Treating The Symptom Instead Of The Disease
by Gerald A. Honigman
Recently, my youngest daughter, Elana Judith, came down with a case of the flu--probably swine flu, says the doctor.
While we were discussing various treatments, he emphasized the importance of not simply masking the symptoms but treating the actual disease. I knew that--but wisdom, anyway. And this relates to the seemingly perpetual mess in the Middle East as well.
You see, we're always treating symptoms there too--especially regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict--unless you buy into the Arab line that Israel is the source of all evil.
Case in point...
Secretary of State Clinton made a hasty visit to North Africa--both Egypt and Morocco--to kiss Arab leaders' derrieres for her previous "mistake." Her crime? She dared to praise Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's temporary halt to allowing more Judeans--Jews--to live in Judea, a place where they lived and owned land for millennia up until their slaughter by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s. Over a million Arabs--many hostile to Israel and supporters of those who would see it destroyed and its people slaughtered--can live in the Jewish State without fear, but how dare Jews live in a small part of Judea.
Only in the early 20th century were Judea and Samaria also given the name "West Bank" to distinguish that area from the new Arab state created on the east bank of the Jordan River and today known as Jordan. The latter, by the way, sits on almost 80% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine and declared that no Jew could ever live there. When the Emirate of Transjordan conquered the west bank in the '48 fighting, that area also became off limits to Jews while Arabs had already been flocking into it and elsewhere in the Mandate from all over the region. That's how Transjordan became Jordan, and so much for the Arab claim that Jews got all or most of the land.
I truly feel sorry for the interested, reading public. They must get tired of hearing the same claims and counter claims over and over again. And we who try to set the record straight are tired of this too. But what is our choice--to not respond to Arab assertions and outright lies? So, please bear with me...
First of all, the settlement issue that has Hillary and her boss hot and bothered--Jewish towns/settlements, that is (Arabs' are proclaimed kosher here)--is largely all about whether Israel gets the necessary territorial buffer promised to it after the 1967 war via Resolution 242 and supported by past American leaders or not. It is about whether sanity prevails or Israel allows itself to be bullied by those practicing hypocrisy in the worst way. Read my last article, Between Samoa and Samaria for further clarification if necessary.
Secondly, I'm concerned over Netanyahu's offer too...so Arabs have company in this corner. Who knows what he actually offered if Hillary gave him some praise. She's definitely no fan of Jewish leaders who act like they still have their private parts intact...regardless of what too many card playing Jewishgrandmaslike to think. Israelis did not vote Bibi into office to elect yet another yes massah stooge for an American State Department which fought against Israel's very existence from the getgo and remains hostile and largely Arabist in orientation to this very day.
Hillary responded at her subsequent meeting with Arab foreign ministers in Marrakesh by virtually ordering Israel to halt resettlement of Jews anywhere in Judea or Samaria--the other part of the West Bank. And notice, Hillary also got Netanyahu to blackball his own foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman--asecretary of state's appropriate counterpart--because Lieberman has the cohones to tell it like it is. This is yet another cause of concern regarding some of our hopes that things would really be different with the new Israeli leadership.
Okay--back to symptoms and diseases...
Some say that the Arab-Israeli conflict is too complex to resolve.
It may not be resolved--but not because it is too complex.
The conflict between Jew and Arab is indeed a mere symptom of a far more serious disease--one that far too many academic "experts" refuse to even touch with a ten foot pole. It's much easier (and less problematic to professional careers given funding realities and other "opportunities" which may be lost) to merely treat the "symptom." So, the disease is usually totally ignored.
What's the symptom, you ask? Anyone, besides Arabs, demanding a slice of political justice in what Arabs claim to be purely Arab patrimony.
Think of it...There was Hillary in "Arab" North Africa. And what was she up to? Reassuring Arabs that Israel will remain a 9-15 mile wide sub rump state, perpetually at their mercy under threat of invasion, terrorism, and being severed in half. Israel is simply expected to forget about the establishment of real and secure borders--not previously imposed armistice lines--that the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242 called for after the 1967 fighting which started as a result of an Arab blockade of Israel and other hostile acts.
