Dear Paul,
I never imagined I’d be writing you a letter like this.
I grew up in Queens in the 1960s, not far from where you started shaping the sound that would define an era. Your music walked with me through childhood, adolescence, army service, parenthood-its honesty, its humanity, its unmistakable moral core. You were the kid from Queens who made it big but never lost that clear-eyed sense of right and wrong.
Which is exactly why your decision to sign a letter calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti-a convicted murderer responsible for the orchestration of lethal attacks on Israeli civilians-felt like a punch to the gut.
Let’s be plain:
Barghouti wasn’t convicted for writing poetry. He wasn’t imprisoned for political dissent. He was found guilty, after due process, for directing terror attacks that killed innocent Jews. Mothers, fathers, teenagers on their way home, regular people whose lives were stolen because they existed in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There is no moral gray zone here.
There is no “context” that transforms the deliberate killing of civilians into heroism.
Yet by placing your name on that letter, you aligned yourself-not accidentally-with those who seek to whitewash terrorism and recast murder as resistance.
You’ve spent a lifetime cultivating an image of insight, conscience, and moral sensitivity. That’s why this hurts more than when random celebrities speak out of ignorance.
You, Paul Simon, should know better. You were raised in the same borough as I was-the old Queens where we were taught to smell propaganda a mile away, where we learned to call a thug a thug and a murderer a murderer.
So, I have to ask:
Did you even read what you were signing?
Do you understand who Barghouti is and what he did?
Or were you swept up in the latest fashionable cause, the kind that flatters Western egos while trampling Jewish graves far away?
Because if you did understand, then your signature isn’t just misguided-it’s morally outrageous.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were misled.
But you’re not a kid from the schoolyard anymore; you’re a global figure. Your words carry weight. Your name grants legitimacy. And when you lend that legitimacy to a convicted terrorist, you don’t just make a mistake-you inflict real harm.
You owe the victims and their families more than silence.
You owe the Jewish people more than a shrug.
You owe the public a retraction. Clearly, publicly, and promptly.
Retracting your signature isn’t a political act-it’s a moral necessity. It’s the bare minimum expected of anyone who claims to understand the gravity of human life and the consequences of violence.
This isn’t about left or right, hawk or dove.
It’s about the basic decency your music always seemed to champion. And it’s about whether the Paul Simon so many of us admired still exists behind the headlines.
I hope he does.
Respectfully-but unapologetically,
A fellow Queens native who remembers the difference between right and wrong,
and refuses to let murder be rebranded as peace.
Rabbi Yonaton Behar is originally from Queens, NY, and lives in Har Bracha, where he is a marketing and public relations exper. He translates many of the writings of Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Eliezer Melamed into English.