8Zgram - 8/24/2001 - "Orient House" - Conclusion

[Ingrid Rimland]

Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

August 24, 2001

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

I thought it would be appropriate to end my "Orient House" ZGrams by giving
Thumbs up to one courageous American mainstream paper that did not censor
the article below.  We still have a free press here - and as long as the
Zionist Lobby cannot prevent writers and articles like this one from being
published, there is still a chance for the poor Palestinians.

This one appeared in the Philadelphia Enquirer on August 16, 2001.

[START]

 In the debate on Middle East, both sides worthy of criticism

 By Jerry Long

 When debating what level of support the United States should give to the
state of Israel, the "self-hating Jew" may have a range of options.

 The self-thinking Gentile, unfortunately, is allowed only two: Love it or
fund it.

 We must accept the arrogant defiance of the Israeli statesman bluntly
telling us to stay out of his country's internal affairs as he strolls up
to Capitol Hill to pocket billions of our tax dollars.

 Above all, we must never suggest that Palestinians have as much right to
their own independent state as the Israelis do, lest we be portrayed as
modern-day Kristallnacht enablers.

 Personally, I have never considered the phrase God gave this to us an
acceptable policy position. As though some Ancient Omnipotent Landlord
mistakenly drew up a lease agreement with a 3,000-year sublet option. Yes,
the Palestinians refused to compromise in 1947, but if the Lenape showed up
today with a 300-year-old claim to the Delaware Valley, I doubt we'd be
packing up and partitioning.

 Yes, there have been Jews on the land for millennia, but there have also
been Palestinians. And before either, there were Canaanites and Philistines
amid the milk and honey. The Jews dealt with these peoples the
old-fashioned way: They smote some, co-opted others, and constantly made
bloody war among themselves. In fact (on the off-chance that facts matter
to the discussion), the entire period of a "Greater Israel," the basis for
the current settlement controversy, lasted no more than 80 years and ended
around 920 B.C.

 Some Jewish groups are properly unceasing in their efforts to teach the
world the lessons of the Holocaust. But when a country institutes a policy
of preemptive assassination, it may be about time to ask what lessons
Israel has learned, and from which side it learned them.

 While Israeli government rationales have never been strangers to
hypocrisy, shouldn't someone at least mention that if the British had
pursued a strategy of assassinating militants deemed to be threats to
security, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir would have been killed in the
1940s and Count Folke Bernadotte, the man appointed U.N. mediator in
Palestine in 1948 (and promptly assassinated), would have spent the 1950s
in a suite at the King David Hotel?

 So Yasir Arafat is a terrorist - but should Israelis then feel superior
because their current prime minister is merely a war criminal? Granted,
Arafat must exert greater control over his murderers - but couldn't Sharon
have trundled down from his perch above Sabra and Shatilla to stop
Christian Phalangists >from bashing the heads of Palestinian children
against stone walls? OK, Yasir Arafat is a corrupt fraud - but should the
United States really be in the business of denying a people their rights
based on the inadequacies of their leader?

 Please spare me the hackneyed analogies about how Americans would feel if
subjected to terrorist bombings from Canada. Last time I checked, we
weren't surrounding Montreal with troops. We weren't diverting the water
supply of Edmonton, bulldozing homes on the outskirts of Toronto, or
erecting roadblocks and checkpoints throughout Quebec.

 Perhaps there can never be peace in the Middle East as long as Arafat is
alive. But there will also never be peace until the Holocaust is seen for
what it was: a rancid and unspeakably obscene chapter in a 20th-century
book of depravity that includes Armenians, Cambodians, Rwandans and Kulaks
- and not an Accountability E-ZPass for a government to view its policies
as somehow beyond criticism.

 Meanwhile, the United States continues to deplore all violence while
pursuing policies that indulge the lunacy of the settlers and fuel the
lunacy of Hamas. Our government can never be an honest broker of Arab hopes
until it finds the political courage to cease being a willing executor of
Israeli demands.

 These are the only absolute truths about the Middle East: Barbarity and
goodness exist on both sides while innocent children are dying.

  Jerry Long (JerryBeggar@aol.com) and his brother Joe are known as the
satirists - the Sturdy Beggars.

[END]

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Thought for the Day:

"Remember that Rabbi Cooper and Rabbi Hier and others of their ilk are
*de*facto* publicists for Revisionism."

(Letters to the Zundelsite)