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Israel and the U.N.N.

                                                                        Hamas, Gaza, And The U.N.N.
                                                                                                         (United Nauseating Nations)
                                                                    by Gerald A. Honigman
 
 
     No sooner was Israel reborn in the wake of the Holocaust in May 1948 as a result (on the human part of the deal, at least) of a United Nations’ vote, it was attacked by a half dozen Arab nations--most of which had gained their own independence only recently as well. From that moment on, with a few (but important) rare exceptions, the U.N. would work to basically try to undo its "mistake" of permitting the resurrection of the Jew of the Nations.
 
     Can’t help it...visions of the Hebrew Prophets pour though my mind. Some excerpts from Ezekiel 37:
 
     The hand of the Lord was upon me... set me down in the midst of the valley full of bones.... very many... and, lo, they were very dry.
 
     And He said unto me, "Son of man, can these bones live?" And I answered, "O Lord God, thou knowest."
 
     Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; ‘Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, bring flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you.’ "
 
     So I prophesied... there was a noise...shaking, and the bones came together, bone to bone... sinews and flesh came up upon them, and skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.
 
     Then said He unto me, "Prophesy unto the wind, Son of man, and say to the wind, 'Thus saith the Lord God: ‘Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’ "
 
     So I prophesied... and the breath came into them, they lived, and stood up upon their feet....
 
     Then He said unto me, "Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, 'Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost....Therefore prophesy and say, 'Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O My people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel....’ "
 
     Whoa...! Heavy stuff...I still get goose bumps..
 
     Written some twenty-six centuries or so ago
, if this wasn’t the resurrected phoenix of the Jews--Israel--then I’m Michelangelo.
 
     And when Jews from the remote corners of the "Arab" world--where they also didn’t know what the morrow would bring and were commonly known as yahud kelb/Jew Dog killers of prophets--were gathered to be flown to Israel, with tears they recited the Hebrew
prophecy predicting that they would return to Israel on the wings of eagles as they boarded the planes used in Operation Magic Carpet.
 
     One of those above 1948 Arab attackers, Transjordan, became independent two years earlier. Its army was led by British officers and, like Egypt’s, was well equipped with Allied armaments left in the region after World War II.
 
     Since the Emirate’s own story is crucial for understanding attempts made to try to balance conflicting Arab and Jewish claims over that part of the Turks’ previous empire which emerged as the Mandate of Palestine after World War I, I frequently reference this in my work. Arabs bring up their tale of how Jews allegedly stole all of the land over and over again; hence my own need to repeatedly remind readers of the truth as well.
 
     Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill convened the Cairo Conference in 1921. As a result of this and other machinations of the latest empire (the Brits’) to acquire the land of the Jews--Judaea--since the fall of the latter to Hadrian’s Roman armies in 135 C.E., Britain’s Hashemite Arab allies were awarded all of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine east of the Jordan River--almost 80% of the total area–in 1922.
 
     Transjordan's King Abdullah attributed this gift to an act of Allah in his memoirs. Along with other observers, Sir Alec Kirkbride, the Brits’ East Bank (of the Jordan River) rep, had much to say about this as well in A Crackle Of Thorns.
 
     Not long afterwards, Abdullah’s brother, Emir Faisal, was gifted with all of the Mandate of Mesopotamia--renamed Iraq. Millions of Kurds thus saw their own best chance at independence shattered on behalf of Arab nationalism and British Petroleum politics as well.
 
     The Ottoman Turkish Empire had ruled most of the region for the previous four centuries. Most of those above invading and other "Arab" states had, in turn, become Arab by the conquest, subjugation, and forced Arabization of millions of native peoples who survived earlier jihads in the wars of the Dar ul-Islam against the Dar al-Harb...another point I feel a need to stress repeatedly.
 
     Similar stories could be told all over the region...millions of native, non-Arab peoples, within the power vacuum created by the collapse of empire, seeing their own hopes for freedom and independence in the new nationalist age swept away on behalf of the Arab Nation. Some later fought alongside Arabs against the Mandatory Powers...did them little good after the French and the British left the scene (one way or the other), however.
 
     From Egypt, through North Africa into the Sudan, to Lebanon, Iraqi and Syrian Kurdistan, and elsewhere, scores of millions have all been forced to consent to this forced Arabization process.
 
     As Egypt’s most famous native "Uncle Tom" Copt, the late President Sadat’s Foreign Minister Dr. Boutros Boutros Ghali basically summed it up for Israel (as well as all others) in an interview with an Israeli author: if you want to be accepted in the neighborhood, you have to consent to Arabization.
 
    The post-1922 up to the current fight, therefore, has been to create a second state for Arabs in what’s left of "Palestine"--not a first...the Arabs’ 22nd in total spread out across over six million square miles of territory. And that state is expected, by "moderates" willing to tell the West what it wants to hear, as well as the more honest Hamas types, to replace the sole state of the Jews–not live peacefully along side it.
 
     Back to the United Nations...
 
     In 1947, another partition plan was presented which would have divided the roughly 20% of the Mandate of Palestine left after the creation of Transjordan in half between Jews and Arabs.
 
     Had Arabs accepted this, they would have wound up with some 90% of the total original area.
 
     They rejected this offer on the grounds that all was part of the Dar ul-Islam and/or their "purely Arab patrimony." The rest is history.
 
     Some things change, others never do. Israel’s fight with Hamas, Fatah, and others today is the same as it was back then.
 
     Back to May, 1948...
 
     The U.N. watched its newest child brutally attacked upon birth. It did nothing to stop the onslaught and only finally stepped in after the Jews turned the tide of the battle.
 
     Afraid that they would push the Arabs back even further and take more of the non-apportioned territory of the Mandate, the U.N. finally acted. Keep in mind that, unlike Arab claims, these were not "purely Arab" territories.
 
     The armistice lines drawn up by the UN. in 1949 simply marked the point where hostilities were stopped.
    
     Amongst other things, they left Israel a mere 9-miles wide in some places, and not much more in its strategic waist--where most of its population and industry are located. Many peole travel farther than that just to go to work. It should not be a surprise, therefore, that these became known as the Auschwitz Lines--a constant invitation to Arabs to attack. The lines were never expected to be Israel’s real borders, as America’s own U.N. rep, Dr.Ralph Bunche, wrote about himself.
 
     Recall that as a result of the 1948 Arab assault, Transjordan grabbed the non-apportioned west bank of the Jordan River (where both Jews and Arabs had roots, owned land, and were allowed to live). Now holding both banks, it changed its name to Jordan (since it now held territory from other parts of the Mandate besides those across the river)--and made all the land it now held Judenrein (Jew free)--including east Jerusalem. Numerous age-old synagogues were destroyed, ancient Jewish tombstones were used to pave roads, build latrines, and so forth. Only two nations recognized that illegal seizure.
 
     While Jordan thus emerged above, Pharaoh--who had used Gaza to invade the land of the Jews for thousands of years--once again grabbed that coastal strip.
 
     Note that during the time Jordan and Egypt held Gaza and the West Bank (aka, Judea and Samaria, its real name)--almost two decades--no one demanded the birth of the Arabs’ second state in Palestine in those areas. Not a peep from the United Nations either...
 
     As another result of the Arab attempt to nip a microscopic, resurrected Israel in the bud, two refugee situations were created...another point that needs to constantly be reemphasized.
 
     The Arabs have continued to this day to thrust the plight of their own refugees--created primariliy as a result of their own actions--into everyone else’s faces--people who were pawns (willingly or unwillingly) of the Arabs’ own murderous schemes that backfired. Scores of millions of non-Arab peoples also became refugees as a result of wars over the last century. Yet the folks who have received the most aid have been the biggest whiners.
 
     Arab refugees, right from the start, were made virtual wards of the world--unlike all the others above. The United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA)--whose spokemen, right now, are villifying Israel over Gaza--was created just to cater to these folks--most of whom were newcomers themselves coming into the land because of its economic development by the Jews.
 
    The U.N.’s predecessor, the League Of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission, recorded numerous Arabs crossing into the Mandate from the surrounding Arab states. Many more slipped in through very porous borders under cover of darkness and were never recorded. And still many others arrived with Muhammad Ali and son Ibrahim Pasha’s armies from Egypt about fifty years or so earlier and never left...all alleged "native Palestinians." Hamas's virtual patron saint (for whom those rockets Gaza has been blasting israel with are named as well as Hamas's "militant wing), Sheikh Izzedin al-Qassam, was from Latakia, Syria. Arafat was born in Cairo.
 
     Indeed, so many Arabs were recent arrivals themselves into the Palestinian Mandate that UNRWA had to adjust the very definition of "refugee" from its prior meaning of persons normally and traditionally resident to those who lived in the Mandate for a minimum of only two years prior to 1948.
 
     Now, keep in mind that for every Arab who was forced to flee the fighting that Arabs started (after all, how dare Jews want in one tiny, resurrected state what Arabs demand for themselves in some two dozen others), a Jewish refugee was forced to flee "Arab"/Muslim lands into Israel and elsewhere...but with no UNRWA set up to assist them. Why not?
 
     UNRWA has been openly hostile to Israel from the getgo. It has long allowed the promotion of anti-Western and anti-Semitic attitudes among the Arabs it serves, and has done little to help solve the problem of their refugee status--unless giving shelter and employment to those who would terrorize and destroy their Jewish neighbor counts in his regard.
 
     Before Israel’s current round of fighting in Gaza, back in 2004, UNRWA Commissioner-General Peter Hansen told the Canadian Broadcasting Company "I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll and I don't see that as a crime."
 
     Solid evidence and documentation obtained from Arabs on the spot have revealed that UNRWA has turned a blind eye to Arabs setting up mortar and rocket firing positions adjacent to U.N. schools, hospitals, private homes, and so forth. Additionally, in this latest round, Israel had solid intelligence that Hamas leaders were hiding in the basement of such a hospital.
 
     Similarly, when Israel was forced to go after Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006, it turned out that the U.N force there, UNIFIL, not only did not prevent attacks on Israel but allowed Hizbullah to set up its positions right next to UNIFIL units. After a U.N. position got hit as a result, pictures made the rounds showing just such a Hizbullah position right next to a U.N. building. Furthermore, solid evidence surfaced that UNIFIL members collaborated with Hizbullah to enable the kidnaping of Israeli troops from inside Israel proper-the move which started the war in the first place.
 
     Ahhh,
the United Nations...Nice to know where many millions of American tax dollars are going to, isn’t it?!?!
 
     Turning the clock back again, from 1948 to1956, Israel was attacked repeatedly by Arabs using Egyptian and Jordanian territories as their bases. In 1956, when Egypt blockaded it at the Strait of Tiran, Israel struck back hard. France and Great Britain were peeved at Egypt’s Nasser as well for nationalizing the Suez Canal, so the time was ripe.
 
     In a lightening assault, Israel soon found itself on the banks of the Suez Canal.
 
    Before Western pressure forced it to withdraw--note the inaction of the U.N. to stop Arab attacks on Israel and so forth which provoked the Sinai Campaign (sound familiar?)--Israel’s David Ben-Gurion received assurances that if Egypt ever played the same blockade game again, it would be recognized as a casus belli. This would become very important, once again, in the not-too-distant future. A United Nations Emergency Force was also set up in Gaza and at the Strait of Tiran to supposedly prevent such happenings again.
 
     So, tell me please...what good is a fireman who, at the first smell of smoke, disappears from sight?
 
     In Spring 1967, Egypt’s Nasser must have been all sugared up once again.
 
     Pharaoh amassed 100,000 troops, but instead of chariots, he positioned planes, tanks, artillery, and so forth on Israel’s border, reinstated the blockade, and ordered the U.N. force out of Gaza so his tank divisions would have an open door.
 
     Without a wink, the U.N. turned tail and ran--leaving Israel, once again, all on its own. Nasser, meanwhile, got other Arab nations to jump aboard his own latter-day Final Solution bandwagon as well. While Syria was up to its eyeballs in this right from the start, others--like Jordan’s young King Hussein--had to be lured into this a bit later.
Big mistake...
 
     Well, as you probably know, things didn’t quite turn out as Arabs planned...
 
     In six days in June 1967, Israel destroyed several Arab air forces, left hundreds of their tanks smoldering, took thousands of prisoners, etc.and so forth...Remember Ben-Gurion’s casus belli deal in 1956 regarding a renewal of blockade?
 
     Oh yes--I almost forgot...
 
     Israel also now found itself holding all of the Sinai Peninsula (in which it developed oil fields, established important air bases, and at last gained a little strategic depth) up to the Suez Canal; in control of the Strait from which it had been repeatedly blockaded; on top of the Golan Heights, from which its farm villages and fishermen on the Sea of Galilee had been repeatedly attacked; in Gaza; and back in Judea and Samaria--the "West Bank," from which all Jews were either previously slaughtered or later excluded from as a result of Transjordan’s land grab in 1948. Places like Hebron--where the Hebrew Patriarchs and some of the matriarchs are buried--and elsewhere once again saw Jews.
 
     And in a rare moment (Divine guidance?), something else next happened which proved to be not par for the U.N.’s usual course.
 
     After much argument, and thanks to America and Great Britain--folks who also opposed Israel in the past--the final draft of the U.N. document, UNSC Resolution 242, which dealt with any future Israeli withdrawal, was worded in a precise way which called for the creation of secure and real borders to replace Israel’s ‘49 Auschwitz lines. It also allowed for a necessary revision of those borders in order to undo–somewhat at least–the travesty of the ‘49 U.N.-imposed lines.
 
     Here’s Britain’s Lord Caradon on 242...
 
     It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them.
 
     President Ronald Reagan commented on this same subject on September 1, 1982...
 
     In the pre-1967 borders, Israel was barely 10-miles wide... the bulk of Israel's population within artillery range of hostile armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.
 
     Regardless of the renewed pressure that will undoubtedly be coming with the new American President’s administration, Israel must insist upon those territorial adjustments it was promised in order to right an historical wrong. A fair compromise must be demanded by Israel's own new leaders.
 
     The State Department opposed Israel’s creation from the start and has been usually hostile ever since.
 
     Expect more of the same, if not worse, coming from the Foggy Folks with an Obama Administration.
 
     The Jews the new President appoints to work with him are as reassuring on this matter as James Baker’s stick it to the Jew of the Nations "Jew Boys" were before--a good shield to deflect criticism later on from Jews who really care. I truly hope I’m wrong here...but doubt it. In fact, President Obama apparently just loves Baker’s Jew Boy Dan Kurtzer--Foggy Bottom’s Jew point man used to force the Jews in Israel to ignore 242 and return to their previous suicidal Auschwitz lines.
 
     The new President had already sent his well-known, anti-Israel friend and special envoy, Robert Malley (raised in a family of anti-Zionists and Communists who counted Yasir Arafat as a close friend), to Lebanon’s slave master and Iran’s best buddy, Syria, before he even took the oath of office.
 
