Arab Attitudes

By Alan Caruba

According to a recent Zogby poll taken in Arab nations, “The United States is viewed less favorably in much of the Arab world today than it was during the final year of the Bush administration and President Obama is less popular in the region than Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

The poll results were released by the Arab American Institute, described as a “nonpartisan research and advocacy group.” Yeah, I believe that, don’t you? The poll was conducted by the Zogby organization and James Zogby is the president of the Institute.

There are Christians and Jews born in Arab nations, but when I speak of Arabs it is exclusively those who are Muslim.

The fact is that I don’t believe anything Arabs say on any day about anything. Yes, I am biased, but as the phrase goes, “Everything I know about Islam I learned on 9/11.” Mumbai, India has just suffered a second terrorist attack and it really doesn’t matter who’s specifically to blame because it is Muslims who committed it.

The fact is that on any given day you can read headlines or hear stories of Arabs committing murder and mayhem on one another and on what they call “non-believers.” The Syrian despot is shooting people in the streets where they are calling for his overthrow. We learned that Osama bin Laden was plotting a 9/11 anniversary attack on the U.S. A bomber struck at funeral service for the assassinated brother of Afghanistan’s president. And on and on and on.

How many people do Arabs have to kill before we get around to figuring out that Islam is a murderous cult that has been killing each other since the Sunni/Shiite schism shortly after the death of Mohammad and killing everyone else who would not convert or pay extortion?

I am also thoroughly sick of a White House that steadfastly keeps trying to get Americans to be more tolerant and understanding of Muslims, here and abroad. Ask any European what it is like when their Muslim population reaches a point where it begins to demand that everyone else accept Sharia law and behave like a Muslim.

Why should anyone be tolerant of the Palestinians when a recent survey revealed that 73% of those surveyed agreed that Jews, i.e., Israelis, should be annihilated?

Ask them why there are whole sections of major European cities where non-Muslims dare not venture, including the police. In parts of London and across England, Islamists are creating “Sharia law enforcement zones. As this is written, Muslim enclaves are being established all around America and, of course, some want to build a mosque within a short walk of Ground Zero in New York City.

The West should stop pretending that Islam isn’t better described as a totalitarian political entity than an alleged religious one. When not being ruled by or trying to overthrow dictators throughout the Middle East and northern Africa, the human rights track record of Arab or Muslim nations is deplorable. In January 2010, Freedom House released its annual survey of political rights and civil liberties, “Freedom in the World 2010.”

According to Freedom House, “The Middle East remained the most repressive region in the world” followed by Africa that had “suffered the most significant declines.”

“The most repressive region in the world” and the Arab American Institute tells us to be concerned that “In 2008, only nine percent of Egyptians had a favorable attitude toward the United States” and that Barack Obama’s popularity “has plummeted to just five percent. Recall, it was Obama who led off his term with a speech in Cairo, quoting “the holy Koran”, during his concerted outreach to the Arabs of the Middle East.

Similar data reflected less favorable attitudes toward the U.S. in Morocco, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates since the end of the Bush administration. According to the poll results, Arabs are more favorable to Iran these days and it is a Persian theocratic thugocracy. Arabs respect the threat and use of power.

George W. Bush was under the impression that Iraq could be dragged into being a democratic nation if the U.S. would do them the favor of capturing Saddam Hussein so he could be hanged by his victims. He also believed that Afghanistan, a Stone Age nation, could be coaxed into modernity if the U.S. just killed enough Taliban.

With considerable irony, Barack Obama has managed to get the U.S. involved in a civil war in Libya for the same purpose, the removal of Muammar Gadhafi. In the process he revealed the weakness of NATO while “leading from behind.”

Obama’s singular “success” in the Middle East has been to authorize the assassination of Osama bin Laden, for which he took full credit without mentioning the years of intelligence gathering that preceded it, nor his predecessor.

