Of Horses And Jews...

Of Horses And Jews (Dead Versus Live)…
by Gerald A. Honigman

I’m upset.

My wife, Elisabeth, was a 4-H owner of horses; my daughter-in-law, Isabelle, still loves to ride; and I have always admired them as one of G_d’s magnificently noble creatures.

I really wanted to see Steven Spielberg’s movie, War Horse.

Unfortunately, after what I’ve recently learned, I won’t.

No doubt, Steven won’t miss the cost of my and my wife’s theatre tickets--as he didn’t when I refused to see his earlier Munich as well. Still, I don’t have to support such stuff.

I’m getting ahead of myself, however, so please let me explain…

Like millions of other Jews around the world, I’m a “survivor.”

I’m one of those who escaped the Holocaust--the predictable endpoint of a road carefully paved and prepared for millennia. Indeed, scholarly estimates place the number of Jews massacred--often for “holy” reasons--prior to the 20th century to be at least that of those slaughtered in the age of Zyklon B gas.

No, I didn’t live in Europe during the 1940s…I was born in the U.S.A. on President Harry Truman’s birthday in 1948--just several days before Israel’s own rebirth.

On my Dad’s side (of blessed memory), we’ve been in America since the late 19th century. My Grandfather and Father were vets of World War I and II respectively (along with many other members of my family).

But, on my Mother’s side, her Mother--my Grandmother--escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe just before the rise of Hitler in Germany. Most of her family stayed behind and became Nazi statistics. Had Grandma not made it here, I would not be writing this essay right now…

Despite the deniers seeking to murder the victims yet a second time--like Israel’s alleged “peace partner,” Mahmoud Abbas, and Iran’s Ahmadinejad--it’s legit, in most circles, these days to cry at least crocodile tears for Auschwitz’ dead Jews. Even school curricula now often include Holocaust studies. I’ve been nervous about this and expressed my fears to a friend, a non-Jewish lady teaching the subject.

Too many folks, you see, want to hear that the Nazis were from Mars instead of being real people who went to church on Sundays and turned Jews into lampshades and soap on Mondays.

No one wants to know that all that Hitler had to know on this subject was taught to him in Luther’s Second Treatise on the Jews centuries ago, and that the Nuremburg Laws had their precedents in church law and other religious teachings for millennia. Church Fathers such as St. John Chrysostom came right out and called for the Jews’ slaughter.

The problem is exacerbated in that those same schools teaching the Holocaust increasingly are adopting textbooks which promote much of the Palestinian narrative as “Gospel” when dealing with the study of the Middle East. So, while it’s not proper to be an anti-Semite, it’s now fine to be an anti-Zionist. The Jew of the Nations--rather than individual Jews--is now the preferred, or at least acceptable, target.

So, the Holocaust was really not unique.

Indeed, the Jews themselves have allegedly become the new Nazis and the “Palestinians” (Arabs) the new Jews in this thinking.

Sympathy for dead Jews is kosher, but empathy for admittedly imperfect live ones struggling to survive is not.

Israel is subsequently held up to standards and expectations demanded of none others--certainly not the so-called “Arab” world which surrounds it and routinely subjugates, deliberately massacres, and has waged literal genocide against millions of non-Arab peoples in its midst.

Now, this is not to say that suffering has not occurred outside of the Jewish experience…among Arabs too. Look what the latter routinely do to each other (let alone to non-Arabs) in places like Iraq, Syria, and so forth. Of course it has…horribly so.

But, to compare the plight of Arabs at the hands of Jews resisting Arab attempts to wage another Final Solution, to that which Jews have faced--in the Muslim East as well as the Christian West--for millennia is to simply tell a lie or to be ignorant beyond excuse.

Yet, Jews have indulged in this themselves--including prominent ones whom you and I have both come to admire…which brings me back to the first part of this essay’s title, horses.

Look, there’s plenty of talent out there amongst writers. Given a timely break and the right opened door, many a book would make a great tale to tell on the silver screen.

So, please tell me why one of Tinseltown’s current main Hebrews, Steven Spielberg, can only manage, far too often, to discover such worthiness in the likes of folks who spout such anti-Israel venom as the author of the book for which his latest movie was made, War Horse?

I’ll let Richard Millett from Great Britain explain what I mean. Follow these excerpts from http://richardmillett.wordpres.....ideo-game/…

“Michael Morpurgo claims that Israel shoots Palestinian children ‘like a video game.’