     Now, pray tell, what might that be all about?
 
     Decades ago, Israel had already offered a retreat from well over 90% of the Golan Heights to Syria in return for a true peace...
 
.....'Twasn’t good enough for Iraq's Saddam Hussein’s twin butchers in Damascus, the Assad boys–neither Papa nor Junior.
 
     So, guess who and what’s gonna be offered up to try to wean Syria away from Iran? The same folks whose arms are going to be twisted even further than they were already by Condoleezza Rice & Co. to believe that Mahmud Abbas’s latter day Arafatian Fatahniks are really the good cops. After all, President Bush had already begun arming, training, funding, and otherwise supporting those alleged doves of peace.
 
     Trust me Jew of the Nations, to such folks you should give away the store and bare the necks of your kids...
 
     Expect much more of the same (if not worse) with President Obama, close friend and associate of Rashid Khalidi and numerous other blatantly anti-Israel folks. Louis Farakhan has called him the messiah.
 
     With a final return (for now) to the United Nations, let’s just say that with Arab genocidal actions being/having been waged against millions of Kurds and black Africans, and Arab murder and subjugation being waged against millions of Copts, Jews, Amazighen/Berbers, and others, the only thing that the United Nations seems capable of doing is vilifying Israel and placing it continuously under the high power lens of moral scrutiny for its determination to survive and defend itself despite the United Nations’ indifference. Indeed, most of all of the latter’s condemnations have been aimed solely at Israel.
 
     Perhaps it’s time for Israel to seriously consider withdrawing from the United Nauseating Nations or, at the very least, make sure that it quickly elects a new generation of leaders who will know how to stand their ground and demand the fair territorial compromises Israel is entitled to and must have regardless of who’s tightening the screws.
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Talkin' Turkey...Between Ankara And Jerusalem

 Between Ankara And Jerusalem...

                                                                      by Gerald A. Honigman


The Turks are, once again, upset with Israel.

 
Among other things, while hosting a banquet in honor of the visiting United Nations Secretary General, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoggan urged the world "not to turn a blind eye towards Israel's savagery."

In reality, the Arabs killed in the current fighting have been mostly fighters--despite Arab claims. The non-combatants killed have deliberately been used as human shields by their own "heroes."

Where have the United Nations, International Court Of Justice, academic, European Union, and other voices been about that above blatant Arab war crime? Unless it's Israel they can all jump upon, they're about as useless here as they are in stopping Arab genocide in black Africa and Arab atrocities elsewhere as well.

After putting up with about ten thousand mortars and rockets being deliberately fired at their civilian population years after a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the U.N. doing nothing to stop this, the Jews finally had no other choice than to move in to try to stop the terror themselves.
 
How long would Ankara have put up with these deliberate acts of war before reacting?

The Arabs who elected Hamas--an organization which exists primarily to destroy Israel--have been used by Hamas to commit a double war crime: Israeli civilians have been deliberately targeted from Arab civilian centers, while the latter have been used as human shields. The Perfidy and other clauses of the Geneva Conventions speak clearly about such cowardice and barbarism.

While I don't advocate adopting the Arabs' own tactics used against Jews (such as blowing up Arab buses, restaurants, shopping malls, schools, and such), any building, town, home, and so forth harboring murderers and their collaborators must be recognized for what the Geneva Conventions say it is...a fair military target.

Article 51/7

The presence of the civilian population shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attack...

Article 58b

The parties to the conflict shall...avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas.The rats' dens are typically set up in or adjacent to civilian apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, mosques, and so forth. Video tape is available showing Arabs launching missiles from schools.

Article 51/2

The civilian population...shall not be the object of attack. Acts of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited...Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Arabs typically target Israeli civilians.
Before I proceed with a reality check, let me state clearly that I am in favor of an alliance between Turkey and Israel...but one based on an equality in that relationship and the highest moral standards of behavior humanly possible by both parties towards others.
 
So, let's now begin...

Unfortunately, the same folks who have declared over one fifth of their own non-Turkish, Kurdish population (over twelve million people) to be "non-existent" in the past --they're really just "Mountain Turks, don't you know?--and have taken steps to outlaw Kurdish language and culture (Arabic is one of Israel's two official languages), are, once again, enraged at Israel for going after both Arab terrorists and their infrastructure in Gaza. These are the same folks who have killed tens of thousands of Kurds (and many others as well) over the years in the name of their own security, have invaded neighboring Iraq for similar reasons, etc., etc., and so forth.

Again, I favor alliances with Ankara, but that particular relationship with Israel must not be an unbalanced affair...something to use when relations are on the downswing with Syrian Arabs, for example.

 
Ankara complains about Israel being forced to take steps to prevent Gaza from becoming one giant base to launch death, destruction, and terror from--while Israel has agreed in theory to an Arab state being set up there--but totally nixes the idea of an independent Kurdish state being set up in adjacent northern Iraq for the Turks' own security reasons. Think about that for a minute. We'll return to this point a bit later.
 
For several years now, Arabs had a chance to begin to create that 22nd state they say they need in Gaza. All they did with the time and billions of dollars in aid which poured in was to use both to terrorize their Jewish neighbor instead. Gaza was a test--and the Arabs flunked it big time.

So, it's time to use that American expression and really "talk turkey (speak candidly) to Turkey," if you know what I mean.

 
Israel has neglected a brave people who have helped many Jews in the past. Just ask the hundreds of thousands in Israel who originated in Iraq. Israeli leaders have done this largely to not anger the Turks
over this painful issue. So the latter's policies towards the Kurds were treated in a hands off manner. Indeed, Israel has helped Ankara fight Kurds who have resorted to violent means to achieve their own political rights in Turkey...a highly controversial policy.

Since the Turks, however, insist on joining much of the rest of the world in applying hypocritical double standards towards the Jewish State, the time has come for certain truths to at long last come out in the open.

Some thirty-five million Kurds remain stateless today, often at someone else's mercy. At a time when much of the world insists that justice demands that there be yet another Arab state, there is a nauseating silence--in most of the media, in academia, at the United Nations, and so forth--over the plight of this people.

Spread out over a region which encompasses parts of southeastern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and other adjoining areas as well, these modern day descendants of ancient Medes, Guti, and Hurrians continue to find themselves in very deadly and precarious circumstances.

Kurdish culture and language have periodically been "outlawed" in attempts to Arabize or Turkify them, and in an age when other d
ormant nations/national groups were able to seize the moment with the collapse of empires, Kurds were repeatedly denied this chance by an assortment of so-called "friends" and foes alike.

Having been promised independence after World War I, the Kurds saw their hopes dashed after the British received a favorable decision from the League of Nations on the Mosul Question in 1925. Mosul and Kirkuk were where much of the oil was located, and the main arm of British imperial power--the navy--had recently switched from coal to oil.

The Brits decided that their long term interests involved not angering the Arabs, who--by their own writings--declared that the rise of an independent Kurdistan would be seen as the equivalent of the birth of another Israel.

 
Regardless of scores of millions of non-Arabs living in the region (including one half of Israel's
Jews who were refugees from "Arab"/Muslim lands), Arabs declared a political monopoly over what they regarded as "purely Arab patrimony." We are living with the consequences of this mindset today along with the related confrontation of the Dar ul-Islam vs. the Dar al-Harb. Hamas and the current Gaza mess are but the latest manifestations of this.

For a number of reasons--such as not angering Arabs and Turks alike--the State Department insists, after hundreds of thousands of Kurds have been maimed, gassed, and slaughtered in other ways by Arabs just in Iraq alone over the last half century (not long ago, Syran Arabs and Iranians renewed their own previous slaughter of Kurds as well), that Kurds will never gain independence. Recall that the heartland of ancient Kurdistan had been in the oil-rich region around Kirkuk.

Both Ankara and the State Department insist that the Kurds remain part of a united Iraq, regardless
of the bloody consequences this will likely have for them in the future yet again once America leaves the scene.

America's autonomous federal dream, while looking good on paper, will probably not last far beyond America's withdrawal. The majority Shi'a, like the Kurds, massacred and long suppressed by Saddam's Sunni Arabs, now have other plans. Furthermore, as the Brits earlier armed Arabs in their confrontations with the Kurds, America has now done likewise in rebuilding Iraq's Shi'a Arab-led army.

The same State Department--which fought President Truman over America's recognition of a reborn Israel in  1948--insists that there be no partition of Mesopotamia/Iraq. Britain had earlier received the Mandate for Mesopotamia at the same time it received the Mandate for Palestine in the post-World War I era upon the break up of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. But, unlike Palestine (the name Rome gave to Judaea after the Jews’ second revolt for freedom), which would have proposed and actual partitions in attempts to arrive at a compromise solution between Arab and Jew, a much larger Mesopotamia was/is somehow declared to be incapable of doing this same bit of justice for its Kurds.

The main reason put forth for why Mesopotamia/Iraq is incapable of this sort of partition is the potential for instability it will cause in the region. Not only will oil-rich Arabs be miffed at someone else gaining national rights in "their" region, but the Turks, in particular, will supposedly have a fit due to their own large Kurdish minority. Not to mention that Iranian mullahs have been collaborating with Ankara to suppress Kurds as well.

While strong Turco-American and Turco-Israeli alliances are worthy of support, the Turks are wrong on this matter, and too many others have allowed them to get away with this for too long. While it is understandable that they're nervous about the potential problems, this does not give them the right to have a veto power over the plight of some thirty-five million long-oppressed, stateless, and politically abused Kurds.

 
Again, think of the irony here regarding Ankara's outrage at Israel over unabashedly rejectionist Arabs who could have had their additional state (#22) decades ago had they just not continued
to work towards the destruction of the sole, tiny nation of the Jews.

An independent Kurdistan set up in northern Iraq--under the right conditions--might actually be a blessing for the Turks. Those Kurds--like those diaspora Jews, Greeks, Armenians, etc.--wishing to live in an independent state could migrate to it. An arrangement could be made whereby the oil wealth of the area could be shared with the Turks as well, since they feel they got robbed via the earlier decision by the League of Nations on the Mosul Question.

Putting things into an even more important and broader perspective, consider the following
facts:

The CIA shows Israel to have a population of about 7 million people, of whom some 20% are Arab. Among the latter (the freest Arabs, by the way, anywhere in the region) are some extremely hostile elements. Israel's territory is about 20,770 sq km.

Turkey has a population of about 69 million people, of whom about 20%
are Kurds. Turkey's territory is about 780,580 sq km.

 
About 38 Israels would fit into Turkey.

Yet, despite its miniscule size, Ankara, Washington, and others have no problem demanding that Israel allow the creation of another Arab terrorist state, dedicated to Israel's destruction, right on its doorstep. Ignored are the repeated proclamations by even so-called Arab "moderates" that Oslo and all other such "peace initiatives" are but Trojan Horses, steps along the way in the Arabs' post-' 67 destruction in phases strategy for Israel.

Now, how will the fifth of Israel's population that is Arab react to this adjacent potential development? And how will the majority of Hashemite Jordan, which is also mostly Palestinian Arab (however you define that, since many, if not most, "Palestinians" entered Palestine from elsewhere in the region during the Mandatory Period), react to this?

 
Arafat's boys (Mahmoud Abbas's alleged current Fatah "moderates") had already tried a takeover of Jordan in 1970. They were crushed in King Hussein's "Black September." And Israel's mobilization in the north sent a message to Fatah's Syrian allies at the time as well. Yet no one seems to be worried about any destabilizing effects here.

The same hypocrites who declare that Israel must grossly endanger itself so that yet another Arab state might be born insist that Kurds must remain forever stateless because of some problems their freedom
might cause to a Turkey nearly forty times Israel's size in territory and over eleven times its size in population...and with the exact same 80% to 20% mix of potential "headaches."

There's no moral defense for this.

 
Indeed, the Turks definitely need to review the wisdom regarding those living in glass houses not throwing stones.

Asking Kurds to forsake the creation of their one, sole state for the pipedream of an egalitarian Iraq is a travesty of justice if ever there was one.

 
Regardless of their religious coloration, the vast majority of Arabs are in no sharing mood when it comes to questions about what they see as "purely Arab patrimony." They're the rulers, the rest are the ruled...Period...End of conversation.
 
Kurds do not aim to destroy Turkey in order to see their own dreams of independence--or, at minimum, a highly entrenched, sustainable autonomy--come true.
 
The reason Israel has fought war after war with Arabs is because the latter refuse to grant millions of other non-Arab peoples in the region even a tiny sliver of the very rights they demand for themselves. Many people besides Jews have been slaughtered and victimized by Arabs this way.
 
Ankara would be wise to reconsider its stance on all of these issues--especially since it insists on seating itself upon a moral high horse.


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Gaza Ain't Warsaw...


 
 
 
                                   No, Mr. Jihadi...Gaza Isn’t Warsaw
                                                                         by Gerald A. Honigman
 
 
 
     I was treated to a nauseating sight the other night.
 
     Fair and balanced Fox News interviewed an Arab about the Gaza thing to get that side of the current fighting. I can’t remember his name. It doesn’t matter.
 
     His response was typical, one that anyone who has followed the Arab-Israeli conflict over the last century could recite: The "Palestinians" (Arabs) are the new Jews, and the Jews are the new Nazis.

     But Arabs already have almost two dozen states on over six million square miles of territory
, you reply--including one sitting on some 80% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine renamed Jordan. And Jews were stateless until the resurrection of their sole, tiny nation.
 
     Shhhhh...Don’t ruin a fairy tale. Besides, don’tcha know, these ain’t Arabs, they’re "Palestinians" (so what if most came into the Mandate from elsewhere).
 
     Back to Fox News...
 
     Mr. Jihadi’s version of Arab Jews and Jew Nazis is the now popular Gaza is the Warsaw Ghetto claim. For that desecration alone, if there is a Hell, he’ll be there. And he’ll have Adolph--er Pat-- Buchanan, from the right (Gaza is Israel’s concentration camp for Arabs), and zillions of lefties with similar claims keeping him company.
 
     Given ignorance and idiocy, a bit of background is in order.
 
     In 1940, the Nazis began to concentrate most of Poland’s three million Jews into several ghettos. The word ghetto itself comes from a much earlier Church legacy vis-a-vis the Jews. One of the debates among the Church Fathers had to do with what should be done with the "Deicide People." Guess who they allegedly are?
 
     The "gentle" St. Augustine won out--at least at some times and in some places.
 
     So, instead of Jews being burned alive in their synagogues and such (which others suggested and which happened anyway), they were to purposely be kept alive--but in such a lowly state, that when people looked upon them, all would be reminded of their crime and recognize the Deicide People.
 
