Pray for the Peace Israel's Arab Enemies Continue to Refuse

Jamilah Rasheed is coordinator of the Connecticut Islamic Speakers Bureau and a frequent contributor of biased and factually challenged commentaries for the New Haven Register. She has the misleading email address in4truth@comcast.net.

The following is a letter submitted to the Register after one of her typical op-eds was published with the title "All must pray for justice for oppressed." Several people who read it thought it was excellent, but the same editors who keep printing Rasheed's screeds did not see fit to publish it.

Jamilah Rasheed may say "all must pray for justice for the oppressed," but she has her facts wrong about who is oppressing whom and clearly has no interest in praying for justice for the 20,000 residents of Sderot in Israel, whose small town has been targeted by more than 6,000 Kassam rockets since the Palestinian Arabs initiated their current terror offensive after rejecting peace in 2000.

This amounts to more than a rocket attack for each household in Sderot. Imagine what the reaction would be if just one rocket had been launched at each home in New Haven during the last seven years!


The Arabs in Gaza whose whose deplorable living conditions Rasheed wrongly blames on Israel have been living under their own government for well over a decade, in a de facto Palestinian State completely free of Jews since Israel completely withdrew more than two years ago. While Israel tries to control its border with Gaza, just as we try to control our borders with Mexico and Canada, Israel has no control over the border between Gaza and Egypt. Hamas has had little difficulty bringing immense quantities of weapons across that border; there would be no shortages in Gaza if Hamas put that same energy into bringing food, clothing and other necessities of life rather than death across those same borders.

For more than half a century, going back even before the re-establishment of Israel, the leadership of Israel and its precursor, the Jewish Agency, has repeatedly compromised its own rights and agreed to settle for far less than half a loaf in the interest of peace. For all that time, the Arab leadership and the Palestinian Arabs have spurned every opportunity.

The lives that intransigence has ended can never be brought back to life; no prayers can address the injustice that intransigence has caused.

Therefore, I do not pray for a justice that is impossible to attain; I pray for the peace that will become attainable as soon as the Palestinian Arabs join Israelis in its pursuit.