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The Burlington Free Press, January 28, 2003

Leap of logic

By Jules Rabin

Regarding Jan Feldman's It's My Turn on the Paulin case (Free Press, Jan. 21):

I, too, thought it was rotten of the Irish poet Tom Paulin to declare that Jewish settlers who illegally occupy Palestinian land should be shot dead. More violence is what's least needed over there.

But is Paulin's crazy declaration a piece of anti-Semitism, as Feldman asserts? I don't get it. If Ariel Sharon, who is, of course, Jewish, is tried for war crimes before a court in the Hague, will that render the court anti-Semitic? Were the prosecutors of the Jewish gangster Bugsy Segal anti-Semites?

By what leap in logic does Feldman, a scholar, turn Paulin's attack on what she calls a "subset" of the Jewish people (the illegal Jewish settlers) into an attack on all Jews, thereby identifying it as an act of anti-Semitism? Feldman says, in effect, "Well it is," and then drops the matter. That may soothe the hurt in her heart, but it's not sound or fair discourse.

It's the illegal settlers that Paulin singled out. Period. Feldman has presented no textual warrant for saying that Paulin's hatred of the settlers extends categorically to all Jews, thereby qualifying him as an anti-Semite. That she may carry in her mind the nightmare idea that hatred of any of us equates with hatred of all of us, is another matter.

Jules Rabin
Marshfield, VT