Peaceful bandits

As Debkafile reports, Erdogan may further escalate provocations against Israel, involving Turkish military, after the Turkey-supported attempt to break the Israeli naval blockade of terrorist Gaza succeeded in having several of suicidal attackers¹ on Israeli commandos killed. It is hard to imagine that Turkey, a member of NATO, would contemplate not only supporting any escalation, but even that "Free Gaza" flotilla, without permission from the US - if not explicit, then inferred from the actions of the US government. The latest such action is the US-sponsored attack on the supposed Israeli nuclear defense. One only hopes that Americans' dislike for Bush, which has brought a nobody, an impostor, to power, will not be sufficient to justify Obama's lethal retreat, appeasement of fascists and help to terrorists. Since Obama is not a madman to act against himself, his policy expresses whom he wants to see as friends and enemies. Perhaps the continued ascendance of the barbarians, which so obviously follows Obama's policy of punishing friends and rewarding enemies, will open eyes and bring about political change  in the US, and in the world. The price for eye-opening, however, is already too high and is going to grow higher.

1. see MEMRI video: "Gaza-Based Yemeni Professor Abd Al-Fatah Nu'man: As Much as the Heroes on the Flotilla Want to Reach Gaza, The Option of Martyrdom Is More Desirable to Them"

Look who is talking

Imagine how American colonists would react if, after they fought Indians, built towns, cultivated lands and raised families, they were told to leave and go where their government would direct them, on the conditions dictated by the government, or be removed by force and punished. Let's assume for a second that the rationale they were given would be that the Indians needed their own state where no whites would be allowed. Keep in mind that the lands the American colonists settled were indeed Indian, with hardly any justification for any settlement there bar the dubious argument of "Manifest Destiny", whereas no renaming can erase the Jewish character of the Holy Land.

The only reason it is considered holy is because it has been holy for the countless generations of Jews. The Arabs in the Land of Israel are recent settlers and descendants of invaders, who never thought about creating their own state there before the Jewish state was reestablished. For that matter, Arabs' nationalism, which has resulted in their having a unique number of 22 states, had never existed before Britain and other colonial powers induced it in order to divide (the Ottoman Empire) and conquer.

The Arab "Palestinian nation" is also unique in that it is the only one in the world that has no self-name and calls itself by the name of a territory, which itself was invented by the Romans in 2nd century CE to replace and erase the name Judea. "Palaestina" was derived by them from the Hebrew name of a tribe of ancient enemies of Jews. The origin is the same as for the word Philistine, meaning, of course, a boorish, barbarian and antagonistic person. Moreover, in the geographic sense, until creation of Israel and even into 1960's, the name "Palestinian" denoted Jews who lived in the Land of Israel as opposed to the Diaspora. The desire of the Arab world to create a 23d state, as Judenrein as is Jordan, and governed by life-long terrorist chieftains and enemies of Israel and the rest of the free world, is understandable, but does not deserve respect. Since 1948, their goal has been not to create a state, but eliminate Israel. There is no reason to think it has changed.

"Arizona to Palestine"

As seen on TV, demonstrators protest the new Arizona “immigration” law. The law, needless as it is if the much stricter federal law were enforced, cruelly says that if you are arrested for some legitimate reason, which appearance is not, you have to produce your documents. They hold the sign, “From Arizona to Palestine apartheid.” The protests are based on the presumption of police’s guilt and Pravda-like disinformation about another evil deed of American imperialists against – who? A new race, “browns”? “Hispanics” are not a race – it is officially classified as “ethnicity”, whatever it means. One can be “Hispanic” while racially white, black, Native American, etc. I know that because in the papers one has to fill out to account for recruitment of participants in government-funded studies there are two ethnicities only, Hispanic and … non-Hispanic, and another classification, racial (white, black, etc.). The sum totals for these classifications should be equal.

No wonder that lies about fascism in the Arizona law are combined with the double lie about “Palestine apartheid”. Double, because the area implied in that phrase is not Palestine by any definition, and there is no apartheid in that area. There is no apartheid, strictly speaking, even in the part of historic Palestine that is called Jordan. It is simply Judenrein: Jews are prohibited from settling there by the country’s fascist nationality law. That law must be a good thing in the eyes of the current US administration, which would like Jews to stay away from Jerusalem as well. No wonder that in the same eyes the Arizona law is bad.

