HOROWITZ: A MIDDLE EAST HISTORY PRIMER

News and Opinion.com ^ | April 10, 2002 | David Horowitz

[Tom Jefferson]

David Horowitz

A Middle East history primer

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Holed up in his besieged and battered Ramallah headquarters, Yasser Arafat has called for "millions of martyrs to march to Jerusalem…this is our destiny….this is the path I have chosen."

With these words he announced his real agenda for anyone who did not understand it before. As the Arab Muslims of the Palestine Mandate and their successors had previously announced through suicide bombings that target Jewish babies; through maps that erase the state of Israel; through the 1999 rejection of a peace plan that included 95% of their negotiating demands; through the never-abandoned 1964 liberation manifesto that calls for the obliteration of Israel as the "Zionist entity;" through their spiritual leaders the Grand Muftis of Jerusalem - the one who today calls for the destruction of America and the Jews and the one who yesterday, in the midst of the Nazi Holocaust, was a disciple and ally of Adolf Hitler; -- the real agenda of Arafat and the Palestinian leadership is now, and has always been, the elimination of Jewry from the Middle East.

The seed of the Palestinians' genocidal mania is rooted in Islam and began its metastasis more than 100 years ago when the first Zionist settlements signaled that an oppressed people, huddled on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire, was about to assert itself. Jews, in fact, had been living continuously in the region for 3,000 years but only as a stateless minority, easily and therefore frequently abused. Once the Jews began to assert and defend their presence in a world that regarded them as infidels and therefore damned, they immediately became the targets of an Islamic jihad - a permanent holy war whose goal was their destruction.

The struggle in the Middle East is not now and has never been about land. Israel occupies a miniscule 1% of the Arab Middle East and less than 10% of the entire Palestine Mandate, which was not even a political entity - let alone a nation, when the Jews' rights were granted. It was just a "mandate" carved by the British out of the Turkish empire after the First World War, and then allotted 90% to the Palestinian Arabs and 10% to the Jews.

Today the land called Jordan - a nation wholly created by Britain - occupies 80% of the landmass that made up the original Palestine Mandate. Nearly 70% of its inhabitants are still Palestinian Arabs, yet Jordan is not the target of a Palestine liberation movement. How is this possible? It is possible because the Hashemites who rule Palestinian Jordan and are a minority within Jordan, are Muslims not Jews. The Middle East War is not about land and not about injustice. It is a religious war - a jihad -- against the Jews.

In 1949, Jordan annexed the West Bank - that is, the entire territory that is allegedly in dispute -- and held it for 18 long years up to, and until, the 1967 Arab war against Israel. Jordan and the other Arab states lost this war, and the Jews retained control of the West Bank because the Arab states refused to make peace and recognize Israel, and Israel refused to return land to declared enemies, lest they use it as a staging area for war against Israel a third time. Not once in all those 18 years was there complaint from the Palestinians or their "liberation" organization or the other Arab states about the injustice done to the inhabitants of the West Bank. Not once was there an outcry that Jordan had annexed the Palestine "nation." That is because the Palestinians consider themselves Arabs and Muslims first and foremost, and because being "Palestinian" is a remote afterthought inspired by their hatred of the Jews.

Zionist settlers first began arriving in the already existing Jewish communities of Palestine in the 1880s. They were hoping to end the persecution of the Jews, which was a result of their stateless condition and their expulsion 2000 years ago from Judea and Samaria, which is today known as the West Bank. At the time of the Zionists arrival, Palestine was a sparsely occupied, barren desert, controlled by Turkey as it had been for nearly 400 years. Not only was there no Palestinian nation in the region, there were hardly any Arabs at all. This is the way the American writer Mark Twain described what he saw when, in the 1880s, he visited the place that is the site of such bloodshed today:

"Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren …. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent….It is a hopeless dreary heartbroken land….Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes…Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies …. Nazareth is forlorn; … Jericho… accursed…Jerusalem …a pauper village…Palestine is desolate ... A silent, mournful expanse. We never saw a human being on the whole route…. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country."

In this barren place the Jews were granted a sliver amounting to 10% of the land. More than half of this land was the Negev desert. Within a generation the Jews made their sliver bloom. Even today - 120 years later -- the boundary between Israel and Syria is still referred to as the "green line," symbolizing the difference between the Israeli side, which under the care of the Jews has become fertile ground, and the Arabs' side, which is still a desert. On their sliver of land the Jews also built the only industrial and democratic nation in the entire Middle East.

