Student activists believe a fiction

Re “Students’ rallying cry: ‘Free Palestine,’ ” Dec. 10

Emphasizing Israel as a post-Holocaust creation is a way in which the Jewish state’s enemies falsely accuse the indigenous Jewish people as “colonizers.”

In fact, the land of Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people dating back to about 1400 BCE. The Jews lived there until 70 CE, when they were conquered by the Roman Empire. The Arch of Titus in Rome shows the menorah from the Jewish Holy Temple being carried off as spoils.

In 1925, in the pamplet “A Brief Guide to al-Haram al-Sharif, Jerusalem,” the Supreme Muslim Council stated in reference to the Temple Mount: “The site is one of the oldest in the world… Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute.”

Saying the Jewish people colonized the land of Israel is like accusing the Sioux tribes of colonizing North and South Dakota. Pamela Scheinman Chicago

Russia is carrying out an unlawful invasion and committing numerous war crimes. Yet the students who oppose Israel do not demonstrate against these actual war crimes.

Syria has massacred its rebellious populations in part by killing them in illegal chemical attacks. Where are the protests against Syria?

In seems that in general, these students are only concerned when a Jewish state defends itself against a Palestinian group that has attacked it.

Anyone smell antisemitism?

Lawrence Fromm San Clemente

It is hardly reassuring that Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi thinks that his students’ “sloppy thinking” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “undermining the cause.”

Khalidi should ask himself what he has done to promote more critical thinking on the complex subject. Perhaps such examination might undermine the “cause” itself, whatever it is, as based on flawed historical analysis and racist, anti-Jewish or anti-Palestinian animus.

Carl Selkin

Pasadena