SanityAndSurvival

The Communist Roots of Palestinian Terror

2008-01-31T20:22:00.000-08:00

By David Meir-Levi
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, December 14, 2007

The following is chapter from David Meir-Levi's new book, History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. The Terrorism Awareness Project previous printed his history of the "right-wing" influence on Islamic extremism, "The Nazi Roots of Palestinian Nationalism and Islamic Jihad." Taken together (with his entire book), these chapters show that Islamofascism is a political, not merely a religious force; and the potent and deadly offspring of the totalitarian ideologies of the past. -- The Editors.

Although many Nazis found new and ideologically welcoming homes in Egypt and Syria after World War II, the Grand Mufti’s Palestinian national movement itself, bereft of its Nazi patron, was an orphan. No sovereign state of any consequence supported it. On the contrary, most of the surrounding Arab states, all of them buoyed by postcolonial nationalism and looking for political stability, perceived the Palestinian cause, especially as embodied in the Muslim Brotherhood, as a threat. Egypt aggressively suppressed the Brotherhood. Saudi and Jordanian royalty watched the growth of radical Islam with suspicion. Syria and Lebanon, trying to move toward more open societies in the pre-Ba’athist era, feared the Brotherhood’s opposition to western-style civil rights and liberties and its fierce condemnation of westernized Arab societies.

More to the point, each of these states coveted some or all of what was formerly British Mandatory Palestine and were no more enthusiastic about the creation of a new Arab state there than they were about the creation of Israel. As a result of these complex national ambitions and antagonisms, no state for the Arabs of British Mandatory Palestine was created. Even though Israel offered the return of territories gained in the 1948 war at the Rhodes armistice conference of February 1949, the Arab leaders (among whom there were no representatives from the Arabs of the former Palestine) rejected Israel’s peace offers, declared jihad, and condemned the Arab refugees to eternal refugee status, while also illegally occupying the remaining areas that the United Nations had envisioned as a Palestinian state—as Arafat himself tells us in his authorized biography (Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker?). Egypt herded Palestinian Arabs into refugee camps in its new fiefdom in the Gaza Strip, assassinated their leaders, and shot anyone who tried to leave. Jordan illegally annexed the west Bank and maintained martial law over it for the next nineteen years.

For complete article, click here:

Palestians: Aggressors, not Victims

2008-01-31T20:08:00.000-08:00

By David Meir-Levi

FrontPageMagazine.com | 11/27/2007

Arab propaganda has been successful in presenting a picture of the Palestinian people as the helpless and innocent victims of Israeli aggression -- potential friends of America who have been alienated by America’s support for Israel and its failure to support a Palestinian national state. This decision is itself the result of a “Jewish Lobby” run by “neocons” and “receiving its orders” from Israel. The fact that Palestinians are now led by two terrorist organizations, Fatah and Hamas, is also blamed on Israel and the United States rather than on the Palestinians who elected terrorists as leaders.

According to Palestinian revisionism, the Palestinians lived from time immemorial in historic Palestine, a veritable paradise of flourishing orchards and fertile vineyards, teeming with happy peasants. Then, the evil Zionists came and, with the support of the British, stole the Palestinians’ land, exiled their people, and initiated a reign of terror and ethnic cleansing that has not abated until this very day.

Goebbels died 60 years ago, but his core propaganda strategy lives on in the Great Arab Lie that there exists a Palestinian people who have suffered great injustices at the hands of Israel, the UK, and the USA. Arab leaders know that if they just keep repeating the same lie often enough, eventually people will believe it -- and the greater the lie, the more readily will people believe it.

Since the Six-Day War, the Arab world’s most powerful leaders -- in Egypt, Libya, Arabia, Syria, and Iraq prior to Saddam’s demise -- have waged a war of words against Israel. Having failed to defeat Israel by means of naked military aggression, these leaders and their advisors decided, sometime between the end of the war and the Khartoum Conference of August-September 1967, to bring about the destruction of Israel by means of a relentless terror war.

To justify to the world their ruthless mass murder of Israeli civilians and their undying hatred of the West, these leaders needed to invent a bizarre and apposite reality. Slowly but surely, the reality of the “little David” Israel assailed by the “giant Goliath” of the entire Arab world has been reversed. Now the “Goliath” Israel is depicted as the racist, apartheid, war-mongering, oppressive, illegal occupier Jewish State, regional superpower, hell-bent on the destruction, indeed, the genocide of the poor, defenseless Palestinian people -- the Middle East’s new “David.” This grotesque fiction could be foisted upon the world only if there were indeed a “little David” for Goliath Israel to oppress; only if Israel’s combatant in the conflict were not the entire Arab world, but rather some poor, enfeebled people who could mount no real defense against the Jewish superpower, but nonetheless had a stronger claim to the land of Israel than Israel itself.

Thus the PLO, under the tutelage of the KGB, invented “The Palestinian People.”

This propaganda war has developed a mendacious narrative which works in two directions at once. On one hand, Arab propaganda sources claim the Canaanites were Palestinians; Abraham was a Palestinian; so were David, Solomon, and even Jesus. And the Jews were interlopers, invaders, and conquerors in the days of Joshua, just as they are now.

On the other hand, Israel is discredited and delegitimised in the present by the endless anti-Israel resolutions in the UN, orchestrated in large part by the Arab bloc and their Russian (formerly Soviet) mentors; and by the constant clamor of Arab states to the world at large, promoting the risible assertion that Israel is the aggressor. This occurs even though Israel has sued for peace after winning each war, Israel has agreed a dozen times over to the creation of a Palestinian state on part of its land, even as Hamas’ qassam rockets fall daily upon innocent Israeli civilians, even as Hezbollah declares vociferously its goal of the annihilation of world Jewry, and Iran looks forward perpetrating a nuclear Armageddon in order to create a world without Israel. If only Israel were destroyed, they assert, then the entire Middle East would know peace.

This mendacious narrative is stalwartly bolstered by a growing host of pseudo-academics in Western universities, and by a cadre of Western journalists, who churn out books and articles that effectively rewrite history and archaeology in order to erase Israel’s connection to the Holy Land and thus deny both the Christian and Jewish historic and religious roots in the Land of Israel.

This propaganda campaign to legitimize the 60-year-old Arab war against Israel and to create the fiction of the “Palestinian people” as the poor oppressed victims of imperialist colonialist Israel, illegally occupying “Historic Palestine,” is a veritable war against History. It deals in lies, just the kind of lies Goebbels had in mind. And the biggest lie of all is the existence of a “Palestinian People.”

How the Lie Began

After he took over as leader of the PLO, [1] Arafat sent his adjutant, Abu Jihad (later the leader of the PLO’s military operations), to North Vietnam to study the strategy and tactics of guerilla warfare. Arafat was struck by Ho Chi Minh’s success with left-wing sympathizers in the United States and Europe. “Progressive” activists on American campuses, enthusiastically following the line of North Vietnamese operatives, had succeeded in reframing the Vietnam War from a Communist conquest of the South into a struggle for national liberation. An insight into this North Vietnamese PR campaign, which provided the key to the Communist victory and a lesson for PLO operatives, was offered by Ho’s chief strategist, General Giap: “Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand.”

Giap’s counsel was simple but profound: the PLO needed to work in a way that concealed its real goals, permitted strategic deception, and gave the appearance of moderation. And the key to all this was creating an image that would help Arafat manipulate the American and Western news media.

The PLO also looked to other examples of a “people’s war” to find both military allies and ideological paradigms. Thanks to input from the late Romanian President-for-Life Ceausescu, General Giap, and the Algerians, Arafat developed the images of the “illegal occupation” and “Palestinian national self-determination,” both of which lent his terrorism the mantle of a legitimate peoples’ resistance. After the Six-Day War, Muhammad Yazid, who had been minister of information in two Algerian wartime governments (1958-1962), imparted to Arafat some wisdom that echoed the lessons he had learned in North Vietnam:

Wipe out the argument that Israel is a small state whose existence is threatened by the Arab states, or the reduction of the Palestinian problem to a question of refugees; instead, present the Palestinian struggle as a struggle for liberation like the others. Wipe out the impression...that in the struggle between the Palestinians and the Zionists, the Zionist is the underdog. Now it is the Arab who is oppressed and victimized in his existence because he is not only facing the Zionists but also world imperialism. [2]

Of course, there was one ingredient missing in this imaginative reconfiguration of the struggle: There had never been a “Palestinian People,” nor a “Palestinian Nation,” nor a sovereign state known as “Palestine,” nor even any specific territorial entity that could rightfully be called “historic Palestine.”

Inventing “Palestine”

The term Palestine (Falastin in Arabic) was an ancient name for the general geographic region that is more or less today’s Israel. The name derives from the Philistines, who originated from the eastern Mediterranean, and invaded the region in the 11^th and 12^th centuries B.C. The Philistines were apparently from Greece, or perhaps Crete, or the Aegean Islands, and/or Ionia. They seem to be related to the Bronze Age Greeks, and they spoke a language akin to Mycenaean Greek. Their descendents, still living on the shores of the Mediterranean, greeted Roman invaders a thousand years later. The Romans corrupted the name to “Palestina,” and the area under the sovereignty of their littoral city-states became known as “Philistia.” Six-hundred years later, the Arab invaders called the region “Falastin.”

Throughout subsequent history, the name remained only a vague geographical entity. There was never a nation of “Palestine,” never a people known as the “Palestinians” nor any notion of “historic Palestine.” The region never enjoyed any sovereign autonomy, remaining instead under successive foreign sovereign domains from the Umayyads and Abbasids to the Fatimids, Ottomans, and British.

During the centuries of Ottoman rule, when the “dead hand of the Turk” (to quote Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”) brutally frustrated the attempts at national self-determination among the Turks’ unhappy subjects in Greece, Armenia, Albania, and the Kurds, no Arabs under Turkish rule made any attempt to formulate an ideology of national identity, least of all the impoverished Arab peasantry in the region today known as Israel.