     The ghetta (today’s ghetto) was where the iron foundries were located in Italy–the smelliest, most unhealthy areas of the city...Perfect for god-killers (I won’t insult G_d by capitalizing the previous word), gated and locked as well. These soon spread throughout Christendom, while the "Arab" World constructed its own versions, mellahs, for its kilab yahud–Jew Dogs. Does anyone seriously wonder why Israel had to be reborn?
 
     The ghetto in Warsaw was the largest. It held about 400,000 Jews who were told that they would be "resettled" to the East or, at worse, would be going to forced labor camps to work for the Germans.
 
     By 1942, however, word of the Nazis’ true plans had made it into the ghetto. The cattle cars were heading for extermination camps, part of the Final Solution. While some still kept their heads in the sand (not unlike too many Jews to this day), many faced reality and joined the resistance. This was harder for Jews since they often faced the anti-Semitism of the other folks as well--not only the Germans. The road to Auschwitz was indeed paved by many ingrained "religious" teachings...
 
     The full-fledged uprising of David vs. Goliath began in 1943 in the ghetto.
 
     Armed with some pistols, revolvers, home-made weapons and explosives, and some Polish rifles and such paid for dearly, the Jews took on their tormentors and embarrassed them profusely until the Nazis blasted every place they could possibly hide.
 
     During the Holocaust, the Nazis singled out the women and children first. The attractive of the former might be used for pleasure before being murdered. The kids were killed right away as they were of no use...unless they wound up in the labs of Nazi doctors to be turned into human guinea pigs for all kinds of grotesque experiments. All of this is well documented. One and half million of the six million slaughtered--for no other reason than they were Jews--were children.
 
     Okay, so now let’s take a look at Mr. Jihadi’s Gaza "Warsaw Ghetto."
 
     Unlike the Jews who weren’t trying to kill any Germans, the Arabs of Gaza elected an organization dedicated to blowing both Jews and their State apart.
 
     The Arabs killed in the current fighting have been mostly fighters-–despite Arab claims. The non-combatants killed have deliberately been used as human shields by their own "heroes." Where are the U.N., International Court Of Justice, academic, and other voices crying out about this blatant Arab war crime? They're as useless here as they are in stopping Arab genocide in black Africa.
 
     Unlike the Nazis who sought out every last Jew for extermination, Israel has deliberately already sent its own soldiers to their deaths on the ground, fighting door to door knowing, in advance, of booby traps waiting for them, but trying to avoid the deaths of non-combatant Arabs. I disagree with that policy.
 
     When the Allies fought the Nazis and Japan, they fire bombed German cities and nuked the latter.
 
     Israel is fighting Arabs who want it dead. No Israel, regardless of its size, is acceptable. Arab kids are brainwashed from the diaper to the camps to the schools to the mosques to murder Jews. Nothing Israel does humanely--treating Arabs in Israeli hospitals, supplying its Arab enemies (who else does that?), attempted compromises, and so forth--matters. Sad, but true.
 
     So, why waste Jewish lives? The world’s hypocrites will condemn Israel’s self defense anyway. Gaza should be taken care of from above. Actually, perhaps the Jews should follow the Arabs' own Hama Solution.
 
     When Syria’s elder Assad had "problems," he wiped out 40,000 of his enemies in a month by leveling the town of Hama with artillery and so forth. Who screamed about that?
 
     Unlike Nazis who targeted Jews for just being Jews (as Arabs do as well), Israel has tried its best--given the Arab human shield game--to target Jihadi combatants rather than just plain Jihadis.
 
     If killing Arabs was Israel’s goal, does anyone seriously doubt that it could have made Gaza Arabrein by now?
 
     Finally, as I write this, there’s much talk now about a ceasefire--to give Hamas time to rearm and regroup.
 
     Not a good idea...especially since many of those tunnels delivering weapons from Egypt’s Sinai are still functional. Imagine if this was reversed, and Israel allowed its territory to be used against Egypt–-with which it supposedly has a peace treaty–-this way?
 
     Israel should not accept any ceasefire unless it makes it very clear to all of the parties--especially an America under President Obama--that the next missiles fired against Israeli towns (as some ten thousand have already been since Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza several years back) will see Gaza turned into a remake of Dresden 1945, after the American and British fire bombing. Germany finally got the message and the war soon ended. Sometimes there’s no other way--especially if your enemy has genocidal intentions.
 
     Unlike the "civilian" Arabs’ murderous attitudes towards Jews and Israel which polls continuously confirm, Dresden’s German and Hiroshima’s Japanese civilians didn’t seek the destruction of America.
 
     Arabs have had years and billions of dollars in aid to begin building that 22nd state they say they must have. They’ve used the time and the money to prepare for and conduct hostilities against their Jewish neighbor instead...a test of peaceful intent flunked with flying colors.
 
     All of this must be kept in mind when Israel finally decides to fight to win or to deliver, at the very least, the closest thing to a knockout punch.
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Gaza School Daze

Gaza School Daze

by Gerald A. Honigman


So, there I was minding my own business eying the flat ocean on the way to work, wondering what fish were hitting in the surf.

I must be a glutton for punishment...why else would I turn on National Public Radio in the midst of renewed Arab-Israeli "festivities?"

Sure enough, on January 7th’s morning show, some woman reporter could barely hold back her sick glee at being able to report about Israel’shelling of a U.N. school causing numerous deaths. Anything that causes Israel to look bad, NPR jumps on.

While reporting the news is understandable, deliberately reporting only one side of the news is distortion. NPR has a history of this...but the lefty Jews keep funding it anyway. And many of those NPR reporters are also members of The Tribe. After a virtual dissertation of Israel’s alleged crime, you’re lucky to hear some passing footnote at the end posing as "the other side." Unbelievable...

And, of course, it’s not just NPR.

Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post, wrote a syndicated piece which appeared in my local paper on December 30th singing praises to Ehud Olmert’s name...the guy perhaps most responsible for Israel’s current headaches, which were long in the coming. Diehl typifies too much of the mainstream media today. He also ended his op-ed ("...Israel’s hard-line show") by stating that "...it may be many years before Israel again has a leader as willing to make peace."

Guess what? Ever since Israel was forced to fight–again–for its life in 1967, every Prime Minister has held his or her hand out to the Arabs to make a real peace. General Dayan offered, right after the war, to return all the territories for such a deal. The Arabs’ collective answer has often been repeated–the "Three Nos of Khartoum." But Diehl and his ilk aren’t interested in such things.

As for the Arabs living in the portion of the Palestine Mandate left after Jordan wound up with most of it in 1922, they offered Arafat’s famous hudna (ceasefire), his "Peace of the Quraysh," to the Jews in return for the latter giving away what was left of the store. It was and is modeled on the temporary halt to hostilities the Arabs’ Prophet Muhammad agreed to until he could muster the strength to conquer his enemies. Even the most "moderate" of these Arabs still have this in mind...regardless of others’ wishful thinking. Think America’s Foggy Folks, the European Union, and so forth.

Back to the recent school casualties...

It’s no news that Arabs have a long history of using their own women and children as human shields. Pictures made the rounds of Hizbullah gun installations set up in apartment buildings in Lebanon a few years back. Offices of Hamas leaders, the PFLP, and so forth are routinely set up in such places as well, with arms and munitions stored in schools, hospitals, and so forth.

Shoot, maim, terrorize, destroy, and/or murder Jewish property or people--then cry to the assorted world hypocrites and idiots and show off your dead kids who you hid behind when Israel finally is forced to strike back.

Here’s a video of Arabs firing from just such a Gaza school a while back...

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/129266

It’s should be of no surprise, therefore, that Arabs are up to their same old tricks. And once again their own innocents–or, at least, non-combatants--pay part of the price. But while we’re at it, also please recall that the latter elected those "heroes... Know what I mean? By the way, all of this is contrary to the Perfidy and other clauses of the Geneva Conventions–war crimes, big time, as is deliberately targeting Jewish civilians.

Now, here’s what reasonable folks really deserve from NPR and all those other holier-than-thou media types who watched Israel take over ten thousand rocket and mortar hits since leaving Gaza a few years back and barely–if ever–wrote an editorial, produced a radio program, news broadcast, or such about this...

Where’s the NPR producer–after all of these years–who will do an in-depth program on the above repeated Arab war crimes?

Not newsworthy?

Where’s the producer and reporter who’ll ask Arabs what they’ve done with all the billions of dollars in aid they’ve already received–except acquire more and more means to attack their tiny Jewish neighbor which is practically invisible on a world map. Twenty-one Arab states (including one already sitting on most of "Palestine") on over six million square miles of territory (mostly seized and forcibly Arabized from non-Arab peoples) but they still can’t leave the Jews and their resurrected state alone. The second proposed Arab state in Palestine will be their 22nd.

As many of us have asked, is this issue really not a no brainer?

Would that gal chomping at the bit to embarrass Israel--a perennial NPR specialty--want her own government to ignore her own house, neighborhood, school or so forth being attacked this way...repeatedly? Duh...

Hey Jews! Be like good Christians and just turn your other cheek!

Sure...show me the Christian nations which do this.

Indeed, who but the Jews would have put up with this manure for so many years before striking back hard. Yet the Washington Post’s Diehl labels Israel as being "hardline" for trying to put an end to this terror–er, sorry Jackson, "militancy."

The sad, all important fact is that the goal of Israel’s Arab neighbors is still the destruction of the sole Jewish State–for both the terrorists and those who harbor and support them.

For Hamas, this is professed openly; for Abbas–a sweet-talking (sometimes) Arafat in a suit–this is a bit more disguised. As I like to say, blown buses bring bad press. And there’s lots of money at stake for those willing to say the right stuff to an all-too-willingly gullible West...in English. Recall that the rockets were hitting Israel when Abbas was in Gaza as well.

Gaza must be a lesson to the next Israeli leaders who will hopefully replace Olmert’s crew very shortly.

Israel cannot risk having its main population centers in its narrow waist exposed to Abbas’s Fatah, latter-day Arafatians--who remain as rejectionist as Hamas when it comes to the idea. Abbas and his crew do not deny this. They think they’re going to swamp Israel with millions of alleged returning refugees and so forth.

America is now in the process of building Abbas’s Fatah army up so it will be able to kill more Jews. That’s the reality here after Israel hands Fatah a victory over Hamas it couldn’t win itself. Look at the "moderate" Fatah and Palestinian Authority official web sites, maps, textbooks, and so forth if you think otherwise. Part of what Israel is doing to Hamas involves sending Fatah a message as well...

Even in an age of satellites and missiles, land is still important.

Israel must thus insist on a fair territorial compromise, giving it the somewhat secure borders it was promised via UNSC Resolution 242 after the June ‘67 war instead of the suicidal armistice lines which were imposed upon it after the Arab invasion in 1948 which did nothing but invite continued Arab aggression.

 

 

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Gaza--Do It Right Or Not At All




                                            Israel: Do It Right Or Don't Do It At All
                                                                     by Gerald A. Honigman
    
     

     Figures...the one day I don't read the paper or check my computer for news first thing in the morning...

    
Ugh!

     Turns out the Jews finally overdosed and moved on Gaza while I was in the very midst of writing this article. So now, after having to plead my case with publishers I already drive crazy, please check it out anyway. Let's see how good the Israelis do. And hopefully, I'll be proven wrong...on at least some counts.


     One of the so-called "Arab World's" greatest scholars, Ibn Khaldun, singled out the Jews centuries ago when he wrote The Muqaddimah.
   
      Writing of the rise and fall of civilizations, he stressed the overwhelming importance of 'asabiyah--unique group consciousness--to the overall fate of any nation.
    
     While Ibn Khaldun noted that the Jews had one of the most "noble houses" in history, he explained that, as a result of losing their 'asabiyah, they had subsequently suffered constant humiliations as a result.
    
     The Muqaddimah
stressed that the Jews were forced to wander in the desert for forty years due to their "meekness." Ibn Khaldun held that this was necessary so that a new generation would arise with a new, more powerful 'asabiyah.

     Prime Minister Olmert and his crew should pay close attention to this...Jews can't afford yet another of such wanderings.
    
     After putting up with countless mortar and rocket terror launched from Gaza since it unilaterally withdrew from there years ago, it looks like Israel, under Olmert and Livni, has gotten a green light from Washington to do what should have been done long ago. Unfortunately, these are not the leaders to do it right.
    
     Too many of Olmert's crew have much in common with the "post-Zionism" plaguing too much of Israel today.

     Too many of Israel's teachers, especially at the higher levels, lack that 'asabiyah Ibn Khaldun stressed and have spread the disease to their students as well.
    
     Israel's war against Hizbullah in Lebanon was a result of such new leaders. An Israel under Menachem Begin, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, or Arik Sharon would not have fought Hizbullah largely by the Arabs' own game plan. Olmert's crew did--with disastrous results.

     And now this same crew is telegraphing its punch to do a virtual Lebanon II in Gaza.
    
     More young Israelis will be sent on the ground into deadly booby traps set for human and tank alike.
    
     Arabs like to joke about how Jews value life...

     We'll, for starters, they don't believe that they'll have seventy-two virgins awaiting them in Heaven as a reward for blowing up Arab babes and other innocents the way Arabs see this picture for themselves. So, the Arabs are correct--for this and many other reasons as well.
    
     But, following up on this observation, Israel thus needs to play a very different game in Gaza.
   
     Hamas and the Gazan Arabs who elected it to office know that Israel can't lay low forever. It has deliberately been trying to bait Israel into fighting at this time. But I suspect that Hamas expects Israel to follow a game plan approved by Washington--especially the State Department--which will not allow it to do what really needs to be done here...actually win.

     Israel will be allowed to punish Foggy Bottom's bad cop terrorists for the sake of the alleged latter-day Arafatian good cop ones of its darling, Mahmud Abbas. In reality, both have the same long-term goal for the Jewish State. But there's billions of dollars at stake for the winners. Recall Arafat's legendary Swiss bank accounts and so forth.

     Israel must indeed answer terror, but at minimum cost to itself. Every soldier Israel loses is like America losing about sixty.

     No matter how "good" it tries to be here, it will be condemned anyway...So, do it as best as possible.

     Those who deliberately set up terror shops amidst their own civilian human shields will be responsible for the deaths of innocents (and keep in mind that those "innocents" gladly elected the leaders they now have). The Geneva Conventions condemn such cowardice and further state that it will not prevent retribution. See the Perfidy Clause and so forth.

     So, here's the real plan...

     Bombers, not helicopters, will take the lead here.

     Israel has already telegraphed its punch loudly and clearly in the aftermath of all Gaza singing Hamas's praises for hundreds of mortars and rockets fired at Israel in just the past few weeks. Newspaper articles all over the world have reported of Israel's upcoming invasion.

     Massive, quick retaliation, following America's own Powell Doctrine for war, must be the guideline.  If having death and destruction fired non-stop at your towns by folks who don't recognize your very right to exist is not war, then what is?

