Letter to the Editor

The most glaring example of Mohammed's hatred of Jews dates back to 622 AD when Mohammed had his men beheaded over 700 Jewish men and boys in the village of Qurayza. Mohammed did this both to enrich himself by stealing the Jew's property which included enslaving the Jewish women, as well as to punish a people who refused to convert to Islam. Shades of what we're seeing in many places throughout the Muslim world today.

The earliest Muslim biographers of Mohammed, as well as Islamic holy books, contain dozens of examples of anti-Semitism and this is the root cause of the Israeli conflict. The Palestinians are nothing more than the pawns that Muslims use to inflame the situation and Ramzibm's articles and comments are more Quranic-sourced material to further this Islamic genocidal goal.

Just as Muslims have done in Sudan to black Africans, Christians and Animists so do they hope to do to the Jews of Israel. Just as Muslims are doing to the Copts in Egypt, the Chaldeans of Iraq, the Hindus of Pakistan, the Bahai of Iran so do they hope to do to the Jews of Israel. The cause is not Israel it is Islam and its core tenets.

The thing I'm rationalizing - because it's rational - is the effectiveness of their rhetoric, soaked in themes of resistance and defiance (you hear the word so often in their propaganda) in garnering support from the populations they represent, especially in conjunction with the welfare support that they provide.

And I'm trying to demonstrate how this theme is effective in mobilizing these populations, and at times the whole Arab street, by providing you with a historical perspective which doesn't leave out immensely consequential actions of the Israeli state. Believe or not, the support base of these organizations are not a mass of irrational terrorists.

They are people who have suffered, and Hamas and Hezbollah capitalize on that suffering. Hani makes the point that Iran is in a very tenuous position, surrounded by antagonistic forces. Furthermore, its ability to capitalize on Arab popular sentiment is already compromised by ties to Syria, as is Hezbollah's - which is now deeply mired in the Sunni-Shiite split. Israel's absurd treatment of the Palestinian, and its inability to split from a historical legacy of aggressive expansionist actions in the Middle East, is one of the only sources of legitimacy the Iranian regime draw on .

So basically, I'm neither blindly drawn into Iran's propaganda, nor Israeli government propaganda, unlike you and the author. Hani removes the discourse from propagandistic point of view that doesn't deserve the place in the mainstream that it has, so folks can have a real discussion. You and the author attempt to move it back there.

Anyone can argue for each side being the aggressor. One can easily say that considering the majority of the land "at the moment of Israel's inception" in Israel belonged to Palestinian Arabs, the Israelis were the aggressors, seeing as they cleansed a large portion of that population by aggressive means.

You also cite political propaganda from Iran's leadership, a horse beaten so ruthlessly to death. But you back that up by saying that Iran puts its money where its mouth is through Hezbollah and Hamas. Let's take a more nuanced view of those points.

Hamas and Hezbollah have one politically salient characteristic in common: They have dawned the mantel of "resistance" against Israeli aggression. They employ this buzzword over and over, and the reason it is such a potent political characterization is because from the perspectives of the populations that these organizations represent, Israel has often and brutally been the aggressor.

In the case of the Shiites of south Lebanon, they bore the brunt of attacks time and time again in a war between Israel, the PLO, and Arab nationalists, beginning decades before the inception of Hezbollah. A war in which Israel often used disproportionate force. In the almost 20 year occupation of South Lebanon, IDF sponsored a brutal proxy to suppress resistance from the Shiite population, and were party to a number of direct abuses. Then in 2006, in response to capturing soldiers on Israel's border, an entire community of Beirut's southern suburbs was literally leveled to the ground. These are the sorts of things that have made resistance to Israeli aggression a profound mobilizer for Hezbollah.

In the case of Hamas, they truly rose in a political moment when Fatah was representing the Palestinian people in stagnant, and ultimately destructive peace talks. Fatah lost the legitimacy in the eyes of the street as resistors to occupation, quite understandably, while continuing the resistance was a mantra of the Hamas movement. Seeing that most people would rather defend themselves than lay down and die in a crippling occupation, the political choice was obvious.

Notwithstanding the significant political differences between Hamas and Hezbollah that you ignore or are ignorant of, you are also missing the important point that Hani makes: Israeli's actions and behaviors can determine how potent the rhetoric of "resistance" is on the Arab street - rhetoric that Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas have effectively employed until now.