The emergence of Arab nationalism has been thoroughly documented, [3] and Arab sources are clear that even after the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire was carved up into various Middle Eastern nation-states, there was no concept of a separate state or people of “Palestine.” On the eve of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the very first congress of the Muslim-Christian Association met to select representatives; and they took care to note that the entity now termed Palestine by the British was “by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds” in inseparable part of Syria. [4] The same arguments were raised by Arab spokespersons in the UN on the eve of the 1947 partition plan.

The term Palestinian, ironically, was used during the British Mandate period (1922-1948) to identify the Jews of British Mandatory Palestine. The Arabs of the area were known as “Arabs”; and their own designation of the region was balad esh-Sham (the province of Damascus). While some Arab nationalist writers, and coffee-shop intellectuals in Cairo or Beirut, developed the concept of Arab nationalism in large part as a response to Zionism, the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian” were used in their traditional sense as geographic designations, not as national identities.

In early 1947, in fact, when the UN was exploring the possibility of the partition of British Mandatory Palestine into two states, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs, various Arab political and academic spokespersons spoke out vociferously against such a division because, they argued, the region was really a part of southern Syria, no such people or nation as “Palestinians” had ever existed, and it would be an injustice to Syria to create a state ex nihilo at the expense of Syrian sovereign territory. [5]

An even greater irony is the fact that the Arab population of the region grew almost four-fold from the onset of the Zionist Endeavour (1855) to the beginning of Israel’s statehood (1948) in large part because of:

a) The efforts of the Zionist pioneers to reclaim waste land and turn it in to farmland, thus creating both farming and grazing land for Arabs; and

b) The substantial improvements in the economy of the region which were generated by both the British and the Zionists; and

c) The substantial improvements in the health services generated by the Zionists and the British.

From a mere 350,000 in 1855, the Arab population of the region increased to around 1.4 million by 1947. Part of this increase came from immigration in to the region from surrounding areas which lacked the burgeoning economy and health services offered by the British and the Zionists. Part came from the dramatic decrease in infant mortality and increase in longevity which the Arabs of the region enjoyed, thanks to the health and nutrition improvements generated by the Zionists and the British. [6]

Thus, it is quite likely that the majority of Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip today owe their very existence to Zionism and British Middle Eastern foreign policy.

During the 19 years from Israel’s victory in 1948 to Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, all that remained of the UN’s partitioned territory to the “Arabs” of British Mandatory Palestine were the West Bank, under illegal Jordanian sovereignty, and the Gaza Strip, under Egyptian rule. Never during these 19 years did any Arab leader anywhere in the world argue for the right of national self-determination for the Arabs of these territories. A “Palestinian” nation and “Palestinian” people had not yet been invented. Even Yasser Arafat, from the earliest of his terrorist days until 1967, used the term ‘’Palestinians’’ to refer to the Arabs who lived under, or had fled from, Israeli sovereignty; and the term “Palestine” to refer to Israel in its pre-1967 borders (the 1949 armistice line).

Article 24 of the PLO’s original founding document, the PLO Covenant, states: “this Organization (the PLO) does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the Gaza Strip or the Himmah area.” For Arafat before the Six-Day War, Palestine was Israel. It was not the West Bank or the Gaza Strip; because the West Bank and the Gaza Strip belonged to other Arab states, and the inhabitants of these areas were not numbered among the Palestinians whose “homeland” Arafat sought to “liberate.” The only "homeland" for the PLO in 1964 was the State of Israel. However, in response to the Six Day War, the PLO revised its Covenant on July 17, 1968, to remove the operative language of Article 24, thereby newly asserting a “Palestinian” claim of sovereignty to the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

This ploy was, perhaps inadvertently, revealed to the West in a public interview with Zahir Muhse’in, a member of the PLO Executive Committee, in a March 31, 1977, interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper Trouw.

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan. (Emphasis added.)

Arafat himself said the same thing, on many occasions, and asserts often in his authorized biography (Alan Hart, Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker): “[T]he Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.”

But such admissions could not stem the enthusiasm with which these fictions were greeted by Western leaders. Within a few years, the USSR's invention of the fictitious narrative of Palestinian national aspirations and rights of self-determination created the facade of morality and legitimacy that the terrorists needed to curry favor with the EU, the UK, and the U.S. This same facade facilitated the Soviet implementation of its takeover, with the Arab bloc, of the UN General Assembly, and UN committees and functions outside of the Security Council.

“Palestinian nationalism” today?

But what about today? After 60 years of unrelenting terror war against Israel, 60 years of hardship and privation incarcerated in refugee camps scattered throughout the Arab world -- an incarceration forced upon them by their host Arab countries, not by Israel -- after 40 years of the propagandistic pretense that the people today known the “Palestinians” were and are a cohesive national group with historic roots in what they call “Palestine,” and after 14 years of a “Palestinian Authority” created by the Oslo Accords to offer the “Palestinians” the framework and infrastructure of their own state…what is the condition of “Palestinian Nationalism” today?

For the answer to that question, we must look to the current demographic distribution of “Palestinians” both in Israel and in what they call the “Palestinian Diaspora.”

Estimates vary, but most place the Palestinian population at about 9 million worldwide. Of these, more than 3 millionlive in the West Bank and Gaza Strip today, [7] more than 4 million live in Arab countries, and the remainder have migrated elsewhere, mostly to the West. [8] These figures do not include the approximately 1.3 million Arab Israeli citizens (who are sometimes incorrectly referred to as “Palestinians” or “Israeli Palestinians”) living within the borders of pre-1967 Israel.

Although the Arab narrative states the “Palestinians” are Arabs who fled Israel in 1948, and fled the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and were forced in to refugee camps by their host Arab countries, less than one-third of all “Palestinians” in the Arab world and Israel live in refugee camps. More than 67 percent of these Palestinians have left the camps over the decades since those wars, and have created homes, jobs, and families for themselves throughout the Arab countries and the world.

Moreover, even those who remained in the refugee camps harbor no great desire to return to what the propaganda narrative claims are their homes and farms in Israel. In a 2003 opinion poll taken by Khalil Shikaki’s Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (Ramallah, Palestinian Authority), only ten percent of respondents said they would agree to return to a Palestinian state. Only 10 percent of these respondents -- i.e., one percent of the entire survey -- would agree to return to their homes in Israel if it meant becoming citizens of Israel; they would return only if Israel no longer existed and had been replaced by a Palestinian state. [9]

Clearly the results of this poll presented a serious challenge to the concept of Palestinian nationalism and to the hype and hyperbole that the Arab narrative has given to the wholly fabricated concept of “right of return.” So serious was this challenge, and so totally incapable were Arab leaders of mounting any rational argument against it, that they resorted to violence in order to silence Shikaki. Shortly after the poll was published, “there were about a hundred people who basically stormed into the office. They wanted to attack me, attack the center, attack the staff. They believe that the right of return is being tampered with…What it indicated is that there is a great deal of softness, practicality, on the exercise of the right in terms of people electing or choosing their place of residence. That is the shocking, [sic.] in terms of for the first time, having these results being made public.” [10]

Shocking indeed. Other reports indicate that nearly 200 armed gunmen stormed Shikaki’s offices, destroyed computers and books and records, threatened and intimidated office workers, and threatened to kill Shikaki himself if he continued his work. Clearly such concrete evidence that the Palestinian’s putative love for his land and yearning for his ancestral home is long a thing of the past, if indeed it ever existed at all, is existentially threatening to the propagandists who demand a “right of return” for all the millions of “Palestinians” who now claim the status of refugees.

Shikaki’s poll is even more important when one considers the tragic plight of Palestinians, refugees or otherwise, in their Arab host countries. One might think, on the basis of the oft-ballyhooed commitment of Arab states to the “Palestinian cause” that their Arab brethren would treat the Palestinian refugees well in their host countries. But one would be wrong.

The Palestinians have suffered grievously at the hands of their Arab hosts. Conditions vary from country to country, but Arab host governments and societies have maintained a level of hostility toward Palestinians that expresses itself in numerous legal limitations on their rights of movement, employment, land and home purchase, citizenship, discrimination and general antipathy on the part of the host society. Studies of attitudes in various host countries indicate a fear and suspicion of the Palestinians, and a hostility bordering on violence [11] -- this despite the almost universal agreement by Arab states to the Casablanca Protocol, in which is outlined the need for the proper care and rehabilitation of the refugees, but without compromising their status as refugees. [12]

This hostility has in some cases overflowed into lethal violence against the Palestinians by their host brethren. During the first Gulf War, Kuwait expelled 300,000 of its 440,000 Palestinian residents because they sided with Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait, despite the fact that most of them had been born in Kuwait and lived there all their lives. This extreme Arab-vs.-Arab ethnic cleansing merited almost no column-inches in Western news outlets. More than a decade later, Kuwait’s hostility toward Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority is still intense. [13]

Perhaps even more revealing is the fact that once the Palestinian Authority was established, as a product of the Oslo Accords (of September 1993), and Palestinians worldwide looked forward to the emergence of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, there was no perceptible influx of Diaspora Palestinians to their erstwhile homeland.

In light of the above, one may reasonably ask: Why do Arab leaders and their Amen Corner insist on the Arab “right of return” and the fulfillment of the putative “inalienable right of national self-determination” for the “Palestinian people”? Half of the answer has already been given to us by Arafat himself and Zahir Muhse’in in the aforementioned interview. But, unfortunately, the other half is more heinous than the first. The fiction of an uprooted and oppressed “Palestinian people” is really much more than a justification for endless terrorism and war against Israel: it is also the hoax whereby the Arab bloc in the UN can maintain, at levels of near hysteria, their justification for a propaganda war and a terror war against the United States.