     Bombers will need to seek out major groupings of armed fighters. So, the time for the strike should be set for when Hamas is having another of its major rallies or parades. Hopefully, Israeli intelligence can redeem itself here a bit. Hundreds must be sent to Paradise at one time--enough so that there will be a shortage of virgins.

     Qassam rockets and such must be answered by artillery. Forget the tit-for-tat manure that Arabs only laugh at... Massive barrages must target sites from which terror is launched. Prospective mine fields and booby traps must be blasted as well.

     Any suspected hideouts of Hamas leadership must be taken out. Israel had opportunities in earlier decades to do this and refused because of the human shield thing. Not this time...

     Hide with them, die with them. President Bush almost said those exact words himself.

     Many underground bunkers as well as tunnels have likely been constructed by Arabsin preparation for Gaza's virtual  Lebanon II. This is a good time to test those bunker-busters, assuming Israel has gotten some decent intelligence here before it uses those expensive bombs.

     Israeli teens and others should not be sent in on the ground until everything has been done to reduce their casualties. To Hell with those "innocents" who'd slit Jews's throats in an instant given the chance.

     It's time for Israel to fight to win...like any other country would. So...

     I don't recommend hitting Gaza now.

     Conventional wisdom states that Israel should attack before President Obama takes office along with his list of anti-Israel advisers.

     While this is a consideration, it is trumped by the make-up of Israel's current leaders and the wisdom of Ibn Khaldun.

     Israel has waited this long to strike. It must wait a bit longer...until new elections produce leaders for whom the Jews's Zionist 'asabiyah is once more calling both the political and military shots.

     At that time, it will be able to fight to win--not merely play the game that others have in store for it.
    
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Kurds, Jews, And Shi'a Shoes

 

                                                                      Kurds, Jews, And Shi’a Shoes

                                                                   by Gerald A. Honigman

     As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, on a recent surprise visit to Iraq, President Bush had to duck when a Shi’a Arab journalist threw shoes at him in protest of American policies and presence in Iraq. During a news conference, Muntadhar al-Zaidi yelled out,"this is a gift from the Iraqis, a farewell kiss, you dog" and fired away. Thrown shoes and dogs are about as low as you go in the Arab world. Forget about Marley and Me, Rin Tin Tin, or Old Yeller.

     I wish I could say that I was shocked by this disrespect usually reserved for such folks as the tolerant Arabs’ kilab yahud—Jew dogs. I wasn’t.

     Polls show that most Arab Iraqis—especially Shi’a—supported al-Zaidi. While he was roughed up by those with a stake in the current regime, those later reports reveal the pulse of the nation. While the Sunni have no love for America either—they were Saddam’s folks—they now fear what’s in store for themselves later on.

     While estimates of the dead vary (some hundreds of thousands), the 60% of Iraq who are Shi’a had their own aspirations suppressed only via the iron fist of the Sunni Arabs’ Saddam. He employed the same murderous tactics against them as he did with non-Arab Kurds in the north. Similar bloody actions against others in neighboring Iran by the majority non-Arab, Persian Shi’a are probably not a bad model for what to expect after America leaves a Shi’a-dominated Iraq as well …Payback time, so to speak. And don’t expect a President Obama to move back in.

      Unfortunately, the Kurds will also be caught up in this murderous, age old Arab feud. The one thing both Shi’a and Sunni Arabs can agree on (just like with Israel, the black African Sudan, Berber North Africa, and elsewhere) is that Kurds should have no claims on alleged “purely Arab patrimony.”

     Having supported America’s move against Saddam, decades of intense study, publication in academic journals and elsewhere, and involvement with the region still made me very wary.

     While the Arabs owed Great Britain a huge debt for the very creation of a united, Arab-ruled Iraq out of the post-World War I Mandate of Mesopotamia, this didn’t stop them not long afterwards from rising up against what they only saw as British imperialism.

     No giving the devil his due here…Use him then lose him.

     I can understand that. Too bad Arabs can’t grant this same understanding to others though.

      Imperialism is only nasty when it’s not Arabs dishing it out. How do you think the region became “purely Arab patrimony” in too many an Arab mind?

     Without the Brits’ involvement, the Turkish phoenix rising under Ataturk from the ruins of the centuries’ old Ottoman Empire would have surely grabbed the oil-rich region around Mosul (which it formerly ruled) and probably would have extended its claim to the black gold of Kirkuk as well.

     To make the new prospective Arab state viable (the British navy had recently switched from coal to oil and was the main arm of the British Empire), the Brits had to attach the oil of the Kurdish north to the Sunni Arab center and Shi’a Arab oil of the south.

     In the process of siring the Middle East’s version of Yugoslavia, London thus shafted Kurds out of the best chance they ever had at regaining their own independence…something the Brits had promised them earlier as well.

     After having their very country created and handed to them by the Brits (who also supplied aircraft and such to fight the Kurds), the Arabs soon revolted to try to drive the Brits out.

     Granted, imperialism has its nasty side, and the Brits created an Arab Iraq for their own reasons, yet still…    

     So, the point here is that America should have known not to expect any gratitude from most Iraqi Arabs either. Hence the thrown shoes, the thrower now a national hero, and so forth.

     There’s yet another angle to this…

     Think of all the American blood, lives, money, and other aid which have been spent for the sake of Arabs in Iraq, giving them new freedoms which they have never had.

     Trillions of American dollars will be spent before it’s over, billions each month. Visit a local VA hospital to see just some of the other tragic, lasting costs…That shoe-thrower who called President Bush a dog would have literally been fed to the dogs if he tried that trick with the man America freed him from. The innocents who died whom the shoe thrower complained about mostly died because of the same cowardly Arab trick Israel deals with daily. Arabs love to use their non-combatants as human shields…against the Geneva Conventions, and so forth. They shoot and then run behind the skirts of their women and toys of their kids.

     Was/is America hoping to get something positive for itself as a result of its Iraq expenditures? Sure…But does that erase the above truisms?

     Think about those anti-Israel voices quick to protest about two billion dollars in aid sent to Israel each year…an investment whose return comes back to us positively in many ways.

     The current war in Iraq costs America more (for the sake of Arabs who mostly hate us as “infidels” in a context of a war for their Dar ul-Islam) in one week than Israel gets in foreign assistance in one year. And, in exchange for that assistance, the State Department feels it has the right to pressure Jews into suicidal concessions.

      America has already spent about $500 billion dollars for Iraq, with much more set to come.

     It would take Israel centuries to get this much aid from America. And Israel doesn't ask for American blood to be shed on its behalf or to be bribed to display America's own values and democratic inclinations. How long will the latter last among Arabs after America's exit from Iraq?

     Ironically, the one people in Iraq who better share our values--the Kurds--are the folks the Arabist James Baker types in the State Department are determined to shaft yet againon behalf of Arabs who want to be sure that oil in Kurdish lands remains part of the "purely Arab patrimony."

     Sound familiar?

     Same shafting game you read above…just different shafters.

     While I didn’t vote for the Obama-Biden ticket largely because of the long list of known anti-Semitic and anti-Israel friends and advisors Obama has aligned himself with (he’s already brought several into his future Administration), Senator Joe Biden has a better understanding of the Yugoslavian nature of Iraqi demographics than most politicians.

     I’m hoping against the odds that he’ll pull more weight than the shaft the Jews and the Kurds Arabist types which are all-too-common in the State Department (and among Obama’s buddies) which Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will soon be leading.

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Of Mumbai And Beyond...


 

Of Mumbai And Beyond…

by Gerald A. Honigman

 

 

 
     The recent atrocities committed in Mumbai, India in the name of the ongoing quest for the spread of the Arab and Arabizeds' Dar ul-Islam is merely a continuation of a war waged by Muhammed's followers for about fourteen centuries now against the Dar al-Harb…the realm of war, i.e. all peoples and lands not yet conquered either in the name of what Arab pipedreams proclaim to be "purely Arab patrimony" or the faith of the Arabs' Seal of the Prophets.
 
     As Arab armies burst out of the Arabian Peninsula around the mid-7th century C.E., lands native to other Semitic but non-Arab peoples (despite the wishful thinking of those who espouse the Winkler-Caetani Theory--Jews, Assyrians, Phoenicians/Lebanese, etc.), Copts, Berbers, Kurds, Persians and other Aryan peoples, Turks, black Africans, Indians, and others fell one after another to Arab and Arabized imperial conquests. Numerous millions of people were slaughtered in the process--continuing to this very day. Others willingly jumped on the Arab bandwagon to gain shares of the conquests.
 
     Muhammad of Gaur first spread the Dar ul-Islam into India in the 12th century C.E., and the highlight of these conquests came with the Moghul Empire several centuries later.
 
     The results were lasting, and the partition of the Indian subcontinent into a Muslim Pakistan and largely Hindu India in 1947 reflected this. During that same year, Arabs would reject a similar partition of what was left of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine after Arab Jordan was created from nearly 80% of it in 1922. Had Arabs accepted this, they would have wound up with about 90% of the whole with the creation of their 2nd, not 1st, Arab state in "Palestine"--the name the Roman Emperor Hadrian gave to Judaea after the Jews' second revolt for freedom in 133-135 C.E.
 
     There are, indeed, similarities between what Israel faces in Judea and Samaria today--renamed, as a result of 20th century British imperialism and Jordanian Arab conquest, the "West Bank"--and what India faces in Kashmir and elsewhere. The one big difference, of course, is that there are about one billion Indians (who were never earlier subjected to a forced diaspora like the Jews were after taking on Rome) instead of some six million Jews facing similar threats from Arab and/or Arabized.
 
     Over the years, more and more Indians themselves have begun to notice this. As they do, they see the linkage between Arabs blowing up Jews on buses and restaurants, and Arabized Pakistanis blowing up and massacring Hindus and others in Parliament and in hotels in Mumbai.
 
     Before moving on, something else must be said about those partitions of the Mandate of Palestine and the Indian subcontinent mentioned earlier…

 
     While working for the liberation of India from British imperial occupation, Mohandas Gandhi opposed the partition of the Indian subcontinent into a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan. He believed that people of all religious faiths should be able to get along in the same nation. He was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist.
 
     So much for getting along…Some places it works, some places it's laughable. The Mahatma didn't understand the nature of the enemy he was facing…an enemy who sees justice only in terms of its own ilk.
 
     Gandhi opposed Zionism--the national liberation movement of the Jews--to the very end; his major statement circulated as an editorial in the Harijan of November 11, 1938. Among other things, while first professing his supposed "sympathies" for perennially persecuted Jews, he next claimed that...
    
     Palestine of the biblical conception is not a geographical tract. 
    
     Actually, he did get that one right. Palestine wasn't...It represented a vague geographical area according to the ancient Greeks.
 
     As mentioned above, the name itself was bestowed on Judaea--the defined land of the Jews--by Hadrian, after the Jews' second major war (133-135 C.E.) for their independence against the Romans. To squash their hopes once and for all, he renamed the land itself after their historic enemies, the Philistines (Syria Palaestina), a non-Semitic Greek people from the area around the Aegean Sea.
 
     But Israel and Judaea were well-known nations/kingdoms peopled by Hebrews/Jews. As just one of many examples, the Habiru/Apiru--Hebrews--were written about throughout the extensive correspondence of ancient Pharaohs, their vassals, and others as well. And these folks evolved into a separate people with their own unique culture, language, history--and, yes, religion too. Gandhi saw the religious claims of Jews as their main, if not only, leg to stand on in this conflict...which he rejected.
 
     But the differences which separated Jews from Arabs were not simply theological. While Gandhi still has plenty of company here in his booboo (including academics), this doesn't excuse it. What made matters worse, if you don't really know, you shouldn't really say...especially if you see yourself, or are seen by others, as a major voice for justice and morality in this world.
 
     With all due respect to a man whom I otherwise greatly admire, Gandhi knew about as much about Jews and their history as most Jews know about the various Indian peoples. The difference, however, is that Jews would never have told the latter to remain forever victimized and at the potential receiving end of those with a long history of bloody conquest and persecution.
 
     While it would be nice if we all just really "got along," and there was no need for nationalism, national borders, and such, the reality is that this belief is too often fiction--and especially when it comes to the millennial Jewish experience...something Gandhi acknowledged himself when admitting "his sympathies."
 
     What else is new? In a post-Auschwitz age, people may grudgingly cry crocodile tears for dead Jews (a la the Holocaust and such), but have no room for empathy for live ones.
 
     Listen to Gandhi again:

     However...my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice...why should they
(Jews) not, like other peoples...make that country their home where they are born...? 
    
      
     I guess he hadn't heard of the Dreyfus Affair in "enlightened" France, or had not seen pictures of Jews waving their medals from World War I in front of the Nazis, or had not heard of General Grant's order of expulsion for the Jews of the South during America's Civil War, or of the Damascus Blood Libel in 19th century Arab Syria, etc., etc., and so forth…Again, what you don't really know, you really shouldn't comment on…
 
     Imagine, for one moment, that India--as massive as it is--underwent the experiences that the Jews in their tiny state did in their fight for freedom and independence against an imperial power like Rome, culminating in much of the population massacred and most of the rest forcibly exiled in that great Diaspora already mentioned.
 
     Next, imagine that those hypothetical Indians (like those real Jews) in almost everywhere that they eventually landed--the Muslim East as well as the Christian West--never knew what the morrow would bring...massacres, forced conversions, expulsions, ghettoization (the mellah in the Arab world), demonization, and such culminating in a holocaust which wiped out one third of all Indian people.
 
     Would Jews insist that Indians remain forever at someone else's mercy and give up on a resurrected national existence simply in order to survive?
 
     I think not. Yet that's what Gandhi expected of Jews. Einstein had a famous disagreement with Gandhi over this. So I'm in good company.
 
     Unlike Indians, Jews were literally forced into those above positions and had earlier tried desperately to follow Gandhi's advice to be "accepted"... but to no avail. As nasty as some aspects of the British Raj were, they do not compare to those millennial experiences of stateless Jews.
 
     So, the real question that the Mahatma and others needed to ask is…
 
     Is a victim any less a victim because his victimization has been the longest and most enduring?
 
     Should Jews (those above victims) have not wanted something better for their children? Should they have continued to put their trust only in those who declared them to be G_d-killers, children of the Devil, killers of Prophets, sons of apes and pigs, dogs, and such with periodic and predictable consequences?
 
     Sadly, the otherwise wise Gandhi thought so.
 