Occupiers and natives

I'll start, indeed, with duplicating one of the items located on my Israel on My Mind website. Not for better, but for worse, nothing that made me to write it has changed.

July 19, 2003. - I was invited to celebrate Independence Day by a nice American couple. Almost everybody there, with a rare Canadian exception, was a US-born American citizen. I would like to emphasize this ''US-born,'' the point close to the root of the problems discussed here.

As usual where a group of Jews is gathered, the conversation turned to Israel. I had known that the hosts were far to the left from me. For this reason, and because of the traditional voting pattern, I expected everybody to be a Democrat (which I, increasingly reluctantly, was myself). Unexpected, however, were the opinions regarding Middle East conflicts. First, even though support for the Iraq war, according to the polls, is the same among Jews as in the rest of the population, in this highly educated group it was scarce. More dramatic, it was even scarcer for Israel. There was little time left to find out why exactly, but two main points were clear: Israel was considered a cruel occupying power, and Arabs were unreservedly viewed as the suffering party.

I do not need to go into the much discussed issue of why Israel's rule in the disputed territories of Judea, Samaria and Gaza is not occupation - an interested reader is referred to the in-depth and definitive treatment of this issue by Eugene Rostow (former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, 1966-1969, and one of the drafters of UNSC Resolution 242) and Dore Gold. Jews have full legal right to live anywhere in these territories - the same as the right to live in Tel Aviv or Haifa. Clearly, however, the pro-Arab propaganda, operating with lies and distortions, has suppressed the influence of any objective information. Indeed, the human mind is selective in its information processing. It assimilates better what goes along with a pre-existing perspective (which, if not based on objective knowledge, is called prejudice), and, within the time limits afforded, can absorb only a limited amount. This is why the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, can comfortably lie about "500 victims" of the Israeli operation in Jenin, perfectly knowing that this lie will be disproved. He does not care about his credibility - he knows he has none. What matters to him as an experienced disciple of Goebbels is that this abhorrent misinformation is thunderously amplified by the media and fills the limited information space, feeding on old prejudices and supplanting truth, just as poisonous carbon monoxide supplants oxygen in the blood. This means that even if an equal amount of truth were to follow, it would be inadequate to set the record straight.

Any truth, however, is hardly forthcoming from major media sources, whose reporting standards have been hopelessly compromised by outright fraud compounded by anti-Israel bias. Nobody is surprised any longer that The New York Times published that photograph of a bloodied Jewish youth, Tuvia Grossman, protected from the Arab mob by a vicious-looking Israeli policeman – with the title “An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian on the Temple Mount” - and this is on the clearly seen background of a gas station (see Mr. Grossman's own account of that lynch attempt). BBC’s reporting in Israel has deserved its comparison with another notorious media source, Nazi “Der Stuermer,” which incited Germans to genocide.

The gross distortion of truth about Israel is promoted by a distinct group of intellectuals, whose left, right, Muslim, socialist and other platforms converge on one point – their Jew-hatred. The difference from the Nazi situation is two-fold. First, as observed in a comment attributed to Martin Luther King, “the times have made it unpopular, in the West, to proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews.” Second, the left were themselves persecuted by Hitler, so that they had little chance to join him in his genocidal effort. The same is true about Jew-haters among the Jews themselves, whose participation in Nazi crimes was limited to the few collaborationists who served in Judenrats (ghetto councils) and ghetto police. The times of war usually polarize people’s positions, and gradations in politically charged opinions become less likely. Nowadays, in what we – erroneously - perceive as peace, the Jewish opponents of Israel vary in shades from disliking the thought that they may be identified with whatever antisemitic/anti-Israel stereotypes and prejudice the Gentile population may entertain (which in Steven Rose's case extends to disliking the source of his misfortune of being born Jewish – his parents) to acting as a supporter of the mass murderers of Jews. These supporters, the contemporary candidates for the ghetto police and Auschwitz kapo jobs, include, but are not limited to, Stanley Cohen, the narcissistic Hamas attorney paid from the money this terrorist group gets from Saudis and Iran for murdering Jewish babies, and the Jewish members of the International Solidarity Movement who "recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle".