Palestinians in the Jihad against “global non-belief”

As described above, Palestinians and their leaders were allied with the Nazis before and during World War II. After the war, Arab states offered safe haven to Nazi criminals and incorporated Nazi Jew-hatred in to traditional Muslim anti-Jewish ideology. During the Cold War, Palestinians were in alliance against the U.S. with the USSR, serving as their proxy terrorists against Western targets; and during the first Gulf War they sided with Saddam Hussein. Palestinian leadership and some significant part of the rank-and-file have been the enemies of the USA and the West for the past 70 years. [14]

Today, Hezbollah and Hamas work with Iran and al-Qaeda to advance the cause of global jihad. Israel is the first target, but the USA is next. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasr’allah has said, “'Death to America’ is not a slogan. Death to America is a policy, a strategy, and a vision.”

Just as Arafat served his Soviet masters, so too now do Hamas and Hezbollah serve Iran. Pursuant to Iran’s goals and strategies, Hezbollah has attacked many USA targets over the past 25 years. Iran’s use of Hezbollah as its proxy gives Iran “plausible deniability” in these actions. Of Hezbollah’s terror attacks against USA targets, the most deadly were the April 18 and October 23, 1983, suicide bombings against American targets in Beirut, killing 63 and 241 Americans respectively, wounding hundreds of others. [15]

The tragic and very perilous reality is that Palestinian Arabs, since before World War II, have in large numbers supported the very worst of America’s enemies, from the Nazis to the Soviets to Saddam Hussein; and now they support the Islamo-fascist terrorist jihad against the West. Today the majority party in the Palestinian Authority is Hamas, a self-defined terrorist organization which has joined forces with Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and Iran in their terror war against the West. On September 13, 2001, a high-ranking Hamas official told the world just how deeply Hamas hates the U.S. In response to the attack of 9/11, Dr. Atallah Abd as-Subh published an open letter to America, in which he said: “Allah has answered our prayers; the sword of vengeance has reached America and will strike again and again.” [16]

Hamas cooperates closely with al-Qaeda. Since the Israeli unilateral and unconditional retreat from the Gaza Strip in August, 2005, al-Qaeda cells under the leadership of Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, have entered the Strip and work alongside of Hamas and the dozen other terror groups at large there. Al-Zarqawi recruits Gaza Strip Palestinians with family members in the West Bank for his terrorist efforts because they can more easily cross the Israeli check points under the guise of “family reunions.”

Al-Qaeda and Hamas and Hezbollah deployed for terror in the USA

Operatives from the major Arab and Iranian terror groups have infiltrated our own homeland with the intent to attack us from within. Palestinian terror groups and individuals are a key part of this operation. [17]

Very little of this information has ever appeared in our mainstream media. Rather, the task of informing the American public of the dangers posed to us by Iranian and Palestinian terrorist jihad falls, with very few exceptions, to more highly specialized (and apparently more honest and courageous) media outlets.

A survey of these non-mainstream media discloses the most discomforting evidence that Palestinian and other terrorists are:

Thoroughly and comfortably ensconced in downtown America, under the noses of law-enforcement and Homeland Security officials, and they number in the thousands; [18]
Training for war in secret camps in the USA; [19]
Infiltrating the USA’s own military; [20]
Penetrating Washington, D.C., with political influence, staffers, and spies; [21]
Exploiting our legal system to advance their propaganda and stifle criticism or analysis of their jihadist goals; [22]
Copying American Indian legal precedents in order to establish enclaves of Muslim legal independence in which Shari’a law trumps the Constitution inside the USA; [23] and
Working to prevent us from understanding the jihadist goals of these actions by dissimulating, covering up and whitewashing the terrorists and their apologists. [24]

And our mainstream media seem ignorant of, or inclined to ignore, the accumulating evidence that jihadist sleeper cells abound with Hezbollah and Hamas and al-Qaeda terrorists hidden within the Islamic American community, waiting for the call to action from Teheran or Damascus. [25]

Palestinian attempted attacks on American Soil

Recently declassified CIA documents reveal that as early as March 1973, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, a PLO sub-group created by Arafat, tried to detonate three car bombs in New York City, timed to coincide with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's visit. The powerful bombs, which might have killed or wounded hundreds, failed to explode due to improper wiring of the timing mechanisms. It is now well known that Arafat ordered the murders of American and Belgian diplomats in Sudan. And since then the PLO and Fatah and other Palestinian terrorists groups have claimed dozens of Americans as their victims. Later, individual Palestinians carried out their own personal version of jihad with attacks or attempted attacks on American soil. Palestinian Arabs in Brooklyn prepared a biological terror attack on a Brooklyn bus and a subway station, which was thwarted by an almost unbelievable stroke of good luck. (A neighbor in their Brooklyn apartment complex noticed the multiple UPS deliveries of glass laboratory equipment to their apartment. She alerted the police, thinking that they were running a ‘meth-lab’ in their kitchen). Palestinians were involved in the attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993. They had also planned to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the United Nations building.

And many more attacks have been planned. Especially after 9/11, al-Qaeda commanders and officials stationed in Western countries, including the United States, have recruited Hamas operatives and volunteers to carry out reconnaissance or to serve as couriers. In August 2004, two suspected high-level Hamas operatives, Mohammed Salah and Abdelhaleem Ashqar, were detained in the U.S. and charged with providing material support to Hamas, racketeering and money laundering. In November 2003, Jamal Aqal, a Gazan who emigrated to Canada, was arrested in Israel under suspicion of receiving weapons and explosives training from Hamas for use in future terror attacks in Canada and New York City. Aqal pleaded guilty in 2004 to planning to kill American and Canadian Jewish leaders and Israeli officials traveling in the U.S.

Also in 2004, Ismail Selim Elbarasse, a long-time Hamas money man, was arrested in Maryland, reportedly after authorities witnessed his wife videotaping Maryland's Chesapeake Bay Bridge from their SUV as Elbarasse drove. The images captured by Elbarasse's wife included close-ups of cables and other features "integral to the structural integrity of the bridge," according to court papers. Hamas leaders discussed openly their plans, and threats, to carry out terror operations against American targets in the Middle East and in the USA because of America’s support for President Abbas and the PLO after Hamas’ election victory.

Conclusion

During the week of June 13, 2007, Hamas forces soundly defeated the much larger and better armed Fatah forces in Gaza, killing at least 160 Arab Palestinian Fatah loyalists, effectively destroying the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip and establishing complete control over the Gaza Strip.

This new development affords Hamas a prime strategic asset for escalating its violent campaign against Israel. This sudden and unexpected shift, this rebellion against Abbas, is also a rebellion against moderation; and it is a direct attack against U.S. goals in the Middle East. Hamas’ actions, and the widespread support for these actions among the Palestinian people, also reveal something else: that the Palestinian people are at war with America.

The history outlined above demonstrates that this war has been going on for three-quarters of a century, beginning in the 1930s with the alliance between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler, developing from the 1960s to the present with Arafat’s actions as an agent for Soviet policy and a supporter of Sadam Hussein in the first Gulf War, and Hamas’ overtly anti-American threats and attacks and its backing of Hezbollah’s attacks against Americans today.

It cannot be argued that hatred of America is restricted to only a small minority of Palestinians, the leaders, the fanatics, the extremists. Hundreds of thousands adored the Mufti and yearned for his Final Solution. Millions followed Arafat, cheering and celebrating when he hit both Israelis and Americans. Tens of thousands flocked to his banner to join his forces (Fatah, PLO, PFLP, PFLP-GC, DFLP, the abu-Nidal group, Tanzim, Force 17, el-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the Black September Group, among others) and created a full-fledged terrorist army.

Moreover, in 1996 the Palestinian people voted him in to office with a landslide victory. When his mandate expired in January of 2000, there was no opposition to his continued illegal control of the Palestinian Authority until his death in November 2004. After Arafat’s death, the voters’ loyalties shifted not to his supposedly more moderate successor, Mahmoud Abbas (nor to any of the other moderate parties on the 2006 PA ballot: Hanan Ashrawi’s “Third Way” party garnered only 3 percent of the votes on a platform of ending the Intifada), but to the terrorist army offering the most extreme agenda of terrorism and mass murder and endless war against Israel and against the USA: Hamas.

But why this animosity toward America? One reason commonly offered is that Palestinian hatred comes from U.S. support for Israel. The fictions of the “Palestinian people” who have been exiled and oppressed by Israel, and of the “Palestinian homeland” which has been stolen from its rightful owners by the evil Zionists, provide justification to Arab hatred against the USA for supporting Israel, the cause of all the Palestinian suffering.

But while the U.S. does support Israel, it has also done much to support the Arab world, the Palestinians, Yasser Arafat, and the PLO in particular. And the USA has been a prime mover in the efforts since World War II to create a Palestinian state alongside of Israel. After World War II, President Roosevelt took the uncompromisingly anti-imperialist position that Third World countries should be given the opportunity for self-determination; and the Muslim Third World was very much a part of his vision. On a regular basis from Roosevelt to Clinton, the U.S. has given almost as much money to Egypt as to Israel, has given billions more over the years to many other Arab states, and has given billions more to UNRWA for support of Palestinian refugees, and this despite the fact that UN representatives acknowledge that UNRWA refugee camps have become havens for terrorists whose targets include Americans and who have been complicit in the development of worldwide terrorism.

In addition to being a consistent source of financial largesse to the Palestinians, America has for almost 60 years has consistently and intentionally turned a blind eye to the fact that at least some of that money is used to recruit, train, equip, arm, and deploy terrorists against Israel, and at times against American targets.

As president, Jimmy Carter played a crucial role in Arafat’s makeover from terrorist to statesman, and as ex-president he has slavishly supported the Palestinians. Arafat was an honored guest at the White House more than any other head of state during Bill Clinton’s presidency. President Clinton hosted the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, which brought Arafat out of exile and set in to motion what should have been the creation of a Palestinian state. He presided, as well, over the Camp David II talks, in which Arafat was offered the state of Palestine on a silver platter. Presidents Clinton and Bush have authorized hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to the PA since the Oslo Accords (1993).