     Take a look below at how the ancient historians saw this identity issue. Here's a few of my favorite quotes from Vol. II, Book V The Works Of Tacitus, which discussed the Jews' first major revolt in 66-73 C.E. for their freedom and independence against the Soviet Union (or British Empire, Mr. Gandhi)--of its day, Rome. There were others (Dio Cassius, Josephus, etc.) who wrote about such things as well:

     It inflamed Vespasian's resentment that the Jews were the only nation who had not yet submitted...Titus was appointed by his father to complete the subjugation of Judaea... he commanded three legions in Judaea itself... To these he added the twelfth from Syria and the third and twenty-second from Alexandria... amongst his allies were a band of Arabs, formidable in themselves and harboring towards the Jews the bitter animosity usually subsisting between neighboring nations... 
     No, Rome was not just referring to the Jews' religious identity, which Gandhi spoke of, here, but to a distinct nation and people.
 
     If Indians can have a homeland, and Arabs almost two dozen created mostly via conquest of non-Arab peoples' lands, then why single out and deny Jews their miniscule, resurrected one?
 
     Towards the end of the movie made about Gandhi starring Ben Kingsley, there's a telling scene. Numerous people are seen walking in opposite directions, depicting the population exchange involving many millions of people going on after the Indian subcontinent's first partition.
 
     The same thing happened after the Arabs' attack on a reborn Israel in 1948.
 
      For every Arab refugee created as a result of this, there was a Jewish refugee fleeing Arab/Muslim lands--where they were commonly known as kilab yahud...Jew dogs. Unlike Arabs, however, the Jews didn't have almost two dozen other states (again, most conquered from non-Arab peoples) to choose from.
 
     Those in India and elsewhere who still demand that Israel agree to suicide so that Arabs can have yet another state must also take the following into consideration…
 
     How about allowing the creation of yet another Muslim state on Gandhi's own Indian subcontinent--besides Pakistan and Bangladesh?  
    
     Not that I agree with this (I obviously don't), but there are still Indians today making the same arguments that Gandhi made earlier in terms of Israel and Zionism. And there are, after all, about 160 million Muslims in India...
 
     With each new Arab or Arabized atrocity against India, those anti-Israel voices become fewer and fewer, but the ignorance leading up to those earlier positions must nonetheless be confronted head on.
 
     The wars of the Dar ul-Islam and/or Arabism target any and all who dare stand in their murderous, subjugating way--be they in Kosovo, Darfur, Kurdistan, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, the Philippines, Thailand, North Africa, and elsewhere…including India. The war against what Arabs call "their" kilab yahud--Jew dogs--has never been how big Israel is --but that Israel is.
 
     Jews were murdered along with Hindus and others recently in Mumbai. Reports from Indian officials stated that the Jews were singled out for special torture… a rabbi and his pregnant wife included. The couple's bloodied two-year old son had been clinging to his mother's body and was saved by his Indian nanny.
 
     I have, at last, one final thought (for now, at least) on these matters…
 
     I'm hoping that, in death, this latest tragedy, committed in the name of the Dar ul-Islam, will bring closer together both India and the Jew of the Nations--Israel--to confront a common enemy which refuses to grant any justice whatsoever to any but its own.
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The Saudis And Those Allegedly Crazy Israelis

                                                      The Saudi "Peace" Plan...An Offer Israel Can--And Should-- Refuse
                                                                                                           by Gerald A. Honigman
 
 
     According to a Times Of London story on November 16th, President-elect Obama allegedly stated that Israel would be crazy not to accept the resurrected, alleged Saudi "Peace Plan." Dubya and Condi are trying real hard to force this post-Thankgiving turkey down Israel's throat as well.
 
     A bit earlier, a stop along President Bush's Middle East trip--after further pressuring Jews to further accept his vision of Abbas's latter day terrorist Arafatians as being the good cops -- took President Bush to the sands of the Saudis and other Arabian Peninsula nations.
 
     A photo was published worldwide of the President wielding a sword along with Bahraini hosts, and Dubya brought along a New Year's present -- tens of billions of dollars in military aid...Hey, if we don't sell it to them, the Brits, Germans, French, and so forth certainly will. So goes the argument…
 
     During that visit, Bush asked if perhaps the Arabs might reach out to Israel a bit more. Saudi King Abdullah responded that he didn't know what else he could do. After all, he came up with his own "peace" (of the grave) plan some time ago...the one Obama now claims Israel would be nuts to reject. Here it is in a nutshell...
 
     If Israel (and not a Jewish Israel) merely agreed to return to its pre-'67, 9-mile wide '49 armistice line -- not border -- existence and agreed to be swamped by millions of "returning" jihadist refugees (many, if not most, of whom were new-comers to the Palestinian Mandate themselves) created because the Arab attempt to nip a reborn Israel in the bud backfired, along with everything else that the Arabs demand for the Jewish State's suicide, then the Saudis and other Arabs might normalize relations with Israel.
 
     Again, the above is the plan that Obama, Condi, and Dubya consider to be an offer that Israel simply can't refuse. Of course, they'd accept such a plan for America given similar circumstances (yeah, right)...What's even more sickening is that they get stuck-in-the-ghetto-minded Uncle Abe (instead of Uncle Tom) Jews like Ehud Olmert and Shimon Peres to sing praises to it as well. Where are those Israeli elections!!!???
 
     The Desert Kingdom has long gotten away with a virtual free pass from America and most of the rest of the world. The same folks -- including academics and others who should know better -- who routinely scrutinize Israel and the actions it's forced to take merely to survive, act deaf, dumb, and blind when it comes to the Saudis and too many other Arabs controlling much of the world's oil and influencing many other petrodollar-connected, multi-national corporations in the process. Together, this power and influence--via their many tentacles and manifestations-- make the much spoken about "Zionist lobby" look pitiful.
 
     Years back, when I was a card-carrying member of the London-based Anti-Slavery Society, persistent reports spoke of slavery throughout Saudi Arabia and other Arab lands…in the oil fields, and other places as well. It was still "above ground" up until the middle of the last century. But it was all treated as though it didn't exist. Have you ever noticed the many black Saudis and other Arabs? Guess who and what their mothers mostly were?
 
     Hush...
 
     Okay. Let's get back on track.
 
     What else can the Saudis do to reach out to the Jews? Here's some suggestions…
 
     On Dubya's trip, he pledged some twenty billion dollars in state-of-the-art aircraft, missiles, bombs, and so forth to the Saudis, supposedly to bolster them against the Iranian bogeyman.
 
     The problem is, despite all of those Arabs prancing around with their swords, each time they were threatened -- by fellow Arabs like Saddam or the Iranians--America had to pull their chestnuts out of the fire with our own blood and money anyway…despite billions of dollars in military aid given previously. Not to mention the Saudis' gift of most of the suicide/homicide bombers of 9/11.
 
     Previous sophisticated weaponry and aircraft that the Saudis pledged to place to face the Iranian threat were stationed a stone's throw from Israel instead. Indeed, they've been expanding the King Faisal Air Base at Tabuk. Prior to Bush's new holiday gift, the base contained about 50 advanced F-15S fighter-jets, which were sent to the northwestern facility on the eve of the U.S.-led war against Iraq in March 2003. Other promises related to those sales later proved to be worthless as well.
 
     So much for past and future similar Arab guarantees...
 
     What else could the Saudis do for Israel?
 
     How about honoring the pledges above, for starters.
 
     The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion is perhaps one of the most flagrantly anti-Semitic doctrines ever written. Guess who was one of the latter day leaders in endorsing and spreading it around?
 
     While the Saudis aren't the only Arabs still doing this sort of hate-spreading stuff ("peaceful" Egypt still freely indulges), ending such practices is another suggestion for the "what else"…as is ending dehumanizing "kilab yahud" -- Jew dogs -- even further by routinely also calling them sons of apes and pigs. Extend this further by revising the textbooks of Arab children, hatred in the media, sermons, and so forth which routinely demonize Jews and Israel, and an Arab "peace" might become more believable.
 
     Since America is poised to force a pax Saudia on Israel, are you ready for more?
 
     When Israel was squeezed by President Clinton at Camp David and Taba to cave in to Arafat and abandon its right to defensible "secure and recognized" borders instead of pre-'67 Auschwitz/armistice lines a la resolution 242, while Arafat rejected the plan, Clinton and the State Department's Arabist "deal" Prime Minister Barak was forced to accept became the new starting point for President Bush's subsequent Annapolis travesty. With numerous anti-Israel friends and advisors, it will certainly be a President Obama's as well.
 
     During the era of Clinton's "Oslo Peace," the more Israel tangibly conceded to Arabs, the more it bled.
 
     Guess who was paying Arab families tens of thousands of dollars each for having a "shahid" member blow up Jewish kids in teen night clubs, buses, pizzerias, and so forth during the Intifada (conducted under Arafat and Abbas's Fatah good cops' watch -- not that of Hamas's bad cops)? Maybe Saudi despots, who condemn women victims of rape to hundreds of lashes and humiliation, could revise their policy here also…
 
     The Saudis, like other Arabs, are always quick to claim the whole region as purely Arab patrimony.Hence their additional concern about Iranians and others who call the body of water in the north the Persian Gulf instead of the Arabian Gulf. More than just words are involved here.
 
     Since Arabs claim all that they acquired after Muhammad and successor Caliphal armies burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E., conquering and forcibly Arabized millions of non-Arab peoples and their lands, and then rejected the rights of Jews (one half in Israel who were refugees from "Arab"/Muslim lands), Kurds, Berbers, black Africans, and so forth in a later age of nationalism to resurrected political rights of their own, perhaps the Saudis need to be reminded of another time period in what is now their country…
 
     As I have written elsewhere, when Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, fled enemies in Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E. (the Hijrah), the inhabitants welcomed him. Medina had been developed centuries earlier as a thriving date palm oasis by Jews fleeing the Roman assault on Judaea (the banu-Qurayzah and banu-al-Nadir tribes, etc.). Medina's mixed population of Jews and pagan Arabs opened their doors to the future Prophet of Islam.
 
     Muhammad learned much from the Jews. While the actual timing of his decision on the qibla, the direction of prayer, may never be known, during his long sojourn with the Jews of Medina, his followers were instructed to pray towards Jerusalem. Early prominent Arab historians such as Jalaluddin came right out and openly stated that this was done as an attempt to win support among influential Jewish tribes (the "People of the Book") for Muhammad's religio-politcal claims.
 
     It is from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (which Arabs now claim Jews have no connection to -- including Bush's good buddy, Abbas) that Muslims believe Muhammad ascended to Heaven on his winged horse. A mosque, the Dome of the Rock, would later be erected on this Jewish holy site after the Arab imperialist caliphal conquest of the land in the 7th century C.E.
 
     Arab imperialism? Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh…… Only nasty westerners do that stuff--don'tcha know?
 
     There is no doubt among objective scholars that Jews had an enormous impact on both Muhammad and the religion that he founded. The holy sites for Muslims in Jerusalem (i.e. the mosques erected on the Temple Mount of the Jews) are now deemed "holy" precisely because of the critical years Muhammad spent after the Hijrah with the Jews.
 
     Not mincing words, the Temple Mount of the Jews had no prior meaning to pagan Arabs.
 
     While there was some early Christian influence, intense scholarship has shown that the Holy Law (Halakha) and Holy Scriptures of the Jews had a tremendous influence on the Qur'an, Islamic Holy Law (Shari'a), and so forth.
 
      Muhammad's "Jerusalem connection" was most likely not established until after his extended stay with his Jewish hosts. This was no mere coincidence…Muslim religious beliefs regarding Muhammad's conversations with the Angel Gabriel notwithstanding.
 
     When the Jews refused to recognize Muhammad as the chief political honcho, "Seal of the Prophets," and so forth, he turned on them with a bloody vengeance. Before long, with the exception of Yemen, there were virtually no Jews left on the Arabian Peninsula. And the direction of prayer was changed away from Jerusalem and towards the Kaaba in Mecca instead.
 
     Now, imagine, since Arabs claim all of Israel because of their previous conquests, that descendants of Arabian Jews staked their own claims as well? How about declaring Medina as a Jewish city?
 
     Certainly, when demands by Arabs for compensation and the like regarding Arab refugees comes to the front burner, Jewish refugees from "Arab" lands -- who number more and who left behind far more property and financial assets than their Arab counterparts did due to a war that Arabs themselves started -- need to put forth their own demands and need to backed by an Israeli government which will state unambiguously that there will be no fulfillment of the one claim without the other.
 
     What else can the Saudis and other Arabs do to convince Jews that the alleged Saudi "peace" now being promoted by assorted lame ducks and new ducks is indeed not simply a peace of the grave? After all, Muhammad made his "Peace of the Quraysh" too -- a temporary hudna designed to buy time until he could conquer his enemies. Arafat loved to talk about this regarding Israel. Dubya's darling, Abbas, was Arafat's # 1 lieutenant and choice for Prime Minister. And Abbas & Co. insist that Israel accept all Arab demands as is. So much for negotiating...
 
     There are two words which should comprise a proper Israeli response to such Arab games...and let's just say they ain't Merry Christmas.
 
     As I've pointed out often before, the solution to the Arab-Israeli mess is not as complicated as many others have claimed.
 
     When enemies make peace, they truly negotiate so that a compromise, meeting the needs of both parties, is at least somewhat achieved. One party doesn't simply just offer a take it or leave it dictate. 
 
     The Arab game plan--the alleged breakthrough offer some American leaders say the Israelis would be nuts to refuse--is, in reality, simply a ploy to force Israel to yield in "diplomacy" what hundreds of millions of Arabs have not been able to achieve on the battlefield.
 
     Seen as a starting point for further negotiations, not a take it or leave it gimmick, the Saudi plan might have some value.
 
     Getting rid of the plan's stipulation requiring Jews to allow their sole state to be swamped by allegedly returning Arab jihadis raised on Jew-hatred is a must, as just one example. Keep in mind that more Jews fled Arab/Muslim lands as refugees in a war Arabs started than Arabs who fled in the opposite direction. The difference? Jews didn't have almost two dozen other states to go to and weren't perpetually stuck in camps by their own brethren. Jews absorbed their own refugees in a state about the size of New Jersey, virtually invisible on a world map.
 
     Finally, if the Saudis and other assorted Arab despots want to really reach out to Israel, all they have to do is to grant to Jews in their sole, tiny, resurrected state a miniscule sliver of the same rights they claim for themselves in demanding the creation of the 22nd member nation of the Arab League and second, not first, Arab one in "Palestine" --Jordan carved out of some 80% of the Mandate's original 1920 borders.
 
     The day Arabs can, at long last, get themselves to do this, they will find an Israel bending over backwards, sideways, and forwards to be a good neighbor--and to the entire region's benefit.
 
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Gaza--The Only Thing Israel Owes It Is An Ultimatum

                                                                  Israel Owes Gaza Nothing…Except An Ultimatum
                                                                                                                                       by Gerald A. Honigman
 
 
     In May 1948, Egypt was one of a half dozen Arab states which tried to nip a nascent, resurrected Israel in the bud. And for the same reasons Arabs and Arabized have slaughtered, subjugated, and committed genocide against Kurds, black Africans, Berbers, Assyrians and others besides "their" kilab yahud--Jew dogs--who dared insinuate that they too--besides Arabs--have rights in a region proclaimed by the latter as purely Arab patrimony. One half of Israel's Jews today consist of Jews who pre-dated Arabs in that region but who fled to Israel…the refugees no one talks about. Over another million of these folks fled abroad to the Americas, France, and elsewhere.
 
