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.
Although I appreciate your thoughtful insights, I must take exception with the above statement.
Although I accept that those with something in common tend to relate to each other better than those without common beliefs and/or backgrounds, (left to their own devices Shiites and Sunnis will kill each other off, but will unite to kill non-Muslims), I believe Christians as a rule have not historically supported, either overtly or covertly, those who act in violent, hateful ways in the name of their faith. [--And before you ask the standard "Have you ever heard of the Crusades?", I must point out the the Crusades were undertaken as a desperate response to Muslims having overrun the regions considered the birthplace of Christianity, and were a relatively brief portion of the two millenia of Christendom.]
In fact I'd go so far as to say that those who impose their will on others through force in the name of Christianity are MORE susceptible to criticism by Christians. Those who take their faith seriously wish to distance themselves from such heretical behavior MORE than anyone else because to act in such a manner clearly goes against the tenets of the faith.
In Islam, on the other hand, it is part and parcel of the faith, as even most nominal Muslims can not deny--and if they do they are either lying or ignorant of what their faith in fact teaches.
THIS is the reason there is tacit approval among the vast majority of Muslims of jihad. There would NOT be such deafening silence on the part of millions who identify themselves as Christians if similar acts of barbarism were being perpetrated in the name of the one true God.
The nature of the God of the Bible, as contrasted to Allah, clearly does not condone such behavior, let alone reward it-- and despite the fact that most in the world today who identify themselves as Christian are every bit as poorly grounded in their faith as are most Muslims, I am confident that the there would be a far different response from Christians than there is from Muslims to the same actions. The ONLY time anything is heard from most Muslim groups is in condemning some mistreatment of Muslims or "demanding" that President Bush condemn anyone who responds to any of the myriad groups committing murder in the name of Allah.
I can personally assure you that if anyone were doing such things in the name of my faith I would not be "pro-Jihadist".
Easy for him to write when he lives in the safety and security of the United States. Try writing that in the Middle East and they'd kill him.
I respect your steadfast refusal to be dismissed as a run-of-the-mill "bigot".
After having spent considerable time studying--and praying-- on the subject over the past five years, I must agree with your conclusion.
Unfortunately, the person with whom you've been debating seems disproportionately influenced by personal history than that of his ethnic heritage at large.
His family lore is inspiring. And it is true that there are millions of "nice" Muslims--ALL of them nominal in terms of their commitment to the teachings of the Qur'an, Hadith and the "perfect" example of Mohammad.
Perhaps he needs to talk to some other Jews whose family lore includes going-along-to-get-along in Germany or Poland during the middle of the last century, certain that, even though they were rounding up some of the undesirables, their friends and neighbors would not bother them and their family.
A few more replies are over here - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1664172/posts
It's a lot less these days than it used to be, but there are still traces of it, in terms of the strife in Northern Ireland.
Historically, there have been any number of violent wars and struggles within Christianity. There were a number of wars and battles between Protestants and Catholics -- the 30 Years war comes to mind, as does the French religions wars with the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.
Even before Luther, there were also various wars against off-shoots of Christianity, deemed heretical, in suppression of the Cathars (Albigensians) in the 12 century. For that matter, the 4th Crusade never made it to fighting Muslims and ended up with the Crusaders turning on and sacking Constantinople -- which weakened the Byzantine Empire so much, as to lead to Southeastern Europe being captured by Islamic forces several centuries later.
Christians have turned on other religions in their midst. "Pogrom" is a 19th century term, but even before that, there various massacres of Jews -- The York massacre in the 12th Century England and the Chmielnicki massacres in 17th Century Urkraine come to mind.
The remarkable thing about Christianity is that, over the last few centuries, most of these struggles have stopped, particularly in Western Europe and America. Northern Ireland has been the exception, not the rule. (The Holocaust was founded more on racial lines (albeit false ones) than religious; Communism's suppression was based more on politics than anything else.) This is a large part of what has allowed the Western world to pull ahead of the Islamic. But on the larger scale of history, it is a relatively recent phenomenon.
bttt
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