Published initially in 2010 and now reissued as a paperback edition, in “A Privilege to Die” by Thanassis Cambanis, the author reports that “Hezbollah has inculcated millions—including many beyond Lebanon’s borders—into its ideology of Islamic Resistance, which is coupled to an unusually effective operation program. That recipe has put Hezbollah in the pilot’s seat in the Middle East, steering the region into a thicket of wars to come.”

If the West does not come to Israel’s defense, it will seal its own doom for generations to come. The Arabs in particular and 1.3 billion Muslims in general don’t like us much and would like to see a mosque on every corner of every city and town in America, including just down the street from Ground Zero.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

No Peace for Israel

By Alan Caruba

The Iranians and the Syrians are on heightened military alert as the Russians fuel the Iranian nuclear reactor at Brushehr today and everyone has an opinion about when and who will attack it. If the world wanted to stop the plant from functioning, it could and would have done so long ago.

The military alert is understandable. Israel destroyed an Iraqi reactor that Saddam Hussein was building and a clandestine one being built by Syria. As anyone who has a World Almanac with its map of the world from the United Kingdom to a tip of Australia can determine, it is a very long way from tiny Israel to Iran. Distance increases the risk along with what is surely a ring of missile defense around the reactor.

While the Israelis have conducted some exercises to demonstrate their bombers could make the trip, they have been rather quiet about the Iranian reactor. A very real part of that involves Hezbollah in Lebanon which is armed to the teeth and Hamas in the Gaza strip, both of which are Iranian proxies in any conflict.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the occasion on Friday to announce that the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority (PA) had agreed to once again sit down and discuss peace. This is kabuki theatre, a charade, a farce. It’s the old land-for-peace swap that has not resulted in a day of peace for Israel since it was founded in 1948.

Mamoud Abbas, the head of the PA, was the right-hand man to Yassir Arafat, famed Nobel Peace Prize winner (thus rendering that award one of the great farces on the international scene) and he has no more power than that which the Israelis grant him. As for the rest of the Arab community, the Palestinians have been completely abandoned.

Writing in The New York Times on August 2, Efraim Karsh cited a recent Al Arabiya television network survey that demonstrated that Arabs have no interest in the fate of the so-called Palestinians. It is a fact of history that there never was a Palestine beyond the name the Romans applied to Israel in order to make people forget its existence.

History also shows that Israel’s neighbors have attacked it since its founding and Arabs repeatedly attacked its Jewish population in the decades preceding it. The notion that Abbas can negotiate anything that would last longer than a day or so is idiotic. The Israelis know this and I suspect so have U.S. administrations since the days of Jimmy Carter.

In Tehran, the hated leaders of the regime have put their Revolutionary Guards “in full readiness to encounter firmly with the stupidity of the U.S. and Zionist regime.” As for Abbas, DEBKAfile, an Israeli news agency is reporting that “sources close to the Palestinian Authority quoted him saying that direct talks with Israel were not in the offing because ‘a big military surprise awaits the Middle East.’”

The surprise will come when Israel decides to act and not a minute before. I seriously doubt it will be today, tomorrow, or any time the Iranian ayatollahs expect it. When it comes, if it comes, the Saudis will have opened their air space to facilitate it. With the exception of Syria and now Turkey, few in the Middle East have any love for the Iranian regime.

The same can be said for the regard in which the United States is held. The U.S. has been militarily active in the Middle East since the days of Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary pirates, but more recently since 9/11. It has 50,000 combat (training?) troops in Iraq and comparable troop strength in Afghanistan.

The U.S. also has a Commander-in-Chief who has never served in the military, is getting advice from a National Security moron who thinks “jihad” means something other than war, has been openly mocked and insulted by the Iranian leadership, and has demonstrated a hostility to Israel the likes of which has not been seen before and since its founding.

There will be no peace between the PA and Israel. Both sides know it. The so-called Palestinians have not only refused peace, but have conducted Intifadas, terrorist campaigns, against Israel. The one in 2000 killed a thousand Israelis.

