Mark Steyn: Palestinians agree with Israel shock horror

The Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | 05/06/2002 | Mark Steyn

[Pokey78]

I USUALLY save the I-told-you-so gloat for the year-in-review column, but I can't resist noting that Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation has now come round to my way of thinking on the Jenin refugee camp. "There was no massacre," I wrote here two weeks ago, when Robert Fisk and Fleet Street's other sob-sisters were running around weepin' and a-wailin' about mass graves and war crimes. The Israeli government's latest figures for Jenin put the death toll of Palestinians at 52. The Palestinians themselves put the death toll at - wait for it - 56.

That's right: 56. There are no missing zeroes on the end. The only missing zeroes are those gullible British hacks who swallowed that line about hundreds of dead civilians but have fallen mysteriously silent as the figures have been revised downward. The total of 56 dead was announced by Kadoura Moussa, the Fatah director for the northern West Bank, after four Palestinian Authority investigators reported their findings to him at his office in the camp. Is a discrepancy of four enough to qualify as a "massacre"? Twenty three Israeli soldiers died at Jenin, so the comparative death tolls sound less like a "massacre" and more like a - what's the word? - "battle".

So the Israelis and Palestinians are more or less agreed. The only guys who don't agree are excitable chaps such as Gerald Kaufman, who's demanding sanctions against Israel, and my colleague Armando Iannucci, whose droll killer-Jews-on-the-rampage column appeared on this page yesterday. Considering that the Telegraph Group is routinely dismissed by Richard Ingrams and co as a Zionist lackey, I do think we could do more to live up to the name.

In contrast, the other day the Independent's Phil Reeves criticised "the Palestinian leadership, who, instantly and without proof, declared that a massacre had occurred in which as many as 500 died. Palestinian human rights groups made matters worse by churning out wild, and clearly untrue, stories." They obviously weren't quite so clearly untrue a week and a half earlier, when a presumably entirely different Phil Reeves wrote about Israeli "atrocities committed in the Jenin refugee camp, where its army has killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians".

So, 52-56. Hmm. Where have I heard those numbers before? Why, in another famous media illusion - "the brutal Afghan winter", under whose gruelling conditions Kabul this January had to cope with average daytime temperatures of 52-56! It would, however, be unfair to suggest that in every ludicrous Fleet Street fiction the correct figure will prove to be 52-56. For example, when the Yanks were torturing al-Qa'eda suspects in "the searing heat of Guantanamo", the overnight low was 66 and breezy, or about the same as a late January day in Kandahar in the brutal Afghan winter, when the warlords and their catamites stroll arm in arm down the sun-dappled streets.

None the less, in recognition of my colleagues' spectacularly inept record since September 11, I am proud to announce the inauguration of the British Press Award For Total Fantasy. Journalists can enter as many of their reports as they wish. Can't decide whether that story based on a Hamas press release is more risible than that dispatch based on the Radio Taliban lunchtime news? Hey, send us both! Winners will receive a grand prize of FIVE THOUSAND POUNDS!!!! However, in keeping with traditional Fleet Street standards of numerical accuracy, when the cheque eventually shows up a month later it'll be for £8.47. The lucky winners will also get a year's subscription to the Independent, which will expire after six weeks. We'll announce the results in mid-September - the first anniversary of early sightings of "the fast-approaching brutal Afghan winter". Who knows? It may even have shown up by then.

But that's not the only columnar innovation this week. I gather Mr Kaufman is upset that Kofi Annan has called off his UN investigation into Jenin. The reason, according to taste, is either that the Israelis are being unco-operative or that there wasn't much point in the commission schlepping all that way just to discover that it wasn't 52-56, but 58, or 61, or 47. One of the three members was Cornelio Sommaruga, the former president of the International Red Cross who once compared the Star of David to the swastika. Anyone interested in pondering this comparison further can find the two emblems conveniently displayed in close proximity at an increasing number of European synagogues.

Anyway, as Kofi's commission isn't going ahead, I'm pleased to announce my own fact-finding investigation into - drumroll, please - the UN. Ex-ambassadors, European Foreign Ministers and former presidents of humanitarian organisations are welcome to apply to join my commission, but, if they're too busy, we'll make do with jes' regular folks. Among the issues we'll be examining: UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia; the UN refugee extortion racket in Kenya; UN involvement in massive embezzlement in Kosovo; the UN's cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa involving aid workers demanding sexual favours from children as young as four; the UN-fuelled explosion of drugs, Aids and prostitution in Cambodia; the UN's complicity in massacres in pre-liberated Afghanistan; and, if we've any time left, the UN's collusion in terrorism in the Jenin refugee camp. As the organisation's own internal investigations usually put it, UN seen nothin' yet!