President Bush was the first American president to make a public commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state; and he led the “Quartet” in initiating the Road Map whose main goal was getting peace negotiations back on track so that a Palestinian state could emerge with the resolution of the conflict.

If their right to national self-determination and getting their own state were indeed what the Palestinians' leadership wanted, that leadership would see the U.S. as an ally. But they see the U.S. as an enemy. Why? Because their most profound dreams do not involve national self-determination or a state of their own.

The Palestinians are instead motivated by the dream of what the most extreme of the world’s Muslim terror armies say they can deliver: the destruction of Israel, “Death to America,” and “Islam uber Alles.”

ENDNOTES:

[1] Much of the following is based upon research published in Meir-Levi, David, History Upside Down: The Origins of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression (Encounter Books, 2007).

The PLO was actually the brain-child of the KGB, which was creating a number of front “liberation” organizations throughout the Third World, which would serve as proxies for Soviet aggression against the West.

In 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved Moscow’s blueprint for a Palestinian National Charter—a document that had been drafted in Moscow—and made the KGB agent of influence, Ahmed Shuqairy, the first PLO chairman. The Romanian espionage service (DIE) was given responsibility for providing the PLO with logistical support. Except for the arms, which were supplied by the KGB and the East German Stasi, everything (as Pacepa wrote) “…came from Bucharest. Even the PLO uniforms and the PLO stationery were manufactured in Romania free of charge, as a “comradely help.”

The Soviets not only armed and trained Palestinian terrorists but also used them to arm and train other professional terrorists by the thousands. The International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the Soviet Security Police (KGB) and Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) all played major roles in this effort. The International Department of the CPSU, working out of the Lenin Institute in Moscow, had the main responsibility for supervising the curriculum of revolutionary thought and practice in these groups as well as liaison with the Central Committee of the CPSU. Selected members of Western and Third World Communist Parties following the Soviet line were trained there in psychological warfare and propaganda, as well as in military techniques and guerrilla warfare.

The CPSU also built Moscow's Patrice Lumumba Friendship University to serve as a base of indoctrination and training of potential "freedom fighters" from the Third World. More specialized training in terrorism was provided at locations in Baku, Odessa, Simferopol, and Tashkent. Mahmoud Abbas, later to succeed Yasir Arafat as head of the PLO, was a graduate of Patrice Lumumba U, where he received his Ph.D. in 1982 after completing a thesis involving Holocaust denial.

[2] As quoted in Pacepa, Ion Michai, Red Horizons.

[3] See George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement; Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History; and Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, for very comprehensive and in-depth surveys of this topic, with ample bibliography.

[4] Hertz, Eli E., Myths and Facts, 2005, and cf. also Porath, Yehoshua, The Palestinian Arab National movement: From Riots to Rebellion, 1977. It is instructive in this context to note that Khalidi (supra note #3) attempts to make a case for a nascent national identity among the Arab Muslims of the Holy land, constructed over a long period of time, as early as the late 18^th century. This assertion has found support in some of his reviewers (and cf. inter alia, Geoffrey Schad’s review of Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, in the Middle East Policy Council Journal, Volume VI, February 1999, Number 3); but even a cursory reading of Khalidi’s treatment of this subject reveals that the only early example of what he calls “Palestinian National sentiment” is actually an example of Muslim religious apartheid. The Muslim religious leaders of Jerusalem protested the Sultan’s permitting French representatives to establish an office in Jerusalem in the late 18^th century. The Jerusalem Muslim religious elite were affronted that an infidel “Ifrangi” (Frenchman) not under a dhimmi treaty should be allowed to pollute the sacred precinct with his presence. Disdain and disgust for someone of another religion is hardly an example of nationalist sentiment.

[5] As correctly noted by Kimmerling and Khalidi (supra note #4) and Conan Cruise O’Brien in The Siege.

[6] For details regarding the population growth of the Arabs in the region in the century before the creation of the State of Israel, cf. Justin McCarthy, Population of Palestine (1990); and more generalized treatment of the issue by Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial, and Conan Cruise O’Brien, The Siege. See also http://www.cjpme.ca/documents/En%20Demographics%20Factsheet%20v.1.pdf and https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/arabs/paldem1.html.

[7] For a detailed discussion of the origins of the Arab Refugee Problem, the proof that the total onus of culpability for the creation of the Arab refugee population rests not upon Israel but upon the Arab states who invaded Israel in 1948, and the documented evidence for an original refugee population of around 725,000 (which magically burgeoned in to many millions over the past si decades), see David Meir-Levi, Big Lies (David Horowitz Freedom Center, 2005).

It is important to note that the Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1965 was about 1,000,000. After the Six-Day War the population at first declined due to Arab refugees fleeing the Israeli army; but very shortly thereafter it began a rapid increase as refugees returned and the economy of the West Bank and Gaza Strip flourished under Israeli sovereignty. Since 1967 the Arab population there has almost quadrupled. Yet the spin-meisters and propagandists routinely accuse Israel of perpetrating a genocide on the Palestinians (some hedge their accusations with the bizarre assertion that it is a “slow motion genocide”).

The salutary nature of Israel’s sovereignty over the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip from 1967 to 1994 is confirmed by the UN. The UN provides a separate estimate of the total Palestinian population of the Gaza, East Jerusalem, and West Bank. It indicates that this population was 1,006,000 million in 1950, and rose to 1,100,000 in 1960, 1,094,000 in 1970, and then leapt to 1,477,000 in 1980 and 2,152,000 in 1990. This increase was the result of improvements in income and health services during the initial period of Israeli occupation before the Intifada. The Palestinian population rose to 2,629,000 in 1995 and 3,183,000 in 2000 – a more than 20% increase during the five years before the Israeli-Palestinian War [the second uprising] began [Source: Anthony Cordesman, "From Peace to War: Land for Peace or Settlements for War," (DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 15, 2003), pp. 12-13.]

[8] Below are samples of Palestinian population estimates from various sources including the UN and PASSIA (the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, Ramalla, Palestinian Authority). [For maps of dispersion, and statistics showing where the bulk of the refugees live, go to

http://mondediplo.com/maps/refugeesdiasporapaldpl2000 and

http://mondediplo.com/focus/mideast/a2335].

http://israelipalestinianprocon.org/?gclid=CKj3-4C74I8CFQpHhgodkWE2-Q

West bank Arab Gaza strip Arab

1960

799,000

302,000

1970^**

677,000

368,000

1980

964,000

497,000

1985

1,044,000

532,288

1990

1,254,506

642,814

1995

1,626,689

875,231

2000

2,020,298

1,132,063

2005

2,385,615

1,376,289

Sources & Notes:
Sources by Year:
1948		Wael R. Ennab "Population and Demographic Developments in the West Bank and Gaza Strip until 1990," Study prepared for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 28 June 1994
1950 - 1980		Justin McCarthy "Palestine's Population During the Ottoman and the British Mandate Periods," 2001
1985 - 2005		U.S. Census Bureau "International Data Base (IDB), Country Summary: West Bank and Gaza Strip," accessed online Sep. 19, 2007
Notes:
*		Increase in the Arab population due to Palestinian Refugees from the territory of the new state of Israel to the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the first Arab-Israeli War (1948-1949)
**		Decrease in the Arab population between 1960 and 1970 due to Arab refugees from the 1967 War.

x=========================================x

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/refugee_table.html

Distribution of Palestinian Refugees

(As of June 2000)

	Registered Population	Number of Camps	Total Camp Population	Registered Persons not in Camps	Percentage of population not in camps
Lebanon	376,472	12	210,715	165,757	44.02
Syria	383,199	10	111,712	271,487	70.84
Jordan	1,570, 192	10	280,191	1, 290,001	82.15
West Bank	583, 009	19	157,676	425,333	72.95
Gaza Strip	842,622	8	451,186	391,436	46.45
Total	3,737,494	59	1,211,480	2,526,014	67.58

Source: UNRWA Liaison Office, DC21755
United Nations
New York, NY 10017
Tel. 2129632255
Fax. 2129357899

=======================================================x

Palestinian Population Worldwide

(mid-2001)

http://www.passia.org/

West Bank & Gaza Strip	3,298,951
Israel	1,012,741
Jordan	2,472,501
Lebanon	456,824
Syria	494,501
Egypt	51,805
Saudi Arabia	291,778
Kuwait & other Gulf	149,786
Libya and Iraq	78,884
Other Arab countries	5,887
The Americas	216,196
Other Countries	275,303

Total	8,807,518

Source: PASSIA (Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs)

[9] Shikaki, Khalil, Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, at

http://www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html. Shikaki’s poll was conducted between January and June of 2003, and published on his website in July of 2003, http://www.pcpsr.org/index.html

Mr. Shikaki took quite a bit of flack for this poll. Note Issam Mufid Nashashibi’s “Palestinians and the Right of Return,” in Counterpunch, August 21, 2003. Nashashibi condemned the poll as being rigged in order to undermine the rights of the Palestinians. The essence of Nashashibi’s criticism is that Shikaki did not include in his survey any Palestinians living outside of the refugee camps (Shikaki explains that he did this because they were no longer refugees, having integrated in to their host countries). It never seems to have occurred to Mr. Nashashibi that indeed, Palestinians born to 2^nd and 3^rd generation residents of various Arab countries who have jobs and homes and families in those countries might indeed be integrated in to those countries and would not want to return to his mythic “Palestine.”