The film of War Horse, adapted from the novel by Michael Morpurgo, has just been released in the UK, but as well as horses being killed on screen there is something else for filmgoers to cry into their popcorn over. Morpurgo is happy to repeat vicious lies about Israel without seeming to bother checking facts.

Last February Morpurgo was given the honour of reciting the richard Dimbleby lecture,which has been delivered by an influential figure every year since 1972, and he chose to speak on the lack of childrens’ rights around the world… He pointed out that 8 million children a year die before the age of 5… Most of those 8 million children die from AIDS, war, malaria, malnutrition and other diseases in Africa. But Morpurgo failed to say anything about that instead choosing to spend a large portion of this high profile speech on the darlings of the left, the Palestinians, and invoking the modern day version of the anti-Semitic blood libel. He relied on statements of those with an anti-Israel agenda.”

As Millett pointed out, Spielberg’s buddy did make some afterthought comments about Israel’s predicament as well, but his attacks and venom were saved for Jews…those imperfect live Jews--not the “okay” dead ones of Spielberg’s apparent preference.

Nowhere does it seem to bother folks of Morpurgo’s ilk that the real barbarians here are those who commit the double war crime (the Perfidy Clause, etc.) of using their own children as human shields while deliberately attacking the children of others. He simply dismisses all of this as inconsequential in the other comments which Millett cites.Just for the record, however, see what the Geneva Conventions have to say about this below…

Article #51/7:

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

Article #58b:

The parties to the conflict shall...avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas.

The rats’ dens are typically set up in or adjacent to civilian apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, etc., as America learned for itself in Iraq.

Article #51/2:

The civilian population...shall not be the object of attack. Acts of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited...Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited.

Arabs typically target Israeli civilians.

These details do make the difference--regardless of what the Morpurgos say and what the Speilbergs choose to present in their “moral equivalence"-type movies..

The deal is that it’s easier to demand perfection from live Jews--something not expected elsewhere--than to confront the real sources of such tragic problems.

Indeed, while Morpurgo’s counterparts sail on flotillas on behalf of Hamas’s Gaza--which wants both Israel and its Jews dead (and maybe then meriting the world’s sympathy again)--I don’t see them afloat on behalf of many different victimized folks in Syria, Copts in Egypt, Kurds in Turkey, Berbers in North Africa, black Africans in the Sudan, or elsewhere right now. With few exceptions, if Israel is not the alleged villain, such enlightened “Progressives” care not.

While Morpurgo is not a Jew, Spielberg is. And Jews too have long been in the forefront of demanding perfection from Israel in an extremely imperfect world. Now, to an extent, that’s a good thing…but it should be done with eyes wide open, not to the point of suicidal expectations. When the great rabbi, Hillel, said two thousand years ago to care for others, he did not demand to do so at one’s own demise.

Related to this current episode, when Spielberg came out with his movie about the Israeli attempt to eradicate the perpetrators of the Munich massacre at the Olympics a while back, he also had many choices to select from with regards to the movie he was making on this subject.

For the all important position of screen writer, he went with Tony Kushner--a well-known, anti-Zionist Jew. I dealt with this issue at that time, and I was told by a friend and prominent writer herself, who frequents Steven’s mother’s restaurant in California, that she personally hand-delivered copies of my articles to Mom so they would get to her son.

Here they are. This version of Can Kushner was sent to Los Angeles’s Independent Media...

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2.....mment.php

Here’s one of Steven Meet Mahmoud…
http://www.anglicanfriendsofis.....u-expect/

And here’s another of Steven--Say It Isn’t So…
http://americandaily.com/article/8180

While I don’t expect simply a whitewash when such films are made, moral equivalence between victims and victimizers is not the ticket either.

If Arabs suffered tragedy because of the fact that, to date, they “only” possess almost two dozen states carved mostly out of scores of millions of truly stateless, non-Arab peoples’ lands, then what, indeed, should those latter victims claim?

Here’s an idea…why don’t the Three Amigos--Tony, Michael, and Steven--team up to do a blockbuster movie about the plight of the region’s 35 million Kurds, another 35 million Berbers, tens of millions of black Africans, Copts, and so forth? If tragedy on the screen is what they seek, there’s plenty of it there…real tragedies--not mostly self-inflicted ones which resulted from the Arabs’ own attempts to deny Jews any justice at all and their attempts backfired.

And while we’re on the subject, why does it take an anti-Semite like Mel Gibson to announce that he intends to do a film about Judah Maccabee (Judah the Hammer…the hero of Chanukah and the fight against Judea’s Greco-Syrian conquerors), but Jews like Spielberg don’t seem to be interested? And who is finally going to put the amazing story of Masada on the big screen?