Regardless of psychological and historical roots of anti-Israelism, the result is the same – the unshakable belief that Israel is illegitimate and occupies the land whose natives – Arabs – have been treated as (or more) unjustly as were American Indians. The peculiar interweaving of these roots has resulted in the cancellation of a simple truth that the natives in the Land of Israel are Jews. Arabs are invaders or, at best, settlers, just as, before them, were Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans and whoever else tortured the Holy Land. The only difference from other invaders is that Arabs have never even ruled over “Palestine,” except when 80% of it was cut off by the British in 1921 and handed over to their puppet Abdullah bin Husayn for his service as his fiefdom. It is ironic that the emirate, and later kingdom, where Jews have been prohibited by law from settling, was given a Jewish name – the name of the Jordan river.

The Jewish presence in the whole of the Land of Israel has never been interrupted, despite all efforts of invaders. But even in places where it was, as it happened in Hevron (Hebron) after Arab pogroms instigated by the Nazi mufti Amin al-Husseini, this does not make invaders natives - just as nobody would think of white New Yorkers as Native Americans, even though the tribes who used to live on Manhattan may not even exist anymore. Being US-born, even in several generations, does not make you a native of the land. The difference in the perception of “nativeness” is all the more striking considering that Indians left no cities on Manhattan, whereas the “Palestinian” city of Hevron, under this very name, was the first capital of Israel under King David, when nobody had even heard of Arabs. The tombs of the Jewish patriarchs are there, in the place bought by Abraham. That Jews could come and worship there again only after the Six Day War, after 700 years of prohibition under Muslim “tolerant” rule, had not made the cave of Machpelah Arab. It is the Jewish names under which this land is known to all humanity, despite all efforts to rename Hevron into al-Khalil, Jerusalem into Aelia Capitolina (Romans) or al-Quds (Arabs), and the whole land into Syria Palaestina (Romans), Palestine (British), or Filastiniya (Arabs). No Orwellian effort to rewrite history can change the fact that Yerushalayim (Jerusalem) has been the capital of the Jewish - and no other - State since King David. Hevron is located in Judean Hills, Judea, the land of Jews.


PS. Little that I knew then, in 2003, that in 2010 an American administration would be first to introduce the Arabic replacement name into the official lingo.

Watch, and think about who those students “from Palestine” were, in the ‘70s in Egypt, who taught him “to live in peace and security” and “to practice our faith freely” (unless, of course, he is a Muslim, and "our faith" is Islam). You probably know that the Saudi duties as “custodians of the two holy mosques” include not allowing any non-Muslim to the land of the two "holy mosques", let alone building anything Jewish or Christian in the whole of Saudi Arabia.

If you ever travel to "Palestine", perhaps you’ll visit "Al Quds". I am not sure who will be its custodians, if this administration of Saudi supplicants succeeds in its hard work of creating the new pale of settlement for Jews, this time in the Land of Israel itself.

First Post

My daughter, a graduate student at my university, told me that my political and religious views are not very common in academia. She was right. It seems much easier to find there, as well as on the Web, a Che Guevara fan than somebody who has heard of Natan Sharansky, and a critic of Israeli "occupation" rather than of the expressed desire of Arab and Muslim groups and countries for Israel to disappear from the map. It is easy to find pictures of Stalin, idyllic and complimentary, right on my university's web pages, but not those of his victims. The pressure to conform with the outlook that is often described as "progressive" is substantial. In this climate, not only students but even faculty sometimes feel uncomfortable to express views that deviate from this mainstream into the "conservative" direction. People do not go there, they stay away from that - sometimes because they think they are alone. Hence, the name of this blog. My daughter tells me I could write something helpful. I hope I will, time permitting. I'll probably start with relocating here some items I deployed earlier at my site hosted by the university