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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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April 27, 2008 All In A Day's News... by Gerald A. Honigman
The first was written by a journalist whom I have long admired--and I don't admire many in the mainstream media. I met Tom Teepen, now a syndicated columnist for Cox News, some three decades ago. I was visiting Cincinnati for a few days out of my Columbus office and had assorted media, university, and other visits, lectures, and televised debates scheduled. We have, on occasion, briefly touched base afterwards over the years. Tom was editorial editor, I believe, for either the Cincinnati Post or Enquire. We spent a good deal of time reviewing the Middle East. Unlike too many others in the liberal camp, Tom still has maintained clear vision when it comes to Arab-Israeli politics. The real surprise was that my local newspaper published his op-ed. After many years of batting heads with the paper brass (first on my own, then with others), I'm finally noticing a bit more balance. So, Tom's Blaming Israel, Freelancing On Hamas--What Is Jimmy Carter Thinking? made it into the Daytona Beach News-Journal. He recapped Mr. Peanut's recent hot date with Hamas in Syria, where Carter tried his best to make the deliberate disembowelers of Jewish babes and other innocents look good by getting it to provide him with some foggy cover for his non-stop assault on Israel, but Hamas--to its credit--wouldn't let him. Headlines soon claimed, anyway, that Mr. Peanut achieved a breakthrough, with Hamas offering to "accept" Israel. When will they learn? Tom exposed Carter's nauseating comedy act. While an allegedly "born again" Carter evidently doesn't put much value in honesty, Hamas does. It has no--and will never have--any intention of granting Jews in one tiny state what Arabs demand for themselves in some two dozen others on over six million square miles of territory.including one already created from almost 80% of the original 1920 borders of Mandatory Palestine renamed "Jordan." The new state Arabs insist on creating on the ashes of Israel, not along side it, would be their second--not first--in "Palestine," the name the Roman Emperor Hadrian gave to Judaea after the Jews' second costly revolt for freedom in 133-135 C.E. He renamed the country after the Jews' historic enemies, the Philistines--a non-Semitic sea people from around Crete. Contemporary Roman historians such as Tacitus, Dio Cassius, and others wrote extensively about this themselves. To most Arabs, the whole region is simply purely Arab patrimony.in their own words. As for the scores of millions of non-Arabs who have been conquered, massacred, and suppressed, Egypt's past Uncle Tom Copt Foreign Minister, Dr. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, perhaps said it best.accept forced Arabization and /or dhimmi status (like he did) or else.Copts were the native Egyptians conquered by Arabs after the 7th century C.E. along with numerous others. As Mr. Peanut also knows, regarding the above, Hamas is no different than the alleged moderates of Abbas's latter day Fatah Arafatians--regardless of how much whitewash he, Washington , and others throw upon them both. In order to force the Jews to play ball, a supposed Arab good cop had to be created to counter the State Department's Arab bad cop. Fatah (with as much, if not more, blood on its hands than Hamas) is simply more willing to play the Arabs' well-known destruction in phases "diplomacy" game vis-à-vis Israel to use petrodollar greased-international pressure to force Israel back to its pre-'67, 9-mile wide, armistice line--not border--existence to set it up for a combined Arab/Iranian final blow.something that UNSC Resolution 242 expressly stated was not to happen in the aftermath of the 1967 War. But, Honigman, you say, you keep repeating these same points in many of your articles. Yes, I do. And as long as Arabs keep on repeating their lies and distortions, and morons or deliberate accomplices like Mr. Peanut do the same, those of us who care must repeatedly answer them. Their approach is if they repeat a lie often enough (and it goes unanswered), it will be accepted as truth. Teepen did a good job with his short op-ed, especially since he has been a fan of Carter in the past. But let me continue to pick up yet a bit more where he left off. With a new Presidential election approaching, I'll never forget the last televised Democratic National Convention featuring "Apartheid Israel" Mr. Peanut chasing "Israel is one of the top three evils in the world" Michael Moore all over the convention floor. Closer soul brothers do not exist--unless you want to throw in a more slick Obama and the company he keeps to make a trio. It was befitting that Carter visited Hamas in Syria, for Syria--not "Palestine"--was indeed the birthplace of Hamas's patron saint, Sheikh Izzedin al-Qassam (for whom its "militant" wing and rockets are named ).Latakia, to be exact. Of course, back then, many if not most Arabs in the area considered themselves to be southern Syrians, espousing one version or another of a Greater Syria plan. "Palestinians" were