See the pattern here?

If it does not involve dead Jews and Jewish victimization, the Spielbergs won’t touch it with a ten foot pole.

You’d think the sire of the movie, Schindler’s List, the Shoah Foundation, and such would have learned the ultimate lesson from those very endeavors. But perhaps that was part of the problem...at least for Jews like Spielberg.

Should any nation’s raison d’etre be simply its perpetual victimization...even if, as in terms of the Jews, it has been the bloodiest and longest recorded in history? I had earlier come to expect this sort of thing from the Woody Allen types, but I thought the man who also brought the world The Prince of Egypt knew better.

It seems that, while becoming somewhat of an expert on the ashes of the Holocaust, Spielberg, unfortunately, seems oblivious to its lessons and to the role of Israel as the risen Phoenix of the Jewish people--just as G_d’s Prophet, Ezekiel, predicted over 2,500 years earlier in the Biblical passages of the Valley of the Dry Bones. Look them up…they’ll send chills up your spine.

As Richard Millett continued in his January 16th commentary…

“If Morpurgo was really concerned about the rights of Palestinian children he would have highlighted the child abuse prevalent in Palestinian society where children are used as human shields…where Hamas destroys childrens’ summer camps in Gaza, and where television programmes are regularly aired by the Palestinian Authority on which children claim a desire to grow up to become martyrs…Instead he chose to believe the propaganda of those…spreading lies about Israel...

What a waste of an important speech…Instead of bravely speaking up for Palestinian children like he could have, Michael Morpurgo probably only succeeded in adding a little more hatred of Jews into the world.”

The truth has always been that, like all other nations of humans, Israel will also make mistakes from time to time.

But the truth is also that no other nation surpasses Israel in its attempts to seek true compromise and accommodation with enemies who will settle for no other solution other than another final one involving itself. Any objective study of the Arab-Israeli conflict would soon reveal that fact.

And, like I always like to ask, what compromises have Arabs ever agreed to with any of their own scores of millions of non-Arab competitors in the region? The answer is none--but that does not seem to bother the likes of the above Three Amigos at all.

That folks like Steven Spielberg feel that they have to give further prominence to people who specialize in duplicitous demonization of Israel is beyond sad. It is pathetic and sickening.There are indeed many other talented people in his industry to choose from. Those selections have largely been Steven’s, and only he knows why he’s made them.

Sadly, I cannot get myself to cater to his and other Hollywood Hebrews’ self-flagellating indulgences--in this instance teamed with nastiness and blatant hypocrisy of at least one non-Tribal collaborator as well.

Having said this, I truly regret that I will have to miss War Horse. That’s a shame. I hear that it is a good movie and love the magic that Spielberg can bring to films.

Perhaps, as my good friend Jerry Sobel writes http://www.teapartytribune.com.....-disease/, Steven also suffers from a somewhat more subdued strain of a particular genetic disorder...

www.geraldahonigman.com

The Iron Lady and Israel...On The Balance Sheet

The Irony Lady: Israel And The Arabs…On The Balance Sheet
by Gerald A. Honigman

John Campbell’s biography of Great Britain’s former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (1979 to 1990), has just hit the big screen. Meryl Streep is already being talked about for another academy award for her portrayal of the Iron Lady.

Like her nation’s overwhelming and centuries’ old imperial past, there are multiple ways of viewing Prime Minister Thatcher’s own actions.

Ask people which empire in all of recorded history was the largest, and see if they know…

To save you the task of researching this, the British Empire beats them all by far, at one time comprising nearly a quarter of the land mass of the earth and about a quarter of its population up until the post-World War II era in the last century.

Name the location…all North America; British West Indies; Egypt, and much of the rest of the Middle East and elsewhere in North and sub-Saharan Africa; Australia and New Zealand; Hong Kong; the former Burma, Ceylon, and the Indian sub-continent and its environs; islands off of South America; etc. and so forth… not to mention the earlier forced acquisition and consolidation of the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish peoples’ lands.

His and Her Majesties realm dwarfed all others, and despite many of the Brits’ former possessions now having attained independence, the legacy of that imperial experience is still very much with those former subjects today with impacts on much of the rest of us as well. The late 19th century poem by Rudyard Kipling, speaking of the White Man’s Burden, sums much of this up nicely. While addressing America’s new dabbling in such enterprise after its war with Spain, it was indeed originally written with Great Britain in mind.