Nobody really wants a war in the Middle East except the Iranian ayatollahs and, in the fullness of time, unless they are overthrown, it will come, but just not now.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Commander-in-Cliche

By Alan Caruba

Some of my favorite science fiction villains are the “shape-shifters” like the cyborg from the 1984 “Terminator” movie. Barack Hussein Obama reminds me a lot of those creatures.

All during the campaign, the use of his middle name was decried as a subtle form of racism, suggesting his Muslim roots, but when he took the oath of office, there it was and, in Cairo, Obama stressed those same roots. Salaam Alaykum everyone!

His Cairo speech, however, was met predictably by his Arab Muslim audience with less than enthusiasm and, as always, the endless complaints by people for whom democracy is an illusion and oppression is a way of life.

Our Commander-in-Cliché did not disappoint anyone by saying anything original. “We have a responsibility to join together on behalf of the world we seek.” No kidding! Wow! Obama is under the impression that America and the nations of the Middle East “share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

I suppose that explains all the bombings of mosques, the beheadings, the endless turmoil from so-called Palestinians who have refused to accept a two-state solution for six decades or been assimilated into Muslim nations for all that time. For Obama, their situations was one of “occupation” but it doubtful that Obama will ever reference the many Arab “settlements” in the West Bank or the way Arabs have pushed out Jewish and Christian residents from Israeli cities whenever they gained a majority foothold.

For the Arabs, the response to his speech was the very tired claims about the Palestinians (there is not, nor ever was, a “Palestinian” state. Palestinians are stateless Arabs.) The Arab man in the street tended to dismiss Obama as “just a prettier face,” as one Cairo electrician put it. “I don’t expect much from the man.” Both newspapers and ordinary Arabs who had previously welcomed Obama’s election warned against emulating George W. Bush by “lecturing Muslims about democracy.”

Osama bin Laden put out the word that Islam was locked into a very long war with America, democracy, human rights, whatever. The man desperately needs killing.

There is, of course, one genuine democracy in the Middle East and that is Israel. Iraq’s first steps toward democracy were made possible by an American invasion, the removal of Saddam Hussein, and our continued military presence. If we go, democracy is likely to leave with us. That leaves Turkey which has practiced democracy with some success so long as its army can keep Islamists from taking over.

With considerable irony, having stopped in Saudi Arabia just prior to his Cairo speech, a Saudi newspaper warned Muslims against having high expectations. “The Islamic world should not think that Obama is coming to be an ally or a supporter,” said an Al Riyadh editorial.

In Tehran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the guy that runs Iran, said “The nations of this part of the world…deeply hate America because during many years they have seen violence, military interference, rights violations, discrimination…from America.” Not like Iraq under Saddam who invaded Iran and made war for eight years; that guy was a real statesman. In Iran, you can get hanged for just about anything including littering.

As for Israel, Khamenei called it a “cancerous tumor in the heart” of the Muslim world. And Iran backs up that bile by funding both Hamas and Hezbollah, the two Palestinian terrorist organizations. Egypt and Jordan who both signed peace accords with Israel probably disagree.

Obama called the bonds between America and Israel “unbreakable”, but it’s hard to know what this presidential shape-shifter will say tomorrow, so proceed with caution.

For his Middle East Muslim audience, Obama’s speech largely fell on deaf ears. The only things they want is for Israel to go away, for the U.S. to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and for Islam to be the lone religion of the world. With more than a billion Muslims in the world, however, it is doubtful they all agree on any common view of America or the future.

One thing we do know, however, even if Obama does not, is that there are just over two million Muslims in America and one assumes most are happy living here. His deliberate tripling of that number suggests ignorance or his rather odd notion that America is not a Christian nation and is, in fact, a major Muslim one.

Is Obama sincere in his latest appearance on the world stage outside of the White House? He could be just the pathological narcissist we have come to know from the days of his campaign. He could be a Muslim with a secret agenda. It is hard to know anything for sure about Obama except that, since taking the oath of office he has tirelessly worked to destroy our economy in every way possible. Overseas, no one appears to take him seriously.