The productivity and tolerance of the Jews in the state they created have given birth to an Arab citizenry inside Israel of more than one million people. Unlike their Arab brethren, these Arab citizens of Israel vote in free elections and are themselves elected to the Israeli parliament. Their status provides an eloquent contrast to the intolerant and hate-filled world that surrounds and threatens the Jewish state.

As Israelis citizens, Arabs have more rights, privileges and opportunities than the inhabitants of any Arab state in the Middle East. At the same time, the so-called Palestinian refugees of the West Bank are barred even from becoming citizens in 21 of the 22 Arab nations. That's why they are "refugees." Because the Arabs want them to be miserable and destitute, and available as cannon fodder for their suicide wars against Israel. In contrast, the 600,000 Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from Arab countries after the 1948 war have been fully resettled in Israel where they are productive citizens who desperately want peace.

What is the crime of the Jews that they should not have been welcomed into this unpromising desert -- a tiny sliver of the Turkish Empire -- from the very beginning? What is the crime of the Jews that their infant state should have been attacked by five Arab armies on the day of its creation? What is the crime of the Jews that these Arab states should have continued their war for fifty years without a peace in sight? What is the crime of the Jews that these Arabs should make Jewish women and children the targets of their suicide bombers, and that their leader should call for millions of "martyrs" to plow into the heart of the Jewish sliver to blow up its inhabitants once and for all?

Their crime is that they are Jews. Their crime is that they are heathens in the empire of Islam. Islam divides the world into Dar al Islam, the "house of Islam," and Dar al Harb, the "house of war," which is the house of infidels who -- if they do not convert - could or should be put to the sword. Perhaps there is a moderate Islam that rejects this alternative and has found a way to live peacefully with unbelievers who are its neighbors. But such an Islam does not exist as a political force in the Arab Middle East today.

That is why even a barren sliver was too much to allow the Jews. That is why the creation of a miniscule state in the middle of a desert provoked a genocidal war. Israel is Dar al Harb. That is why the annexation of the entire West Bank by the Kingdom of Jordan meant nothing to the Palestinian Muslims who inhabited it. Jordan is Dar al Islam. That is why peace cannot be made with the Jews. They are infidels who live in the house of war.

The Palestinian terrorists -- Arafat, the Palestine Authority, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the al-Aksa Martyrs -- along with the governments in Saudia Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Iran who support their terror and their genocidal agendas are the Nazis of the Middle East.

There will be no peace until they are defeated or destroyed.

[LarryLied]

Good for David. Both Israel and the Palestinians want,for different reasons, their war to be our war when the fact of it is, the war is much wider than that. Best thing possible is for Israel to take out her immediate enemies while we go after the backers of those enemies.

[Stand Watch Listen]

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[The Great Satan]

The Middle East War is not about land and not about injustice. It is a religious war - a jihad -- against the Jews.

There it is, the truth in a nutshell.

[MeekOneGOP]

Gee, I could say that the Palestinian suicide bombers aren't people but are more like wild animals,
but that would be a high insult to animals everywhere...........

Chairman Arafat
Mark Steyn Link Excerpt:

Just as revealing was the reaction from the European media. In the American press, you read things like: "An observer to the bomb-blast scene described a dead young girl, perhaps 10 or 12, lying on the ground with her eyes open, looking as if she was surprised." For Europe, on the other hand, the main significance of this development was that it was "unhelpful" to the "peace process". Before I'm accused of being more upset about dead Jewish than dead Muslim kids, let me say that I take people at their own estimation: in the Palestinian Authority schools, they teach their children about the glories of martyrdom; indeed, the careers guidance counsellor appears to have little information on alternative employment prospects; at social events, the moppets are dressed up as junior jihadi, with toy detonators and play bombs. It's not that I place less value on Palestinian lives, but that Chairman Arafat and his chums in Hamas do. So does Saddam Hussein, whose government (the subject of an admiring article in this week's Spectator) gives $25,000 to the family of each Palestinian suicide bomber. So does the Arab League, which at last year's summit passed a resolution hailing the "spirit of sacrifice" of the Palestinian "martyrs" and thus licensed Wednesday's massacre. As for the "peace process", those Europeans who, just a few months ago, were urging the Americans to cease operations for Ramadan evidently feel no compunction to demand from Chairman Arafat and his dark subsidiaries any similar "bombing pause" for Passover.

