those commenting was J. J. Surbeck, the founder and executive director of T.E.A.M. (Training an Education About the Middle-East), an Israel advocacy group.  He sent to San Diego Jewish World a copy of  letter he had sent to the U-T.   It reads:

Oh boy. San Diegans should be warned that “That slow-moving truck making its way around San Diego” which Kowit mentions carries nothing but lies, stated out of context and reduced to facile slogans meant not to inform but to manipulate whoever sees them (and doesn’t know better) into blaming Israel for all the Palestinians’ woes. Kowit is a repeat offender when it comes to stating the historical facts surrounding the Middle East conflict objectively and dispassionately. The rest of his article has too many inaccuracies to count, but let me mention the most salient ones. First he claims that the BDS movement is gaining ground everywhere, when it is exactly the opposite that is happening. On every college campus where pro-Palestinian activists have been active for years, everyone is sick and tired of their theatrics and shenanigans that only result in hijacking those campuses for a cause that no one cares any more about when 250,000 people have been slaughtered in Syria alone in the last three years, and thousands more are being killed all over the Middle East every day. But according to Kowit and his compadres, we should ignore all that and focus only on the Palestinian kids who, brainwashed to hate Jews since birth, have the unpleasant habit of throwing heavy rocks on Israeli cars, killing Israeli children in the process (google 4-year old Adele Biton if you don’t know what I am referring to). Then he peddles of course the old lie that Israel is not allowing the Palestinians who FLED in 1948 to come home (which Israel had every right to do since it was the neighboring and local Arabs who attacked first), allegedly violating thus international law because there is this thing called their “right of return”. Newsflash: there is no such thing as a “right of return” in international law. Nowhere. For anyone. This is pure fiction which has led to one of the most enduring of the many myths created by the Palestinians out of thin air. Kowit is a poet. Are we supposed to believe that he knows anything about international law? He clearly doesn’t. So, contrary to what he wants so desperately to believe, the US-Israel love affair is alive and well because every year more and more Americans discover that the Palestinians’ version of history that Kowit tries to keep alive is one big fraud, and they don’t like it. It is the love affair between the Palestinian cause and the ragtags of deluded leftists who support it that is alive. Nothing else. The annual Pew report on polling Americans’ views on the conflict is there to prove this point: “When Asked to Choose, Public Sympathizes with Israel by Wide Margin” (http://www.people-press.org/2014/08/28/more-express-sympathy-for-israel-than-the-palestinians/8-28-2014_02/). When you see that bus, you can just laugh and ignore it.

— Donald H. Harrison, editor

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  If you have a concern you would like to share with our readership, please send it to him at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com.  If you have a comment on either of the letters published above, you are welcome to post them, following the instructions below:

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