The National Review also had some harsh words for Shikaki in Max Abrahms’ “Right of Return Revisited,” August 13, 2003. Abrahms pointed out that the problem was the nature of the questions posed. It seemed obvious to Abrahms that Palestinians would not want to go to a Jewish State, so, of course, 99% said no. But, opines Abrahms, they would want to return if the state were Palestine, and not Israel. It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Abrahms that any such return would involve the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state…hardly a sound option if one is seeking peace in the Middle East.

Mr. Shikaki found a more friendly reception on NPR, where he was interviewed by Robert Siegel on “All Things Considered,” July 14, 2003 (http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/transcripts/2003/jul/030714.shikaki.html). Siegel agreed with Shikaki that this poll indicates that the “right of return” as demanded by Palestinian and other Arab leaders is, in reality, a dead issue. There is simply almost no one (maybe 1%) in the “Palestinian Diaspora,” whether in refugee camps or in other parts of the world, who is possessed of a yearning for a return to “historic Palestine.”
[10] Dr. Shikaki to Robert Siegel on NPR, supra note #9.
[11] See http://mondediplo.com/maps/refugeesdiasporapaldpl2000 and http://mondediplo.com/focus/mideast/a2335 for statistics and summary. For more detailed information, note Simon Haddad’s “Palestinians in Lebanon: Towards Integration or Conflict?” in http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/MEPP/PRRN/papers/haddad.html; and http://www.forcedmigration.org/guides/fmo025/fmo025.pdf for an extensive and fully footnoted discussion of Palestinians in Jordan, where in general they have been treated much better than in other host countries: with citizenship and rights to work and ability to integrate in to the country, get passports, travel abroad. For Syria, see “Palestinian refugees in Syria” in http://www.forcedmigration.org/guides/fmo017/fmo017-3.htm; And also http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/syria.html (Reprinted from UNRWA, http://www.unrwa.org). For the most comprehensive and critical treatment of the plight of the Palestinians in Arab host countries, see http://www.islamonline.net/english/In_Depth/PalestineInFocus/Thepeople/articles/01.shtml

[12] For a detailed discussion of the Casablanca Protocol, see “Protocol for the treatment of Palestinians in Arab States”, Sept. 11, 1965, in http://www.badil.org/Documents/Protection/LAS/Casablanca-Protocol.htm

[13] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1361060.stm.

[14] For a more detailed treatment of this subject, see Meir-Levi, David, History Upside Down (supra note #1). For detailed examination of Arafat’s allegiance to Saddam Hussein, cf: Glick, Carolyn, "The Baghdad-Ramallah Axis," Jerusalem Post, Oct. 7, 2002; Karsh, E., Arafat’s War (2003); Idem, “Arafat's Grand Strategy”, Middle East Quarterly, 8.3.04; Meir-Levi, David, “Left-wing Monsters: Arafat,” FrontPageMagazine.com, Sept. 23, 2005; Rubin, B. & Rubin, J. C., Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography.

And for Arafat’s alliance with Iraq during Gulf War 1, cf. also:

The PLO's Palestinian Legislative Council denounced the U.S. missile strike in western Iraq (in response to Iraqi attacks on Kurds there last year), as "American aggression against the sister state, Iraq." The PA also urged Arab states to provide Iraq "any form of financial aid and moral support...so that sister Iraq can recapture her natural place in the taking of the national and pan-Arab responsibility." (An Nahar, Sept. 5, 1996)

In 1991, the PLO representative in Washington, Hassan Abu Rahman, circulated a fabricated transcript of a radio interview in which U.S. General Norman Schwarzkopf supposedly "admitted" that "the war that our men fought against Saddam Hussein was for Israel, our men fought to destroy Israel's main enemy in the region." (Jerusalem Post, June 5, 1991)

During the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf crisis, PLO chairman Yasir Arafat was Saddam Hussein's closest Arab ally. After the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, the PLO denounced America's opposition to the occupation, accusing Washington of "beating the drums of a destructive war and raising tension toward a complete explosion." (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 14, 1990).

According to the London Independent, "much of the logistical planning for the Iraqi invasion was based on intelligence supplied by PLO officials and supporters based in Kuwait." (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 8, 1990)

According to Yossef Bodansky, The Secret History of the Iraq War, Arafat was closely involved with Saddam in training special Iraqi terrorist forces for attacks against Israel and the USA using chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Arafat’s PLO trainers worked in Syria and in Iraq in partnership with both Saddam and el-Qaeda to train and deploy Iraqi and Palestinian terrorist cells to infiltrate Israel, Europe and the USA for such attacks.

[15] The following list of Hezbollah attacks against the USA, since the organization was created by Iran in 1982, is from Jewish Virtual Library, per supra (note # 8).

July 19, 1982, Beirut, Lebanon. Hezbollah members kidnapped David Dodge, acting president of the American University in Beirut. After a year in captivity, Dodge was released. Rifat Assad, head of Syrian Intelligence, helped in the negotiation with the terrorists.

March 16, 1983, Beirut, Lebanon. Five American Marines were wounded in a hand grenade attack while on patrol north of Beirut International Airport. The Islamic Jihad and Al-Amal, a Shi'ite militia, claimed responsibility for the attack.

April 18, 1983, Beirut, Lebanon. A truck-bomb detonated by a remote control exploded in front of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 employees, including the CIA's Middle East director, and wounding 120. Hezbollah, with financial backing from Iran, was responsible for the attack.

October 23, 1983, Beirut, Lebanon. A truck loaded with a bomb crashed into the lobby of the U.S. Marines headquarters in Beirut, killing 241 soldiers and wounding 81. The attack was carried out by Hezbollah with the help of Syrian intelligence and financed by Iran.

January 18, 1984, Beirut, Lebanon. Malcolm Kerr, a Lebanese born American who was president of the American University of Beirut, was killed by two gunmen outside his office. Hezbollah said the assassination was part of the organization's plan to "drive all Americans out from Lebanon."

March 7, 1984, Beirut, Lebanon. Hezbollah members kidnapped Jeremy Levin, Beirut bureau chief of Cable News Network (CNN). Levin managed to escape and reach Syrian army barracks. He was later transferred to American hands.

March 8, 1984, Beirut, Lebanon. Three Hezbollah members kidnapped Reverend Benjamin T. Weir, while he was walking with his wife in Beirut's Manara neighborhood. Weir was released after 16 months of captivity with Syrian and Iranian assistance.

March 16, 1984, Beirut, Lebanon. Hezbollah kidnapped William Buckley, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Buckley was supposed to be exchanged for prisoners. However when the transaction failed to take place, he was reportedly transported to Iran. Although his body was never found, the U.S. administration declared the American diplomat dead.

April 12, 1984, Torrejon, Spain. Hezbollah bombed a restaurant near an U.S. Air Force base in Torrejon, Spain, wounding 83 people.

September 20, 1984, Beirut, Lebanon. A suicide bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in East Beirut killed 23 people and injured 21. The American and British ambassadors were slightly injured in the attack, attributed to the Iranian backed Hezbollah group.

September 20, 1984, Aukar, Lebanon. Islamic Jihad detonate a van full of explosives 30 feet in front of the U.S. Embassy annex severely damaging the building, killing two U.S. servicemen and seven Lebanese employees, as well as 5 to 15 non-employees. Twenty Americans were injured, including U.S. Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew and visiting British Ambassador David Miers. An estimated 40 to 50 Lebanese were hurt. The attack came in response to the U.S. veto September 6 of a U.N. Security Council resolution.

December 4, 1984, Tehran, Iran. Hezbollah terrorists hijacked a Kuwait Airlines plane en route from Dubai, United Emirates, to Karachi, Pakistan. They demanded the release from Kuwaiti jails of members of Da'Wa, a group of Shiite extremists serving sentences for attacks on French and American targets on Kuwaiti territory. The terrorists forced the pilot to fly to Tehran where the terrorists murdered two passengers--American Agency for International Development employees, Charles Hegna and William Stanford. Although an Iranian special unit ended the incident by storming the plane and arresting the terrorists, the Iranian government might also have been involved in the hijacking.

June 14, 1985, Between Athens and Rome. Two Hezbollah members hijacked a TWA flight en route to Rome from Athens and forced the pilot to fly to Beirut. The terrorists, believed to belong to Hezbollah, asked for the release of members of the group Kuwait 17 and 700 Shi'ite prisoners held in Israeli and South Lebanese prisons. The eight crewmembers and 145 passengers were held for 17 days during which one of the hostages, Robert Stethem, a U.S. Navy diver, was murdered. After being flown twice to Algiers, the aircraft returned to Beirut and the hostages were released. Later on, four Hezbollah members were secretly indicted. One of them, the Hezbollah senior officer Imad Mughniyah, was indicted in absentia.

September 9, 1986, Beirut, Lebanon. Continuing its anti-American attacks, Hezbollah kidnapped Frank Reed, director of the American University in Beirut, whom they accused of being "a CIA agent." He was released 44 months later. September 12, 1986, Beirut, Lebanon. Hezbollah kidnapped Joseph Cicippio, the acting comptroller at the American University in Beirut. Cicippio was released five years later on December 1991.

October 21, 1986, Beirut, Lebanon. Hezbollah kidnapped Edward A. Tracy, an American citizen in Beirut. He was released five years later, on August 1991.

February 17, 1988, Ras-Al-Ein Tyre, Lebanon. Col. William Higgins, the American chief of the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization, was abducted by Hezbollah while driving from Tyre to Nakura. The hostages demanded the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon and the release of all Palestinian and Lebanese held prisoners in Israel. The U.S. government refused to answer the request. Hezbollah later claimed they killed Higgins.

March 6, 1989, Cairo, Egypt. Two explosive devices were safely removed from the grounds of the American and British Cultural centers in Cairo. Three organizations were believed to be responsible for the attack: The January 15 organization, which had sent a letter bomb to the Israeli ambassador to London in January; the Egyptian Revolutionary Organization that from out 1984-1986 carried out attacks against U.S. and Israeli targets; and the Nasserite Organization, which had attacked British and American targets in 1988.