Former American presidents and secretary of states, such as Johnson, Reagan, and Shultz, American military leaders, all of the architects of the final draft of 242, and the last president before Obama, George W. Bush, understood this and the need for a real territorial compromise here. As I have supplied many of their exact statements in previous articles, I'll refrain from doing so now.
Yes, there was Hillary in "Arab" North Africa demanding the creation of the Arabs' 22nd state (and second one in "Palestine") at the sole, microscopic state of the Jews' expense. And, all the while simply playing deaf, dumb, and blind to the plight of tens of millions of native, non-Arab North African people, the Imazighen ( Berbers), who--together with numerous native North African Jews (who had earlier fled the Roman conquest of Israel/Judaea)--resisted the murderous jihad and forced Arabization process for centuries--clear up until the present day.
Ibn Khaldun, perhaps the greatest Muslim scholar of all time, wrote of this forced Arabization of the Berbers and their brave resistance to it six centuries ago. He also wrote of the alliance of the Jews and Imazhigen, under the leadership of the Jewish queen, Dahiyah al-Kahina (the priestess), to fight the Arab invaders, settlers, colonizers, and conquerors of their lands.
Today, most of North Africa's (including Egypt's) Jews have fled, moving to Israel, France, the Americas, and elsewhere--part of that other side of the refugee problem that is rarely spoken about.
Tens of millions of native Imazighen, however, remain. If they are willing to do what Dr. Boutros Boutros Ghali told an Israeli author Israel must do to be "accepted" in the region--consent to Arabization like he, one of the most famous of Egypt's Copts, and many other millions of these Egyptian native, pre-Arab people have been forced to do after Egypt's own Arab conquest in the 7th century C.E. , then they too may gain acceptance.
Today, if one really wants to know what's happening with the Copts, one is forced to consult with those who have fled their native land. Murder, burned down churches, intimidation, and never knowing what the morrow will bring--i.e., the plight of the dhimmi Jew or Christian in Arab Muslim lands--is the reality back home.
And all of the above is virtually ignored on the world scene--certainly by Hillary and the Arabist State Department she now leads. Yet, the Copts at least warranted one brief, flash of a second mention by President Obama in his earlier, now famous Cairo speech. Not so, however, for North Africa's Imazighen, mostly west of Egypt.
Most of the world acts as if these tens of millions of native people don't even exist--in other words, have bought into the Arab game plan hook, line , and sinker...the real disease that no one will even acknowledge, let alone treat.
Imazighen who do not consent to this forced Arabization--forsaking their own language, culture, and so forth--do so at the risk of their own lives. Many have indeed been killed for such reasons over recent decades let alone before.
As Hillary was joining the stick-it-to-the Jews Arab foreign ministers' party in Morocco, Amazigh parents were increasingly being told that they could not even name their own children with traditional names but must use Arab/Islamic ones instead.
Please pay close attention to a few excerpts included in a Special Dispatch of MEMRI on May 3, 2007 written by Belkacem Lounes of the World Amazigh Congress as he responded to Libya's Mu'ammar Qaddafi's denial of the very existence of the Amazigh people:
"The people of whom you speak...speak their own Amazigh language daily...every day live their Amazigh identity...What worse offense to elementary rights is there than denying the existence of a people...30 million in North Africa? You menace the Amazigh, warning that whosoever asserts his identity will be a traitor...identical problems in Algeria and Morocco (right where Hillary was joining Arabs in lecturing Jews)...There is no worse colonialism than internal colonialism--that of the Pan-Arabist claim that seeks to dominate our people. It is surely Arabism--an imperialist ideology that refuses diversity--that constitutes an offense to history and truth..."
Or, how about these excerpts and paraphrases from the New English Review on January 18, 2008 and reported in North-of-Africa.com on July 3, 2009:
" In Algeria, Berbers were forbidden to use their own language, Tamazight...riots erupted, reported in France but ignored elsewhere in the West...America, of course, had been sufficiently subject to ARAMCO (the Arabian American Oil Company) propaganda, a payoff to the Saudis by Big Oil, to allow the latter to produce and market Arab oil. So, ARAMCO's message to America was that there is just an Arab world in this region in which there are no Copts, Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Turkmen...and, of course, no Berbers and no Jews--they all came to Israel, you see, from Europe for everyone in this region is just Arab."
