Posted on 10/06/2001 10:02:00 AM PDT by Masada
Disaster doesn't always bring out the best in us.
Sometimes, tragically, it brings out the worst. A case in point: the finger-pointing in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, seeking to blame the atrocities on America's supposedly misguided support for Israel — and on Jewish Americans who supposedly manipulate the system to tilt our policy the wrong way.
No, it's not a national groundswell. You hear it mainly on the margins, and if past experience is a guide, it will stay there. Still, the variety and persistence of the finger-pointers is startling: left-wing professors in California, right-wing fanatics in Idaho, Arab-American activists in Michigan, smart-alec journalists in New York. There's enough of it to be worrying.
In reply, important voices are being raised from within the Jewish community, declaring that the attacks and the hatred behind them have nothing to do with America's support for Israel. Osama bin Laden and his ilk are motivated, we are reminded, by larger, more global issues: suspicion of modernity, secularism, democracy and the Western civilization that champions them. On the policy plane, his passion is driving American troops off the holy soil of Arabia. Israel isn't on his screen, except perhaps tangentially, as one more example of the West's corrupting influence.
The fact is, things are a bit more complicated than that. Bin Laden and his allies are driven, above all, by an extremist version of fundamentalist Islam. And Islam, as many of those same defenders of Israel have noted countless times, regards the mere existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East as a cardinal theological challenge. Indeed, pessimists in the pro-Israel community have been pointing for decades to the power of Islam's territorial imperative as a reason to dismiss Israel-Arab peacemaking as impossibly naïve. It's hard to see how that reading squares with the notion that the world's most dangerously fanatical Islamist just isn't interested in Israel.
But we needn't search the theology texts to divine bin Laden's motives. He's spelled them out repeatedly in various public statements. He's on a self-declared holy war against "Crusaders and Jews," with a three-fold goal: "liberating" Mecca and the rest of Arabia from American "occupation," "liberating" Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem from Jewish "occupation" and lifting the Western embargo on Iraq. They're always stated in that three-fold form, and usually in that order.
The fact is, Israel is one of the issues, though not the only one, driving bin Laden and his cohorts. It is foolish to deny it; that merely undermines the credibility of Israel's defenders at a time when Israel sorely needs defending. The best defense is always the truth.
And the truth is that America and Israel are allies, not because of some cabal of Jewish lobbyists, but because their two peoples demand it. America's support for Israel is not misguided, but profoundly moral. America and Israel share a deep community of values. They are partners in the democratic enterprise, cities on a hill devoted to something larger than themselves. Both are imperfect, at times painfully so. Both become impatient when their imperfections are pointed out. Still, both are societies striving to represent the better nature of humankind, and for that reason they deserve defending.
If America's defense of her values sometimes puts her on the firing line, then that's the right place to be. That's not a hard case to make. Most Americans, like most Israelis, understand it instinctively.
No, I was not aware Stalin was the first to recognize Israel. I suspect his motivation was to rid himself of internal dissenters. Perhaps he changed his mind when he realized, like Hitler, he needed internal "enemies" (Jews) as well as external ones (the USA).
Rather annoyed, I'd imagine.
You also make the point that boundaries shift, borders change, nations disappear.
Can you name me a couple of states that existed before WWII that no longer do? If anything, it would appear there are MORE countries now than before the war and that the concept of self-determination has never been more prevalent.
Except in Israel.
Arabization and Ethnic Cleansing (the fairy tale of "indigenous Palestinians" exposed (my title))
"At the beginning of the conquest....the conquered populations of the Orient were still using their national languages: Aramaic (Iraq, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine), Coptic (Egypt), and Pahlavi (Persia), and the foundations of Arab power were still weak. Consequently, notwithstanding their repugnance, the caliphs and their governors had to resort to the services of local Christian or Jewish administrators, a situation which risked jeopardizing the performance of their power. It therefore became imperative to consolidate Islamic politico-military domination by a demographic increase in Arab numbers and by Muslim legislation to stabilize the situation....These two phases, which roughly corresponded to the period of Arabization under the Umayyads [661-750 A.D.] and of Islamization under the Abbasids [750-1517 A.D.] , defintitely ensured the Arab-Muslim hold on the conquered lands and population.
In fact, the postconquest period was a time of intensive Arab colonization dictated by strategic requirements. For whereas pursuit of the ongoing jihad procured considerable booty and cemented Islamic solidarity, these battles in far-off lands weakened the Arab military presence in the conquered countries. To mitigate this danger, Umar, and particularly Uthman, adopted a policy of Arab colonization pursued by their successors.
The continuous migration of whole tribes with their flocks---tribes originating from different regions of Arabia and often hostile to one another---not only created problems of settlement in towns and country areas that were among the most fertile and most highly populated, it also gave rise to difficulties regarding subsidies and cohabitation with the native population, the nomads being adverse to agricultural and urban occupations.
