Madison Wisconsin: Solidarity with Hamas
Last May I had a piece about Madison Wisconsin, whose City Council has been taken over by lunatics who think it’s a grand idea to become a “sister city” of the Palestinian town of Rafah—a terrorist haven riddled with weapons smuggling tunnels, run by the terror gang Hamas.
A reader in Madison emailed to let me know that despite angry protests from residents, the Madison City Council is apparently determined to railroad this issue through. Local media have completely ignored the protests, except for this article in Madison’s “progressive” daily that gives you an idea how bad things have gotten: Rafah debate anguished, bruising.
“Daniel Pekarsky, a UW professor, said he is no fan of the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon and supports the right of Israelis and Palestinians to each have their own state. But he said adopting Rafah as a sister city would be terribly divisive, representing support for one of the groups in the conflict and a “moral critique of others.”
Other opponents accused Rafah of being a hotbed of terrorism and said a sister city that so divides the Madison community is the wrong choice.
Lester Pines, a member of the Madison Jewish Community Council executive board, charged that the sister city project was not a humanitarian effort, as advertised, but rather an effort to be part of a “movement to delegitimize the state of Israel.”
Pines also took Jennifer Lowenstein, founder of the sister city project, to task for referring in an email to the executive board of the Jewish Council as “deeply racist.” Pines condemned Lowenstein for the email, sent to the editor of the NGO Monitor, a Web site dedicated to promoting “accountability” among non-governmental entities involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, in an email to City Council members.
In an interview Tuesday afternoon, Pines said Lowenstein’s words reveal the true agenda of the sister city project. “It’s not a project about humanitarianism and seeking peaceful solutions to strife through people-to-people contact,” Pines said. “It’s a way of getting a platform for expressing a particular opinion about this particular conflict.”
In her e-mail, Lowenstein dismissed the NGO watch group’s criticism of Al Mezan and took a shot at the executive board of the Madison Jewish Community Council, which has opposed the proposed sister city project from the start.
“It is a terrible shame that an organization such as yours accepts at face value the unsubstantiated charges of a deeply racist, blindly pro-Israel organization here in Madison,” she wrote.
In an interview, Lowenstein said she stands by her statements about Jewish Council’s leadership. “Their attitudes toward Palestinians are deeply racist,” Lowenstein said.