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We Are Not Paranoid
(Jerusalem Post) David J. Forman - We Israelis are not paranoid. Much of the world is truly out to "get us." Witness the Amnesty International report accusing Israel of "crimes against humanity" and "war crimes." What of the intentional Palestinian murders of innocent Israelis? Are these not "crimes against humanity"? It is ironic that it took the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, not Amnesty, to report on the systematic torture and killing of Palestinians by the Palestinian Authority. It is amazing how one can start out with a perfectly logical formula and misapply it so it becomes dangerous nonsense. Granted, Nazis and Jews are both members of the human race, but they are not interchangeable, as the language characterizing Israel's behavior in the territories suggests. Neither the Presbyterians nor the authors of the Amnesty report have the slightest sensitivity to our perspective. What is our narrative? It is America going to war with Iraq in 1991, and Scuds landing in Tel Aviv, not in Des Moines or New York. It is the story of a terrorist entering a Jewish home and shooting at point-blank range a three-year-old and a five-year-old child, in the head. The root of that evil is not the occupation, but the nightmare we Israelis live with - that the Arab nations have not given up their dream of destroying us. No one has suffered greater "crimes against humanity" than we Jews. Before judging us, the world would do well to understand our narrative, and to acknowledge not just our historic nightmare, but its many manifestations that continue to this day.