On June 5, Obama visits Buchenwold, the former Nazi concentration camp. He might just make a connection between that place and Israel’s right to exist on its own terms, not his. In Tehran, Mamoud Ahmadinejad will be busy telling everyone who will listen that the Holocaust never happened.

Fortunately for our Commander-in-Cliché, he gets to strut and fret his stuff upon the world stage again as he pays homage to D-Day on June 6, the 65th anniversary of when Americans continued their tradition of rescuing Europeans from themselves. Now there is very little left of Europe to rescue. It has long since become Eurabia.

No doubt he will deliver another speech filled with hope and change and, well, whatever. We’ve heard it all before. He’s beginning to bore everyone, but worse, he’s beginning to scare everyone, too.

Israel's Arabs

By Alan Caruba

Prior to the Israeli elections, Ali Zahalka, the principal of an elementary school in Kfar Kara, Israel, wrote about the rise of Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of an Israeli political party who has become a pivotal figure in determining who will be the next Prime Minister.

Taking note of Lieberman’s increased political power, Zahalka said, “Apparently, we got what we deserve. If we (Arab), citizens of the State of Israel, which has a Jewish majority, connect to the worst enemies of the State, why are we surprised that this is what we get?”

In December 2006 I attended a luncheon in New York sponsored by the Middle East Forum. Avigdor Lieberman was the speaker and I wrote a commentary that asked, “Who is Avigdor Lieberman?” because I suspected few Americans had ever heard of him and because a great many Americans, Jewish and gentile, follow events in Israel closely.

At the time, I wrote that, “Lieberman is staring at the glacial destruction of Israel by demography; the way populations grow or decrease. For Israel, the numbers do not bode well.” By 2005, the Arab population was 16% and today it is 20%.

Zahalka warned against anti-Israeli radicalism. “This extremism climaxed with the ‘Death to the Jews’ chants during Operation Cast Lead,” the decision by Israel to respond to months, if not years of rockets from Gaza. It was an effort to destroy the tunnels through which munitions were smuggled into Gaza. Hamas leaders, however, found safety in bunkers or in Damascus while Palestinians bore the brunt of the short military action. When it ended, Hamas declared they had achieved a victory and, in the Arab world, they had. It was a PR victory.

Zahalka’s fear of Lieberman’s party gaining more seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, came true.

In my January 2007 commentary, I noted that Lieberman wants Israel’s Arabs to take a loyalty oath or lose voting privileges in national elections and the right to hold national office. He wanted to expel Arab politicians in the Knesset and to impose a “permanent resident” status on Arab Israelis to deter their influence on the future of Israel.

The Arab population of Israel is not just a political or demographic question, but rather an existential one that asks whether a nation created to be the homeland for Jews can exist if its Arab population continues to grow and, as citizens, play a growing role in its affairs?

Considering the serious divisions that exist between the liberal Democrat Party and conservative Republican Party in the United States, can you imagine an Israel that must address divisions between its Arab Muslim population and its majority Jewish one? These are more than merely political divisions, they are religious and cultural, and they occur in a nation literally surrounded by Arab nations, most of which deny Israel the right to exist.

Zahalka has good reason to fear the future for Israel’s Arab population, but mostly because it has acted in ways that give rise to genuine fears about their loyalty as well as their growing numbers.

The fact is that Israel’s Arabs enjoy more actual freedoms than any of their counterparts elsewhere in the Middle East. They can and do serve in the Knesset. Some even serve in its judicial system as judges. However, it must also be said that, where they gather, they tend to drive out both Jewish and Christian populations. Bethlehem, for example, is now nearly bereft of Christians.

Zahalka made reference to “radical Arab parties” in Israel and pleaded for “the opportunity to integrate as citizens with equal rights.”

What Lieberman knows and what exists wherever there are large minority populations anywhere, is that they do not integrate.

France has seen Muslim riots of great ferocity. In England, Muslims continue to press its parliament for separate but equal rights to impose Sharia courts and to make all manner of other demands. In the Netherlands they are threatening that nation’s traditional tolerance.

