Open Letter to Speaker Elect Nancy Pelosi

Dear Speaker-elect Mrs. Pelosi,

I have been quite vocal about my support for many causes that are espoused by the Democratic Party.

Your recent remarks about Nobel Peace Prize Winner, former President Jimmy Carter’s statement regarding Israel’s apartheid practice of racism is very disconcerting. You said, “It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based suppression, and Democrats reject that allegation vigorously,”

Who can deny the fact that no American politician of high stature has ever spent as much time to finding a just and peaceful solution to the Middle-east crisis as former President Carter? His statement about the on-going criminal and horrendous practice of racism by the Zionist state against the Palestinian people is not something that can be brushed away so lightly.

Mrs. Pelosi, let us talk about the history of the Zionist state. We don’t have to go too far there to agree that it was the Israeli people who had voted for the Likud Party shortly after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered by an extremist Jew, who had drawn his inspiration for the gruesome murder from hard-line rhetoric of Benjamin Netanyahu and his party. It was the same Jewish people who had elected Ariel Sharon (a war criminal - responsible hitherto for the war crimes in Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps and found guilty by the Israeli Supreme Court) to power, defeating Yehud Barak’s Labor Party.

Your statement above unfortunately reflects an obsession for the Israeli people that is biased and not at all conducive to ending Israel’s unjust war against the Palestinian people. It can easily be construed as being racist and chauvinist. It betrays history and truth. It tries to give a clean bill of health to a murderous regime that has only been emboldened by its ‘Amen Corner’ in the Capitol Hill of the USA.  Such short-sighted and untrue statements, apparently to appease our powerful Jewish lobby within America, make all of us, Americans - Jewish and non-Jewish alike, perceived in the rest of the world as partners-in-crimes of the Israeli apartheid state. Worst yet, your statement exemplify hypocrisy, and benefit none, not even the very Israeli Jew about whom we see lots of crocodile tears from our disingenuous politicians. The people in Israel need genuine peace and not an Armageddon.

Dear Mrs. Pelosi, when you opt to shut your eyes to the war crimes of the Zionist state, you have simply relegated yourself to the status of one more opportunistic politician who has forgotten the basic of conflict resolution - no peaceful solution can be found without addressing the existing issues honestly and frankly. And that was essentially the message of President Jimmy Carter that you seemed to have missed.

Regards,
Dr. Habib Siddiqui
Philadelphia

December 10, 2006