With this as background, let’s turn now to just a few events which transpired during the Iron Lady’s days as Prime Minister…

A few years into Thatcher’s administration, in 1982 Argentina once again got peeved at the audacity of British imperial and colonial policies which had resulted in its earlier grabbing islands a few hundred miles off the Argentine coast.

Almost 8,000 miles away from Great Britain, Las Malvinas--aka, the Falkland Islands--were perceived as a thumb in the eye of Argentina. Imagine, for example, the latter staking claim to the Isle of Wight or the Hebrides off of “Great Britain"…Scotland’s coast.

Anyway, after the Argentine invasion, the Iron Lady’s Brits went to war to re-conquer the islands in the name of British national interests…almost a third of the circumference of the world away from home.

Let’s turn the clock back now to the days of the June ("Six Day") War in the Middle East. And, to really understand the point, we have to go back even further, to the break-up, after World War I, of the Ottoman Turkish Empire which controlled much of region for some four centuries.

The Brits made a lot of conflicting promises to lots of different peoples during those days.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt--and going beyond those would claim just neo-colonial, divide to still remain in control policies--there was also a sincere feeling, in at least some circles, that long-suppressed, different peoples should at long last get a taste of freedom and independence

Arabia for the Arabs, Judea for the Judeans (Jews), Armenia for the Armenians, and Kurdistan for the Kurds was one way of expressing this view, and President Woodrow Wilson’s famous “Fourteen Points” emphasized this as well.

Having said this, that view often clashed with the actual folks running the British Foreign Office and such.

So, to not anger Arabs, for example, the Brits, whose imperial navy had recently switched from coal to oil, reneged on promises to the Kurds--currently some 35 million truly stateless people who pre-dated Arabs by millennia in the Mandate of Mesopotamia.

After receiving a favorable decision from the League of Nations regarding the northern oil fields in 1925--London supported only Arab nationalist interests in what would soon become a united Arab Iraq instead. Specially designed British Hawker-Hunter (anti-guerilla) attack aircraft took care of the Arabs’ Kurdish headaches afterwards.

A few years earlier, the Brits were involved in similar imperial shenanigans…

While Jews had earlier been promised that they would be able to live throughout the Brits’ other, smaller Mandate of Palestine, in 1922 almost 80% of the land was handed over to Arab nationalism instead. Transjordan was thus virtually severed from the remaining 20% of the original April 25, 1920 Mandate of Palestine’s territory while still technically being a part of the Mandate until gaining independence in 1946.

Led and formed by the Brits’ Sir John Bagot Glubb ("Glubb Pasha"), Transjordan’s Arab Legion seized lands west of the Jordan River in its attack on a minuscule reborn Israel in 1948 and, now holding territory on both banks, soon renamed itself Jordan instead.

Note please…the conquest of Judea and Samaria (only recently thus being dubbed the “West Bank” as well), was an illegal occupation of non-apportioned (not “purely Arab") territory in the Mandate, and no nations besides Pakistan and the Brits themselves recognized this.

Having been blockaded at the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba by Egypt and shelled by the Jordanians a bit later (casus belli), when Israel took the land in its war for survival in 1967, it was thus taking it from an illegal occupier.

In his book upon which the movie, Iron Lady, is based, John Campbell refers to and/or insinuates that Israel’s defensive actions on the West Bank amounted, instead, to the illegal acquisition of “Palestinian” lands. It’s a bit confusing as to whether those words in his book are his own thoughts or are actually those of the Iron Lady…Either way, they’re simply wrong.

The disputed lands in question were indeed non-apportioned, and all of the Mandate’s residents were allowed to live there…not just Arabs. Much, if not most, of the area was state lands, and Jews had lived and owned property there until they were slaughtered by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s and Transjordan officially made the territories Judenrein (as it made itself) after 1948.

Again, the Brits are a mixed blessing on all of these matters, wavering back and forth between issues of real politik and just reasoning…And the Iron Lady was no exception, despite her relative friendliness to Israel compared to what it faces coming out of her nation these days.

Thatcher’s Britain--which could fight Argentina 8,000 miles from home in the name of Her Majesty’s national (if not also still imperial) interests--would constantly press Israel to return the territories used to launch attacks against it and on which Jews (unlike the Brits on the Falklands) have thousands of years of connecting history to.