November 8, 1991, Beirut, Lebanon. A 100-kg car bomb destroyed the administration building of the American University in Beirut, killing one person and wounding at least a dozen.

June 25, 1996, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A fuel truck carrying a bomb exploded outside the U.S. military's Khobar Towers housing facility in Dhahran, killing 19 U.S. military personnel and wounding 515 persons, including 240 U.S. personnel. Several groups claimed responsibility for the attack. In June 2001, a U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, identified Saudi Hezbollah as the party responsible for the attack. The court indicated that the members of the organization, banned from Saudi Arabia, "frequently met and were trained in Lebanon, Syria, or Iran" with Libyan help.

[16] Ar-Risala [the Hamas official newspaper], Sept. 13, 2001, quoted in MEMRI, Sept. 17, 2001, #268, http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=jihad&ID=SP26801

[17] In-depth exposure of this infiltration in to the USA by Palestinian and other Arab terrorist groups can be found in:

Bodansky, Yossef, Target The West: Terrorism in the World Today, 1993, and The Secret History of the Iraq War (2005)

Diaz, Tom, & Newman, Barbara, Lightning out of Lebanon (terrorists in USA);

Emerson, Steven, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us;

Kushner, Harvey, Holy War on the Home Front: The Secret Islamic Terror Network in the United States;

Sperry, Paul, Infiltration: How Moslem Spies Penetrated Washington;

Murawiec, Laurent, Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West;

Spencer, Robert Islam Unveiled and Onward Muslim Soldiers;

Trifkovic, Serge The Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad

Infiltration in to Latin America has been on-going since the early 1980’s, and very successful in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela. For a brief summary of the situation see Meir-Levi, David, “Connecting the South American Terror Dots,” (FrontPage Magazine, August 9, 2004) and Barlett, Donald and Steele, James, “Who left the door open? American’s border: even after 9/11 it is outrageously easy to sneak in,” (Time Magazine, September 20, 2004). For further corroboration of the continued expansion of the Arab terror bases in South America, and the infiltration of these terrorists in to the USA via Mexico, cf.: BBC News, “Arab smuggling network broken up,” April 28, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/3710060.stm; Coman, Julian, “Arab terrorists are getting into the US over Mexican border”, UK News Telegraph, May 15, 2004; Cucullu, Lt. Col. Gordon, “Hamas moves into South America,” Front Page Magazine, Feburary 10, 2006; Gato, Pablo and Windrem, Robert, “Hezbollah builds a Western base: From inside South America’s Tri-border area, Iran-linked militia targets U.S.,” NBC News, May 9, 2007; Jehl, Douglas, “U.S. aides cite worry on Qaeda infiltration from Mexico,” New York Times, February 17, 2005; Myers, Joseph and Poole, Patrick, “Hezbollah, Illegal Immigration, and the next 9/11,” FrontPage Magazine, April 28, 2006; North, Oliver, “Back Door to Terror,” Human Events, October 20, 2004, and cf. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=17639; and Sherman, Mark, “FBI warns of ‘special interest’ aliens,” Associated Press, March 8, 2006)

[18] “Northern Virginiastan,” editorial, Investors Business Daily, February 26, 2007, and cf. http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=257386735556435&view=1

[19] “HOMELAND INSECURITY: Probe finds terrorists in U.S. 'training for war,' Neighbors of Muslim encampment fear retaliation if they report to police” World Net Daily, 2.19.06

[20] Pipes, Daniel “Pentagon Jihadis,” New York Post, September 29, 2003, and cf. www.danielpipes.org | www.danielpipes.org/article/1259

[21] Glasov, Jamie interviews Paul Sperry in FrontPage Magazine, April 12, 2005

[22] Taylor, Randy, “Islam: Setting the United States up for the fall,” March 19, 2007, Northeast Intelligence Network, http://www.homelandsecurityus.com/Taylor031907

[23] Smith, Issa, “Native American Courts: Precedent for an Islamic arbitral system,” The American Muslim, February 14, 2007, originally published April-June, Spring 1993, and cf. http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/native_american_courts_precedent_for_an_islamic_arbitral_system/0013143)

[24]. Poole, Patrick, “Cover Up and Deny,” FrontPage Magazine, Part I, May 16, 2007, Part II, May 31, 2007

[25] Asman, David, “Does any terrorist organization pose a greater threat to Americans than al-Qaeda?” aired on Fox News, January 20, 2007, as “Smokescreen: Hezbollah Inside America”; Gaubatz, Dave, “Sleeper Cells in the United States and Canada, American Thinker, February 5, 2007, and cf. http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/sleeper_cells_in_the_united_st.html; and Lathem, Niles, “N.Y. Hezbollah Hunt,” New York Post, May 22, 2006; and cf. supra, note #10 for more in-depth analysis of this threat.

David Meir-Levi lectures in English, Hebrew, and Spanish and is a contributor to Frontpagemag.com.

Israeli “Occupation” vs. Palestinian Self-Rule

2008-01-31T19:27:00.001-08:00

Israeli “Occupation” vs. Palestinian Self-Rule

By David Meir-Levi
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, September 12, 2007

2007-06-23T20:24:00.000-07:00

Recent Articles in Front Page Magazine. Go to www.frontpagemag.com, click on archive, and click on my name "david meir-levi" for the link to all of these articles.

Remembering The Six-Day WarPublished: Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Why Bangladesh Matters Published: Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The Jericho JihadPublished: Tuesday, March 21, 2006

My Brother's Keeper?Published: Monday, March 13, 2006

Hamas Uber-AllesPublished: Friday, February 24, 2006

Divestment: The How-To ManualPublished: Monday, February 20, 2006

Who Is Really Oppressing the Palestinians?Published: Friday, February 03, 2006

Terrorism: The Root CausesPublished: Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Big LiesPublished: Friday, October 07, 2005

Left-wing Monsters: ArafatPublished: Friday, September 23, 2005

Divestment Fraud Published: Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Occupation and Settlement: The Myth and RealityPublished: Friday, June 24, 2005

The Big Arab LiePublished: Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Does Israel Have a Right to Exist?Published: Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Mainline Christian Anti-SemitismPublished: Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Bethlehem's Christian ExodusPublished: Wednesday, January 05, 2005

The "Missing Peace" Is Missing PiecesPublished: Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Arafat's New "One State Solution"Published: Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Islamikazi War and Palestinian PovertyPublished: Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Connecting the South American Terror DotsPublished: Monday, August 09, 2004

Eyeless in GazaPublished: Monday, May 24, 2004

The Myth of the “War Criminal” SharonPublished: Monday, August 04, 2003

Oxfam's InfamyPublished: Friday, July 25, 2003

2007-06-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

Silence in the face of evil -- the Middle East conflict David Meir-Levi (06/21/2007)

I am continuously puzzled by the fact that so few commentators on the topic of the Middle East conflict turn their attention to what I call the great moral divide.

It seems to me that this moral divide should be a really big factor in how westerners look at the dynamics of the conflict. Instead, it is almost never mentioned; and in fact, in my opinion many commentators assiduously avoid dealing with it, intentionally obfuscate it, or even lie about it.

Such obstructionist behavior makes me feel that the great moral divide must be really important....otherwise commentators would not be so reticent to deal with it.

As I see it, there are two aspects to the moral divide:

1.) What the Arab terrorists (*) do, say they want to do, and boast about what they have done or are going to do.....is all really evil by any standard of western morality. No matter how it is spun by the various pundits and journalists and politicians and clergy and academicians and pseudo-statespersons who serve as cheerleaders for the terrorists, the obvious bottom line behavior and goals, based upon the terrorists' own words and deeds, are:

genocide, attempted genocide, incitement to genocide, diatribe of genocide,

targeting of civilians for murder, attempted murder, mass murder, attempted mass murder,

kidnapping, attempted kidnapping, of Israelis and other non-Muslims

suicide/homicide,

hate speech, hate preach, hate teach,

pressing women and children in to terrorist service (some times without their knowledge and/or against their will),

theft, embezzlement, re-directing/mis-directing billions of dollars from intended civilian beneficiaries to terrorist activities or to secret private accounts,

routine running of criminal activities, auto theft, extortion, kidnapping their own for ransom,

and international trafficking of weapons and hard drugs for profits to fund terrorism,

impoverishing a whole population so that foreign aid can be embezzled and used for terrorism,

denying a whole population its civil and human rights and its right to political self-determination via the democratic processes promised it by the UN and the USA and Israel.........

..........all of these are galactic violations of a host of international legislation regarding civil and human rights, international laws of war, international interdictions regarding genocide, international conventions, and internationally canonized rights of women and children and non-combatants.

All of these are just plain evil.

And all of these are the defining characteristics of the Arab terrorists and various Moslem and Arab governmental authorities which support and fund and shelter and train and arm the terrorists.

The Arab Palestinian terrorist cause is the only cause in the world, and across all of world history, for which the sole defining paradigm is terrorism, and the unique and unrelenting goal is the destruction of a sovereign state and the genocide of its people. It is obvious that such a cause cannot be a just cause. But even if it were, its methods are evil, its intentions are evil, its aspirations are evil, its words are evil, and its deeds are evil. The Palestinian terrorist movement is just plain evil(*).

Silence (obfuscation and justification all the more so) in the face of evil is complicity. Complicity with evil is evil.

The Palestinian terrorists and their cheerleaders are evil.(**)

2.) What many of the leaders (*)of many Arab and some non-Arab Moslem states say and do and teach and preach in support of the Palestinian Arab terrorists is evil.

Openly, knowingly, enthusiastically cheering and supporting and harboring and funding and training and deploying evil is evil.