The flow of migration, duly controlled by the Arab military administration, was directed toward specific regions. Certain tribes joined up with military population centers: Basra and Kufa in Iraq, Fustat in Egpt for example: others received the vast domains farmed by the native inhabitants reduced to slavery or bond service (Iraq, Egypt, Spain, the Maghreb). In Palestine and Syria, tribes from Yemen and nomads from Hijaz settled in the towns and countryside where they took over houses and lands...
This Arabization had disastrous effects on the native populations, as the confiscation of lands by the invaders and the appropriation of houses and villages did not take place without plundering and abuse. This emigration had four major consequences. First, the total area of the conquered lands was seized by a tribe originating from Mecca, who exercised their military authority through nomadic Arab tribes. Second, the massive Arab emigration engendered endemic anarchy in countries where hitherto, in comparison with the native population, they had only constituted tiny minorities on the desert fringes.....Moreover, during this period of Arabization in the Near East, the caliph Abd al-Malik (685-705) forbade the use of native languages in the adminsitration, replacing them with Arabic. Thus emigration into countries of settled civilization by nomads, who were strengthened in their bellicose habits by the ideology of jihad and by their victories, increased the instability, while plundering turned cultivated areas into deserts." (Bat Ye'or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam (1996)pp.58-60).
As far as naming countries that changed during or after WWII, I don't have the time nor inclination to do the research no (Rushing to joins some folks to watch the UT v OU game) but perhaps someone else will oblige you.
The USA does not need to be the latest tag-team participant in a conflict that have been going on for some thousands of years. We should not be in the holy war business.
The Jewish people suffered much in the holoccaust in WWII but this was caused by Germany and not the Arabs. They should have been given Northern Germany for a homeland and ran out the Germans. Actually the UN solution sounds more like the British way of planting people like they did in Ireland. The UN started this so they should end it.
Your contention that the creation of Israel is somehow analagous to winning a lottery is interesting. Pity the prize already belonged to someone else.
Perhaps the Israelis are simply recycling the money we GIVE them back to the U.S.A.
Your history excerpt is very interesting, but so are the figures for the 1918 census:
Muslim Arabs 512,000
Christian Arabs 61,000
Jews 66,000
Those numbers seem a good deal more pertinent to today's world than a potted history lesson re. 1300 years ago.
Further proof why Palestine national ambitions must be recognised (along and in conjunction with Israel's of course) comes from Vladimir Jabotinsky, who I imagine is a poster boy of yours for his militarism. Jabotinsky said of the palestinians:
"They are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered but still living." I could provide other quotes but I'm leaving for a wedding and don't have time to transcribe them. You no doubt know them anyway.
It's fashionable to dismiss Jabotinsky, of course, as Ben-Gurion (born David Grien) did when he called him "Vladimir Hitler." But Gurion also had some similar thoughts:
"We shall organise...an elite army.....and then I am sure we shall not be prevented from settling in other parts of the country, whether through mutual understanding with our Arab neighbors, or by other means."
Now, remember, I'm a moderate. But if Israel and indeed the world is ever to get any peace, Israel's origins can't be simply denied. There are people living in squalor and another groupo of people living in a constant state of defiant fear.
There can be no either/or solution. It has to be a viable compromise.
Now you can begin calling me a Jew-hater.
Hence, your number game only points up an important point:
(1) You lied about "Palestinians" claiming THEIR land was taken. No such claim is viable given the fact they themselves profited from the conquerings of ISLAMIC kingdoms including the Ottomans.;
(2) The demographics are entirely irrelevant from another standpoint in that they don't address the locations of Arab settlement as well as the fact the 1918 figure includes the area east of the Jordan.
It just so happens the Jews were deprived of the eastern Jordan area in 1922 and thus undermining the Balfour Declaration, by the creation of the Transjordan by Britain chopping up the National Home by 2/3. Now the Arabs could claim a Jew free area east of the Jordan and could also make contrived and bloated claims West of the Jordan.
Further proof why Palestine national ambitions must be recognised
I could care less about their "ambitions". Their "ambitions" are stated clearly in the PLO Charter. For THAT ambition they should be trusted like the neighborhood thug.
"We shall organise...an elite army.....and then I am sure we shall not be prevented from settling in other parts of the country, whether through mutual understanding with our Arab neighbors, or by other means."
Do you want me to start quoting from your "Palestinian" Arab nazi friends like the Grand Muft Hajj Amin al Husayni the Grand Mufti during the Mandate Period? Should I quote all that vitriole of your pan Arab Islamic fascist friends seeking to destroy Israel and the Jews and drive them to the sea?
What exactly about the statement that the US gives billions of dollars in aid to Israel is untrue?
You are a Middle Eastern nation with some exterior trappings of western society.
Your national policy decision making centers upon the position that Jerusulam is yours because GOD gave it to you
This is not a position a western nation would take
All the best
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