So, yes, Avigdor Lieberman, a politician who has been a part of the former Olmert administration and who continues to press for limits on Israel’s Arab population, is emerging with growing political power at the same time Israel appears to remain deeply divided over its future as some hope for some accommodation with the so-called Palestinians while others conclude they cannot and will not accept a peaceful co-existence.

If Iran makes good on its many threats to destroy Israel, the irony and tragedy will be that its Arab population will die along with its Jewish population. They should heed the call to integrate, to show their loyalty, before it is too late to have a nation called Israel.

The Arab Reaction to Obama

By Alan Caruba

On November 5, Amr Moussa the head of the Arab League called upon President-elect Barack Obama to act swiftly to try to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

According to an Associated Press report, Moussa welcomed the result of the U.S. election and said it marked a watershed for the United States and for efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. Moussa said Obama's call for change is needed in the Middle East to ease tensions between Arabs and Israelis, and to resolve the nuclear standoff with Iran.

What this primarily reveals is that Israel’s existance remains the Arab obsession, second only to their belief that non-Arab Iran plans to take over the Middle East by using a nuclear threat and the Palestinians as their proxy army. Apparently Arabs think that America, not the Arab league, is expected to solve the problem. Americans who believe this are deluding themselves.

Americans might expect that the initial response from the Arab world of the Middle East would be to greet the election of Barack Obama with enthusiasm, but that is because most Americans haven’t a clue as to how Arabs perceive the world and how wedded they are to their victimization and belief that (a) America exists only to rule them and (b) America’s foreign and other policies are determined by “Zionists” and, of course, “capitalists.”

The think tank that specializes in review and analysis of the media in the Middle East, MEMRI, provides a look into their very strange and illogical world.

I begin, however, by taking notice that the very first announcement out of Iraq after the election was one by its foreign minister who expressed the hope that American troops would not be leaving too soon. It’s one thing to hate the occupier and it’s quite another to fear one’s neighbors and domestic insurgents. This is and has been the rule in the Middle East since the days when camel power was the only way to get around. In other words, “America, please don’t go!”

The response by Hamas, one of the Palestinian factions, was to lob 35 rockets into Israel the day after the election. If one is seeking peace in the Middle East, he is likely to wander in the desert much longer than the Jews and they at least had Moses to lead them.

So, one need hardly be surprised that Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawl issued a fatwa to the effect that “Whoever thinks that the Democrats are less hostile to [the Arabs] than the Republicans should know that the number of Iraqis killed during the siege [of Iraq] by the Democrat Bill Clinton is twice as high as the number of [Iraqis] killed by the Republican [George] Bush.” The problem with this, as with most such fatwa nonsense, is that Bill Clinton did not engage the U.S. in any military action against Iraq. Clinton did manage to get a bunch of our boys killed in Somalia, however, before beating a hasty retreat.

According to Al-Qaeradhawl, “The Democrats kill you slowly without you noticing it—and therein lies the danger. They are like a snake whose touch is not felt until its poison enters your body.” Tell me about it!

An Iranian daily, Jomhouri-ye Eslami, opined that, “The most that black man can do in the White House is to replace some of the staff and change some ceremonial procedures. He will never manage to change the structure of the American regime, which was established by capitalists, Zionists, and racists.” Since Iranian newspapers publish only what their government deems acceptable, one can extrapolate that Obama will not receive any warmer welcome than previous presidents going back to Jimmy Carter.

In Syria, currently deploying troops around Lebanon, the Syrian daily, Al-Watan, was far more gracious. Indeed, they hastened to declare Obama the winner before the final results were in. “We wanted to declare Obama president…as a show of solidarity with millions of Americans, Arabs, and colleagues in the world media who [all] yearn for ‘change’ in U.S. foreign policy.” So much for optimism and good will, but it was quickly followed by the view that, “Some claim that if Obama wins he will be no better than Bush, if not worse…They may be right, since it is well known that no American president has ever stood on the side of the Arabs—rather they have all stood on the side of Israel.”

