In “Lifeline For The Aliyah From Hell” (Aug. 26), reporter Michele Chabin quotes a disgruntled American oleh: “I’d had enough, that they bring us here and drop us like a hot potato.”
The premise of the story is simply not true, since Americans make aliyah voluntarily. Most are immeasurably successful, the fulfillment of dreams to live in the Jewish state. A few are not, which is no different than those moving to any new country. The fact that the disgruntled American founded a nonprofit organization to work with the panoply of aliyah-helping organizations does not make up for the damage of calling aliyah “hell” and referring to “immigrants abandoned by the Israeli government” on your front page.
The real question is, why is The Jewish Week feeding Israel’s enemies rather than giving readers the crucial information we desperately need to fight BDS, which is almost completely missing from our secular media? Why don’t you report Palestinian President Abbas’ incitement of his people to kill Israelis and publicly honoring of the murderers that feed Palestinian children with hatred for Israel and Jews — all in violation of international law, information we need to fight BDS?
The Jewish media allow defamations of our people — lashon hora — to spread at our peril. To paraphrase Paul Johnson in his “History of the Jewish People,” violence always follows the delegitimization of Jews, which we know too well from the facilitating of the Holocaust by Nazi propaganda.
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