Hanan Ashrawi: "Today, 20 years after Baruch Goldstein cut down so many innocent lives in a burst of hateful rage, the poisonous anti-Arab racism that turned him into a mass murderer is alive and well in Israel."

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/199475-kahanes-legacy?utm_campaign=congressblog&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Kahane's legacy

By Hanan Ashrawi 

Twenty years ago this week, a Brooklyn-born Israeli settler named Baruch Goldstein walked into the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and opened fire with his army-issued assault rifle, killing 29 Palestinians and wounding 150 others. In the following days, Israeli soldiers shot and killed at least 20 more Palestinians and injured hundreds of others as protests erupted across the occupied territories. The Israeli government convened a commission of inquiry that found Goldstein had acted alone and deemed there was no deeper problem, despite repeated warning signs that he posed a serious danger prior to the massacre. A year later a Jewish extremist and admirer of Goldstein assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in an attempt to stop the peace process.

Goldstein and Rabin’s killer, Yigal Amir, were both followers of the notorious Rabbi Meir Kahane. Kahane, a fellow Brooklynite of Goldstein’s who advocated a Greater Israel and the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories, founded the Jewish Defense League in New York before immigrating to Israel in the early 1970s where he formed the Kach political party. At the time of Kahane’s assassination in 1990, Kach had been barred from Israeli politics for its overt racism and extremism...READ MORE

Ashrawi is a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and head of the P.L.O. Department of Culture and Information.