It takes a special brand of crazy to both welcome the President-elect and then declare that he is a crypto-Zionist. How can anyone say that a man named Barack Hussein Obama does not feel just a little connection to Arabs?

In Saudi Arabia, they were equally pessimistic. The Saudi daily, Al-Watan, said in an editorial that “There is no difference between Obama and McCain. They disagree only on the means to achieve America’s chief goal, which is to rule for another hundred years.”

The Middle East will continue to believe that Jews in general and Israelis in particular determine U.S. foreign policy. Despite, for example, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, they think the U.S. had no interest, nor reason to repulse that U.N. sanctioned war against a Gulf state ally. Despite having taken U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979, the Iranians see no reason for U.S. hostility. And, despite having been defeated repeatedly in their efforts to destroy Israel, Arab nations still resent and deplore its right to exist.

Expecting this state of delusion and dementia to see things “our way” is a fool’s game. What they understand, in between recovering from their latest defeat, is the determined application of power to repulse or deter their next misstep. They never learn. Never.

The Arab's Bad Mood

By Alan Caruba

From the West’s point of view, the Middle East’s long history of authoritarian governments, its failed wars against Israel, its drift toward terrorism from Bali to London and, of course, to New York and Washington, D.C., one would feel justified to take a dim view of Arabs for their failure to express any tolerance towards the West and each other.

In a recent edition of The Economist, an interesting article examines the mood of the Arab street. “Many Arabs still see Mr. Bush’s 'war on terrorism' as a crusade against Islam. But many also note that al-Qaeda-style jihadism has killed more Muslims, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to the squalid Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon, than ‘infidels.’”

It may seem glib to say that the Arab’s many problems can be traced to one factor, Islam, but any student of history knows that Islam has accounted for why this region of the world has so consistently failed to advance at a pace comparable to Europe, the New World, and even Asia.

“Huge differences persist among 300-million Arabic speakers and 22 countries of the Arab League…Yet to travel through the Arab world right now is to experience a peculiar sameness of spirit. Particularly among people under 30, who make up the vast majority of Arabs, the mood is one of disgruntlement and doubt.”

Islam traps the mind with its absolutism, its assumption of moral superiority to all other religions, and its lack of tolerance. Even seeing the obvious superiority of other nation’s forms of government, quality of education, military and economic power, Arabs appear unable to accept or understand that Islam has stunted their ability to compete, trapping them in nations where a handful of hereditary monarchs or dictators keep the majority of their populations in relative poverty and weakness.

The short, ugly history of the Palestinians is an affront to Arabs who wonder, “If the Palestinians cannot unite in their own cause, why should other Arabs help them?” That said, the refusal to acknowledge the Jews’ historical claim to Israel, going back three millennia, also has made it impossible to achieve any Arab accommodation with the Jewish state.

The social traditions of Arabs, so fixed on family and tribe, have further ensured that Arabs encounter difficulties in terms of upward mobility within their societies. The corruption endemic to their societies further damages the advance of commerce. Arab educational institutions with their emphasis on rote learning rather than innovative thinking has left Arabs unable to compete in the larger world. And of what value is the Koran in a world of high technology and global communications and trade?

How can any modern society function when its population is expected to stop everything, face Mecca, and pray five times daily? How does a society function when its women are denied opportunities to contribute economically and politically?

The failure of Arab nations to adopt secular forms of government, believing as they do that all laws must come from Allah, further holds them captive to a faith that is more a cult than a true religion. It discourages democracy; the need to compromise and cooperate. As a result, governments in Arab (and Persian Iran) are merely the outward form of democracy without the substance of it.

Mostly, though, is the intellectual vacuum that exists in Arab nations. “More literature is translated into Spanish in a single year than the entire corpus of what has been translated into Arabic in 1,000 years.”