[Pokey78]

Ping for the MSPL.

[M. Thatcher]

One of the three members was Cornelio Sommaruga, the former president of the International Red Cross who once compared the Star of David to the swastika. Anyone interested in pondering this comparison further can find the two emblems conveniently displayed in close proximity at an increasing number of European synagogues.

I am, as always, in awe of this guy's pen.

[StriperSniper]

BTTT

[Gritty]

BTTT

[Argus]

But the Palestinians will never give up their quest to be the most oppressed and massacred stateless people in world history. They've only got 5,999,945 corpses to go to beat the Jews' record, and they're going to keep trying!

[dennisw]

I finally figured out that Mark Steyn's prodigious output is really his way of making a web log.

[jimtorr]

Among the issues we'll be examining: UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia; the UN refugee extortion racket in Kenya; UN involvement in massive embezzlement in Kosovo; the UN's cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa involving aid workers demanding sexual favours from children as young as four; the UN-fuelled explosion of drugs, Aids and prostitution in Cambodia; the UN's complicity in massacres in pre-liberated Afghanistan; and, if we've any time left, the UN's collusion in terrorism in the Jenin refugee camp. As the organisation's own internal investigations usually put it, UN seen nothin' yet!

All of the above allegations are proven and admitted to by the U.N.

[Amelia]

All of the above allegations are proven and admitted to by the U.N.

And great points by Steyn.

[Pokey78]

Steyn Online

[VaBthang4]

Dang Bruh.....can I be down with the Steyn ping?

[Pokey78]

Probably this one.

[rucrazee]

Mark Steyn deserves honorary Freeper status. :)

[WIMom]

Thanks, great writing, as usual.

[Pokey78]

You beez already on it. Got a note from Meek the other day.

[RobbyS]

Didn't he nail them!

[dts32041]

I hate it when you do that, I have been waiting for that web sit to go on line since it was first announced.

Once again you have pulled the football away.

[dennisw]

HOLY COW!..... This will outdo Andrew Sullivan for sure. He better pace himself or he will crash and burn.

[Zorobabel]

"I am, as always, in awe of this guy's pen. "

Mark Steyn puts the proof to the saying,"The pen is mightier than the sword."

[Paradox]

If I were single, and if Mark Steyn had a sister, I would propose marriage to her.

[dennisw]

PING!!!!

[dennisw]

If I were single, and if Mark Steyn had a sister, I would propose marriage to her.

That's one way of getting (making) smart children!

[VaBthang4]

Sho'you right! My Ba'ad. Good lookinout Dog...Haha...Thanks.

[OldFriend]

That is not exactly the truth. The comment was that they didn't want the Israeli's to use their Star of David on the ambulances......his said if we allow their symbol then we might have to allow the swastika.

[Dark Wing]

ping

[monkeyshine]

Yeah, except for the fact that no country uses the swastika as a national emblem, and the Islamic countries are allowed to use a crescent moon because the cross is offensive to their religion, and the Jews have the same objection to the cross.

There is no legitimate reason for keeping Israel out of the IRC.

[dread78645]

said if we allow their symbol then we might have to allow the swastika.

The Muslim rejected the Red Cross for religious reasons. They then proposed another religious emblem, the Red Cresent.
When the IRC accepted the Cresent they took the first step in the swamp of religion vs. national symbols.

Why should they balk on the swastika ?

[M. Thatcher]

That is not exactly the truth. The comment was that they didn't want the Israeli's to use their Star of David on the ambulances......his said if we allow their symbol then we might have to allow the swastika.

It is exactly the truth.

And anyone who finds the two symbols comparable, as this bozo clearly does, can contemplate them side by side in desecrated synagogues.

Which is Steyn's dead-on point.

[Frances_Marion]

Wha? Sorry mate, I had blood in me ear!

Blahahaha! Someone give that guy a few more mussolini head-kicks, please!

[TopQuark]

Perhaps, a more pricese expression would have been "who found (the two symbols) comparable."

[sarasmom]

bttt

[Victoria Delsoul]

The Israeli government's latest figures for Jenin put the death toll of Palestinians at 52. The Palestinians themselves put the death toll at - wait for it - 56.

So the Israelis and Palestinians are more or less agreed.

Bump!

[Jethro Tull]

MARK STEYN is a complete headcase. Here he advocates AMERICAN IMPERIALISM IS THE ANSWER TO GLOBAL PEACE.

WHAT A FRIKIN' WHACK-JOB....

*****
******

Imperialism is the answer

October 14, 2001
BY SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

---

For a few minutes last Sunday, Osama bin Laden was the only 11th century guy with his own CNN gig, and what he had to say was useful and illuminating.

