Posted on 08/15/2002 5:26:15 AM PDT by SJackson
Among the eight terror attacks in which Arabs indulged on last week’s ‘Barbarian Sunday’ one stands out in its shocking simplicity. An Arab walked up to an Israeli phone company employee sitting in his company truck at a Jerusalem gate. The Arab shot him dead. Then he opened the back of the truck and shot the security guard inside dead. Arabs find it just that easy to kill a Jew, any Jew in Israel – or, apparently, LAX – and any friend of Jews, like Druze, Filipinos, foreign workers, American students. Seems Arabs have given themselves license to use guns the way the rest of us use cameras: Just point and shoot. And too many are, much to the delight of their brethren. “We advise Israelis to prepare more body bags and wait for the coming operations,” a masked Hamas man crowed jubilantly to Jerusalem Post reporters amidst Gaza celebrations, in which 10,000 gleeful Arab-Palestinians, made merry by their daylong Jew-killings, passed out sweets, as at a Sunday picnic, and prayed.
Arabs pretend it’s a ‘cycle of violence’ but it’s not. It’s closer to a situation in which a schoolyard bully daily hits the one kid he knows won’t fight back – until one day the kid manages to at least put his arms up to shield his face. So the bully plays to his audience “Oh, so he wants to fight! Now I’m really going to give it to him.” Thus, Arab-Palestinians can tell their mesmerized world audience that now their random Jew-killing rampages are because Israel vanquished terrorist planner Shehada, a vile barbarian by any civilized standard, with the blood of hundreds of innocent Israelis on his hands no less than the famous Arab lynch mob that proudly displayed their blood soaked hands at the police station window for the cheering crowds below, before dragging the bodies through town, whooping for all Muslims to come kick the dead Jews. Shehada is their hero. “At the celebrations Sunday night militants shouted through loudspeakers to ‘avenge every drop of his blood,’” reported the Jerusalem Post.
Last Sunday’s random Jew-killings were purportedly just the beginning of a “series of reprisals.” And before that, Arabs’ random Jew-killings were due to Israel’s “occupation,” even though the Arab-Palestinians have been under Palestinian Authority civil rule, not Israeli, since early 1996. And before that their Jew-killings were because the Palestinians had “no hope” of attaining statehood – no, no hope whatsoever, except for the numerous offers Israel made to them that were somehow never “good enough” even when foolishly comprising 98% of Palestinians’ own requests. And before that their random Jew-killings were because they did not have a “real” army, so fashioned a poor man’s one of mass-murdering terrorists.
Are they randomly killing Jews because of “revenge”, because of “the occupation”, because of “no hope of statehood” or because they feel military inferiority grants them license to immorally and barbarically foul all over the country of the Jews as they please – it’s getting harder and harder to keep all their many “reasons” straight. However, it is becoming easier and easier to see what these “reasons”, and many more like them, are - just excuses. Whoppers. Lies, the purpose of which are to turn their socially unacceptable murderous bully urges toward Jews and their country, into socially acceptable ones somehow justified by the Jews’ own defensive actions and the jargon of the day.
In fact spectacles such as the one on Barbarian Sunday were common throughout the Arab world this past century. For example on January 27, 1969, while American hippies were planning Woodstock and rhythmically chanting “make love not war”, it seems Iraqis were planning a picnic of their own. According to Miller and Mylroie’s Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, Baghdad Radio urged Iraqis to “come and enjoy the feast” as 500,000 men, women and children paraded and danced past scaffolds where, after a systematic two years of expropriating Jewish property, freezing bank accounts, shutting businesses, canceling trading permits, disconnecting telephones and jailing Jews on trumped -up “spy” charges, the bodies of 11 hanged Jews swung, the mob rhythmically chanting “Death to Israel.”
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The Arabs have literally been dying to ethnically cleanse the Middle East of Jews since the 1917 Balfour Declaration provided heads-up that their powerless dhimmis were finally slated to inherit a tiny bit of power of their own. Proud Jews in the Middle East must have been utterly unthinkable to them. Although Jews have inhabited the Middle East for millennia, with the birth of Islam around 600 CE, they became a powerless, apartheid minority, second class citizens, or dhimmis required to avert their eyes, step down onto the road whenever they passed a Muslim Arab on the sidewalk and other daily dramatizations of their lowly status. It was the Arabs who, in the ninth century, dreamed up the demeaning custom of making Jews wear yellow patches, a precedent they later shared with their Nazi friends. Middle Eastern Jews were not protected by the law in a dispute with Muslims. Consequently, for centuries throughout the Middle East, Jewish property was randomly stolen and Jews were randomly massacred as pleased the Muslim Arabs. Mitchell Bard in his essay “The Treatment of Jews in Arab/Islamic Countries” stated that “Even Muslim children participated in the degradation of Jews, by throwing stones at them or harassing them in other ways.” In fact he went so far as to say that “peaceful coexistence between the two groups involved the subordination and degradation of the Jews.”