A Great Britain, which acquired territories and conquered peoples all around the globe while grabbing their natural resources for its own good as well, saw and still sees no trouble complaining about an allegedly “expansionist” Israel because, having been repeatedly attacked by Arabs who want it destroyed, says it needs to become something beyond the nine-to fifteen mile wide sub-rump state that it was left as after 1949…in other words, needs the very territorial compromise the British Foreign Secretary, as will be discussed below, had promised Israel just a bit earlier himself.

“Land for peace” became the constant lecture even from the friendly Iron Lady…even though it was quite clear to all with eyes open and neurons intact that the only “peace” the vast majority of Arabs had in mind for Israel was the peace of the grave--regardless of its size.

What makes this all the more confusing is that it was an earlier British Foreign Secretary himself, Lord Caradon, serving as chief architect of the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242 in the aftermath of the June ‘67 War, who deliberately built in a territorial compromise over the disputed territories so that Israel would, at long last, get more secure, defensible, and real political borders instead of the armistice lines imposed upon it in 1949 after the combined Arab invasion the year before. Again, those lines had left Israel a mere 9-15 miles wide at its waist, where most of its population and industry were concentrated…an irresistible temptation to its rejectionist enemies.

Here were the Iron Lady’s colleague, Lord Caradon’s, very words on the subject…

It would have been wrong to demand Israel return to positions of June 4, 1967 … those positions were … artificial … just places where soldiers of each side happened to be on the day fighting stopped in 1948 … just armistice lines. That’s why we didn’t demand Israelis return to them.

With this in mind, Jews would obviously have to repopulate areas in Judea and Samaria in which they indeed had lived earlier…for millennia. Until the Jordanians destroyed numerous synagogues and such, this included East Jerusalem as well, the location of Judaism’s holiest of sites, the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

To get what 242 promised--that territorial compromise--it’s a no brainer, as my students would say, that Jews would have to actually live on the land. So, please explain this next alleged statement from Thatcher in 1980 recorded in a secret diplomatic cable written by Ambassador John Robinson on May 4th 1980…

Efforts to convince (Prime Minister) Mr. Begin that his West Bank policy was absurd, and that there should not be Israeli settlements on the West Bank, had failed to move him… His response was that Judea and Samaria had been Jewish in biblical times and that they should therefore be so today.

To her credit, however, she also made the following statement on page 246 in her book, Statecraft…

Israel must never be expected to jeopardize her security: if she was ever foolish enough to do so, and then suffered for it, the backlash against both honest brokers and Palestinians would be immense - ‘land for peace’ must also bring peace.

By the way, the Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations and other solid documentation show that the vast majority of Arabs were newcomers into the Mandate themselves, Arabs settlers setting up Arab settlements in Palestine.

Indeed, after the combined Arab invasion in 1948 backfired on the Arabs themselves, so many Arabs in the Mandate were indeed newcomers that the United Nations Relief Agency set up to assist Arab refugees had to adjust the very definition of that word to assist those people.

So many Arabs were recent arrivals--settlers--themselves that UNRWA had to change the definition of “refugee” from its prior meaning of persons normally and traditionally resident to those who lived in the Mandate for a minimum of only two years prior to 1948...Please understand what this is saying.

And there was no special agency set up to help numerically more Jewish refugees, fleeing so-called “Arab” lands, than Arabs who were fleeing in the opposite direction due to a war which Arabs started over Israel’s rebirth.

While the Iron Lady is missed these days for her relative fairness towards Israel, besides the troubling example above, there were some other episodes as well…like when she joined American political leaders, such as George H.W. Bush, James Baker, and others (and most of the rest of the world) in condemning Israel’s surgical destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Just imagine if Saddam had the bomb when he invaded Kuwait, went to war with Iran, and so forth…

Working non-stop on behalf of freedom for the Soviet Union’s Jewish refuseniks, she then made the leap, however, comparing them to allegedly “stateless” Arab refugees. The plight of the latter was mostly a self-inflicted wound…that of the former was not. Read this to see what I mean… http://www.icjs-online.org/index.php?article=263

And Arabs already had one state created for them in the lions’ share of the Palestine Mandate--Jordan. They refused another proposed partition plan in 1947 which would have given them about half of the 20% that was left. 90% was not enough for them…Jews were entitled to nothing in this vision of “justice"--the same subjugating Arab mindset which victimizes scores of millions of other non-Arab peoples in the region as well.

No doubt, it’s disappointing when folks like the Iron Lady’s fail to see such differences.

On the overall balance sheet, however, and despite the above and other “flaws” (just ask the Irish, for example), when judging world leaders, the world would be a better place if Margaret Thatcher was still in her office at 10 Downing Street.

www.geraldahonigman.com

Why Myanmar...But Not Judea?