Never before, in all of human history, has there been such massive expenditures of money, resources, human efforts, and energy that many Arab and some Moslem state leaders have been making, for over three-quarters of a century, in order to destroy Israel and exterminate its Jews; either with their own forces, or by support of proxy Arab terrorist forces. Even the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe never reached the multi-national dimensions and umpteen billions of dollars of expenditures and endless relentless international propaganda campaigns of Arab leaders and Arab states -- and all for the sole purpose of destroying one small nation and its Jewish citizenry.

Where else in the world, and in all of human history, do we find the leaders of so many sovereign states endlessly diverting resources, for decades, from their own people, and neglecting their own people's needs, in order to eradicate a sovereign state?

Where else in the world, and across all of human history, do we see such enormous energy poured into international collaboration for the propagation of the PR and propaganda and revisionist history and political machinations and mendacious mis-information that have characterized the Arab political and propaganda assaults on Israel? And these assaults have been maintained within the family of nations and at the UN and in the intellectual arenas of the Western world, for decades ...and all with the sole intent to demonize Israel so that it will lose the support of its allies, and thus be easier prey when its Arab enemies are ready to launch their great final jihad?

The sheer obscenity of such a heinous endeavor is beyond description; but no one seems willing to comment on the pure evil of such design.

Consider too the commitment that these state leaders have made to an education system that systematically demonizes Israel and Israelis (and in some cases Jews and Judaism), in order to create in the minds of their youth (today's sophomore is tomorrow's Senator) the cross-generational trajectory that will keep the evil alive far in to the future, and will provide justification for those evil expenditures and evil goals.

Teaching children to hate is child abuse raised to the level of public policy. Child abuse is evil.

And consider the cost of the lost opportunities. What would the Middle East look like today if Arab leaders had been willing to cooperate with the Zionists in the application of western agrarian technology, medicine, epidemiology, industrial technology, and science in general, to the Arab waste lands and to the impoverished peasantry who barely eked out a subsistence living on those waste lands? And how much more so, had neighboring Arab states been willing to make peace with, and work with, and build with, both Israel and the state of "Palestine" which would have come into existence with the UN partition plan of 11/29/1947?

Look at the sand dunes 8 miles north of Jaffa in 1911. Then look at Tel Aviv today, built on those sand dunes. Something similar could have happened in the desert south of Damascus, in the waste land north of Amman, in parts of the Sinai desert east of Egypt, on the eastern shores of the Dead Sea, and more, had Arab leaders chosen to work with Zionists rather than try to exterminate them.

The cold, bitter, implacable, brutal, primitive and baseless hatred that so many in the Arab world bear toward Israel, Israelis, Zionism, Jews and Judaism – that hatred is evil. And those Arab leaders who nurture this hatred, and who use it to run others, for decades -- they are evil. And evil too are their intellectual collaborators in both Arab and western nations, who try to spin for us a new pseudo-reality in which that hatred has “just cause” and that terrorism is spawned by “real grievances”.

Baseless brutal hatred is evil. And all the more so when it impels the haters toward violence and war and destruction and terrorism and mass murder and genocide.

But what about Israel? Judging from the level of hysteria in the endless anti-Israel diatribe from the UN and much of the media and mosques in Muslim and western countries, one might conclude that Israel is the world’s worst violator of human rights -- far surpassing China or North Korea or Libya or Arabia or Cuba or Venezuela or Iran or Russia or any of the failed states whose misdeeds have been documented but have drawn no ire from the civilized world.

Certainly there are evil people among Jews, Israelis, Zionists, as there are among all groups across the world. Israel as a state, and Zionists as active participants in the creation of that state, have done some bad things, some times, to some people, as have all states at some time, somewhere.

But there is a radical and substantive difference between a state doing some bad things, making some mistakes, harming some people…..and a state or group whose core intentions and goals and methods and deeds and official policies are evil.

No state is perfect. No society is flawless. And this is certainly true of Israel as a state and as a society. But even if all the lies that Arab PR and propaganda have perpetrated about Israel were true (they are not, but even if they were), the fate that the Arab terrorists, and their state enablers, and their mendacious cheerleaders, all avidly seek for Israel would not be justified. The extermination of an entire people cannot be justified, ever, except in the hearts and minds of truly evil people.

No Jewish leader, no Zionist leader, no Israeli leader, ever, during the entire history of Zionism and the State of Israel, ever perpetrated the heinous acts which are par for the course in the Palestinian Arab war against Israel: acts which are the hallmarks of the Arab terrorists and their enablers; and which are part of the very core of Arab political and religious ideology.

Yet, almost no one discusses the sheer evil of the Arab anti-Israel (and anti-Jewish) program. It is as though the Arabs get a free pass to be evil, and to do evil and arouse no ire save that of their victims.

Consider the long and discouraging list of utterly evil actions in Victor Davis Hanson’s essay (“When should we no longer support Israel?” Victorhanson.com, March 30, 2004) which characterize Palestinian terrorism and terrorist government:

“……we should no longer support Israel, when:

Mr. Sharon suspends all elections and plans a decade of unquestioned rule.

Mr. Sharon suspends all investigation about fiscal impropriety as his family members spend millions of Israeli aid money in Paris.

All Israeli television and newspapers are censored by the Likud party.

Israeli hit teams enter the West Bank with the precise intention of targeting and blowing up Arab women and children.

Pre-teen Israeli children are apprehended with bombs under their shirts on their way to the West Bank to murder Palestinian families.

Israeli crowds rush into the street to dip their hands into the blood of their dead and march en masse chanting mass murder to the Palestinians.

Rabbis give public sermons in which they characterize Palestinians as the children of pigs and monkeys.

Israeli school textbooks state that Arabs engage in blood sacrifice and ritual murders.

Mainstream Israeli politicians, without public rebuke, call for the destruction of Palestinians on the West Bank and the end to Arab society there.

Likud party members routinely lynch and execute their opponents without trial.

Jewish fundamentalists execute with impunity women found guilty of adultery on grounds that they are impugning the honor of the family.

Israeli mobs with impunity tear apart Palestinian policemen held in detention.

Israeli television broadcasts to the tune of patriotic music the last taped messages of Jewish suicide bombers who have slaughtered dozens of Arabs.

Jewish marchers parade in the streets with their children dressed up as suicide bombers, replete with plastic suicide-bombing vests.

New Yorkers post $25,000 bounties for every Palestinian blown up by Israeli murderers.

Israeli militants murder a Jew by accident and then apologize on grounds that they thought he was an Arab, to the silence of Israeli society.

Jews enter Arab villages in Israel to machine gun women and children.

Israeli public figures routinely threaten the United States with terror attacks.

Bin Laden is a folk hero in Tel Aviv.

Jewish assassins murder American diplomats and are given de facto sanctuary by Israeli society.

Israeli citizens celebrate on news that 3,000 Americans have been murdered.

Israeli citizens express support for Saddam Hussein’s supporters in Iraq in their efforts to kill Americans.

So until then, I think most Americans can see the moral differences in the present struggle.

If the Palestinians wish to hold periodic and open elections, establish an independent judiciary, create a free press, arrest murderers, subject their treasury to public scrutiny, eschew suicide murdering, censure religious leaders who call for mass murder, embrace non-violent dissidents, extend equal rights to women, end honor killings, raise funds in the Arab world earmarked only to build water, sewer, transportation, and education infrastructure, and pledge that any Jews who choose to live in the West Bank will enjoy the same rights as Arabs in Israel…………then they might find Americans equally divided over questions of land and peace.

But all that is a lot of ifs. And so for the present, Palestinian leaders should not be too surprised that Americans increasingly find very little in their society that has much appeal to either our values or sympathy. If they continually assure us publicly that they are furious at Americans, then they should at least pause, reflect, and ask themselves why an overwhelming number of Americans, not Jewish, not residents of New York, not influenced by the media, are growing far more furious with them.”

As Dr. Hanson notes, were these atrocities perpetrated by Israelis, the world would rise up in righteous ire, heaping calumny on Israel. They are typical of the Palestinian terrorist government -- and the world is silent.

And, not surprisingly, the same is true of Arab much ballyhooed and state-supported Holocaust denial.

Virtually alone among peoples of the world, Arabs appear to have won a free pass when it comes to denying or minimizing the Holocaust. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has declared to his supporters that "Jews invented the legend of the Holocaust." Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recently told an interviewer that he doesn't have "any clue how [Jews] were killed or how many were killed." And Hamas's official Web site labels the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews "an alleged and invented story with no basis."

Such Arab viewpoints are not exceptional. A respected Holocaust research institution recently reported that Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia all promote Holocaust denial and protect Holocaust deniers. The records of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum show that only one Arab leader at or near the highest level of government -- a young prince from a Persian Gulf state -- has ever made an official visit to the museum in its 13-year history. Not a single official textbook or educational program on the Holocaust exists in an Arab country. In Arab media, literature and popular culture, Holocaust denial is pervasive and legitimized. (Robert Satloff, “The Holocaust’s Arab Heroes”, Washington Post, 10.8.06).

This denial, criminal in some countries in the West, is standard government policy in many Arab and some Moslem countries.

Finally, consider as well the tragic fact that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where anti-government demonstrations can muster up to 400,000 (June, 1982) proclaiming their opposition to a war (in this case it was the Lebanon war), even as the Palestinian Arab terrorists in Lebanon rain terrorist rockets on civilian communities. Has there ever been an anti-war demonstration in any Arab country, anywhere, at any time?

Israel is the only country in the Middle East where anti-war activists can demonstrate outside of the Parliament building against the closure of crossing points in to Gaza (because it makes life harder for the Gazan Arabs), even as Hamas’ Qassam rockets from Gaza rain down on Sederoth.

That fact, perhaps more than any other, depicts for us the great moral divide in this conflict.

David Meir-Levi

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(*) Nota Bene! I'm talking ONLY about Arab terrorists, and the state leaders who support them, and the rank-and-file terrorists who join their terrorist groups, and the broader population throughout the world which supports them.