Thus, as each Arab country was granted independence this past century by Europeans, who had overcome the centuries-old Turkish Ottoman Empire, brutal treatment of Jews immediately burst forth. Wave after wave of Middle Eastern Jews were forced to flee with nothing, forced to leave centuries worth of property and possessions behind. In effect the Jews were transferred out of the Arab areas of the Middle East and concentrated into the single Jewish area. Palestine was considered the “Jewish area” of the Middle East in terms of character, demographics and historical precedent. It is worthwhile to note that the Jewish homeland was not carved out of countries in which Jewish homes had been located for centuries. Those homes Jews left behind forever when they were brutally transferred out of Muslim lands and made their way to Jewish ones. This point is well worth noting whenever “Palestinians” demand the world hand them a homeland in the heartland of Israel, just because they own real estate there, the majority held for no longer than several decades.
Indeed, whatever became of the real estate the Jews left under duress? Local Arabs quickly moved in to the millions of dollars worth of Jewish property, then turned greedy eyes to newborn Israel, encouraging Arabs there to get out of the way while they overtook Jewish homes there as well – promising them they could all return and live grandly in them afterwards just like their brethren all over the Middle East had already done. Furthermore, as Efraim Karsh details in “What Occupation?” (Commentary, July 2002), they never envisioned “Palestine” would thenceforth remain an entity, much less be “homeland” for these assorted Arabs. Indeed, the invading countries were planning on divvying the region up among themselves “the most likely arrangement seems to be Eastern Galilee to Syria, Samaria and Hebron to Abdalla, and the south to Egypt” according to the British high commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham. Free houses and who cared what Arab country you ended up in afterward. To the victors would go the spoils. That was the grand Arab plan.
When it failed, the self-created Arab refugees, rather than being offered the homes originally abandoned under duress by, say, Iraqi or Syrian Jews, which would have been a capital idea (still is), or even just granted citizenship in their new host countries, were instead forced by their own brethren into squalid camps for decades. Meanwhile, unlike the Arab refugees, Jewish dhimmi refugees were being welcomed by their own brethren as full fledged citizens of their own country for the first time in nearly 2000 years, joining indigenous Jerusalemites (Jews who had simply never left) to comprise the bulk of Israelis. At last the Middle Eastern Jews had a tiny sliver of land to call their own.
Fast forward fifty years and it’s easy to understand that Israel’s success in the world has been a particular anathema to the Arabs, furious that not only have their lowly dhimmis endured in their own country, but they have surpassed the Arabs in every conceivable way. Arabs have harbored a desire to smash Israel; they have harbored a desire to cleanse the Middle East of Jews as easily as they have successfully cleansed it of Christians, at least in terms of any significant power. After fifty-four years of warring against Israel, it can hardly be called a latent desire, but at least it was controlled by outside factors such as world opinion. Lately, even those outside factors have diminished and things have predictably spiraled out of control, to the point where not only is Arab murderous desire hanging out on the line for all to clearly see, but the rest of the world is subtly urging it on - excusing the Arabs’ every heinous move as “justified”, while wagging its fingers and lobbing economic and political grenades at Israel.
How did this state of affairs develop?