The cave man (literally) warmed up with a remark about ''the tragedy of Andalusia''--a reference to the end of Moorish rule in Spain in 1492.

As he sees it, the roots of Islam's downfall in Andalusia lie in its accommodation with the Christian world and a move toward a pluralistic society.

That's very helpful. Osama's not just anti-Jew or anti-Christian, but objects to the very idea of a society where believers of all faiths and none rub along together. He's at war with, for want of a better word, multiculturalism.

The bonehead left, missing the point as always, march around the cities of the West waving placards against ''the racist war.'' But he's the racist. If Susan Sontag were to swing by his cave, he'd shoot her dead before she'd have time to bleat, ''But I'm on your side.''

By comparison with this big central grievance, the specific ones are easily solved. To be honest, he has a point about the U.S. military presence near Islam's holiest sites in Saudi Arabia: It is a humiliation that one of the richest regimes on Earth is too incompetent, greedy and decadent to provide its own defense that those layabout Saudi princes, faced with Saddam's troops massing on the border, could think of nothing better to do than turn white as their robes and frantically dial Washington.

In fact, insofar as the Middle East's the victim of anything other than its own failures, it's not Western imperialism but Western post-imperialism.

Unlike Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Americas, Araby has never come under direct European colonial rule. Instead, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the Great War, the winners carved up the Arabian peninsula not into colonies but ''spheres of influence,'' a system that continues to this day.

Rather than making Arabia a Crown colony within the Empire, sending out the Marquess of Whatnot as governor, issuing banknotes bearing the likeness of King George V, setting up courts presided over by judges in full-bottomed wigs and introducing a professional civil service and a free press, the British instead mulled over which sheikh was likely to prove more pliable, installed him in the capital and suggested he have his sons educated at Eton or Harrow.

The French did the same, and so, later, did the Americans. This was cheaper than colonialism and less politically prickly, but it did a great disservice to the populations of those countries.

The alleged mountain of evidence of Yankee culpability is, in fact, evidence only of the Great Satan's deplorable faintheartedness : Yes, Washington dealt with Saddam, and helped train the precursors of the Taliban, and fancied Colonel Gadhafi as a better bet than King Idris, just as in the '50s they bolstered the Shah of Iran and then in the '70s took against him, when Jimmy Carter decided the Peacock Throne wasn't progressive enough and wound up with the ayatollahs instead.

This system of cherrypicking from a barrel-load of unsavory potential clients was summed up in the old CIA line: ''He may be a sonofabitch but he's our sonofabitch.'' The inverse is more to the point: He may be our sonofabitch, but he's a sonofabitch.

Some guys go nuts, some are merely devious and unreliable, some remain charming and pleasant but of little help, but all of them are a bunch of despots utterly sealed off from their peoples.

As we now know, it was our so-called ''moderate'' Arab ''friends'' who provided all the suicide bombers of Sept. 11, just as it's in their government-run media--notably the vile Egyptian press--that some of the worst anti-American rhetoric is to be found.

The contemptible regime of President Mubarak permits dissent against the U.S. government but not against its own, licensing the former as a safety-valve to reduce pressure on the latter.

This is a classic example of why the sonofabitch system is ultimately useless to the West: The United States spends billions subsidizing regimes who have a vested interest in encouraging anti-Americanism as a substitute for more locally focused grievances.

As a result, the West gets blamed for far more in a part of the world it never colonized than it does in those regions it directly administered for centuries.

By comparison with the sonofabitch system, colonialism is progressive and enlightened. Even under its modified, indirect Middle Eastern variation, the average Egyptian earned more under the British than he does today--that's not adjusted for inflation, but in real actual rupees. Even in Afghanistan, the savagery of whose menfolk has been much exaggerated by the left's nervous nellies, such progress as was made in the country came when it fell under the watchful eye of British India. With the fading of British power in the region in the 1950s, King Zahir let his country fall under the competing baleful influences of Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism.

What will we do this time 'round? Will we stick Zahir Shah back on his throne to preside over a ramshackle coalition of mutually hostile commies, theocrats and gangsters, and hope the poor old gentleman hangs in there till we've cleared Afghan airspace?

Or will we understand Osama bin Laden's declaration of war on pluralism for what it is? Afghanistan needs not just food parcels, but British courts and Swiss police and Indian civil servants and American town clerks and Australian newspapers. So does much of the rest of the region.

America has prided itself on being the first non-imperial superpower, but the viability of that strategy was demolished on Sept. 11.

For its own security, it needs to do what it did to Tojo's Japan and Hitler's Germany after the war: Systematically dismantle them and rebuild them as functioning members of the civilized world.

