Abraham Foxman and the Syrian Gassings

Abraham Foxman, National Director
Anti-Defamation League
605 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10158-3560
(212) 885-7700, www.adl.org

12 September 2013

Dear Mr. Foxman:

With regard to the recent killings by chemical weapons in Syria, either by the Syrian State or others, you have been quoted as saying:

“Our people have been exterminated by the use of gas. We cannot stand by without a reaction when we see gas being used to kill others.”

I am going to take it as a given that you would argue that it is wrong to “exterminate” others, no matter what weapon is used to accomplish the deed.

This suggests a question of some significance that, so far as I know, you have not addressed.

Each year during Passover, while the rescue of the Jews from Egypt is celebrated, the other half of the story is routinely ignored. The half that tells us how God “exterminated” all the first-born of the Egyptians on that dreadful night when he “passed over” the doors of the Jews. Countless thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of first-born Egyptian babies, children, youths, mothers—all the first-born of all the mothers and fathers throughout the land of Egypt—murdered.

While Passover has been celebrated for some 3,000 years, as it was this year, I am unaware that you, Mr. Foxman, have ever expressed any note of sympathy, or expressed any other reaction, to the horrors of what the Egyptian mothers and their first-born, who in almost all cases were innocent of all wrong-doing, suffered on that terrible night of mass extermination. Am I wrong about this?

Does it make all the difference to you, Mr. Foxman, that the “weapon” used to exterminate the Egyptian first-born was not “gas?” Please tell me what I’m missing here.

Thank you,

Bradley Smith
Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust
POB 439016
San Ysidro, California  92413
E: [email protected]
Web: www.codoh.com