I read with some interest the opinion piece crafted by Grace Cross. It was a nice story, written without context that vilified the state of Israel with almost no mention of the country, but to repeat two pieces of propaganda she clearly learned from the benefactors of her trip, Sabeel and their American counterpart Friends of Sabeel.
Cross dedicated much of the ink in her column to the “genocide” of the Palestinian people and use of the performative catch word “colonial.” While I understand that her column is an opinion piece, my issue with the words genocide and colonial, and the pejorative implications baked into their usage, is the same as a previous letter I wrote to the Globe: a lack of journalistic integrity.
An editor should have fact checked Cross’ column and required her to explain how Israel’s defense of its citizens constitutes a genocide. An editor should also have asked Cross to define colonialism and why she feels a migrant tribe of people who entered a land after it had been established as a Jewish homeland is not the colonizers. An editor might also have pushed the question of whether there was ever an independent Palestinian state administered by Palestinians before 1948 (spoiler alert, there wasn’t).
I realize The Globe is a student-run newspaper but that shouldn’t free it from its journalistic responsibilities.
I am also curious as to where the other voices supporting Israel might be found between The Globe’s pages.
And while one could argue that The Globe isn’t required to include a point/counter point on each issue it covers, I wonder what the editors’ response would have been if a columnist wrote in support of ICE or Turning Point USA or against Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. I have a feeling that the pages of the newspaper would have been filled with rebuttals.
Missing from Cross’ piece was any mention of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on the state of Israel during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. The 1,219 individuals killed, the nearly 250 kidnapped and the sexual violence perpetrated by the internationally recognized terror group didn’t warrant an inch of column space in Cross’ piece, which would have given needed context to Israel’s reaction.
Missing also was any discussion of the brutality of Hamas. It’s treatment of the LGBTQ+ community, murder of dissenting political figures in Gaza, the group’s theft of funding provided by the international community to uplift the citizens it governs–using it instead to buy arms from Iran and build tunnels meant to aid in attacks on Israel.
And while Cross presented a picture of a struggling group of people just trying to live their lives, she made no mention of the swastikas carved into doors at the al-Am’ari Refugee Camp I saw when I visited the West Bank in 2022 or the blackened guard posts where Palestinians had thrown lit tires at IDF soldiers.
Cross seems to have missed the disparity, created by the Palestinian National Authority, between the poor in the refugee camps who continue to be radicalized by their “leaders” and the mansions PA leaders live in surrounded by armed guards—meant not to keep out the IDF but those who might question how politicians can live in such luxury. Nor did she question the United Nations, which is supposed to be administrating funds and supporting those in its camps.
Instead, Cross’ entire piece was curated by Sabeel and its American counterpart the Friends of Sabeel, a driving force behind BDS attempts here in the states.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, “Sabeel’s efforts to demonize Israel and Israelis have also featured charges of deicide against Jews; they have compared Palestinians to a modern-day Jesus and accused Israel of engaging in a ‘crucifixion’ of these Palestinians.”
The ADL notes that while Sabeel and FOS claim to reject Palestinian terrorism, “they also seek to lay blame for this phenomenon on Israel, noting on their Web site that the terrorism is ‘rooted in this oppressive situation of occupation’ and ‘fomented’ by repression.”
The point is that any point of view presented by Sabeel or FOS needs to be taken with more than a grain of salt.
Locally, FOS has been a destabilizing force in relationships between the Jewish community and others in the region. One must look no further than Chad Collins, a local pastor connected to the organizations. One of Collins daughters has been radicalized to the point where she is facing federal charges for her connection to an individual that has been charged, not only with vandalizing Chabad of Squirrel Hill and the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, but with building bombs with the intent of harming the Jewish community. Another daughter was arrested for her behavior at encampments at the University of Pittsburgh.
While Cross has presented a nice story it is a tale replete with bias and a one-sided point of view that should have been tempered by The Globe’s editors. In the future, I urge both the paper’s editors and advisors to provide a more complete picture of complex issues that deserve more than Cross’ curated vision of what one saw on a brief trip to the Middle East.
David Rullo
Senior Staff Writer, Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and former Point Park College student
[Editor’s Note: The Globe welcomes all opinion pieces regardless of viewpoint and the
current editorial team does not write rebuttals against any piece. We would publish the examples given in Rullo’s letter without pushback.]