Kipling called it ''the white man's burden''--the ''white man'' bit will have to be modified in the age of Colin Powell and Condi Rice, and it's no longer really a ''burden,'' not in cost-benefit terms.

Given the billions of dollars of damage done to the world economy by Sept. 11, massive engagement in the region will be cheaper than the alternative.

If neo-colonialism makes you squeamish, give it some wussify ied Clinto-Blairite name like ''global community outreach.'' Tony Blair, to his credit, has already outlined a 10-year British commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan under a kind of UN protectorate. We can do it for compassionate reasons (the starving hordes beggared by incompetent thug regimes) or for selfish ones (our long-term security), but do it we must.

Mark Steyn is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc.


Original URL
http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn14.html

[GuillermoX]

bump, this guy rocks.

[Stultis]

Bump

[happygrl]

Hmmmm...seems pragmatic to me.

[sleavelessinseattle]

Realpolitik BUMP!

[lainde]

BTTT...made my day!

[MeekOneGOP]

Mark Steyn: Palestinians agree with Israel shock horror

Excerpt:

I USUALLY save the I-told-you-so gloat for the year-in-review column, but I can't
resist noting that Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation has now come round to my way of
thinking on the Jenin refugee camp. "There was no massacre," I wrote here two weeks ago,
when Robert Fisk and Fleet Street's other sob-sisters were running around weepin' and a-wailin'
about mass graves and war crimes. The Israeli government's latest figures for Jenin put the death toll
of Palestinians at 52. The Palestinians themselves put the death toll at - wait for it - 56.

That's right: 56. There are no missing zeroes on the end. The only missing zeroes are those gullible
British hacks who swallowed that line about hundreds of dead civilians but have fallen mysteriously
silent as the figures have been revised downward. The total of 56 dead was announced by Kadoura Moussa,
the Fatah director for the northern West Bank, after four Palestinian Authority investigators
reported their findings to him at his office in the camp. Is a discrepancy of four enough to
qualify as a "massacre"? Twenty three Israeli soldiers died at Jenin, so the comparative death
tolls sound less like a "massacre" and more like a - what's the word? - "battle"...............

Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my ping list!. . .don't be shy.

[Neophyte]

The Muslim rejected the Red Cross for religious reasons.

Which was a red herring. The red cross in question has just a secondary connection to Christianity - it is more the simbol of Switzerland (Geneva Convention) than a religious one.

How about these quote from the Britannica:

JEAN-HENRI DUNANT Swiss humanitarian, founder of the Red Cross... he proposed the formation in all countries of voluntary relief societies for the prevention and alleviation of suffering in war and peacetime, without distinction of race or creed...Having gone bankrupt because he neglected his business affairs, Dunant left Geneva in 1867 and spent most of the rest of his life in poverty and obscurity... He continued to promote interest in the treatment of prisoners of war, the abolition of slavery, international arbitration, disarmament, and the establishment of a Jewish homeland.

[MeekOneGOP]

Thanks for the link Pokey! What a FOOL Robert Fisk is.........

[TLBSHOW]

bump

[OldFriend]

No doubt this was merely a smokescreen excuse to keep the Israeli's out of their 'pure' organization but it does us no good to change the words to suit ourselves.

This is something Terry Moran did the other day in regard to Dick Armey's remarks about the Palestinians settling on vast tracts of vacant land in other Arab countries. Moran stated that Armey was for 'ethnic cleansing'.

It is intellectually dishonest.

[OldFriend]

THERE IS NO LEGITIMATE EXCUSE FOR KEEPING THE ISRAELI'S OUT OF THE INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS.

IT'S ALL BLATANT DISCRIMINATION.

[OldFriend]

Perhaps the difference lies in the extra 'dead' people who managed to stay on the stretcher and not fall off while the camera in the drone plane was rolling.

[LoneGOPinCT]

Thanks for the PING MnM! Steyn is dead-on-balls as usual. Work is still crazy so I appreciate the PINGs, it makes it easy for my to find the interesting stuff in my limited alloted FReepin' time. Keep it up!

[TopQuark]

I completely agree when you say, "...it does us no good to change the words to suit ourselves." And I applaud your high stadards revealed in your call for intellectual honesty.

Since I had not seen a pattern of this in the writings of this author, could it be that he simply misspoke?

Regardless of that, it was good that you caught it. I wish I could get help from you on my own writing... (sigh)

[MeekOneGOP]

Yes he is. And thanks. I appreciate hearing when someone appreciates my pings! :O)

[MeekOneGOP]

Sorry mate, I had blood in me ear!
Blahahaha! Someone give that guy a few more mussolini head-kicks, please!

LOL! :O)