To the Editor:

In Tuesday’s column (“Anti-Semitism: back en vogue and kicking”), Justin Zaremby ’03 asks, “why don’t we take our money away from the terrorists?” I find it extraordinarily difficult to imagine that Yale gives money to suicide bombers. The question that Zaremby avoids with this ridiculous rhetorical question is whether Yale should be giving money to Israel; that terrorism would be a bad investment has absolutely nothing to do with it. The carelessness and intellectual dishonesty of Zaremby’s argument are clear just from the fact that he lists Israel’s “confiscation of land” as one of “the very acts that are committed by violent [anti-Israeli] terrorists”: nonsense.

As for the pat confusion of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment, when I went to Yale we were encouraged to prove our arguments; Zaremby “proves” that divestment is based on a hatred of Jews by pointing out that (a) the Egyptian government is anti-Semitic and (b) that the United States cried “anti-Semitism” at a U.N. conference on racism. No one could argue in good faith that this proves anything at all. I wonder what Zaremby makes of us anti-Israel Jews. Are we self loathing? Are we crazy? Are we Aryans in disguise?

The fact is that it is extraordinarily convenient for Israel’s supporters to dismiss all that country’s critics as anti-Semitic, and that is why they do.

Alexander Rubens ’00

November 19, 2002