I am NOT talking about your average Arab/Moslem man-on-the-street, regular person, nice civilian, non-terrorist, non-militant, who (I presume) wants nothing more than to lead a normal life, raise crops and a family, give his kids a good start in life, and leave the world a bit better off than he found it....same as you and I.
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(**)And the evil is not limited to the Arab – Israel conflict. Arab attacks on Arab healthcare workers, misuse of the neutrality of Arab patients and ambulances, destruction and violence and genocide of Moslem against Moslem in Sudan (Darfur as well as South Sudan), Iraq, Mauritania, Yemen, Algeria, Somalia, Lebanon, and Gaza, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- this evil abounds throughout the Moslem world and has been a characteristic of the Moslem world since the days of the first Caliphs. And the common thread through all of these calamities is the deep-seated religious and racial intolerance that causes Sunni and Shi’a Iraqis to massacre each other in mosques and markets and funerals and weddings, drives the ethnic cleansing of Darfur that has resulted in deaths and displacement by the hundreds of thousands, and the bona fide genocide in south Sudan which has resulted in the deaths of more than two million black African Christians and animists.

Muslims slaughter Muslims: where's the outcry

2007-06-07T14:54:00.000-07:00

The article below is of great significance for our understanding of the true dynamics of the Arab-Israel conflict.

Since the advent of Zionism as a movement, c. 130 years ago, an estimated 60,000 Arabs have been killed by Jews and (since 1948) by Israelis. This number is an estimate of Arabs killed in Israel's defensive wars, as well as those killed when they mounted terror attacks, and civilian casualties. Almost all of these Arabs were armed Arabs engaged in armed conflict against Israel, where the Arab side was the aggressor.

Of that number, about 6,000 thousand were Palestinians, most of whom were armed terrorists killed in the process of committing, or preparing to commit, terror attacks against Israeli civilians, or in Israeli reprisals for such attacks.

Yet these 6,000 are the ''martyred heroes'' of Arab media (and some western media) whose deaths are considered proof of Israel's hatred of, and intent to genocide, the Palestinian people who number somewhere around 9,000,000 (c. 3,000,000 in Israel and c. 6,000,000 in the Palestinian Diaspora). And for the deaths of these 6,000, Israel is excoriated as the world's worst oppressor criminal terrorist state.

YET....

Since 1994, more Palestinians have been killed by Palestinians under the rule of Arafat and Hamas than have been killed by Israel. Both the media and the Arab world are silent.

Recently, the civil war in Gaza has claimed hundreds of civilians on both sides, including innocent children murdered as they sat in the back seat of their father's car. Both the media and the Arab world are silent.

And now, during the Hezbollah and Fatah-el-Islam fighting in Lebanon, the carnage of Arab against Arab is horrendous....and both the media and the Arab world are silent.

AND HISTORICALLY.....
Since 1948, somewhere between 12 million to 20 million Muslims have been killed by Muslims, in endless wars between Muslim states and within Muslim states around the world.

The one single individual who can be credited with killing more Muslims than any other person in the entire world, and across all of world history…..is none other than Saddam Hussein, the Muslim Arab tyrannical dictator of Iraq (c. 1,300,000 Muslims killed during his 32-year reign of terror…including c. 800,000 on both sides in the 8-year Iran-Iraq war).

Yet, across the entire Muslim world, Saddam is adulated and mourned as a great Arab leader, a modern-day Saladin, a hero.

World wide, and across the entire Arab and Muslim world, there is no acrimony, not even any critique, for the tens of millions killed in Muslim vs. Muslim wars. There is no condemnation of Saddam as the butcher of Shi'ites, the mass-murderer of Kurds. There is not even a critical word to be heard anywhere in the Muslim world for the mind-bogglingly obscene child-abuse of the Iranian army's Basiji: the thousands of hapless helpless 10- to 14-year-old boys drafted into Iranian military service and deployed to clear minefields in the Iran-Iraq war, by walking through the mine-fields!(*); or the child-abuse raised to the level of public policy in the Palestinian Authority as a Mickey Mouse surrogate teaches 5-year olds that they must eternally hate Jews and kill Israels and fight for Islam's domination of the entire world.

But there is endless acrimony against Israel for its successful defensive actions; and there is endless acrimony against the USA for its retaliatory defensive and pre-emptive wars against Islamofascist terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Apparently, the death of Muslims matters to Muslim leaders only when caused by Jews or Americans. This appalling fact of history bespeaks an abysmal moral failure in Islamic society: an inability to challenge evil within the society, and an all too eager willingness to blame others, especially Jews (and in latter day times, Americans) for that evil.

The cause of the Arab-Israel conflict is not Israeli repression of Palestinians -- the Lebanese and Egyptians have done far worse to their Palestinians, and without the need to defend themselves against the endless terror war that Palestinian terrorists have waged against Israel.

The cause of the Arab-Israel conflict is not any fictional hatred that Israelis bear toward Palestinians -- the Lebanese and Iraqis harbor a truly frothing and fomenting hatred of Palestinians, as do Kuwaitis and Saudis, and without ever having been at the receiving end of a Palestinian suicide bomber.

The cause of the Arab-Israel conflict is this obvious, but unmentionable in polite society, abysmal moral failure of Muslim society. No matter what the cause, no matter how great the cost, no matter how horrible the Muslim suffering, never take responsibility for Muslim crimes. Never acknowledge the essentially apartheid nature of Islamic religious discrimination against Jews and Christians. And never allow a Jew to have authority.

This is religiously legislated apartheid, politically legitimized Jew-hatred. That apartheid, that hatred, is the cause of the conflict and the reason for its having become the longest war in world history.

David Meir-Levi
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(*) The boys wore Plexiglas keys around their necks. These were the keys to paradise, and to the 72 virgins, to which the boys would ascend immediately and painlessly if they were killed by the land mines. The maimed, one-legged survivors of such mishaps still live in Iran today...still awaiting their virgins.

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Jenin in Lebanon: So where is the outcry?
Jonathan KayNational Post (Canada)
Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Last week, the Lebanese army attacked a squalid Palestinian refugee camp that's become infested with Islamist suicide terrorists and guerilla fighters. On May 20, government troops surrounded the camp, with tanks and artillery pieces shelling it at close range. Army snipers gunned down anything that moved. At least 18 civilians were killed, and dozens more injured. Water and electricity were cut off. By week's end, much of the camp had been turned into deserted rubble.

Thousands of terrified residents fleeing the camp reported harrowing stories of famished, parched families trapped in their basements.How did the rest of the world react? The Arab League quickly condemned "the criminal and terrorist acts carried out by the terrorist group known as Fatah al-Islam," and vowed to "give its full support to the efforts of the army and the Lebanese government." EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana also condemned Fatah al-Islam, and declared Europe's "support" for Lebanon. And the UN Security Council called the actions of Fatah al-Islam "an unacceptable attack" on Lebanon's sovereignty. As for the Western media, most outlets ignored the story following the first flurry of news reports.At this point, please indulge me by re-reading the first paragraph of this column -- except this time, substitute the world "Israeli" for "Lebanese" in the first sentence.

Let's imagine what the world's reaction would be if the ongoing siege were taking place in Gaza or the West Bank instead of the Nahr al Bared refugee camp on the outskirts of Tripoli, Lebanon.First of all, a flood of foreign journalists would descend on the camp to document Israel's cruelty and barbarism, and the story would remain front page news to this day. Al-Jazeera would be a 24/7 montage of grieving mothers swearing revenge on the Zionist butchers, and rumours would swirl of mass graves and poison gas.

The Arab League, EU and United Nations would condemn Israeli aggression -- as would the editorial board of The New York Times. The Independent would dispatch Robert Fisk to embed with Fatah al-Islam. And the newspaper's cartoonist, Dave Brown, would produce another award-winning rendition of his signature theme: Jews eating Palestinian babies.Actually, we don't need to speculate: What I have just written is exactly what happened when the Israeli army invaded the Jenin refugee camp to root out terrorists in April, 2002, a battle that was similar in scale to this month's siege at Nahr al Bared. (At Jenin, 52 refugee camp residents were killed -- most of them gunmen, according to Human Rights Watch.

At Nahr al Bared, the figure is 45 and climbing.) The main difference between the two sieges is that Israel's army put its troops at far greater risk by invading Jenin with infantry -- whereas the less humane Lebanese army has simply pummelled Nahr al Bared with explosives from a distance. Jews apparently care a lot more about saving Palestinian civilians than do Lebanese soldiers.For years, we have been told that Palestinian suffering and "humiliation" is at the root of the Middle East conflict, as well as the Western-Muslim clash of civilizations more generally. This is nonsense: The 200,000-plus Palestinian refugees who live in Lebanese camps are treated worse than dogs -- with no access to decent schools or good jobs -- and no one in the Arab world cares a whit.

In fact, many Arabs seem to embrace the same blind anti-Palestinian hatred of which Israel is typically accused. When Lebanese armoured personnel carriers rolled through Tripoli on May 20, they got a standing ovation from local residents. "We wish the government would destroy the whole camp and the rest of the camps," one local told The New York Times. "Nothing good comes out of the Palestinians."Just as Lebanon's stew of eternally warring Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Hezbollah terrorists and militarized clans serves as a Mediterranean microcosm for the political dysfunction of the Arab world, this month's events capture perfectly the utter cynicism of the Islamic world's trumped up vilification of Israel, and the West as a whole. As with the Muslim- on-Muslim slaughter in Darfur, Iraq, Pakistan, Gaza and a dozen other hot spots, the siege at Nahr al Bared shows that what inflames "the Muslim street" (for lack of a better cliche) isn't Muslim suffering, but the relatively tiny fraction thereof that jihadi propagandists and their Western apologists can lay at the feet of Jews and Christians.Muslim blood apparently comes cheap -- but only when it's drawn by other Muslims.

Jkay@nationalpost.com© National Post 2007
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