Posted on 05/13/2002 10:52:49 AM PDT by gordgekko
Retiring 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace, on Mike Barnicle's WTTK/Boston radio show, sounded a lot like an Yasser Arafat mouthpiece. After re-gurgitating the usual anti-Israel atrocity propaganda, Wallace, in a comment that sticks in my craw, drew a moral equivalence between Palestinian suicide/mass murderers and Zionist patriots who fought the British in the period leading up to Israeli independence. The British called these Israeli freedom fighters "terrorists," yet, unlike Arab mass murderers today, they did not deliberately target innocent British or Arab civilians for murder. Barnicle responded, perhaps unconsciously, by indirectly unmasking Wallace with a discreet and indirect reference to a "self-loathing Jew."
Wallace was bitterly referring to Jewish Irgun and Lehi fighters who, like their American Patriot counterparts at Lexington and Concord, fought against British tyranny. While the British rulers of Palestine were interning Jews in concentration camps in Cyprus and Kenya and sinking boats overflowing with Jewish refugees from Hitler's death camps, the ragtag Irgun and Lehi carried out brilliant military maneuvers to open up Palestinian ports.
An example of Irgun ingenuity was the blowing up of the British military headquarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The Irgun men entered the basement of the hotel disguised as Sudanese milkmen and planted time bombs disguised as milk cans. This was followed by the Irgun command phoning the British commander to inform him he had twenty minutes to evacuate before the explosion. When the British commander, Sir John Shaw was given the news by his chief adjutant, he arrogantly sniffed "I am here to give orders to the Jews, not to receive orders from them." While Shaw commanded his people to stay put, he and several others discreetly evacuated. Unfortunately, many stayed and 90 were killed, several injured. The British headquarters and archives were destroyed.
The Irgun deserve a large share of credit for the 1948-1949 victory in the Israel War of Independence. The secular socialist Zionist Haganah, headed by David Ben Gurion, distracted itself with an unnecessary war against the conservative, free market Irgun at a time when the Arab League was fielding divisions from 5 Arab states. An example of this was the sinking, by the Hagana, of the Irgun arms ship Altalena in June 1948, at the height of the Arab attack. The Altalena, with much needed munitions on board, was machine gunned and sunk by a Hagana division headed by a young officer named Yitzhak Rabin. Had the Hagana instead concentrated on fighting the Arabs in alliance with the Irgun, Israel would've stood a better chance of liberating all of British Palestine and there would be no discussion of a partition today.
Sir Winston Churchill, in a late 1940's conversation with Irgun supporter Billy Rose, in the home of Bernard Baruch, recounted by Ben Hecht in the book "Perfidy," told Rose, "If you were interested in the establishment of an Israeli Nation, you were involved with the right people. It was the Irgun that made the English quit Palestine. They did it by raising so much hell that we had to put eighty thousand soldiers into Palestine to cope with the situation. The military costs were too high for our economy. And it was the Irgun that ran them up."
The Jewish establishment in America today continues to march to the socialist philosophy of the Hagana founders of Israel before independence. They timidly cow tow to the idea of partitioning Israel into two Bantustans, one Jewish and one Arab, which they believe will miraculously give birth to "peace." Many of our establishment Jews, displaying a loathing for Jewish religious principles, see nothing wrong with the racist and apartied policy of uprooting and transferring 200,000 Jews, perceived as largely religious, from Judea and Samaria in accordance with Arab wishes. They are the spiritual descendants of establishment American Jews who did and said nothing during Hitler's Holocaust for fear of offending Roosevelt.
Their false socialist utopian ideas caused a weak Israel in the first place and now they advocate, in the name of "social justice" that Israel be reduced to an indefensible mini-state in exchange for "peace" alongside a newly created Arab state controlled by Arafat. Fortunately, good Christians such as Congressmen Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, more pro-Israel than the Jewish establishment, are picking up the cudgels with calls for Israel to formally annex Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
Chuck Morse is a talk show host of Salem Radio/WROL in Boston.
Although I do consider some of the Stern Gang attacks, especially the assasination of Lord Moyen in 1944, to be real terrorism, it's true that it isn't quite the same as blowing yourself up in a supermarket.
Britain under Churchill, or even under the Labor Party, is not the same as under George III. You do not have to kill the British to influence them.
When it's official policy, you can't quite trust that eventually will ever come.
Lie.
November 2nd, 1917
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur James Balfour
Which part? It is true that British civilians involved in the administration of government were targeted. This I condemn. However, dependents of such civilians were not targeted. (The Arabs claim that the Jewish terrorists exploded trains. If so, this would have been terrorism, but I don't think it is true; they did destroy track and rail yard buildings.)
Same for Arab targets in the 1940's--civilian leaders, perhaps, but not deliberate targeting of women and children. Arab propaganda claims that Arab women and children, actually killed as collateral damage victims of bitter Israel War of Independence battles, were deliberately murdered; this is what the charges that former Israeli Prime Minister Begin was a terrorist were all about.
I do not think that there was any claim of credit. The men who were convicted by an Israeli court of the murder were members of the Stern Gang (LEHI). Yitzhak Shamir, who later become an Israeli Prime Minister, was one of the top two or three leaders of the Stern Gang, but was not implicated in the murder.
When Israel was founded, it was not ordained that it would become a representative democracy. Some of the Jews saw a model in, believe it or not, Mussolini. Others were Stalinists. Establishing the rule of law, abolishing private armies, and legitimizing represenative political institutions took many months of struggle, much of it going on at the same time Israel was in a life and death struggle with invading Arab armies. Events such as the sinking of the Altalena, mentioned in the article where begins this post, and the imprisoning of Bernadotte's killers, were part of this successful process of democratization. The struggle to insure respect for private property and free economic institutions took much longer but is now largely won. Nation building is messy.
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