Religious texts that preach the superiority of Islam and not just the right, but the necessity of imposing it on the entire world, are bestsellers in Arab nations. This puts Arabs in constant conflict with other nations and, where they represent a large population, in conflict with host nations such as England and throughout Europe. The fanatics among them even pose a danger in moderate and modern Muslim nations.

After a short, early history of conquest that took Islam across northern Africa, up into Spain, and eastward into India, Islam has fallen on sad, bad times. Colonized by European nations after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the last century, invaded in this one by the United States, acting on its own and its allies’ behalf to destroy Islamism and seeking to transform its outlook on the wider world, Arabs are in a bad mood about their prospects.

It is unlikely Arabs and other Muslims will ever see Islam as their real problem, but its rigidity is the template that keeps them emotionally and intellectually trapped in the seventh century A.D.

It is far easier to blame the Jews or the “crusaders”, i.e. Christians, for their problems, but these “infidels” or unbelievers have left them in the dust. Now the West is engaged in an effort to drag them into the twenty-first century and the Arabs, resistant to change as always, must decide whether they prefer the past to the future.

Prelude to a Palestinian Bloodbath

By Alan Caruba

One of the most astonishing aspects of President Bush’s visit to Israel is the demand for a Palestinian “State.” Such a state exists. It is called Jordan.

In 1922-23, the League of Nations gave the British a formal mandate to govern Palestine, making them responsible for “putting into effect the declaration…in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The British set aside land, more than three times the size apportioned to Jews, which was then called Trans-Jordan.

Arab attacks on the Jews who emigrated were a constant factor in the pre-Israel decades, including riots in Jerusalem and Hebron. In Europe, as WWII raged, the Nazis set about the deliberate extermination of the continent’s Jews, resulting in the deaths of six million.

When on November 29, 1947 the United Nations ended the British Protectorate of “Palestine” it created a partition. When Israelis established themselves as a sovereign nation, the immediate Arab response by Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Trans-Jordan, and Iraq, was to attack its Jewish population.

There has never been any peace between the enemies of Israel and the so-called Palestinians, nor by extension the entire Muslim world.

Here then is the dilemma of a Palestinian state. A friend and fellow blogger who goes by the name of Longstreet who is not Jewish postulates that, “Once there is a state of Palestine, Israel will no longer be fighting a bunch of terrorists and thugs; she’ll be defending herself against a nation/state…a nation/state backed by the United Nations. For all intents and purposes, to create a Palestinian state is to create another terrorist state!”

Like many American Christians, Longstreet is not sympathetic to “a people who openly rejoiced by dancing, and singing, in the streets when their fellow Muslims slammed those airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and killed 3,000 of my countrymen.” He decries having “U.S. dollars being poured into that rat hole to be used to arm terrorists who kill Jews…”

While one can argue that Jordan is the “Palestinian state”, there has never been one recognized as such. Jordan is ruled by a monarchy descended from Arab bedouins.

Amidst the calls by the President and others for a Palestinian state, Rachel Newuirth, writing about “The Arab ‘Right of Return’ to Israel”, noted that, “First and foremost, the Palestinian Arabs were primarily the aggressors in the 1948 war, not innocent victims of the ‘Zionists’ as their spokesmen and advocates claim.” Then, citing numerous sources, she documents the actual events.

Most damning are the words of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Yassir Arafat’s closest advisor and now the present head of what is left of the Palestinian Authority, who in March 1976 wrote that, “The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe.”

A former Syrian Prime Minister, Khaled al-Azm, writing in his memoirs, published in 1973, confirmed that, “Since 1948, it is we who demanded the return of the refugees, while it is we who made them leave. We brought disaster upon a million Arab refugees by inviting them and bringing pressure on them to leave. We have accustomed them to begging…all this in the service of political purposes.”

The role of the United Nations in all this has been a crime against humanity. Through UNWRA, an agency that exists solely for the maintenance of the Palestinian’s refugee status, the claims of a “right of return” have been kept alive while leaving Palestinians locked into an impossible limbo that denies Israel’s right to exist.

