Letters: Recall support | Selective condemnation

Submit your letter to the editor via this form. Read more Letters to the Editor.

Pride flag ban
justifies recall

Re: “Pride flag ban will continue in district” (Page A1, Oct. 12).

As a parent and educator, I support the recall effort of Board President Ryan Jorgenson and Trustee Linda Hurley by Sunol parents, teachers and former board members. Their votes to ban the LGBTQ Pride flag only make sense when taken in the larger national context of extremists moving in on communities to roll back LGBTQ people’s safety and equality.

Jorgensen gives a “respect both sides” argument as justification for the Sept. 12 resolution. He is quoted in USA Today as saying, “Even though I may have my personal beliefs … we don’t need to … try to control their families.”

Do those “personal beliefs” you refer to so vaguely, Mr. Jorgensen, include anti-LGBTQ beliefs? You have been voted in to support education for all children in your community. We will vote you out or you will be recalled.

Kristine Wyndham
Oakland

Selective condemnation
has effects here, abroad

Re: “Universities must stand against Hamas extremism” (Page A13, Oct. 15).

I was disappointed to read Eric Gertler’s opinion piece.

Over the past week, we’ve seen almost all politicians and major institutions loudly condemn the actions of Hamas. However, as Israel kills Palestinian civilians, those same people and institutions are silent. Israel’s defense minister has called Hamas “human animals” and threatened to “demolish everything.” Israel has bombed civilians fleeing their homes.

Our culture claims to value all lives but holds up Israeli life as more worthy than Palestinian life. Here in America, this has dire consequences: Palestinian and Muslim Americans are being followed, harassed and even killed.

As an American Jew, I am appalled at the hypocrisy of this selective condemnation and mourning. My grandparents fled the Holocaust to establish a better life in America. They would be appalled to see another genocide carried out in their name.

Clara Weinstein
Berkeley

Terrorism, self-defense
offer no equivalence

On Oct 7, Hamas, a terrorist group backed by Iran, launched a brutal, unprovoked attack on Israeli citizens. Driven by hate and the goal of “wiping Israel off the map,” they raped, tortured and murdered innocent people, Israeli officers have said.

Hamas’ murderous massacre was on a scale unseen since the Holocaust. They committed not only war crimes against Israeli civilians but they are continuing barbaric crimes against their own civilians in Gaza by cowardly using them as human shields.

All decent people must condemn Hamas and other terrorist groups and remind Americans that there is no moral equivalency between the massacre of innocent civilians and Israel’s response to the heinous crimes the world witnessed 10 days ago.

Katherine Hienke
Walnut Creek

Don’t give Hamas
apologists a platform

Re: “End Israel’s colonial occupation and stop the apartheid system” (Page A13, Oct. 15).

Anna Baltzer speaks of the Palestinian “fighters” who “broke through the illegal wall that imprisons them.” I hardly know where to begin.