An Open Letter to the 84 Celebrities: No to Israeli Terror and Hollywood Hypocrisy

To:  The 84 Celebrity Signatories of the August 16 Advertisement in the Los Angeles Times

Resistance not Terrorism

• You write that you are "pained and devastated by the civilian casualties in Israel and Lebanon caused by terrorist actions initiated by terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas," ignoring the fact that Hezbollah and Hamas' recent actions were directed at military targets to secure release of political prisoners, which include 450 Palestinian children.
  http://www.dci-pal.org/english/home.cfm

Israel's State Terror

• You whitewash Israel's terrorism in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank and disingenuously ignore Israel's imprisonment of twenty-five percent of the democratically elected Palestinian legislature, imprisonment of its cabinet members, destruction of its Foreign Ministry and Prime Minister's Office by the claim: "If we do not succeed in stopping terrorism around the world, chaos will rule and innocent people will continue to die. We need to support democratic societies and stop terrorism at all costs."

• Consider the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the Headquarters of the British Rule in Palestine, in 1946 by the Irgun, a terrorist Zionist organization, in which 92 British, Arab, and Jews were killed. And Consider that Israeli leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister, commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing last July.
  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-2277717,00.html

• Consider that terrorism and ethnic cleansing were introduced to the region with the advent of political Zionism. David Ben Gurion aka David Gruen formed a committee to "'erase' all the names used in historic Palestine for the past five thousand years and to create new Hebrew names" thus destroying "the vocabulary of the life of the people."
  http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/images/fortherecord.php?ID=235

• Consider that "the average of Arab civilians killed in each month of the six months preceding the declaration of the birth of the state of Israel reached 150 dead."
  http://jerusalem.indymedia.org/news/2003/07/127149.php

• Consider that Israel before and after its statehood depopulated 675 Palestinian villages, demolished 438 of them (Khalidi's All That Remains) and is responsible for seventy plus massacres to encourage flight of Palestinians in 1948.
  http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/images/fortherecord.php?ID=235

• Consider that recent events in Nablus are a continuation of Zionists' ethnic cleansing. Israel's Occupation Forces, in spite of being offered the keys to the building, blew up the ancient town's Ministry of the Interior wiping out "hundreds of thousands of file cases and documents--birth and death certificates, identification records, passports and other travel documents, ledgers of hand written information--a heritage of historical information about Nablus residents that covered more than 100 years of successive Palestinian occupations under the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, the Jordanian kingdom, and the current Israeli regime."
  http://www.counterpunch.org/toensing07272006.html

• Consider, between June 29, 2006 and August 22, 2006 forty-four Palestinian children seventeen years and under have been killed by Israel's Occupation Forces in Gaza alone. Consider that during the first Intifadah in 1987 against Israel's illegal occupation the orders of Defense Minister Rabin were to break the bones of young Palestinian stone throwers.
  http://www.dci-pal.org/english/Display.cfm?DocId=506&CategoryId=11

• Consider also the 100 Palestinians in Gaza whose arms and legs were dismembered by Israel's occupation forces from June 25-August 12, and the 203 Palestinians in Gaza who were killed during the same time by Israel.
  http://www.imemc.org/content/view/20761/1/

• Consider that Israel recently demolished thirty-one Jerusalem homes between January-July 2006.
  http://english.pnn.ps/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=396&Itemid=1+

• Consider the "pain" and "devastation" of the families of the 1300 Lebanese civilians, "their arms wrapped around each other in the moment of death as their homes were beaten down upon them by the Israeli air force," according to Robert Fisk, whereas only forty civilians, many of whom are Palestinian Arabs, whose homes lack bomb shelters and whose neighborhoods are in the vicinity of Israel's weapons factories, were killed by Hezbollah's rockets.

Israeli Terrorism Against People Like You

• Consider that to the Israeli the Palestinian pen is more dangerous than the Palestinian sword. Many Palestinian civilians who have been evicted from their homes and illegally deported included 200 with PhDs and thousands of engineers, doctors, pharmacists, artists, and writers.

• Consider that just a few of the tens of Palestinian intellectuals maimed and killed by Israel include Ghassan Kanafani, renowned writer, blown up along with his niece in the early seventies, Kamal Nasser, the poet, murdered by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Anis Sayegh, head of Cultural Research was a victim of a letter bomb.
  http://jerusalem.indymedia.org/news/2003/07/127149.php

• Consider the USS Liberty ship which was "intentionally" attacked by the Israeli Air Force in 1967 killing 34 Americans on board.

• Consider Rachel Corrie, the heroic 23-year-old American girl crushed to death on March 16, 2003 as she tried to prevent the demolition of a civilian family's home in the Gaza Strip.
  http://www.wrmea.com/archives/May-June_2006/0605021.html

• Consider Tom Hurndall, the 22-year-old British activist who was intentionally shot in head and killed while he acting as a human shield for Palestinian children amid gunfire in the Gaza Strip.
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1750915,00.html

• Consider the humiliation suffered by handicapped Palestinian-American comedian Maysoon Zayid who recently "was made to bleed for hours in the airport all over herself in a wheelchair."
  http://umkahlil.blogspot.com/2006/08/zionists-brutalize-handicapped.html

Zionism Is Racism

• Consider that any Jew from anywhere in the world may immigrate to Israel and become an instant citizen, but elderly Palestinian refugees may not be buried in the place of their birth. The price for this Jewish privilege has been devastating to occupied Palestinians and Palestine's 7.2 million refugees, many of whom live within 100 kilometers of land to which they hold deeds.

• Consider that a Palestinian within the occupied territories or within Israel may neither be unified with his/her spouse if the spouse has foreign citizenship or if the spouse comes from Gaza or the West Bank.

• Consider the 650-kilometer (400 mile) long and eight meters (25 feet) high Apartheid Wall being built by Israel in the West Bank since 2002, encircling Palestinian cities and villages and turning them into ghettos or Bantustans, and consider that the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu described the apartheid regime in South Africa "a picnic in comparison with the utter brutality of Israel's occupation of Palestine."

Right of Return is inalienable

• Consider that Israel refuses to implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, Section 2, which states "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

• Consider that Israel refuses to honor United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 which states "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date."

• Consider that the denial by Israel of the Palestinians' inalienable right to return home is ethnic cleansing and that by supporting Israel you are complicit in ethnic cleansing, which is a war crime.

And to conclude, consider educating yourselves about the roots of what you call "terrorism" in the region (and we are providing you with a reading list to start with) and until you do consider that we will spare no efforts to inform the public to boycott your films, publications, sporting events, and any other enterprise in which you take part.

http://ifamericansknew.org

http://www.hrw.org/doc?t=mideast&c=isrlpa

http://www.jewsnotzionists.org

http://www.stopthewall.org

http://www.unrwa.org

http://palsolidarity.org
http://www.palestinecampaign.org
http://www.wrmea.org

http://www.palestineremembered.com

http://www.miftah.org

http://www.imeu.net

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

The An Open Letter to the 84 Celebrities: No to Israeli Terror and Hollywood Hypocrisy Petition to The 84 Celebrity Signatories of the August 16 Advertisement in the Los Angeles Times was created by Members of Al-Awda and written by Nancy Almendras (alawda.members@gmail.com).  This petition is hosted here at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service. There is no endorsement of this petition, express or implied, by Artifice, Inc. or our sponsors. For technical support please use our simple Petition Help form.

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