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Scary ‘peace builder’

I was surprised to see Marianne Torres and Myrta Ladich mention Mazin Qumsiyeh as somebody working for peace between Israelis and Palestinians in their June 30 op-ed, and even more surprised to hear that group calling itself Interfaith PeaceBuilders would include him as a speaker.

Qumsiyeh is hardly a household name, but his views are well-documented. There isn’t room here for all his ugly comments, but he frequently claims Jews control the U.S. government, Zionist Jews control the media, and that Jews take money from businesses to certify food as kosher, then send that money to Israel. He engages in Holocaust revisionism by falsely claiming that Zionists worked with the Nazis during the Holocaust, while dismissing the very real collaboration between the Palestinian leader Haj Amin al Huseini and the Nazis.

That the column’s writers and Interfaith PeaceBuilders think so highly of Qumsiyeh says much about the peace they hope to build. Real peace can only come when the rest of us stop giving people like Qumsiyeh and his supporters a pass on their inflammatory speech just because they call themselves peace builders.

Mike Barenti

Spokane

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