OTHER PEOPLE’S MAIL

Compiled by Dale Sprusansky

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVE. NW WASHINGTON, DC 20500 COMMENT LINE: (202) 456-1111 WWW.WHITEHOUSE.GOV/CONTACT SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE 2201 C ST. NW WASHINGTON, DC 20520 PHONE: (202) 647-6575 VISIT WWW.STATE.GOV TO E-MAIL

ANY MEMBER: U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES WASHINGTON, DC 20515 (202) 225-3121 ANY SENATOR: U.S. SENATE WASHINGTON, DC 20510 (202) 224-3121

BIDEN ENDORSES VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

To the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, Oct. 8, 2022

Vladimir Putin recently announced Russia’s annexation of four additional regions of Ukraine. International law is clear on this issue: annexation and territorial conquest are strictly forbidden by the Charter of the United Nations.

President Biden released a strong response: “The United States condemns Russia’s fraudulent attempt today to annex sovereign Ukrainian territory. Russia is violating international law, trampling on the United Nations Charter and showing its contempt for peaceful nations everywhere.”

On the subject of illegal annexations, Israel captured and occupied East Jerusalem from Jordan in the Six-Day War of 1967. In 1980, it claimed sovereignty over East Jerusalem by enacting a law that declared Jerusalem to be Israel’s unified capital. The United Nations Security Council countered by passing Resolution 478 that ruled that law to be “null and void.”

During the same war, Israel also captured the Golan Heights from Syria; a de facto annexation occurred in 1981 when it applied Israeli law to the occupied area. The United Nations Security Council reacted by passing Resolution 497, which declared Israel’s action to be “null and void and without international legal effect.”

On Dec. 6, 2017, President Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. On March 25, 2019, he also signed a proclamation that recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. These actions put our country at odds with much of the international community, including the EU and the U.N. which consider both East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to be “occupied territories.”

Biden’s statement is quite ironic, however, because in June 2021, his administration affirmed that the U.S. would continue to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Obviously, that position does not align with the United Nations Charter or the Fourth Geneva Convention, which also expressly prohibits the annexation of occupied territory.

In the future, President Biden might consider purchasing a retirement home in the Golan’s newest community, “Trump Heights,” discretely named after you-knowwho. Israel may arrange for a discount, and maybe even assign Biden’s name to a side street, roundabout or, possibly, the municipal sanitation transfer station.

Rick Boheler, Cheyenne, WY TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT ISRAELI APARTHEID

To The Salt Lake Tribune, Sept. 18, 2022

The article by Peggy Fletcher Stack on Sept. 11 about Palestine (“In the Holy Land, a place divided by religion, we discover how it is—and isn’t—like LDS Utah”) was very disturbing and loaded with misinformation and generalizations that libel entire communities.

My family is a Palestinian Christian family. Stack did not interview any leading Palestinian Christians (or Muslims) on either side of the 1948 Green Line and was content with giving us only Zionist views about what Christians (which she called incorrectly “Protestant”) feel or think, and about “riots” on what she calls the “Temple Mount” (Al-Aqsa Mosque compound which Israeli occupation forces regularly storm while people are in prayers).

The article is loaded with colonialist-orientalist language about the natives. For the record, Palestinian Christian and Muslim villages were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and we continue to be removed from our land, our houses demolished. Eight million Palestinians are refugees or displaced people (10 percent of whom are Christian) thanks to a U.S.-backed apartheid system intent on taking a multi-religions, multi-cultural society called Palestine into a Jewish state called Israel. My 90-year-old Christian mother still remembers her friend Hayah Balbisi killed in the massacre of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948!

We Palestinian Christians also reject the innuendos directed to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My sister who happens to belong to that church wrote a whole book relating to her life under Israeli occupation (see Sahar Qumsiyeh, Peace for a Palestinian: One Woman’s Story of Faith Amidst War in the Holy Land). Please read it to see if she was “intimidated” by Muslims.

Next time we would welcome objective reporting and actual meetings with us, the descendants of the first Christians, instead of projecting Zionist ideas to your readers.

Mazin Qumsiyeh, Bethlehem, Palestine AN ELECTED OFFICIAL’S ONESIDED TRIP TO ISRAEL

To The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, Oct. 4, 2022

After five days in Israel, North Dakota State Rep. Shannon Roers Jones (R) recently wrote an op-ed to assure us that everything is hunky-dory in Israel. She learned from the trip, curated by an organization that supports Israel’s far-right government, that no, there’s no apartheid in Israel. The two-plus million Palestinians in the West Bank and Israeli-occupied East