In the days after September 11, we were told that Muslims had great respect for their fellow "people of the book" - ie, Jews and Christians. This ought to be so: after all, the dramatis personae of the Koran include Abraham, Moses, David, John the Baptist, Jesus and the Virgin Mary. It's one thing to believe that the Israelis are occupiers and oppressors and that the Zionist state should not exist. But no Muslim with any understanding of his shared heritage could in good conscience blow up a Passover Seder. It marks a new low in the Palestinians' descent into nihilism - though, as usual, the silence of the imams is deafening. As for the nonchalance of the Europeans, that too should not surprise us: in my experience, the Continent's Christians, practising and nominal, find the ceremonies of Jewish life faintly creepy, notwithstanding that these were also the rituals by which their own Saviour lived.

But this year, when the Christians' solar calendar and the Jews' lunar calendar have coincided and Easter and Passover fall together, it's a safe bet that George W Bush will make the connection. The first time I ever heard him speak, he spoke openly about his faith and about Christ in a way that would be unimaginable for a British politician. He will know all the details - "the baby tried to crawl away, but it died, too".......................

[MeekOneGOP]

Before I'm accused of being more upset about dead Jewish than dead Muslim kids, let me say that I take people at their own estimation: in the Palestinian Authority schools, they teach their children about the glories of martyrdom; indeed, the careers guidance counsellor appears to have little information on alternative employment prospects; at social events, the moppets are dressed up as junior jihadi, with toy detonators and play bombs.

[MeekOneGOP]

A LETTER FROM ISRAEL
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/focus/news/658193/posts

[hoot33]

Great, informative post Tom. Thank you Sir.

[rdb3]

I never thought of the Palestinians as puppets of Islamic fundamentalism - I thought that they were the leaders of it. They exist as an excuse to kill Jews. They are cannon fodder. Without the Palestinians, Islamic expansion would be exposed for what it really is - religious conversion by force; with the Palestinians there is "global pity for an oppressed race".

Correct. Now let's try a mental exercise, shall we? Instead of "Palestinians," insert "blacks" in its place. Instead of the phrase "They exist to kill Jews," replace it with "They exist as an excuse for race hustlers and poverty pimps."

Get the picture?

It's appalling how a group or groups of people are used by the so-called elite few for their personal gain. It's exploitation, plain and simple.

Look at Arafat's home. It's a multi-million dollar estate! Yet we see so-called Palestinian refugees without homes who look to this man as their leader. Now look at Jesse Jackson, a man who has never held a real job, never been truly ordained as a "Reverend," and never created a dime of wealth but for himself and his cronies. Yet Jackson is a multi-millionaire just like Arafat. Are either Arafat or Jackson truly representative of their people or truly have their best interests in mind? Not at all.

Though I'm an American black, I'm not afraid to tell it like it is; Inner-city blacks are the American Palestinian refugees, and they are being used just like the so-called Palestinians are in the Middle East.

Put that in the bank and it will draw 75% interest compounded hourly. Trust me.

[MeekOneGOP]

[ZULU]

Horowitz is right.

Militant Islam is the enemy of civlization as well as the enemy of the Jews. Unless the U.S. wakes up and can get its cowardly, pusillanimous, degenerate European allies to wake up also, its all over for us.

Militant Islam is on the move in Israel, Nigeria, the Sudan, Indonesia, Kashmir, and India. It has inserted its demonic tentacles into the body of every European nations and into the very heartland of the U.S. Militant Islam's goal is every woman in a birqua, every state an Islamic Theocracy, and every non-Muslim either dead or relegated to an abused, disenfranchised and terrorized minority.

[rdb3]

Do you have a link to that Tony Blankley column? I heard Rush talking about it today, but I didn't get which publication it came from.

Thanx.

[Irene Adler]

Drudge has a link to Blankly that goes right to the article.

[PsyOp]

The Palestinian terrorists -- Arafat, the Palestine Authority, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the al-Aksa Martyrs -- along with the governments in Saudia Arabia, Iraq, Syria and Iran who support their terror and their genocidal agendas are the Nazis of the Middle East.

And there you have it. Anyone who doesn't understand that connection will never get it, or is of the same heart and mind.

[MeekOneGOP]

HOROWITZ: A MIDDLE EAST HISTORY PRIMER

Excerpt:

The productivity and tolerance of the Jews in the state they created have given birth to an Arab citizenry inside Israel of more than one million people. Unlike their Arab brethren, these Arab citizens of Israel vote in free elections and are themselves elected to the Israeli parliament. Their status provides an eloquent contrast to the intolerant and hate-filled world that surrounds and threatens the Jewish state.