First, Arabs had to convince others they had a “right” to kill Jews and smash Israel. So they created a “political framework”. In 1964 they created a so-called indigenous people (composed primarily of Arab migrant workers who had been living in the Palestine area as little as two years prior to Israel’s creation in 1948 – but hey, they had to make do with what they had), who were supposedly “displaced” by the creation of Israel. Suddenly any Arabs who had been living in that region were called not Syrian-Arabs, but “Palestinian-Arabs”. They feigned a huge tie to the very piece of real estate on which Israel sat - and this was even before Israel won Jordan’s West Bank in its defensive 1967 war. However, the most important thing was that these newly created “Palestinians” presented themselves as piteously as possible. They borrowed heavily from the history of the Jews in this, even claiming to have had their own “holocaust”, which they called a nakba. They claimed to be a people in “diaspora”. They demanded a “right of return” just like the Jews, and to the very country of the Jews, and never mind that they already had a “right of return” to Jordan. In fact, they plagiarized wildly from any oppressed group in the world. They are victims of “apartheid”. They are “impoverished”. They are being “massacred”. In fact, there is not much that the Jews or anyone else has endured past or present that these “Palestinians” do not claim as having had to endure as well – at the hands of the Jews of course. Arab nations have inflicted untold misery upon the Arab “Palestinians”, wholly to make them as pitiful as the Jews were after the European Holocaust, in order to blame the Jews for this misery, to delegitimize Jews as the Nazis were delegitimized. Then, Arabs could be free to righteously, and with world approval, pursue their oft stated goal of wiping Israel off the map and the Jews out of the Middle East.
That day is here.
The day’s dawn was ushered in at the Durban Conference in the summer of 2001. It was the starting gun. It was their Wannsee Conference, their Nine Nights of Poetry (Iran). It was the signal that told them that after decades of propaganda, the world was now fully ready to accept their “narrative” of the pitiful Palestinians being victimized by the Jews. Arabs had worked patiently for decades continually feeding the press photos of crying Palestinian mothers standing atop rubble piles claiming it had once been their homes, cute little children skipping school to throw rocks at Israelis and disseminating their lugubrious tales of woe via western educated intellectuals such as Hanan Ashwari and Edward Said.
Naturally, all this completely self-inflicted suffering was blamed on the Jews of Israel, the dhimmis, who had overstepped their second class citizenship only to behave like Nazis and subjugate others. So the story went. In Arabic. In English, the story rarely mentioned Middle Eastern Jews, but told only of a colonialist horde of European Jews, borne on the guilty wings of the Europeans, suddenly descending into “Arab lands” one day to just arbitrarily create a Jewish state there for some unknown reason, in the middle of ‘entrenched’ Muslim-Arabic culture. By ‘entrenched’ they must mean the 30 years after Balfour that they used to flood the region with Muslims while barring Jewish entry. “No Jews to Palestine or there’ll be no oil for your war,” threatened Saudi King Ibn Saud to everyone from the Europeans to the Americans to his good friends the Nazi Germans, according to the old spies interviewed by John Loftus in The Secret War Against The Jews. A 1905 census conducted by Muslim Turks showed that of the 60,000 inhabitants of Jerusalem, 40,000 were Jewish, 13,000 were Christians of mostly European descent and only 7,000 were Muslim, of mostly Turkish descent. In other words, Muslim Arabs were barely a presence there, unlike today.
Nevertheless, even many gullible Israelis and guilt-ridden Jews around the world bought into the sad narrative of the “Palestinians”, actually believing the creation of Israel to be the cause of all Arab woes. Of course, all enemies of the Jews could be counted on to quietly buy into it at once, as could those whose amoebae-like one-note morality always has them root for the monetarily deficient, no matter what. At last hidden anti-Semites the world over could come out of the closet and justify their Jew hatred with rational sounding “reasons”. Nazi books and literature, always available in Arab countries, could now barely be printed quickly enough to meet worldwide demand. Although Arab countries were among the last cesspools of what Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi called “the barbarity of anti-Semitism,” like all cesspools, they had infected the surrounding environs, spreading anti-Semitism like a malaria plague throughout the world. So it was at the conclusion of Durban that the Arabs reviewed with satisfaction the huge guest list for their Jew-hating picnic. They ordered the sweets and, with the help of their master party-planners like Shehada, got down to a year of serious Jew-killing, Arab-style.
‘Oh be careful’, the world admonishes little Israel, knowing full well Israel has every right to hit back and hit back as hard as their might will allow. ‘After all, you still have to live with the bully afterwards’.
Why? Just as the socially disturbed bully who goes berserk is transferred to juvenile hall and a team of caring youth workers, why is it not within the realm of possibility for the socially disturbed and berserk Arab-Palestinians to be transferred out and away from the people they are fixated on smashing, transferred back to the homogeneous countries from which they came only thirty years before Israel’s formal inception? Those countries obviously favor the idea of transfer, as they transferred their own centuries-old Middle Eastern Jewish communities out completely. Perhaps once the bully is out of the playground he can get the proper love and attention he needs from his own family and healing can begin for all.
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Charlotte West is an Arizona-based columnist. The author can be reached at snoozalarm@hotmail.com.
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