i dont know why, but my post got deleted for some reason. heres the article again, very accurately portrays the conflict
NY TIMES
An Ugly Rumor or an Ugly Truth?
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
THE day after the deadly Palestinian attack on Hebrew University in Jerusalem, The Guardian, the left-leaning British newspaper, published an editorial criticizing Israel for what the paper called "random, vengeful acts of terror" against Palestinian civilians during its reoccupation of the West Bank town of Jenin last spring. This after a United Nations report dismissed Palestinian claims that Israel had massacred civilians there.
Over the past several months, such sentiments have become common in much of Europe. A few months ago, when Tom Paulin, a poet, Oxford University professor and regular guest on BBC television, told Al Ahram, Egypt's leading newspaper, that American-born Jews who have settled on the Israeli-occupied West Bank were Nazis who "should be shot dead," his remarks, which outraged some, were also met by approval and admiration.
A. N. Wilson, a prominent conservative British writer and editor, publicly defended Mr. Paulin, who has also published a poem in The Observer magazine that referred to Israeli soldiers as "the Zionist SS."
"Many in this country and throughout the world would echo his views on the tragic events in the Middle East," said Mr. Wilson, who himself wrote in The Evening Standard, the London newspaper, that he had "reluctantly" concluded that Israel no longer had a right to exist.
That, too, is a view that throughout Western Europe seems to command a fair degree of sympathy. In France, demonstrators held posters aloft saying "Death to Jews." In Italy, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican daily, wrote that Israel was engaging in "aggression that turns into extermination." And José Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel laureate in literature, said, "We can compare what is happening on the Palestinian territories with Auschwitz."
It all raises a question: Does the ferocious moral condemnation of Israel mark a recrudescence of that most ugly of Western diseases, anti-Semitism? Or is it legitimate, if crude, criticism of a nation's policies? Where does one draw the line? And how does one judge?
The issue is complicated by several factors, not the least of them that many harsh critics of Israel are Jews. When, a few weeks ago, two British university professors called for an academic boycott of Israel, among the roughly 700 scholars who signed their petition were several Israelis.
Other observers, including a number of Jews, don't see anti-Semitism in the European anger at Israel but simply the success of the Palestinians' campaign to portray themselves as an oppressed people. The Palestinians get more sympathy than, say, the Tibetans, because their plight is what Europeans see in their newspapers and on their televisions every day.
Even those most worried about a new wave of anti-Semitism do not argue that it is the same as the anti-Semitism of the 1930's or even the 1950's in Europe, when to express contempt and hatred for Jews was respectable. These days, for the most part, it is not respectable.
), not Israel grabbing ever more land, and ethnically cleansing the original populations ?