Why Myanmar...But Not Judea?

by Gerald A. Honigman

Why Sri Lanka, but not Samaria?

Why not Rhodesia, but the “West Bank?”

It’s admirable (don’t you think?) when a people throws off the legacy of imperial oppression to embrace their new freedom. The very renaming of nations themselves has often been a reflection of this wonderful development.

Admirable, indeed--unless those people happen to be Jews.

Among the examples of this which have occurred over the last half century are people who lived in Great Britain’s former imperial possessions of Ceylon, Rhodesia, and Burma. Those nations are now known as Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, and Myanmar.

While I’ve thought about this for decades, what brought this issue onto my own front burner was an article I read recently about Myanmar’s pro-democracy hero and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi. Too often foreign imperialism gets supplanted by home-grown despotism, as the latter knows only too well.

Here’s the problem, and admittedly, the Jews pose a unique case related to this discussion due to their forced exile in the wake of taking on the imperial conqueror of much of the known world not just once, but in two major (and other lesser) revolts recorded in depth by the Romans themselves. Before we proceed, please contemplate this thought for a moment.

Is a victim any less a victim because his victimization has been historically the longest enduring?

While the so-called “Progressives” of the world are adamant that the previous imperialist names of conquered lands be dismissed, why is it that when it comes to dealing with the oft-conquered land of the Jews, the opposite is the case?

Such sources of ethical enlightenment frequently insist instead that the millennia-old names of the land--Israel, Judea, and Samaria--be abandoned for the sake of the names Roman, British, and Arab imperialism and conquest gave to them instead."Palestine” and the “West Bank.”

Everyone else is entitled to national liberation.but not Jews. The latter must agree to their scapegoat, victim, and preferred whipping post par excellence existence for eternity. Or just disappear.

With Christmas 2011 still very much of recent memory, a good portion of the world once again became familiar with the story of Jesus’ birth. During this season, it has also become common for Arabs to declare the alleged “Palestinian"(non-Jewish) identity of Jesus.

Since I’ve answered this with both barrels elsewhere, I won’t bother with the deliberate Arab attempt to hijack another people’s identity in this essay.

But, since the subject is directly related to the overall issue of whose nation truly needs to be liberated in the land, please read whatever version you prefer on your favorite search engine of my earlier analysis, Arafat’s Jesus. Here’s the moderate Muslim print newspaper, Pakistan Today’s, version from early 2004 http://www.paktoday.com/honig16.htm and a recent update from this year in Virtual Jerusalem… http://www.virtualjerusalem.co.....emid=4881

Returning to the account of Jesus’ birth, among other places, this appears briefly in Matthew 2:1 in which Bethlehem of Judea is declared his birth place. Bethlehem ("House of Bread” in Hebrew) was also the birth place of King David, over a thousand years earlier, the site of the beautiful story of Ruth and Naomi (even earlier), and so forth. And if the Arabs (whoops--excuse me, “Palestinians") can claim Jesus, then Ruth, Naomi, and David were theirs too.and I’m the Passover Bunny.

Note, please, that this is the same Judaea (Hebrew:Yehudah; Greek: Ioudaía; Latin: Iudaea...land of the Judeans--Jews) which the ancient Roman and Roman-sponsored historians--Pliny, Tacitus, Josephus, Dio Cassius, and others--wrote about themselves; the same Judea which Rome placed on its Judea Capta coins after defeating the first major revolt of the Jews for their freedom and independence after 70 C.E., constructed the towering, still standing Arch of Titus for in Rome, etc. and so forth.

And “Palestine”?

Shame on the “Progressives,” for sure.

While the geographical coastal region near Gaza and such had sometimes earlier been loosely designated as such by the Greeks, the name itself referred to no separate country nor nation. Indeed, there never, ever, ever was such a separate country, language, nation, or culture by that name.

The cold, cruel fact--so willingly ignored by the “Progressive” Left--is that “Palestine” became associated with Israel/Judea by one of the most blatant acts of imperial cruelty ever to be recorded in history.

After the Jews’ costly second revolt for freedom in the second century C.E., the Emperor, Hadrian, decided to try to squash the Jews’ hopes once and for all by renaming the land itself after their historic enemies, the Philistines--a non-Semitic (let alone non-Arab) invading “Sea People” from the islands near Crete.

Below are two of my oft-quoted favorite excerpts from contemporary Roman historians once again.

After the first revolt...

