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An Open Letter to Jumanah Imad Albahri, the UCSD Student who, with Two Words -- "For It" -- Overnight Became the Poster Child for Anti-Jewish Hate and Bigotry in America

Congratulations on becoming viral.  As of this writing, your remarkably forthright statement as a UCSD student supporting Nasrallah's statement, on behalf of Hezbollah, advocating the destruction of the Jewish people, has been seen by more than 413,000 people.   Overnight you have become the poster child -- the voice and face of anti-Jewish hate and bigotry in America.  In your defense, you explain inter alia that you are not anti-Semitic because Arabs are Semites, too.

Dear Jumanah, I wholeheartedly agree with you that you are not an anti-Semite. As you correctly write, Arabs indeed are Semites, too. The question, then, is whether you are a Jew-hater, a bigot, a religious intolerant.  In short, whether you truly are antithetical to what America, the American Constitution, and the American people stand for.

Every organization and movement in history has something good about it. Mussolini’s backers boasted (incorrectly) that he at least got the trains running on time. Hitler’s backers noted (correctly) that the German economy improved on his watch. So the question is not whether Hamas, in the course of its program, does anything positive. I assume, for example, that they maintain traffic lights effectively in Gaza. Rather, the question is: what does Hamas stand for at the core of their program?

Fortunately for you — as for all of us — that question is easily solved by reading their Platform, the Hamas Charter. That document calls for the utter destruction of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. Therefore, dear Jumanah, unless you absolutely and unequivocally condemn that Hamas Charter and publicly disassociate yourself from Hamas, there is just no way you can avoid being acknowledged throughout America as a narrow-minded bigot and Jew-hater. By contrast, I know of no Zionist — regardless of that person’s passion for Israel — who would want to see even a single Arab or Moslem hurt. That is just not our way.

You, of course, are now perceived throughout the United States as the voice and face of crude bigotry and wanton hatred.   So, as you put it, “[f]or [t]ruth, [f]or [j]ustice, [f]or [p]eace” — please read the Hamas Charter, which can be found easily by googling, and then please answer this simple question from a place of silence and quiet meditation, where you have all the desired time and solace you wish to think about it:

For it or against it?

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