As Israelis citizens, Arabs have more rights, privileges and opportunities than the inhabitants of any Arab state in the Middle East. At the same time, the so-called Palestinian refugees of the West Bank are barred even from becoming citizens in 21 of the 22 Arab nations. That's why they are "refugees." Because the Arabs want them to be miserable and destitute, and available as cannon fodder for their suicide wars against Israel. In contrast, the 600,000 Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from Arab countries after the 1948 war have been fully resettled in Israel where they are productive citizens who desperately want peace.

What is the crime of the Jews that they should not have been welcomed into this unpromising desert -- a tiny sliver of the Turkish Empire -- from the very beginning? What is the crime of the Jews that their infant state should have been attacked by five Arab armies on the day of its creation? What is the crime of the Jews that these Arab states should have continued their war for fifty years without a peace in sight? What is the crime of the Jews that these Arabs should make Jewish women and children the targets of their suicide bombers, and that their leader should call for millions of "martyrs" to plow into the heart of the Jewish sliver to blow up its inhabitants once and for all?

Their crime is that they are Jews. Their crime is that they are heathens in the empire of Islam. Islam divides the world into Dar al Islam, the "house of Islam," and Dar al Harb, the "house of war," which is the house of infidels who -- if they do not convert - could or should be put to the sword. Perhaps there is a moderate Islam that rejects this alternative and has found a way to live peacefully with unbelievers who are its neighbors. But such an Islam does not exist as a political force in the Arab Middle East today.

---

Excellent commentary by David Horowitz. Thanks for posting this TJ!

Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my ping list!. . .don't be shy.

[Freedom'sWorthIt]

Below is info I received today - has probably been posted on FR already but there it just toooooo much to keep up with everything. If it has - forgive. If not, it gives a concise summary of what is happening here:

(This summary was compiled by a Christian professor - but I don't know his/her name)

HERE'S THE BRIEF FACTS ON THE ISRAELI CONFLICT TODAY .

1. Nationhood and Jerusalem. Israel became a nation in 1312 B.C.E., two thousand years before the rise of Islam.

2. Arab refugees in Israel began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the modern State of Israel.

3. Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 B.C.E. the Jews have had dominion over the land for one thousand years with a continuous presence in the land for the past 3,300 years.

4. The only Arab dominion since the conquest in 635 C.E. lasted no more than 22 years.

5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem, they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders did not come to visit.

6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in Tanach, the Jewish Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran.

7. King David founded the city of Jerusalem. Mohammed never came to Jerusalem. 8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Muslims pray with their backs toward Jerusalem.

9. Arab and Jewish Refugees: In 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews. Sixty-eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.

10. The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms.

11. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is estimated to be the same.

12. Arab refugees were INTENTIONALLY not absorbed or integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory.

13. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own peoples' lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel, a country no larger than the state of New Jersey. 14. The Arab - Israeli Conflict: The Arabs are represented by eight separate nations, not including the Palestinians. There is only one Jewish nation. The Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost. Israel defended itself each time and won.

15. The PLO's Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. Israel has given the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them.

16. Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were desecrated and the Jews were denied access to places of worship. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian sites have been preserved and made accessible to people of all faiths.

17. The UN Record on Israel and the Arabs: of the 175 Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel.

18. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel.

19. The U. N was silent while 58 Jerusalem Synagogues were destroyed by the Jordanians.

20. The UN was silent while the Jordanians systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.

21. The UN was silent while the Jordanians enforced an apartheid-like policy of preventing Jews from visiting the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

[PleaseNoMore]

You have GOT to read Bibi's book "A Durable Peace". I have not been able to put it down. It is so detailed with all of this history.

[TomB]

As Israelis citizens, Arabs have more rights, privileges and opportunities than the inhabitants of any Arab state in the Middle East.

This bears repeating.

Arabs who are citizens of Israel have more freedom than almost anywhere else in the Middle East.

[livius]

That [Palestinian] state would soon become an enormous liability for Cairo, Damascus, and Amman, Riyadh, and Bagdad..

Noe that (to my knowledge) none of these states will even accept "Palestinians" as refugees. This is an artificially created problem that is meant to give Islamic fundamentalists a rallying point.

I think one does have to admit that Israel hasn't always been blameless - remember, there was much terrorist activity conducted by Zionists (primarily European leftists) against the British, such as the bombing of the King David Hotel.

But there's no excuse to extend this, and whether the Muslims like it or not, the State of Israel is a fact of life. Deal with it - but Islam can never deal with anything it cannot control.

[wardaddy]

Yeah!!!!!....go Dave!

[TLBSHOW]

BUMP TO COMMON SENSE.