     Armed to the teeth with weapons left over by the Brits from World War II, Egypt seized Gaza while a British officer-led Arab Legion in Transjordan (created itself in 1922 from almost 80% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine) seized Judea and Samaria on the west bank of the Jordan River. Transjordan, now controlling both banks, soon renamed itself Jordan. Its occupation of those non-apportioned--not purely Arab--parts of the Mandate was recognized by only two other states.
 
     The same above Arab pair--along with Syria and a few others as well--took another shot at their 1948 goal in June 1967. Big mistake…
 
     Egypt blockaded Israel at the Straits of Tiran (a casus belli), amassed 100,000 troops, tanks, and aircraft on Israel’s border, and convinced Jordan to jump on board. It then ordered the United Nations peacekeeping force out of the area so it would be able to invade the Jewish State unimpeded. Like a fireman who flees the moment a fire starts, the U.N. simply complied. It would repeat its uselessness this way many times later--stepping in only after Israel turned the tide of repeated Arab aggression, not preventing it or punishing the aggressor. Indeed, it did just this in 1948. That’s how Israel wound up with mostly Auschwitz/armistice lines, not borders. Ralph Bunche, America’s U.N. rep, understood this quite well.
 
     That’s how Israel wound up in Gaza and in the “West Bank”…in all of six days. I have all of the newspaper articles from that time period stored in a box.
 
     As has been written many times, during the almost two decades that Egypt and Jordan occupied those areas, no one clamored for the creation of a second state for Arabs within the borders of the Palestinian Mandate. In 1947, Arabs were offered about half of the 20 % of the territory left after the creation of Transjordan and rejected this partition. Some 90% of the total area wasn’t enough. They had to have it all.
 
     That was over sixty years ago--and nothing has really changed regarding the same Arab mindset that refuses to grant scores of millions of non-Arabs living in the region even a tiny sliver of the same political rights Arabs insist upon for themselves. That, in a nutshell, is the Arab-Israeli conflict. 
 
     A few years back, a now comatose Prime Minister Sharon--under intense pressure from Washington--agreed to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, a coastal area which had been repeatedly used since the days of the Pharaohs to invade the land of the Jews. It was also the land of Goliath’s non-Semitic, Aegean “Sea People,” the Philistines (as in Palestine), who gave both Egyptians and Jews earlier shared headaches.
 
     Sharon’s withdrawal plan was highly controversial, but there was enough potentially positive aspects to it that it seemed to at least some folks worth a try. The problem is that all of the worst case scenario results soon emerged instead.
 
     Gaza was a test--and the Arabs flunked it horribly.
 
     Being the target of repeated Arab attempted destruction, Israel was under no obligation to return any territories used for those purposes before treaties of real peace--not hudna and such ceasefires--were signed.

     Borders and territorial possessions all over the world have historically changed for far less than what Israel has faced…including America’s. And does anyone remember the Falkland War the Brits fought with Argentina? Now imagine the Brits (along with numerous other hypocrites) lecturing Israel--as they constantly do--about what the Jews allegedly need to do in their own very backyard (not thousands of miles away from home) regarding Arabs who deliberately disembowel and slit the throats of their kids and other innocents.
 
     With the withdrawal of Jewish organic farmers and so forth (Gaza thus becoming Judenrein), did the Arabs offer Israel any semblance of peace?
 
     The only thing Arabs did was to congratulate themselves about how nicely their well-known destruction in stages scenario for Israel was playing out.
 
     Before the setback in ‘67, they called for a one fell swoop plan for the Jews’ demise. Afterwards, this was replaced with a strategy to force Israel--via diplomacy (arm twisting by its “friends“)--back to its 1949, U. N.-imposed, microscopic armistice line, not border, existence. The final draft of U.N.S.C. Resolution 242 was drafted, in a rare display of true justice, to rectify that wrong after the Six Day War. Any withdrawal of Israel from territories was to be in the context of real peace treaties and to secure and somewhat defensible real borders--not armistice lines. It was expected that the travesty of the ‘49 lines would be rectified as Israel withdrew from territories--not all territories. Indeed, the U.N. fought very hard over the precise wording of 242 for just this reason. A reading of its architects, such as Lord Caradon, Eugene Rostow, and others, makes this very clear. Here’s Lord Caradon…
 
     It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them.
 
     Nevertheless, for a very cold peace, Israel handed Egypt back the best tank trap it had, buffering itself from latter day Pharaohs, as well as oil fields it developed, major airbases, and some real semblance of strategic depth.
With Sinai thus returned, Gaza was the next piece to fall in the post-‘67 Arab destruction in stages game plan.
Indeed, Gaza was a failed test.
 
     Arabs had an opportunity to prove doubters such as myself wrong…and we really wanted that to happen, though knew better.
 
     The “peace offering” Arabs gave Israel in return was to elect Arabs to power in Gaza who didn’t even feel it necessary to play Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah’s Palestinian Authority’s phony game of acceptance of a Jewish neighbor. Actually, Abbas and his crew don’t do this either and still refuse to speak of a Jewish Israel. Arabs can claim almost two dozen Arab states (created mostly from non-Arab peoples’ lands), but how dare Jews speak of one miniscule state of their own…
 
     Yet, to prop up the West’s sweet-talking, latter day Arafatian darlings, Mahmoud Abbas (one of Arafat‘s chief lieutenants) & Fatah had to be made the good cops by an American State Department long hostile to even the very idea of Israel (opposing President Truman on its rebirth and so forth) to the Hamas bad ones to twist the arms of the Jews. In reality, both have the same long-term plans for Israel. Check out their own official assorted websites, books, speeches to their own people, and so forth if you doubt this. In the Internet age, this is easy to do. Check out the Hamas Charter while you’re at it…and the PLO/P.A.’s as well.
 
     While attacks against Israel from Gaza were launched before Hamas gained control there, they increased afterwards…hundreds of rockets, mortars, and such being launched against Israel proper after the complete, unilateral Israeli withdrawal.
 
     Instead of a hand being offered to an Israel which could indeed be very generous in peace, Arabs elected those who openly (to their credit--no game playing here) call for Israel’s total destruction…the same folks who were blowing up school kids and others on buses, in restaurants, teen nightclubs, pizza parlors, and such a while back. They even set up a museum commemorating their heroism complete with fake Jewish body parts hanging from ceilings for all to sing praises to.
 
    Think about what Israel really needs to do with such an enemy. Does America’s own Powell Doctrine ring a bell? Here’s some of what Wikipedia has to say about it…
 
    “…Powell expanded upon the Doctrine, asserting that when a nation is engaging in war, every resource and tool should be used to achieve decisive force against the enemy, minimizing US casualties and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the weaker force to capitulate. This is well in line with Western military strategy dating at least from Carl von Clausewitz’s On War.”
 
     Lately, there was supposedly a ceasefire in effect. Hamas got tired of losing too many of its folks to Israel’s pinpoint strikes. Yet, during this “ceasefire,” Israel ceased, but the Arabs still fired.
 
     Because of this, the Jews stopped the flow of goods and services to the people who elected those who want both Jews and the Jewish State dead and who cause death, maiming, and destruction in nearby Israeli towns and cities.
 
     How unreasonable of those Jews!
 
     Just ask the U.N.’s Ban Ki-moon, the European Union’s Benita Ferrero-Waldner, NGO Oxfam’s Jeremy Hobbs, and so forth. They simply expect Jews to keep on out-Christianing Christians by turning cheek after cheek after cheek…not that any “Christian” country would ever put up with such murderous manure that Israel is simply expected to accept from Arabs.
 
     Tit for tat responses have never worked well with Arabs. They know there’s hundreds of millions of them and about six million Israeli Jews. Now, why am I nervous about that number? Arafat used to claim that the Arab mother was his best weapon.
 
     To be taken seriously, Israel must treat Gaza’s Hamas and those who elected it according to America’s own Powell Doctrine. If firing rockets, mortars, and such at one’s cities is not considered acts of war, then what is? If calling for the death of a nation and its people and acting on those threats are not acts of war, then what is?
 
     If ever a nation had reason to level an enemy, then who if not Israel? It certainly has the means. Not doing so and trying to be humane to the inhumane only brings hypocritical charges leveled against Jews anyway.

     There are few innocents in Gaza. Arab non-combatants hide murderers who in turn use the former as human shields after they deliberately attack Jewish civilians--all contrary to the Geneva Conventions, by the way. Think Perfidy Clause and such…Sad, but true.
 
     Yet, none of this matters to the U. N., the European Union folks, Oxfam, the State Department, and so forth. Arabs and Arabized are still committing atrocities, waging genocide, and so forth in black Africa and elsewhere, and all they can do is insist that Jews allow the re-supply of those who would butcher them if they had the chance. No doubt…
 
     Egypt has allowed hundreds of tunnels to be dug from its territory to supply Gaza with the means to kill Jews.
 
     Imagine if this was reversed. Pharaoh now supposedly has a peace treaty with Israel. Here’s an idea…let them smuggle food and so forth instead. Furthermore, why smuggle? Let Pharaoh supply his Arab brothers with those supplies. By the way, Israel has been permitting essentials to cross into Gaza anyway.
 
     Jews aren’t obligated to supply their executioners and wannabes with anything.
 
     Would any other people be expected to do this? Should be a no brainer, right? But it's that Jew thing again...
 
     Israel needs to hold elections as soon as possible…before its current non-leaders can cause even more damage.
 
     David Ben-Gurion, Golda, Jabotinsky, and Begin must be rolling in their graves.
 
     Prime Minister Olmert is soon scheduled to have some additional last minute arm-twisting done by another soon leaving official, Secretary of State Rice. Dubya, too, will likely join the gang up on the Jews party.
 
     Hey, Clinton received many millions of bucks for his Library and such from the Arab oil spigot as a gift for forcing Jews into the deadly Oslo debacle and agreeing to forsake 242‘s promise of secure borders, why not the scion of the Bush oil family too? He’s certainly been acting that way these past few years…and I (reluctantly) voted for him.
 
     Like many other State Department types, Rice’s career of squeezing Jews is sure to pay off later. Just ask James Baker III (Dubya‘s virtual uncle). As I like to remind folks, Condi already has one oil tanker named after her in the Chevron fleet. Shafting Hebrews and Arab potentate derriere-kissing have been lucrative business decisions for decades…
 
     Israel must have new leaders who will act as if their private parts are still intact--regardless of the consequences. If America threatens to cut off aid, then so be it.
 
     With a man who has dozens of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel friends, advisors, and supporters ready to move into the White House (he’s already sent one of these folks, Robert Malley, as his senior foreign policy advisor to Lebanon's slave master, Syria), Israel must be ready to draw its lines in the sand beyond which it will no further budge.
 
     Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, and such must not be subjected to what Sderot and Ashkelon now frequently receive…and that’s exactly what is realistically to be expected if Israel does in Judea (i.e., land of the Jews) and Samaria (aka the West Bank) what it did in Gaza. A three thousand mile wide America will be shamed if it forces Israel into another Munich 1938 style “peace.”
 
     Israel must insist on reasonable but effective territorial compromises regarding the remaining territories in dispute…be they the Golan Heights or the West Bank. Presidents Johnson and Reagan along with Secretary of State Shultz (an amazing exception to the Foggy Bottom rule), military commanders, and others understood this quite well. It appeared that President Bush II did too…at least for a while.
 
     Arabs (even those few Israel has “peace treaties” with) still refuse to accept the permanent reality of a’49 armistice line, 9-mile wide Israel--let alone anything beyond the virtually microscopic. Think about that purely Arab patrimony thing, the Dar ul-Islam vs. the Dar al-Harb, and so forth. And, again, think gassed Kurds, Darfur, and southern Sudan while you’re at it…
 
     Given all the above, as for Gaza…Israel must send an ultimatum, not supply it.
 
     And the U. N., Oxfam, the European Union, and other assorted hypocrites and practitioners of the double standard?
 
     Let them go to where they’re really needed but to where they never will…to relieve the real--not mostly self-inflicted--plight of scores of millions of non-Arab peoples still being slaughtered, enslaved, subjugated, and so forth throughout the region on behalf of Arab nationalism and its “purely Arab patrimony.”

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I Hate To Say I Told You So...


 
                                                     I Hate To Say I Told You So…
                                                                                                                     by Gerald A. Honigman
 
 
 
     But I told you so.
 
     Writing as a former registered Democrat now Independent who saw problems with both mainstream political parties’ real and perceived positions, I penned several articles prior to the election warning Republicans of the mess they’d find themselves in if they persisted in catering primarily to their ultra-conservative base.

     Being a student of the ‘60s, I was part of the infectious zeal for change that swept across university campuses…Real change--but reasonable change. So, definitely putting it mildly, there was no love lost between radical SDS-types and myself.
 
     Such zeal--indebted to earlier groundwork by cherished mentors--gave rise in the next decade to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, more effective (but still too loose) rules governing the use of dangerous pesticides (FIFRA), the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and its various offshoots, the first serious movement towards the development of alternative energy sources, etc. and so forth. That our nation’s rivers and water sources are much cleaner today than they were before--as just one example--is a result of this zeal…and our children are much better for it, regardless of those who still wish to put smiley faces on dioxin canisters.
 
     I will always be proud to have been part of this movement to turn us into better stewards of this world in which G_d blessed us to live.
 
     As a science teacher going on three decades now, I have taught these lessons to thousands of students …taught, not preached. For me that means looking at issues from different angles, yet not shying away from the bottom line. If we waited for 100% conclusive evidence for practically anything before we acted to prevent potential problems, we’d all be in much deeper trouble.
 
     Forget about anti-smoking actions to protect our kids, as just one example. Think about what just that one industry did to protect its own selfish interests at all others’ expense for decades.
 
     If additional errors are to be made (and they will be) after too long of an era of gross and greedy actions, let them be on the side of caution. Once persistent carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic man-made chemicals are unleashed into ecosystems to work their way up assorted food chains, there’s no issuing a recall. And those type of short-sighted, greed-centered actions were done a plenty in the past--especially during the last century. I like to explain this to students as putting into practice being a part of--not apart from--the world in which we live.

     A close friend of mine and I fight like cats and dogs over these issues. He won’t want to hear this but, whether he’s right or wrong (he’s wrong), his position is nevertheless precisely why Republicans got trounced in the recent elections.
 
