Posted on 07/15/2006 10:54:26 AM PDT by Dark Skies
AS Israel enters the third week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and political talk shows on Arabic language TV networks.
The new views are stunning both in their maturity and in their realism. The best way I can think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs from their Arab friends:
Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:The war with Israel is over.
You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.
We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the “eternal struggle” with Israel.
Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.
At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn’t going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.
You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem.
You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you.
You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation.
Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins.
Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations.
Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.
In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day.
What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all?
More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world’s have-nots?
We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.
Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways.
Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon.
Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you.
Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed.
The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.
Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods – more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives – while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.
The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?
Youssef M. Ibrahim is an Egyptian-born American reporter serving for twenty-four years as a senior Middle East regional correspondent for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, mainly covering political, economic, energy and military issues. Mr. Ibrahim has been based throughout the world, filing hundreds of reports detailing the conflicts and issues between the Middle East and the West.
I hope that he watches his back,
I expect a Fatwa to be issued against him,
otherwise a very thought provoking article, for those who think for themselves
I guess this thread will probably get pulled or locked since it is a duplicate...
But this article is really worth a read.
Syria will blink in the end and it will be Iran goading and supplying Hezbollah.
Ooops. I didn't know it was a dupe.
This nice to hear, but the Iranians are Persins, not Arabs.
bump for later
It was worth it. It's so easy to miss good posts on FR anymore.
>>Ooops. I didn't know it was a dupe.<<
That wasn't a complaint - it deserves a reading from the weekend crowd.
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Persians? That's absolutely, historically accurate. It's also absolutely irrelevant.
While the power divide in the Middle east may still lie between Persia and the Arabs, Islam overshawdows it all. Without Islam as a unifying social, economic, and spiritual force, there would be no world war. Islam is a religion of pure hatred, and it's Muslim footsoldiers consider themselves to be the infidel's rightful executioners, or if merciful, the infidel's slave masters.
ISLAM = NO PEACE. ISLAM = WAR. ISLAM = DEATH OR SUBMISSION.
The persian distinction is irrelevant by comparison. 90% of the Muslims in the world will both agree with the author of that letter in practical terms, yet support every last Jihandist act of lies, murder, rape, and mayhem.
SFS
I agree...
that's the rub isn't it!? It appears that in true islam, those that think for themselves are apostates.
What a crock.
This Muslim is only trying to stall hostilities.
If he thinks real Arabs agree with him, he is smoking dope.
Great article!
It should be air dropped as leaflets all over Palestine.
That's ok. Not everyone can be here 24/7 to catch all the good threads. It only feels like I never go away...
Not a word of this is false. The Palestinian "cause" is ridiculously out of date. If even the Arabs stop supporting it, all they're left with is the Syrians, and Syria could easily be converted to just a wet spot on the map.
1. Iran can continue to wreak considerable devastation in Israel thru it's proxies. But Israel cannot damage Iran unless it violates Iraqi airspace with American approval (not gonna happen). Israel's only hope in this regard is to permanently change the facts on the ground in southern lebanon by permanently occupying southern Lebanon. We know how successful that was last time.
2. Iran and China have now demonstrated sophisticated anti-ship capabilities in the Gulf. (In fact, that may have been the whole point of Iran stepping up tensions over the past month--giving them an way to do so on tactically favorable terms and thereby freeze the West from acting until the Iranians have nukes).
3. Israel's strategy of withdrawing behind the fence to expose the Palestinians as the state-based aggressors has been a complete failure. It makes no difference whatsoever to the euros or the UN or the old media that the kidnappings and missle attacks originate from other nations instead of occupied territory.
4. Perhaps the Arab states are ready to move on, but the Persian and Chinese states are not. And, the Persian state is about to be a nuclear power.
Things always look down for the Palestinians--but they are a dysfunctional bunch of puppets for other arab and persian regimes. But things really look down this week for the Israelis. Things look pretty good if you are an Iranian mullah.
A grand total of two of the world's top 500 universities are located in the entirety of the Muslim world. (Both are are in Turkey and ranked in the 400-500 range, alongside the universities of Akron and Idaho.) There are the seven in tiny Israel alone, three of which are in the top 150 (alongside Notre Dame, FSU, Georgia, and Iowa State).
Istanbul University (est. 1933), according to Wikipedia: "claims that the date of establishment is 1453, which seems to have no relevant historical background." Hacettepe University (est. 1967) is the other. Neither was made with "oil money" (stolen from American and European entities).
(Africa has a total of 4, and they are all in South Africa. Sorry, Egypt.)
Actually, it's a huge distinction. Up until the Ayatollah-led takeover, Iran was friendly with Israel. Even now, at it's most howling moonbat anti-Semitism, it continues to keep a specifically Jewish seat in its parliament that's filled with something more than just a capo.
Turkey has, for most its history, including as the Ottoman Empire, been reasonably tolerant. Indeed, while there are religious parties, the government, since the days of Ataturk, has been secular.
I'm not sure what the general attitude is in Afghanistan, but I've known Afghanis in the U.S. who love it here and consider themselves to be Zionists in a political sense, while Muslim in a religious sense.
Of course, there will be a tendency for Muslims world-wide to be more pro-Jihadist than the general population. In the same way any radical group is going to tend to have more sympathy from those who share similar ethnic and/or religious affiliations. But there is a significant difference between Arab Muslims and the rest of the Islamic world.
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