This has been accomplished for sixty years by pouring in millions to underwrite “all or most of their housing, food, education through college and graduate school, medical care and social services, provided to them for free by UNWRA.” Ms. Newuith notes that, “No Americans or Europeans have benefited from such a generous and all-encompassing welfare state.”

It gets worse. “On top of UNWRA assistance, the Palestinian Arabs also receive a total of a billion dollars a year in aid from other United Nations agencies, the United States, the European Community, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, and Iran.”

Nowhere in the discussion of the Arab “right of return” is any mention of “The more than 850,000 Jews who have either been expelled or fled from Arab and other Muslim countries since the Arab world initiated hostilities against the Jews of Israel-Palestine in 1947.”

The present-day Palestinians Arabs are now further divided between the PLO and Hamas, the militant jihadist party that recently staged a coup d’etat in Gaza, effectively seizing control of the area from which Israel unilaterally withdrew, perhaps in the hope that ceding more land would dampen their desire to destroy the Jewish nation.

A Palestinian state is one of the truly horrid political solutions to a situation created by Arab aggression against the state of Israel. These so-called Palestinians should be absorbed into Arab nations that border Israel. The fact that they did not represents the intention and hope of destroying Israel, an aspiration expressed by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to “wipe them from the map.”

To achieve this goal, the Iranians and others would have to initiate an Armageddon. To create a Palestinian state would be a prelude to the destruction of Arabs, denied citizenship in Arab nations, for political and religious reasons set forth in the Koran.

The United Nations keeps them alive as pawns in the war against Israel. Ironically, the United Nations has been forced to patrol southern Lebanon to keep Palestinians, backed by Syria and Iran, from attacking Israel once again.

The United Nations, along with the genocidal aspirations of the Arabs, is the problem, not the solution.

That problem is now being exacerbated by the policies of the Bush Administration. It reverses America’s long support for Israel by appearing to seek an end to a problem that will continue until the myth of a separate and distinct Palestinian people is put to rest.

Explaining Islam to Muslims and Others

By Alan Caruba

I received an email today from "an Arab and a Muslim" who had read a 2001 commentary of mine, "Islam Versus the World"

"You are a bigot and misusing the freedom of America. People like you are so detrimental to the American interests."

The email arrived while I was contemplating blogging about the latest Islamic obscenity, a suicide bombing in Sherpo, Pakistan--in a mosque where Muslims had gathered for worship--that was at the home of the former interior minister in northwestern Pakistan. It killed at least 50 people inside the mosque.

Something is very wrong with any religion whose followers believe it is okay to (1) commit suicide and (2) kill a lot of innocent people at the same time. (3) In a place of prayer.

Many Muslims believe that Islam is under attack, but they seldom see how Islam is at war with the rest of the world, including as often as not, fellow Muslims.

The email ended by telling me I was "a bag of hate and hatred." Assuming that English was not the first language of the "Arab and Muslim" who sent it, I thought he did a good job in expressing himself, but was overlooking a few things.

The article was written shortly after 9/11 when a number of "Arabs and Muslims" killed over 3,000 Americans and people wanted to know who these people are, what they believe, and why they would attack a nation that was not at war with them. Indeed, America had expended considerable treasure and blood defending Arabs and/or Muslims in places like Kosovo and Kuwait. We had even assisted bin Laden and the Afghans in ridding that nation of the Soviet military occupation. Then we had to go back and rid it of the Taliban whom fellow Muslims seem to hate a great deal.

I can understand it when anyone gets angry reading a serious rebuke to their religion and especially one that requires one to face Mecca five times a day to pray. However, this same religion essentially says it's okay to kill "unbelievers" and has provided ample examples of killing those whom one might reasonably consider to be believers...particularly if they are praying in a mosque.

Islam is in great need of a Reformation not unlike that which the Christian Church underwent. Until it reforms itself it will remain locked into a seventh century mentality that will continue to hold Muslims back from having a decent relationship with the rest of mankind.