     In Sarah And The Wolves, I warned Republicans of the dangers of downplaying environmental and ecological concerns--so important to millions of newly-registered college students, Independents like me, and so forth. I also reminded them that Teddy Roosevelt--one of the true fathers of America’s modern conservation movement and friend and wilderness companion of John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club--was a Republican. Conservative and conservation should not just sound alike…
 
     I must have received a dozen e-mails and brochures from various organizations warning against Sarah Palin’s alleged war against wolves, polar bears, beluga whales, and such. Sarah And The Wolves was my warning that Republicans were once again sending the wrong message to millions of voters for whom such issues had indeed become very important.
 
     What’s even more pathetic is that Senator McCain is not oblivious to all of this. He opposed drilling in ANWR, is not an oil man like some other executive folks we know, and Giuliani, Lieberman, Schwarzenegger, and so forth are his associates. In other words, he’s no unreasonable right wing kook.
 
     The problem thus became a sin of omission not commission.
 
     Not wanting to alienate even further his already alienated ultra conservative base, McCain basically remained silent on the above concerns at the same time that Palin (whom I basically like) was advocating such things as the slaughter of wolves in the only state where they still remained in a natural balance with prey populations and not endangered.
 
     While some still laugh at and belittle such concerns, ecological and environmental issues indeed rank very high with millions of others…especially young, newly-registered, and Democrat-targeted voters.
 
     True, the economic mess couldn’t have erupted at a worse time, but McCain--more than any other Republican--had enough of a well-earned reputation both on national security issues and as a maverick to perhaps have weathered even this storm given all of the nasty, negative skeletons Obama has in his own closet. But added to two unpopular wars and the turmoil in the economy were these other worrisome issues--so the scales tipped beyond repair.
 
     Surpassing the attacks Democrats capitalized big time on regarding ecological and environmental concerns was even a more divisive issue they scared millions on. I wrote about this in another pre-election piece, the A-word (Sweeping It Under The Rug…).
 
     While I’m no fan of abortion and certainly don’t advocate it as a means of birth control, numerous newly-registered young women (and men) were led to believe that a McCain-Palin victory would bring back the days of butchers with coat hangers in back alleys. McCain, again, expended far too little effort to mitigate this perceived problem in order to appease his already distant, non-compromising base.
 
     As it turned out, the economic mess sealed the Republican coffin anyway. But imagine a scenario which actually existed a few months earlier.
 
     What a shame it would have been in that potentially much closer election to have lost it for reasons such as those described above.
 
     There is one truth that Republicans better quickly wise up to…
 
     They now face, as in the ‘60s, a charged electorate with new faces and multiple agendas. And at least some of those agendas represent issues which deserve the support from any would-be occupant of the White House.
 
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The Real Problem With The Obama-Khalidi Connection...

                                       Tales From The Inside…The Real Problem With Obama’s Khalidi

                                                                                                                                                     by Gerald A. Honigman

 

This is the weekend when Americans set clocks back an hour for daylight savings time.

Thus, I guess it’s only fitting that, given all the current fuss about the Los Angeles Times’s refusal to make public even a transcript of Senator Obama’s love fest with Professor Rashid Khalidi and his ilk (no doubt, Jews included), I’ll turn the clock back as well…but almost three decades.

You see, Fox News means well, and while most of the mainstream media in general is either ignoring the story or downplaying it, Fox--and even the McCain people themselves--miss the real problem.

It’s not that Obama indeed has far too many friends, advisors, admirers, and so forth who are anti-Semites and/or anti-Zionists (not that there’s really a difference--one deliberately targets Jews for “special treatment,” the other, in a post-Holocaust world, carefully revises the target to the Jew of the Nations), it’s that those folks demand that all others see justice only through their own eyes. While I was a doctoral student decades ago, this problem was already well under way.

Having to be employed full time for financial reasons while doing my earlier, nicely progressing doctoral work at the Kevorkian Center For Near Eastern Studies, a consortium of Princeton, Columbia, and New York Universities based at NYU in the ‘70s, my bread and butter job later required a move to the Midwest. As hindsight is always the best sight, I realized later how huge a mistake that was…especially in those days. The Kevorkian has since gone the way of Khalidi’s Columbia and too many other Middle Eastern Studies programs today.

Part of my Columbus-based job involved guest lecturing at dozens of universities and colleges across a multi-state region to try to minimally balance resident anti-Israel professors. The Mid East Studies Association was already hijacked by Khalidi’s buddies, and the only Jews that got/get ahead were/are those who out-Arab the Arabs in their hatred and vilification of Israel. In age when budgets were tightening, all remembered who buttered their own bread as well…and this undoubtedly affected what was and wasn’t presented to students in the classroom. Mucho bucks have been donated to such programs via the Arab petro-spigot.

To simply get a somewhat fair--not “pro-Zionist"--hearing about Israel, students are usually forced to take courses offered by the resident Jewish Studies Department. And, as should be the case--but in stark contrast to what will be described below--they will get an honest appraisal of the imperfectly human quest of a resurrected Jewish nationalism.

Let me present just a few personal examples…

Having been invited to be one of several presenters at a Columbus Citizen-Journal-sponsored event before hundreds of people on the Middle East regarding American foreign policy considerations in the region, I prepared accordingly.

As I was slated to be the last to present, I listened carefully to the others, but when I heard an Ohio State University professor switch gears to present about how those nasty Zionists stole poor Arabs’ land--Obama’s friend Khalidi’s same line--I had no choice. I tore up my presentation, threw it into the air, and unleashed both barrels in response.

After the presentation, I was approached by another professor who introduced himself as a representative of OSU’s Middle Eastern Studies program. After a chat about where I did my earlier studies, he asked me if I’d consider resurrecting my doctoral work. I laughed and asked him if he had heard what I heard coming out of the mouth of his colleague. Why would I put my fate into such an academic program’s one-sided hands?

I was assured that there were others at OSU who could serve as my Ph.D. dissertation advisor. On that note, while still working full time, I reentered academia.

Not wanting to drag this painful tale of woe out, let me just say that my initial gut reaction proved to be all-too-correct.

The tenured chief honcho who covered the modern Middle East certainly knew who buttered his bread…and into his hands I was placed.

While teaching advanced classes on Arab-Israel themes, he never once mentioned such things as Britain’s Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill’s crucial Cairo Conference of 1921. It was that Conference which led to gift of almost 80% of the original 1920 territory of the Mandate of Palestine to Arab nationalism in 1922 with the creation of what would later be renamed Jordan. And the latter fact was never mentioned as well…! This in a graduate studies class.

While also--but a bit more subtlety than Khalidi--promoting the theme of nasty Zionists and the need to create Arab state # 22 (2nd, not first, one in Palestine), Carter Findley never once mentioned the plight of over thirty million Kurds who remain stateless to date, who have been gassed and slaughtered by Arabs (and others as well), and who had their one best chance at statehood aborted by a collusion of British petroleum politics and Arab nationalism. My work on this subject can be found on the recommended reference list of Paris’s acclaimed Institut d’Etudes Politiques--Science Po. Indeed, the only time Findley ever mentioned Kurds at all was when he mocked their plight in Turkey.

To his credit, the other professor ( I was his T.A.) invited me to do a presentation to students on the Kurds. Notice, however, that he too wouldn’t touch this subject himself with a ten-foot pole. Afterwards, the Arabs in class caused such a commotion that I caught hell for merely presenting the plight of another non-Arab people--besides Jews--who were seeking a tiny slice of justice in a region proclaimed by Arabs to be purely Arab patrimony. The Arab genocide against blacks in the Sudan, subjugation and murder of Copts, Assyrians, Berbers, and so forth were going on back then as well…and, again, not a peep out the Findleys, Khalidis, and their brother Hebrew hypocrites over any of this.

As just one last personal example of the problem Obama’s Khalidi-type friends and advisors present, let me return to Findley’s graduate seminars again.

I’ll never forget one woman who I’m sure has a great position at some university today. I can’t think of her name, but I do remember her well.

Her idol was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who spent World War II in Berlin at Hitler's side and organized a division of Muslim Nazis, "the Hanzar." He also played a first-hand role in instigating the genocide of Europe's Jews, Serbs and Gypsies. After World War II, he actively recruited Nazi officers into Arab governments of the Middle East.

When she presented her research on the Mufti at our doctoral seminar, all the above was either white-washed or ignored altogether…and Findley, of course--her mentor and featured guest at her wedding--sat through it all approvingly.

Now, contrast this with my own research about Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky…the man most responsible in the early Mandate era for Jewish defense against Arab slaughter. Findley had no problem emphasizing his alleged “fascist connections.”

When it came time for me to prepare for the last leg of my doctoral work, guess who was denied a dissertation advisor? So much for that other professor’s earlier assurance that not all teachers were of the same “persuasion” of the one whom I shared a stage with that night in Columbus. Wasted time, thousands of dollars, etc…Left hanging in the wind, we moved to Florida not long afterwards.

The above is too often the story on campus these days as well.

A little bit of good news is that now there are at least some watch dog organizations and endeavors like Professor Daniel Pipes’s Campus Watch and David Horowitz‘s Academic Bill of Rights. Still, academia largely proceeds full speed ahead, intimidating all who dare to disagree and dismissing critics simply as right wing fanatics.

Israel continues to thus be placed under the high power lens of moral scrutiny by academic practitioners of the double standard, and woe unto all who beg to differ.

So, my friends, the above is the real problem with Osama’s Khalidi-type friends and associates.

Being “pro-Arab” is not the concern--as Fox, meaning well, has nevertheless presented the case.

The problem has always been that for Arabs, anyone who claims that scores of millions of non-Arabs (whom Arabs once conquered during their own imperialist expansions) also deserve a slice of the justice pie in the region is by definition anti-Arab. There is no justice other than Arab justice.

Whether Obama’s alleged statement about Israel’s “genocide” against Palestinians (Arabs by another name--most of whom came from elsewhere) and other gems reported to be on that unreleased LA Times video tape are true or not, Obama’s admiration, association, and so forth of, by, or with the likes of Farrakhan, Rezko, Khalidi, Wright, Jackson, Brzezinski, Mr. Apartheid Israel Peanut, Malley, Soros, McPeak, Khalid Al Mansour, etc. and so forth have to be beyond coincidental.

And this should be the cause of real concern--even for those all-too-many let’s jump onto the cattle cars for relocation again Jews.

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Mr. Shakedown Artist Jackson At Evian, Dubya On The Golan, Etc...

                                                           Taking Care Of Business…

                                                                             by Gerald A. Honigman




     Quite predictable, if disappointing…
 
     What a week this has been.
 
     First I hear about Jesse Hymietown Jackson's quote at the Evian Conference in France stating that when Obama gets into office, he's gonna show those Zionists a thing or two. No doubt...with all those anti-Semitic and/or anti-Zionist (no real difference) advisors he already has lined up.
 
     This is the same Mr. Shakedown Artist Jackson who plays deaf, dumb, and blind to genocidal Arabs still enslaving and massacring black Africans in the Sudan and elsewhere (as they have been doing for numerous centuries)--not to mention their subjugation and butchery of any and all others who dare contest the Arab claim that the entire region is purely Arab patrimony. One half of Israel's Jews fled that 'Arab' world. But all Jackson can find fault with are those damned Jews and their sole microscopic State.

     Soon after the newest Jackson manure, I next learned that, as he prepares to leave office, President Bush is determined to continue to expose his apparently truest hand regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict...support Israel, but force it to become so dependent upon America that it has to ignore reality and its own fragility and vital interests for the sake of Washington--whether it’s also really good for America or not.

     In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Dubya and his Lady at State, Condi Rice (the Secretary, not the oil tanker already named for her), continue to pretend that Israel has something other than a peace of the grave partner in Abbas’s latter day Arafatian Fatah boys.
 
     Lie after lie after lie, cover up after cover up, excuse after excuse--like in the old days and the games Clinton and his crew (including State’s Jew stooges) played to make Arafat and Fatah the good guys as well. With the clock ticking before his departure, it seems that Dubya is still determined to force Israel to cave in to alleged Arab good cops whose well-known real destruction in stages plans (stated by themselves over and over again) regarding the Jewish State are no better than those of the Hamas bad cops.

     And now there’s additional news that America alone aims to determine Israel’s defense and security needs regarding other murderous Arab enemies as well.

     Dubya has evidently promised Baby Assad that if he cuts Iranian ties, he’ll force Israel to give up the entire Golan…
 
     That’s right, reward the butcher and enslaver of independent Lebanon, subjugator and murderer of Syrian Kurds, Jews, and so forth for a temporary respite in Syria’s age-old, deadly machinations...regardless of the highly predictable consequences.

     Looks to me like Dubya is setting himself up for a really nice retirement. 

     Not that it wouldn’t be nice anyway, but Arabs can be quite generous to those who shaft Jews.
 
     Just ask Mr. Shakedown Artist and his friends Jimmy Apartheid Israel Carter and Bill Arafat to the White House over a dozen times Clinton. The results of the latter's squeeze of Ehud Barak over disputed, non-apportioned ( not 'occupied') territories of the original 1920 Palestine Mandate at Camp David and Taba, getting him to forsake the secure and defensible real borders--not artificially imposed armistice lines--promised by U.N.S.C. Resolution 242, have now become the starting point demanded by Arabs for current 'negotiations.' That's Clinton's and Baker's former Jew Boys' legacy vis-a-vis Israel.
 
     Among other things, Dan Kurtzer played front man in the fight with Israel over the route of its defense barrier to protect Ben Gurion airport from the same Arab mortar and rocket attacks it’s now receiving from Gaza courtesy of earlier Foggy fulminations and fantasies. That's how too many Jews get ahead in a State Department which rejected Israel's right to exist from the getgo and fought Pesident Truman over Israel's resurrection on less than 15% of the 1920 Mandate. Arab Jordan now sits on almost 80% of that Mandate's territory.
 
      Since we're on the topic, Dubya’s virtual uncle and his dad’s (George the First) Secretary of State, James f_ _ _ the Jews they don’t vote for us anyway Baker, continues to make a fortune via gratitude from the Arab petro-spigot. For that matter, so does George the First.
 
     Good to see it’s a bipartisan thing...

     Moving on…
 
     As I've stated before (but can't be repeated often enough), as in Judea and Samaria (known by that name far longer than the other, the West Bank, bestowed on it via British imperialism only in the 20th century) with Fatah Arafatians, a real territorial compromise must be the answer with Damascus as well…not what an Arab petrodollar-greased American State Department and now Dubya himself dictate.
 
     Whether Syria plays ball with Dubya's deal to cut ties with Iran is not the point...turning Israel into America's puppet is. And what happens after the forced full Israeli withdrawal when Assad later restores ties with the mullahs?
 
     Israel is stuck with a far worse version of its evacuation from Gaza. It's all down hill into Israel proper for thousands of Syrian tanks...for starters.
 
