Letter to an elected criminal

This letter was NOT PUBLISHED... 

LETTER TO THE EDITOR / Baltimore Sun

'COME HOME TO BDS, SEN. CARDIN!'

Senator Benjamin Cardin, Maryland (D)

We in the BOYCOTT, DIVEST & SANCTION Movement invite Maryland U.S. Senator Benjamin Cardin to support our human rights campaign. He has joined with Prof. Alan M. Dershowitz and others in declaring that any international efforts to change the policies of the State of Israel amount to "singling out Israel" for special scrutiny and punishment, especially when Israel is the target of boycotts, divestment and sanctions. As such, Senator Cardin, like many in the federal legislature, have denounced our movement as unfair, and they have taken steps to legally shield Israel from multinational criticism, particularly within the European Union. We wish to sooth Senator Cardin's concerns about Israel being singled out, so we won't mention Israel anymore. Fair is fair, correct? Thus we ask Senator Cardin to join us in applying the Boycott-Divestment-Sanction human rights strategy to any and all nations that:

• Violated the UN Resolution that permitted its founding by seizing more land than was allowed by the resolution and ignored its explicit stipulations that protected the rights of the indigenous residents
• Engaged in a brutal program of ethnic cleansing against the indigenous residents that included a series of civilian massacres
• Has confiscated the lands and homes of those expelled and has refused any guilt or even any offer of reparation, and has refused to allow displaced residents to return solely because they were not members of a preferred ethnic/religious group, thus violating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• Currently permits and seeks to expand laws that socially, politically and economically discriminate against a significantly large minority population based upon religious/ethnic criteria
• Builds housing and military installation on illegally confiscated land in violation of the Geneva Convention (Article 4)
• Holds several thousand political prisoners, including more than a dozen elected parliamentarians of the subjugated people, as well as hundreds of minor children under draconian conditions and without third-party humanitarian oversight
• Possesses a nuclear weapons program while refusing to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and regularly carries out unprovoked military strikes on its regional neighbors

Now that singling out Israel or anybody else has been removed from the table, we are assured that Senator Cardin will enthusiastically embrace the BDS Movement as a logical, grassroots, moral and peaceful way of addressing such egregious violations of human rights and international law.

Sincerely, Wm Pleasant