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Rabbi Jonathan,
On Sunday my wife told me to read the Tribune article by Fite, saying that I may want to dispute him since he gave his email address. I didn't get around to reading the piece until today. But first I saw your comments on his article.
As to your response in points 1 and 2, and then 1 through 3, I agree with you completely. However, this was not a response to Fite's commentary in particular as he does not address these points at all, nor does he villify Israel in any clearly biased manner. I reread the article two times. It seems to me that he was motivated by a personal experience of being inconvenienced at a border check point, and extended that to Palestinian humiliation at checkpoints in general, which, in fact, he states as being his mission on this trip. In this sense, his comments may be biased or contrived. Even though it may not be Israel's fault directly, but rather an effective response to terrorist attacks, there can be no doubt that the checkpoint procedures do disrupt the lives of ordinary Palestinians. Yes, he does use the word 'occupation', which we Jews don't appreciate even though it is not untrue in many respects for many years in the past.
I decided to withhold my critical remarks for articles that are truly biased against Israel.
Did I miss the point here? I have no further knowledge of Rev. Fite's political motivation.
My response
Thanks for writing. The purpose of that article is to undermine support for Israel without any context. It is critical to continually point out the reason for the need for those checkpoints, lies in ther failure, over 60 years, of the Arabs and Palestinians to take the opportunity to live in peace and create a state. They had a chance in 47, 48-67, Barak/Clinton etc and all they did was fight, intifada etc. If they chose peace, there would be no checkpoints necessary. Cotton was completely out of context, clearly written to undermine Israel etc
Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg
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