the Jews. Along with scores ( if not hundreds) of thousands of others who poured into the Palestine Mandate (after the break up of the over four century old Ottoman Turkish Empire) due to its economic development by Jews, the Sheikh joined numerous other "native Palestinians" who entered relatively recently from the latter 19th century onwards from Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere in rejecting the rights of Jews to do the same thing in any part of the "purely Arab patrimony," the Dar ul-Islam. Recall that half of Israel's Jews were refugees from so-called "Arab" and /or Muslim lands. Moving on. Article # 2, in the same paper, quoted Mahmoud Abbas complaining that, in his recent Washington visit, no one was talking about forcing Israel back to the "'67 borders." I do admit, that was a pleasant surprise. While the State Department (and President Clinton and President Bush off and on) has tried its best to ignore 242's call for the establishment of secure and recognized borders to replace Israel's absurd 1949 armistice lines (which simply marked the point where Arab invading armies were halted upon Israel's rebirth in 1948), Israel, despite the weakness of Prime Minister Olmert and his crew, has evidently made it clear that it took President Reagan's words seriously when he stated 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. Not only were there mostly no Arab-Israeli "borders" back then, but the Abbas/Arab claim that Israel is setting up settlements on Palestinian land has the same amount of truth in it as does the '67 border claim. When Transjordan (army led by British officers)--created from most of the Mandate of Palestine in 1922--attacked Israel along with a half dozen other Arab states loaded with arms left over by the Allies in World War II in 1948, it seized Judea and Samaria.British imperialism's west bank (of the Jordan River) as opposed to the Trans("across")jordanian east bank. Sir Alec Kirkbride, the Brits' East Bank rep, wrote extensively about this in his A Crackle Of Thorns: Experiences In The Middle East. The Arab land grab was illegal, only two nations recognized it. Still, Transjordan renamed itself Jordan, since it now held both banks, and saw to it that no Jews could reenter lands where their ancestors had lived and owned land for thousands of years until their massacres by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, huge numbers of Arabs continued to pour in.more Arab settlers setting up Arab settlements. All together, so many Arabs were recent arrivals themselves into the Palestinian Mandate that the United Nations Relief Works Agency--UNRWA--had to adjust the very definition of the word "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 when counting those who fled the fighting Arabs started upon Israel's rebirth. Contrary to the Arabs' claim that these were "occupied Palestinian lands," Judea and Samaria were non-apportioned parts of the Mandate, and leading international legal authorities such as Eugene Rostow, William O'Brien, and others have stressed that these areas were open to settlement by Jew, Arab, and other residents of the Mandate alike. How could you occupy lands taken from an illegal occupier? The territory in question is indeed disputed .not occupied Arab lands a la Abbas, Hamas, and Mr. Peanut. When Israel captured Judea and Samaria in the '67 War as a result of a bad decision by Jordan to join Egypt's Nasser, Syria, and others in the Arabs' latest attempt upon its life, it came to hold territory of the Mandate officially apportioned to no one.not "Palestinian" land. The Arabs themselves rejected a proposed 1947 partition of the remaining 25% of the Mandate left over after the creation of Transjordan in 1922. While I do not advocate Israel holding on to the entire area, certainly a reasonable territorial compromise which corrects the travesty of the '49 armistice lines--a la 242--is a must. And Judea--land of the Jews--must never become Judenrein again.unless Arabs are prepared to see the one-fifth of Israel itself who are Arabs--many hostile--get the boot as well. Such population transfers have indeed already occurred elsewhere. Consider those involving Turks, Greeks, and Bulgars, Israel's Jewish refugees from "Arab" lands, and India and Pakistan for starters. Now, about those Jewish settlements Abbas complains about in that second article. If Jews are to return to Judea and Samaria in the context of a 242-type territorial compromise, then how and where else will this come about if not by establishing/reestablishing Jewish towns and so forth--"settlements?" Without the latter, Israel doesn't get the former. Article # 3... The News-Journal finally gave the genocide in Darfur some of the attention it deserves.large front page article with maps and big pictures. Unlike the Arab-Israeli mess, however, the perpetrators might as well have come from Mars. No where was the word Arab mentioned. After the Arabs burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E. and forcibly Arabized millions of non-Arab peoples in the process, the Sudan (Nubia, etc.) held out for quite some time. In other parts of North Africa, native Jews aligned with