     Nations who repeatedly attack neighbors over decades from territory often end up losing such territory. That's how Syria lost the Golan. Long ago, Israel offered to return to Damascus far more than it deserves on the Golan Heights…indeed, almost all of it. Both Assads rejected this.
 
     But Syria must never again be able to shell Israeli farms and such from the Heights, nor control Israel’s key water sources. Again, what would America do with such a rejectionist enemy?
 
     Well, for starters, they used to speak Spanish in what Dubya now calls his ranch. And it was he himself who earlier said that some Texas driveways are longer than Israel’s width.

     The decisions made by voters in both America and Israel over the next months will be extremely important ones. Voters from both nations must elect leaders who will not be manipulated by anyone when it comes down to the vital interests of their countries--regardless of the consequences.
 
     And an Israel which can fit about thirty-four times just into Dubya's home state of Texas has a lot more to worry about here than over three hundred million Americans.

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Thinking Jerusalem

                                                                            Thinking Jerusalem...
                                                                                          by Gerald A. Honigman


     While it keeps getting shoved onto the back burner for fear of the intense heat that it will generate, there is no doubt that Jerusalem will be one of the most difficult issues to resolve in any so-called peace process between Arab and Jew. It is time to take a look at some blunt facts regarding this issue, despite the risk of ruffling even some friendly feathers.

     While Christians, Muslims, and Jews all have ties to Jerusalem, these ties are in no way equal. In religious Jewish sources, for instance, Jerusalem is mentioned over 600 times, but it is not mentioned even once in the Qur'an. It is alluded to in the latter in passages about the Hebrew Kings, David and Solomon, and the destruction of the Temples of the Jews. Arabs deny a Jewish Temple ever existed there and call the Temple Mount "Buraq's Mount," after Muhammad's supposedly winged horse. But a mention of Jerusalem itself is nowhere to be found in the Muslim holy book...interesting, since it was recorded in many other places besides the writings of the Jews themselves for over 1,500 years before the rise of Islam.

     Religious claims of both Christians and Muslims to Jerusalem exist primarily because of both of their links to the Jews. Political claims--based upon facts on the ground--are, admittedly, more complicated. Even so, throughout over three millennia since King David conquered the city from the Jebusites, renamed it, and gave it its Jewish character, no other people except the Jews has ever made Jerusalem their capital, despite its conquest by many imperial powers, including that of the Arab caliphal successors to Muhammad as they burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E. and spread in all directions. Damascus and Baghdad were the seats of Caliphal imperial power, and Mecca and Medina were the holy cities. While this is not to say that Jerusalem was ignored by its Muslim conquerors (i.e. the Umayyads built the Dome of the Rock/Mosque of Umar on the Temple Mount making it Islam's allegedly third holiest city), it is to say that Jerusalem was and is in no way the focus for Islam that it is for Jews and Judaism.

     Since David made Jerusalem his capital and it became the site of his son Solomon's Temple, Zion became the heart and soul of Jewish national and religious existence. Jews from all over the early Diaspora made their pilgrimages and sent offerings to its Temple. "By the Rivers of Babylon we wept..." and "If I forget thee O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning..." were just a few of the many Biblical expressions of the Jews for Zion.

      Such yearning persisted throughout subsequent millennia in the Diaspora as well. "Next Year in Jerusalem" sustained the Jew throughout countless degradations and humiliations culminating in the Holocaust. There is no Muslim parallel to these claims, regardless of efforts to portray Palestinian Arabs (many of whom were new arrivals in the land themselves) as the new Jews. Jews, from a hundred different lands, did not have twenty-two other states to potentially choose from and suffered dearly for this statelessness. Most Muslim Arabs demand sole rights over Jerusalem the same way they demand sole rights over Tel Aviv: In their eyes, only they have legitimate political rights anywhere in what they regard as the Dar ul-Islam.

     Regardless of whatever theology one clings to, Jesus' historical experiences in Roman-occupied Judea and Jerusalem were those of a Jew living under very precarious conditions. Thousands of his countrymen had already been killed, crucified, etc. in the subjugation/pacification process. The contemporary Roman and Roman-sponsored historians themselves--Tacitus, Josephus, Dio Cassius, etc.--had much to say about all of this. Listen to just this one telling quote from Tacitus...

      Vespasian succeeded to the throne...it infuriated his resentment that the Jews were the only nation who had not yet submitted.

     These oppressive conditions led to open revolts and guerilla warfare to rid the land of its mighty pagan conqueror--wars which would eventually lead the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, to rename the land itself from Judaea to Syria Palaestina in 135 C.E. in an attempt to stamp out any remaining hopes for Jewish independence and national existence. Judea was thus renamed after the Jews' historic enemies, the Philistines, a non-Semitic sea people from the eastern Mediterranean or Aegean region, to drive home the point.

     For a modern analogy, imagine little Latvia as it was engulfed by the Soviet Union in the latter's heyday of power. Or a Hungarian freedom fighter or Greek partisan taking on the Soviets or the Nazis. Think of the sympathy and admiration normally given to such situations... Now think about the treatment the Jews have received over the ages for longing for this same freedom and dignity. Whatever Jesus did or did not mean in his alleged statement, "render unto Caesar...," this passage and others in the New Testament have been used to belittle this same desire for freedom and independence among the Jews.

     Judaea Capta (not Palaestina Capta) coins were issued, and the towering Arch of Titus in Rome was erected after the first major revolt in 70 C.E. and shows, among other things, the Romans carrying away the giant Menorah and other objects from the Jewish Temple that at least many if not most Arabs and other Muslims claim never existed. It stands in Rome to this very day to commemorate Rome's victory over the Jews and Jewish Jerusalem.

     When Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, fled Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E. (the Hijrah), the inhabitants welcomed him. Medina had been developed centuries earlier as a thriving date palm oasis by Jews fleeing the Roman assault (the banu-Qurayzah and banu-al-Nadir tribes, etc.), and its mixed population of Jews and pagan Arabs had thus become conditioned for a native prophet speaking the word of G_d.

     Muhammad learned much from the Jews. While the actual timing of his decision on the direction of prayer may never be known, during his long sojourn with the Jews of Medina, his followers were instructed to pray towards Jerusalem. Early prominent Arab historians such as Jalaluddin came right out and stated that this was done primarily as an attempt to win support among the influential Jewish tribes (the People of the Book) for Muhammad's religio-politcal claims.

     It is from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem that Muslims believe Muhammad ascended to Heaven on his winged horse. A mosque, the Dome of the Rock, would later be erected on this Jewish holy site after the Arab imperial conquest of the land in the 7th century C.E.

     There is no doubt among objective scholars that Jews had an enormous impact on both Muhammad and the religion that he founded. The holy sites for Muslims in Jerusalem (i.e. the mosques erected on the Temple Mount of the Jews) are now deemed holy precisely because of the critical years Muhammad spent after the Hijrah with the Jews. The Temple Mount had no prior meaning to pagan Arabs. While there was some early Christian influence as well, intense scholarship has shown that the Holy Law (Halakha) and Holy Scriptures of the Jews had a tremendous influence on the Koran, Islamic Holy Law (Shari'a), etc. Muhammad's Jerusalem connection was most likely not established until after his extended stay with his Jewish hosts. This was no mere coincidence...Muslim religious beliefs regarding Muhammad's conversations with the Angel Gabriel, etc. notwithstanding.

     When the Jews refused to recognize Muhammad as the "Seal of the Prophets," he turned on them with a vengeance. Before long, with the exception of Yemen, there were virtually no Jews left on the Arabian Peninsula. And the direction of prayer was changed away from Jerusalem and towards the Kaaba in Mecca instead. To say that Jerusalem has the same meaning for Muslims as it has for Jews is simply to tell a lie.

     In modern times, Jews constituted the majority of Jerusalem's population from 1840 onwards. When Jordanian Arabs--whose nation itself was formed from 80% of the original mandate for Palestine issued to Britain on April 25, 1920--seized East Jerusalem after their invasion of reborn Israel in 1948, they destroyed dozens of synagogues and thousands of Jewish graves, using tombstones to pave roads, build latrines, etc.

      When the Jews were denied access to their holy sites for almost two decades, the whole world remained silent. After Israel was forced to fight a defensive war in 1967 due to its being blockaded by Egypt's Nasser at the Straits of Tiran (a casus belli) and other hostile acts, Jerusalem became reunited. Access to all peoples and faiths subsequently became unhindered. It was at this moment that much of the world next chose to rediscover Jerusalem...demanding its redivision, internationalization, etc. Now there is justice for you! Sickening...but, unfortunately, not really shocking or unexpected in the Jewish experience.

     For centuries, Jews were forcibly converted and/or expelled, massacred, humiliated, demonized, inquisitioned, ghettoized, declared the "deicide people," etc., to one extent or another, in both the Muslim East (where they were also known as kilab yahud--Jew dogs) as well as the Christian West. They are determined that their rights in the sole capital of the sole, microscopic, reborn state that they possess will not be sacrificed on behalf of any 22nd state created for Arabs.

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John, Sarah, and the A Word...



                                                Brushing It Aside Won’t Make It Go Away…The A Word

                                                                               by Gerald A. Honigman



     So, there I was on an early Sunday morn, filleting some recently caught fish I’d never tried eating before.

     To keep myself entertained while performing the least enjoyable part of my piscatorial experience, I put Fox News on (which I often do whether I agree with them or not).

     Add to this the facts that I recently received a disturbing article from my cousin about some of Governor Palin’s alleged policies regarding rape victims in Alaska as well as postcards from the Democratic campaign folks warning about what lies ahead regarding abortion rights if the Republicans won in November, and…well…that’s what this article is about.

     Fox was interviewing a lady who was a former Hillary supporter who now was a big McCain fan. The topic was the big drop McCain has seen lately in prospective women voters.

     As the conversation progressed, a number of issues came up, but the economy, of course, was the number one culprit.

     While I don’t doubt that that’s on everyone’s mind right now (including myself), it was apparent--at least to me--that there was indeed something else that would not be touched with even a ten foot pole

     Look…I have very mixed feelings about abortion. I don’t like it, but I believe that there are certain circumstances which may make it a decision that should not be imposed from the outside. There’s no need to rehash repeated old arguments here.

     But, just as Prohibition didn’t stop people from drinking alcohol, trying to legally impose morality on the abortion issue will go the same route. Only this time, girls will be forced back into real or virtual alleyways into the hands of butchers with hangers again. A twelve-year old raped by her brother, father, or whomever should have a better choice…etc., and so forth.

     While this may not be an issue for older women who were/are especially Hillary supporters, this is certainly an issue for the younger ones…big time.

     What McCain doesn’t need right now is yet another excuse for newly registered younger voters--college coeds, for example--not to vote for him. Most vote Democratic anyway. I did…wanted alternative energy options, more serious concern over environmental and conservation issues, and so forth. I still do.

     So, my advice to McCain and Palin over these crucial remaining few weeks…

     Spend a lot more time focusing on that Independent vote out there.

     Many folks are fed up with both of the main political parties and recognize that there’s enough blame to go around on many of the main issues which implicates them all.

     The Independent vote (mine included) may very likely make the difference in this election--which, by all calculations, should have been an easy Democratic victory.

     McCain’s reputation as true “maverick,” able to work with the other side to get things done, is indeed well earned and gained him problems with fellow Republicans as well as praise from those who are now badmouthing him. Indeed, he is probably the best pick Republicans could have had this time around precisely because of this.

     It must therefore be made very clear that a McCain-Palin Administration will not mean that their own (and those of some of their key supporters) theological or other ideology on the highly controversial issue of abortion will be rammed down everyone else’s throats. If this is not done, and it’s simply swept under the rug as was done on Fox’s Sunday interview, the Democrats may very well win on this issue alone. That’s how volatile and important it is.

     While millions of young women--and men--may be willing to spread blame around for the economic crisis we now face, they won’t be so understanding on the A word.
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Sarah And The Wolves

                                             Sarah And The Wolves-- From One Fellow Fisherperson To Another…

                                                                                                                   by Gerald A. Honigman



     Governor Palin, there’s much about you that I find refreshing.

     No, I don’t agree with you on every issue (so, you’re no different than any other candidate), but my heart tells me that your heart is basically in the right place--and I’m often accused of being too often cranially guided.

     Having said this, please permit me to offer some advice to you in what will probably be a close election this November…and, right now, you guys are behind.

     I am a former Democrat, now Independent, swaying heavily towards Senator McCain. There are many others out there like me--and we may very well determine the outcome of this election.

     Let me begin by telling you a little story that you, as a fellow fisherperson, should be able to appreciate.

     About ten years ago, my son Jonathan and myself were coming back from a fishing trip here in Florida.

     As we were unloading our small boat, along came a commercial crabber with his crates loaded to their tops, crab legs hanging out of the slots. He then struck up a conversation with me.

     A number of years earlier, I was part of a movement here to have red drum (“redfish”) declared a sports rather than a commercial species. Ever since New Orleans’ blackened redfish phenomenon, reds had been drastically plummeting in numbers--breeders disappearing before new generations could be produced.

     The new law that was passed permitted the rebound of the redfish population, ensuring stocks into the future.

     Now back to the crabber…

     He proceeded to complain to me about how difficult it was to catch all the crabs he wanted to now--he with his many crates filled to the top and so forth.

     The problem: Those damned environmentalists! Those reds were now eating too many of “his” crabs!!!!

     I was proud of myself that day…I kept my cool.

     I explained to him that long before man lived in Florida, reds and blue claw crabs lived in happy abundance…G_d working through nature creating predator-prey relationships to strike just the right balance.

     I asked Mr. Crabber if he thought that maybe thousands of folks filling crates just like him might have something to do with the crab shortage.

     Daggers came out of his eyes…

     So Madam Governor, what does this have to do with you?

     Many folks--Independents like myself certainly included--are sickened by the wholesale slaughter of wolves going on right now in your state--being shot from helicopters, etc. and so forth. Your opponents are making plenty of capital on this--sending out your record here in letters and postcards to millions of voters.

     Yours is the one state in America where this noble predator--in balance with various prey populations far longer than man’s presence--is not endangered.

     Like the crabber blaming redfish, Alaskan hunters blame everything but man’s own various adverse activities for their own declining prey populations. I remember a similar picture in National Geographic showing Japanese fishermen herding dolphins into the shallows so that they could beat them to death for allegedly eating too much fish…while Japan has huge nets killing anything and everything in their paths.

     As a person who prides herself in bucking special interests and such, please understand that millions of Americans have become more ecologically tuned in--and not just from your opponents’ camp. Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, in many ways, can be seen as one of the fathers of the modern conservation movement. As many other hunters and fishermen have done, he too became tuned in to nature’s essential balance.

     Governor, from one religious person to another, please rethink your support of such things as the wolf slaughter in your state. It goes against what I believe is the good heart and sensible mind that you indeed possess.
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