To the Editor:
If David Mintz called for the shell-shocked Israeli leadership to take greater care to minimize civilian casualties and suffering, I’d support him. But he calls for a ceasefire.
David Mintz sprinkles his post with the loaded phrases so beloved by the intersectionality crowd, with their charges of colonialism, oppression, genocide, and let’s not forget ethnostate.
There is no hint of understanding that his call for a ceasefire is, in effect, a call for Hamas to rearm and resume its efforts to wipe Israel off the map. Nor does he recognize that Hamas is largely unreconciled with the very survival of the Jews anywhere. In the event their reach ever extends to Oak Bluffs, his atheism is unlikely to shield him.
Just imagine how the U.S. would react to a comparable Islamist attack on U.S. soil. Oh, yes, we already have seen that. The estimate of civilian deaths in Iraq alone are in the hundreds of thousands. And 9/11 was 1/15th the size of 9/11, per capita. What might have happened if the U.S. suffered nearly 45,000 deaths on 9/11?
David Mintz states that he does not support the atrocious and barbaric terrorist attack carried out by Hamas. He then proceeds to describe it as analogous to the Nat Turner uprising, which is mostly viewed as a brave, admirable, and justified effort. Does Mr. Mintz feel that anything short of killing a few Jews himself is not support for the Oct. 7 atrocities? Is he aware that Hamas put a special emphasis on gender-based violence, with deliberate, unspeakably awful tortures, rapes and murders of women, and especially of pretty young girls.
And I must note Mr. Mintz’s less-than-honest reliance on the “Brooklyn Jew in full Orthodox regalia” who called Israel “fundamentally illegitimate and illegal.” That man is part of the fringe sect Neturei Karta, which claims that the existence of a Jewish state is a rebellion against God, as it did not occur with divine intervention through the Messiah. The Neturei Karta have flirted with Holocaust denial and, in one known case, spying for Iran. What kind of source is that for a self-described Marxist-Trotyskyist? [ref: davidmintz.org]
Yaakov Cohn
Edgartown
