To deny your point would be to deny history but the future is ours to make. One can only hope.
In the meantime the wailing and breast beating continues for the hundreds of Israeli dead but not for the thousands of Palestinian dead (not to mention the million Iraqi dead).
Most of the Palestinians deserve to be dead.
And the million Iraqi dead are Saddam's fault.
And the Palestinian dead.
And the Iraqui dead.
And when my eyes dry, I look back, and I see...
I see the Iraqi citizens, subjects to a dictator. He feeds their hatred, but not their bodies. He kills his own people by the thousands. And, when he has finished this, he takes money for food and buys weapons and palaces. And his people starve. And he blames Israel, and the United States.
I see the Palestinians. Payed lip service by every Arabian country, yet denied a place by any Arabian country. Hundreds of thousands of square miles of open land, but it cannot be spared. Not by Jordan, not by the Saudi's, not by Iran or Syria or Iraq. And, since they cannot offer their brothers land, or food, they offer instead hatred and weapons. And, thus armed they look for a target, someone to blame. Shall they blame the people who surround them? Whose hatreds and warlike, xenophobic policies have left them abandoned on the desert? Nonsense. These are fellow People of Islam. How can they be blamed when the obvious culprit sits there in the desert. Occupying a fifth of a percent of that total area. Israel is to blame. Oh yes, and their friends in the United States.
And I see a country. A country which, alone among its neighbors, has maintained at least a semblance of civilized rule, and democracy. A country whose Arab citizens have more rights, more privileges under the law, than any of their neighboring citizens do in their own countries, under their own rulers. I see a country whose citizens die by the hundreds each year. Proportionately, a 9/11 every year or two. Die not in combat, facing an enemy, but in worship, at a meal, at a dance. I see a people who, when faced with genocide, were abandoned by the 'civilized' world. Who, when again faced with genocide, seem a bit wary of 'peace offerings,' and 'accords'. And when her children die at prayer to a cowards whim, and a fanatics zeal, when worship is not safe, when even eating a meal means taking one's life in one's hands, when this happens, who can Israel blame? Why, blame yourself, Israel is told, your own actions brought you here. Blame yourself, oh, and blame America, too.
I see.
I see barbarians masquerading as men. The Bedouin sheiks made wealthy by the very culture they so despise, yet would these men, Luddite in every other way, eschew their technological luxuries? Would they forsake the wealth brought to them by the industrialized world, and the foolish civilizations who believe it better to trade with a partner than to conquer? No. They enjoy their wealth, and buy with it a seat at the table of civilization. A seat they have earned with neither words nor deeds in the past century and a half.
And so, my weeping is short. Because, laid out on the table of discourse was peace. And the barbarians spurned it. They could do nothing else. For a barbarian cannot coexist with civilization. He must enslave it, or be absorbed by it. And so it will be with the Palestinians. They are barbarians. They seek to take with force what they could not earn with deeds a century ago. A patch of wasteland, turned into farmland by a displaced people who have committed the great crime of Existing.
Because if there is one thing to take out of this entire affair, it is this: that to a muslim, the greatest crime a Jew or a Christian can commit, is to exist. It is a capital crime, punishable by death.
Weeping? I would have wept ten years ago. Before Hussein built palaces and weapons instead of feeding his own people. I might still have wept five years ago, when the Israelis occupied lands claimed by others.
But now I see dead children in restaurants and discotheques.
I see the world's loss in what was once an engineering marvel, and is now only a mass grave in New York.
And I can weep no more for Islam.
They have burnt me dry. Ask me not for sympathy; I have no more to give. Let them pray to their deity. Their heresy. I have no more respect for any aspect of their life.