Editor:

Couldn’t help my amusement at reading Aryssa Carvalho’s recent feature on the War & Peace Lecture for Monday, October 14, “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Historical Context and Personal Reflections.” As I see it, the most striking thing about the panel was how it was constituted:

One anti-Zionist Arab Catholic, who identifies as “Palestinian” and entertains creative approaches toward the Commandment forbidding the bearing of false witness against our neighbor;

One anti-Zionist, ethnically Jewish, anarcho-pacifist, who affects to being weighed down by “history” while personally harboring unresolved power issues;  AND

One anti-Zionist, genetically Jewish, universalist flower child, of purportedly undefined “allegiance,” but who identifies as a “humanist.”

That seems to about cover the panel’s make-up, and I guess that was somebody’s idea of ‘balance’ and ‘intellectual diversity.’  Of course, the conspicuously silent and invisible, six hundred pound Lion-of-Judah reclining calmly (right smack-dab in the middle of Ives 101) may have thought otherwise—but it’s evident that nobody bothered to ask for HIS (or HER) take on the evening’s arrangements.

Before introducing the Star’s readers to any of the speakers, Ms Carvalho throws journalistic ethics to the winds, and—instead of sticking to the unspun and unvarnished facts (as is proper for a non-Op-ed item of strict reportage)—she lets it be known, right from the starting gate, where her own sympathies lie:  by flatly telling us:

that “Israel was formed in 1948 on Palestinian land,” 

that since then, Israel “has illegally grown bigger taking even more land from Palestine,”  AND 

that “Jewish people have invaded what land [the soi-disant ‘Palestinians’] do have.”  [emphases added—MZ]

Ms Carvalho also observes in her piece that notwithstanding the presumably varied backgrounds of the speakers, “their solutions to the problem were almost identical.”

What a surprise . . . .

Michael Zebulon

Rohnert Park neighbor