Posted on 12/13/2011 1:01:50 PM PST by Slings and Arrows
Last Friday, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, did something revolutionary. He told the truth about the Palestinians. In an interview with The Jewish Channel, Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an invented people, who are in fact Arabs.
His statement about the Palestinians was entirely accurate. At the end of 1920, the Palestinian people was artificially carved out of the Arab population of Greater Syria. Greater Syria included present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. That is, the Palestinian people were invented 91 years ago. Moreover, as Gingrich noted, the term Palestinian people only became widely accepted after 1977.
As Daniel Pipes chronicled in a 1989 article on the subject in The Middle East Quarterly, the local Arabs in what became Israel opted for a local nationalistic Palestinian identity in part due to their sense that their brethren in Syria were not sufficiently committed to the eradication of Zionism.
Since Gingrich spoke out on Friday, his factually accurate statement has been under assault from three directions. First, it has been attacked by Palestinian apologists in the postmodernist camp. Speaking to CNN, Hussein Ibish from the American Task Force on Palestine argued that Gingrichs statement was an outrage because while he was right about the Palestinians being an artificial people, in Ibishs view, Israelis were just as artificial. That is, he equated the Palestinians 91-year-old nationalism with the Jews 3,500-year-old nationalism.
(Excerpt) Read more at jpost.com ...
Bump!
This writer is always crystal clear in her writings and top notch. What she wrote about Newt’s remark on the Palestinians needed to be said.
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