Industry of lies

The article “NBA team asked to cut ties with company supplying Israeli forces” ( August 6) highlights an example of a widespread malady whose common cause is seldom explained clearly.

A sports team is being pressured to cut ties with a firm that sells sporting optics and binoculars, because this firm also supplies its products to the IDF.

In explaining the opposition to their team supporting the optics firm, an apparently key supporter of the sports team, Olivia Katbi Smith, co- chairwoman of Portland’s Democratic Socialists of America, describes the IDF as “... a murderous death squad that upholds apartheid through continuous brutalization of Palestinians.”

I see only two possible explanations for her expressing such ridiculous malevolent statements quoted from the Palestinian “industry of lies.”

1) She is the type of person who, if someone claimed in the local papers, that a member of her family had perpetrated some ghastly action, would immediately accept the story and condemn and abandon that member of the family without further question.

2) She is simply a grossly antisemitic bigot happy to spread wild, vicious lies about Jews, no matter what.

These two common phenomena, separately or combined, explain the huge support in the West for the Palestinian anti- Israel and anti- Jewish narrative.

CHARLES SMITH Moshav Shoresh