“It inflamed Vespasian’s (the Emperor) ire that the Jews were the only nation which had not yet submitted.Titus was appointed by his father to complete the subjugation of Judaea. he commanded three legions in Judaea itself. To these he added the twelfth from Syria and the third and twenty-second from Alexandria. amongst his allies were a band of Arabs, formidable in themselves and harboring towards the Jews the bitter animosity usually subsisting between neighboring nations.” Vol. II, Book V, The Works of Tacitus.

Please note: the Arabs mentioned in the above account were foreigners to the land, acting virtually as vultures, looking to grab a share of the main Roman kill. They were not “native Palestinians.”

And, after the second revolt…

“580,000 men were slain, nearly the whole of Judaea made desolate. Many Romans, moreover, perished in this war (the Bar Kochba Revolt). Therefore Hadrian in writing to the senate did not employ the opening phrase commonly affected by the emperors, ‘ I and the legions are in health’.” Dio’s Roman History.

The Emperor was so enraged at the Jews’ struggle for liberation from their imperial oppressors that, in the words of the esteemed modern historian, Bernard Lewis...

“Hadrian made a determined attempt to stamp out the embers not only of the revolt but also of Jewish nationhood and statehood. obliterating its Jewish identity.”

To reiterate this important point, wishing to end, once and for all, Judean/"Jewish” (as in Danish, Irish, Swedish, English, etc.) hopes for independence from their imperial conqueror, Hadrian renamed the land itself from Judaea to “Syria Palaestina"--Palestine--after the Jews’ historic enemies, the Philistines, a non-Semitic “Sea People” from the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea.

Yet, one is hard pressed to discover any of the above these days.

Again, no people--besides Jews--had ever established an enduring, separate identity in the land.

After the fall of Judea, only one imperial conqueror after another (including that of the Arabs during the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, ruled from Damascus and Baghdad respectively) grabbed hold of the land--ruling it from afar and colonizing it with their own invading armies. Before the modern era, the Ottoman Turks were the latest to do this, ruling the land for about four centuries until after World War I.

Arabs who both earlier and later came to settle on the land were part of a greater Arab--not “Palestinian"-- identity. They spoke Arabic, their culture was Arab, their loyalties were to family, clan, and tribe, and later--in the 20th century age of nationalism in the region (and largely to oppose the resurrection of Israel)--those who were politically active gave their loyalty primarily to a Greater Syria or Pan Arab identity.not to “Palestine."And that’s what Republican presidential hopeful, Newt Gingrich, was also referring to in his recent comments on the subject

As with Palestine, the story evolved in a similar way regarding the imperial renaming of Judea and Samaria to the “West Bank” as well.

In one account after another about Bethlehem, Hebron, East Jerusalem, and other places in historical Judea and Samaria, those towns have been designated by statesmen, journalists, academics, and others the “West Bank” instead--or, “the occupied” West Bank, to add insult to injury. Judeans/Jews living in those areas are now the alleged “imperialist occupiers” of the land.

And those who beg to differ are more often than not simply dismissed as reactionary Zionist fanatics.

With few exceptions, however, it’s easy to discover that almost all the towns on the “West Bank” were re-named from their original Hebrew sites.

Check out these excerpts from this source http://www.forward.com/articles/6134/ ("What’s In A Town’s name?") for starters. After the Arab imperial conquests of the 7th century C.E.,

“as with Dor and Tantura, the original name-changers in Palestine were the Arabs, who Arabized hundreds of Hebrew place names when they replaced the Jewish population of the country after the Muslim conquest.

In the great majority of cases, Arabization took place by adjusting old Hebrew names to Arabic phonetic patterns. Sometimes these changes were minor, leaving the old names recognizable.

Biblical Anatot near Jerusalem, the birthplace of the prophet Jeremiah, became the Muslim village of Anata; Modi’in, where the revolt of the Maccabees broke out, turned into Midia; Bet-She’an, in the Jordan Valley south of Tiberias, was called Beisan.

Often, however, the changes were great enough to obscure the original name. One might never guess from the sound of it that Jenin, the West Bank town that was so controversially in the news a while ago, was once the Hebrew Ein-Gannim; that the Palestinian village of Jib was the biblical Giv’on, where the sun stood still so that Joshua could finish routing the Amorite kings; or that Bet-El, “the House of God,” the name given according to the Bible by Jacob to the site on which he dreamed of a ladder to heaven, is now the Palestinian Beitin.”

Add to the above the Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations and other solid documentation which show that the vast majority of Arabs were indeed newcomers into the land themselves (i.e., Arab settlers setting up Arab settlements), and the picture becomes even clearer.

