Letter To The Editor

This is a response to Tai Khandaker's letter in the Oct. 23 edition of The Spectrum. Tai's letter was in response to an article concerning anti-semitism on campus and attempted to produce sympathy in the hearts of Spectrum readers by commenting on the fact that 611 Jews have been murdered since September 2000 while 1,625 Muslims have been killed. Interestingly enough, Khandaker happened to leave out the information behind these numbers. Of the 1,625 Palestinians who have been killed, 38 percent were non-combatants, while a whopping 80 percent of the Jewish fatalities were non-combatants. Of the non-combatant fatality category, 13.6 percent of the Palestinian fatalities were under the age of 13, while 69 percent of the Israeli ones were. Another great disproportion exists among non-combatants age 40 and over, where 154 Israelis have been killed, compared to 69 Palestinians. 39 percent of the Israeli non-combatants killed by Palestinians were female, only 7 percent of the Palestinian con-combatants killed by Israelis were female.

Many of the non-combatant Palestinians who were killed were in active war areas, while most of the non-combatant Jews killed were in malls, eateries, dance clubs, or on a public bus - on their way to school or work. Zero Jews died because they decided to take their own life along with the lives of unsuspecting civilians, a stark difference to the 189 Palestinian fatalities that came as a result from their own suicide bombings. These 189 fatalities do not even include "suicide shooters" - Palestinians who attacked Israelis with the expectation of death, but did not specifically blow themselves up. This, of course, is not a full list of discrepancies and does not reflect deaths all around the world that were a direct result of Palestinian terrorism.

I am surprised that Khandaker mentioned bigotry in his letter due to the fact that he misuses his data in a bigoted way - representing only one side, his. On the surface, 611 Israeli deaths are incomparable to the larger number of 1,625 dead Palestinians, but once the surface is scratched and information emerges that explains these numbers, sympathy can no longer be reserved just for the group with the greater number of losses. It is too bad that because much of the media is able to manipulate numbers by regulating the amount of supplemental information that accompanies those numbers, Khandaker felt that he could, too.