LETTER OF THE WEEK

Letter of the Week goes to Ilan Grapel in today's Australian:

Fallacies and Inaccuracies

THE editors of the Flame and Green Left Weekly (Letters, 10/7) attempted to rebut my expose of their extremism with a mixture of misrepresentation, logical fallacies and factual inaccuracies. I’m accused of providing “selected quotes, minus their context”. Moreover my article was a “tactic to stifle dissent”.

Firstly, context was explicit. I explained that the January edition “was devoted to the conflict in Gaza”. The editors complained that I did not mention Israel’s bombs that “rained down on Gaza civilians”. Despite their attempt to change the subject, my article was not about the civilians who were unavoidably killed as human shields for Hamas but about the Flame’s advocacy of the expansion of the war and empowering Hamas to kill, directly and indirectly, more civilians. GLW and the Flame may not regard this as extremism or terrorism, but I doubt many Australians would agree.

Their claim that I aimed to “stifle dissent” is telling. Nowhere did I advocate stifling, censoring or suppressing their paper. I simply publicised that the Flame promotes Hamas, an expansive war against Israel and political assassinations of Israeli ministers. While GLW’s anti-Israel stance is known, the Flame raised the bar. Apparently, those associated with GLW object to the non-Arabic speaking public knowing what the Flame actually says.

Ilan Grapel
Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council
South Melbourne, Vic

The letter was in response to a self-serving apologia from Soubhi Iskander (Editor of the Flame) and Stuart Munckton and Emma Murphy (Editors of Green Left Weekly). Iskander is Sudanese but not of the type that is being butchered on a daily basis by Arab terrorists supported by the Sudanese government, most of the Arab League and of course, the Palestinian terrorist organizations themselves. In that respect he is very much the Sudanese Anthony Loewenstein.