Imazighen ("Berbers") to resist this conquest as well. We'll revisit this a bit later. Back in the '60s, the first modern civil war broke out between the non-Muslim black African south and the Arab and Arabized (remember Dr. Boutros-Ghali's comments above?) north in the Sudan. Sudanese President Nimeiry's stated during the slaughter of over a half million blacks at this time (and over a million more ever since) that. ".the Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into...black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission (Arabism and Pan-Arabism in Sudanese Politics, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 11, #2, 1973, pp. 177-78)." Rudyard Kipling's late 19th century poem, "The White Man's Burden," supposedly typifies Western colonialist and imperialist attitudes towards the Third World. If that's the case, then what does Nimeiry and the other example below, expressed in the Syrian Arab Constitution of the Ba'th, typify? "...The Arab fatherland belongs to the Arabs. They alone have the right to direct its destinies...The Arab fatherland is that part of the globe inhabited by the Arab nation which stretches from the Taurus Mountains, the Pacht-i-Kouh Mountains, the Gulf of Basra, the Arab Ocean, the Ethiopian Mountains, the Sahara, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea." Yet, the more recent full scale outbreak of violence in the Sudan in the 21st century has an even more revealing twist. While earlier bloodshed there and elsewhere could largely be seen as modern extensions of the fourteen century-old clash between the Dar ul-Islam and the Dar al-Harb, the one in the Sudan's Darfur (as those in Arab-occupied Kurdistan and much of the rest of North Africa) is mostly about Arab racism and chauvinism.pure and simple. You know, those folks who like to scream about "racist Zionism." Over a thousand years earlier, this led to the overthrow of the Syrian-based Arab imperialist Umayyad Caliphate. So, in Sudan's western region of Darfur, it's Arab and Arabized versus black Africans.regardless of religion. Ditto for Arab versus Kurd, Amazigh, and so forth. In Sudan's largely non-Muslim south, it's a combination of both Arab racism and the conquest of the Dar ul-Islam--as exemplified also in the expected subjugation and dhimmitude of Egyptian Copts, Lebanon's Christians, Near Eastern Assyrians, and Israel, Jew of the Nations, and home to whom Arabs call "their" kilab yahud.Jew dogs. An Amazigh (Berber) publisher friend ( http://www.north-of-africa.com/ ) recently sent me a video produced by the highly respected Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Its contents http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XROAu1cTcQ8 showed a debate on Al-Alam TV (Iran) on July 21, 2007over a new Berber-Jewish Friendship League set up in Morocco. Even more recently, Morocco has outlawed the creation of an Amazigh political party.especially since it espoused good relations with Israel. Keep in mind that Morocco has had, relatively speaking and as an "Arab" country, reasonable relations with Israel itself. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews had their roots there. But the prospect of former and current fellow victims of forced Arabization getting together has implications for Arabs that even the Moroccans can't allow. Much if not most of North Africa is of Amazigh--not Arab--descent. Among other comments in that debate, the Amazigh spokesman pointed out that both Jews and Berbers predated the Arab conquest by thousands of years, fought long and hard against that conquest, and want nothing to do with Arab identity and forced Arabization. Keeping in mind that in modern times many Berbers have already been killed by Arabs for less, very brave words indeed. To sum things up, those three news articles on April 26th were loaded with important material. The problem is that, without further extensive explanation such as what I've attempted here, the issues are too complex for many readers to grasp. Having said this, journalists and folks like ex-Presidents shoulder huge responsibilities and should therefore dig much deeper before commenting and pontificating a la Carter on such issues. By the way, when's the last time anyone heard Carter comment on any of the above non-Arab civil, political, and humanitarian issues? If they don't involve Arabs, he doesn't want to know. And a look at the contributors to his library and such may explain at least some of Mr. Peanut's Arab-colored vision. Gerald A. Honigman is a Florida educator who has done extensive doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs. He has created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, has lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and has publicly debated many Arab spokesmen. His articles and op-eds have been published in dozens of newspapers, magazines, academic journals and websites all around the world. Visit his website at http://geraldahonigman.com/.
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Along
with other related articles, three covering the
Middle East and North Africa caught my eye on April
26th.
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