The American State Department has been in bed with ARAMCO since its creation--get the picture?
So, there it is folks, plain and simple...the disease.
With the collapse of the over four century old Ottoman Turkish Empire after World War I, Arabs proclaimed themselves, in the relatively new nationalist age emerging in the region, to be sole benefactors and political heirs to the entire area.
Hundreds of thousands of gassed and otherwise massacred Kurds; genocide against literally millions of black Africans in the Sudan and elsewhere; murder, subjugation, and intimidation of Imazighen, Copts, Assyrian, pre-Arab Lebanese, and others; and perpetual jihad against "their" kilab yahud Jew dogs has been the Arab legacy here. In order to just be allowed to exist, one better not rock the boat.
And the world is silent about it all.
It's those checkpoints and a security barrier that Jews erect to stop Arabs from blowing up their kids which are the real problem and that Israel got taken to an international court for.
Or, better yet, scores of millions of non-Arabs are expected to live as "Arabs" in some two dozen states, but how dare some Arabs live in someone else's! That's the real travesty...Sure, and as I like to say, I'm also the Passover Bunny. Don't laugh--that's the Arab mindset which is accepted by the current American administration (and forever by the State Department) and for which Israel is chastised for not accepting.
So, this is the story ignored like the plague by too many academic "experts," the mainstream media, the United Nauseating Nations, the Foggy Folks, and far too many others as well.
It is the disease that plagues the entire Middle East and North Africa (and beyond as well)-- the politically incorrect but very real subjugating intolerance of Arabs towards allowing any others--not only Jews in Israel (one half of whom who were refugees from the "Arab" World)--a tiny slice of the dignity and rights they demand solely for themselves but which all peoples deserve.
And when I state all peoples, I do not include so-called "Palestinians" here.
However one defines that only recently and deliberately concocted term, "Palestinians" are but a tiny fraction of the greater Arab people. In the words of Arab spokesmen themselves, like the P.L.O's own Zuheir Mohsen, the term was adopted merely to negate the dreams of Jews.
Speaking of "stateless Palestinians" in the same breath as thirty-five million stateless Kurds, for example, only makes a mockery of the plight of a truly stateless people.
Using Arab logic here (done as a propaganda ploy to turn themselves into the "new, stateless Jews"), then Kurds should also rename themselves after the numerous different areas they inhabit and then demand the creation of not (finally) one state but a dozen for themselves in the region. Ditto for the Imazighen. While we're at it, let's create another Jewish state in part of Morocco--where Hillary recently returned from (quiet, Jerry...don't you know that Morocco has been fairly tolerant in recent history towards its Jews...do you want to cause trouble?). More Jews are from Morocco-- and, along with the Imazighen, pre-date the Arabs there by centuries than there were Arabs who got to have Kuwait.
The Arab-Israeli conflct, indeed, is but a symptom of this far greater disease.
And it's much easier to treat the symptom by blaming the victim and making it go away than with dealing with the real problem.
Neither the Arabs' more honest Hamas nor the Arabs' latter day Arafatian Fatah's Abbas has any intention of recognizing a state of the Jews nor allowing it to exist in peace--regardless of who is doing the whitewashing. To such enemies, Israel owes nothing except exponential payback.
Why a 22nd state for Arabs constructed mostly on non-Arab peoples' lands, while scores of millions of the region's non-Arab peoples have to fight and die daily to just have the right to speak their own language and for the most basic of human and other political rights? And when will there be a United Nations Goldstone Report exposing such true crimes against humanity?
My new book, The Quest For Justice In The Middle East--The Arab-Israeli Conflict in Greater Perspective, gets into all of this in great detail--issues usually ignored by a wide assortment of the world's hypocrites, practitioners of the double standard supreme, and pusillanimous sycophants of the Arab petrodollar.
Quest...is ready to order now at http://q4j-middle-east.com