Last week, Mohammad Junaid Alam wrote a letter (“Palestinian age-old practice of killing not very old,” March 15) replete with name-calling, and in it I am referred to as a defender of colonialism. He is trying to imply that the Jews in Israel were colonists, while the Palestinians are indigenous. This is demonstrably false; there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Israel for thousands of years, as documented by both history and Biblical archaeology.

Alam proceeds to assert I am “pandering to anti-Arab sentiment” by referring to the Palestinian practice of killing Jewish civilians. I used the word “practice” primarily because the killing of Jewish civilians was the policy of Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini. Husseini, Yasser Arafat’s uncle, became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and de facto Palestinian leader in 1921. Husseini also played a pivotal role in inciting the unprovoked Arab riots of the 1920s and 1930s, during which hundreds of Jewish civilians were killed.

Considering Palestinian state television runs children’s shows glorifying suicide bombers and encouraging children to kill Israelis, it appears not much has changed. Hamas, the recently elected majority party in the Palestinian parliament, includes the following quote in its charter:

“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems [sic] fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).”

I am also accused by Alam of comparing the Palestinians to the Nazis (“Criticism of Hamas Shouldn’t Surprise,” Feb. 15). This claim is easily disproven by reading the original article. Despite the incomparability between Palestinians and Nazis, the links between the two groups are undeniable.

Amin al-Husseini, whom Yasser Arafat referred to as “our hero,” was an honored guest of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany during World War II. He spent much of the war in Berlin advocating the extermination of Jews on his Nazi-funded radio show, which was broadcast in the Middle East. When Husseini visited the death camp Auschwitz, he is reported to have implored the guards running the gas chambers to work more diligently. The current Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, referred to the Holocaust as “the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed.”

Finally, Alam brings up Israel’s founding in 1948 and the historian Benny Morris. Alam refers to Morris as “Israel’s most prestigious historian.” This opinion is not universally held. Professor Efraim Karsh, author of “Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians,” writes the following:

“Benny Morris and his fellow self-styled revisionists were neither new nor true historians. They did not deserve the appellation ‘new’ because they had unearthed no new facts and offered no original interpretations of the Arab-Israeli conflict