At Least The Yankees Don’t Raise Money For Settlers In Hebron

Yes yes yes. The Yankees are the Evil Empire. I embrace it so wholeheartedly you don’t even know. Our evil is strong. And your hatred makes us all the more powerful. I feed off your hatred like Alpha-Bits cereal and use your hot molten bile to forge our 27th championship ring.

But at least the Yankees don’t do this shit. Check out this press release I just got:

Adalah-NY: The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East

New York, NY, November 4, 2009 – Eleven organizations from the US, Palestine and Israel have called on baseball’s New York Mets to cancel a November 21st dinner at the Caesars Club at Citi Field for the Brooklyn-based Hebron Fund. The dinner is a fundraiser for Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank City of Hebron. In a letter sent to the Mets on November 3rd, the groups said, “The New York Mets will be facilitating activities that directly violate international law and the Obama administration’s call for a freeze in settlement construction, and that actively promote racial discrimination, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes in Hebron.” Seven hundred Israeli settlers, living amidst 150,000 Palestinians in Hebron, are expanding their hold on the historic old city by driving out the Palestinian residents.

The groups added that “It would be a tragic irony for an event funding Israeli settlers’ violent actions and discriminatory policies against Palestinians to be held at Caesars Club which, according to the Mets, “sits directly on top of the Jackie Robinson Rotunda,” which was named “in honor of Jackie Robinson, the… great American who broke baseball’s color barrier.” The Mets and Major League Baseball promote Robinson’s legacy, including Robinson’s value of “Justice: Treating all people fairly, no matter who they are.” Mets owner Fred Wilpon has explained in the past that, as a 16 year-old, meeting Jackie Robinson was an experience that never left him. “As a kid, a nothing, he treated me with all of that dignity that he treated everyone else in his life.”

Meanwhile, the Yankees fundraise for the Sloan-Kettering cancer research center in Manhattan, to which I have a very personal connection.

Update: I feel compelled to mention that the CIA charted a plane owned by a minority partner in the Boston Red Sox for extraordinary renditions. Those scrappy underdogs!