Judea and Samaria--the names the disputed territories now constantly making news were known as for thousands of years--became designated the “West Bank” in the wake of World War I and the official break-up of the Ottoman Turkish Empire.

After Great Britain’s handing over some 78% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine’s territory to Arab nationalism in 1922 with the creation of Transjordan, a quarter century later the latter’s British-led army then grabbed the non-apportioned part of the Mandate of Palestine west of the Jordan River upon its invasion of a minuscule, reborn Israel in 1948. Holding both banks of the river, it soon changed its name to Jordan.

And to distinguish the east bank from the newly-conquered territory across the river acquired as a result of the newest imperial shenanigans in the land, the name “West Bank” was thus born.

Jews had owned land and lived in Judea and Samaria until they were massacred by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s. Upon the establishment of the first Arab state in Palestine in 1922, its whole area was declared off limits to Jews. When it illegally seized Judea and Samaria in 1948, it did likewise there as well.

Keep in mind that when those above Arabs then also bulldozed dozens of ancient synagogues, used ancient Jewish tombstones to pave roads and build latrines, and took other measures to erase the Jews’ millennial connections to the land as well, barely a word was spoken in protest, besides those of the Jews themselves.

And today, the only thing that “Progressives” do about all of this is turn truth on its head. Jews and others who dare call the land by its historic names and insist that Jews should also have the right to once again live in their historic lands (displacing no one in the process on the still non-apportioned--not “purely Arab"--lands of the original 1920 Mandate) are branded the colonialists and imperialists instead.

Here’s another thought, while we’re at it.

If Judea must become, as many insist and, as the Nazis liked to say, Judenrein (free of Jews), then why should the one fifth of Israel who are Arabs (the freest Arabs living anywhere in the region) not also get the boot out of Israel? Many of such folks indeed compose a very dangerous, treasonous fifth column.

Despite the tragedy of the Roman Wars and the expulsions and Great Diaspora which followed, Jews remained in the land, in varying numbers, clear up to the rebirth of Israel in 1948.

While this does not give Jews exclusive rights to the land since others have conquered and come to settle it over the centuries, it does mean that Jews are anything but strangers there. Indeed, the historic names of the land itself are named for one of the Patriarchs of the Jewish people--Jacob, whose name was later changed to Israel, and Judah, one of Jacob’s sons. On the other hand, Arabs claim exclusive rights to virtually the entire region, calling it “purely Arab patrimony” due to their own former imperial conquests and despite scores of millions of subjugated, non-Arab peoples still living there.

As just one of many examples which could be cited of this continuous Jewish presence, clear up to the dawn of the Arab conquest in the 7th century, Euthychius, the 10th century Patriarch of Alexandria, wrote in his book of history (Annals of Euthychius I, 216) about tens of thousands of Jewish warriors who aided the invading Persians against the hated Byzantine successors to the Romans in the area.

Regardless of the hypocrisy of the Progressive Left and others who should know better, in Judea and Samaria--as in Israel--the Jews are, at long last, home.

The Judean Hills and the Judean Wilderness will not be renamed the West Bank Hills nor the West Bank Wilderness for the sake of the Jimmy Carters, Michael Moores, Reverend Wrights, and the Noam Chomskys.nor for the Nicholas Sarkozys, Barack Hussein Obamas, or Hillary Rodham Clintons either (let alone the Arabs and their assorted other rah rah squads).

Furthermore, despite the hostility towards Israel practiced by many of the mainline Christian churches today, the birthplace of Jesus will remain in Bethlehem of Judea...not the West Bank.

Matthew 2:1 will not be edited.

Unless folks like black Africans in Zimbabwe and Asians in Myanmar (who, despite other problems, were not largely massacred and expelled by their own imperial conquerors who gave their lands other names--as were the Jews) are expected to call themselves Rhodesians and Burmese and not be allowed to live on their own historic lands, then the duplicity routinely practiced towards Jews in Israel, Judea, and Samaria on these same issues must come to an end as well. And, if not, then the Jews must do what they must do to thrive--not just survive--anyway.

www.geraldahonigman.com

Pinochle...Iraqi Style

Pinochle…Iraqi Style

by Gerald A. Honigman

It’s been decades since I played the game.

I remember watching older college friends mastering the Pinochle deck, and then later becoming pretty good myself.

Four-handed Pinochle, pitting opposing pairs of players against each other, was the most popular version, but I soon learned the far more personal three-handed variety as well. The latter involved each player working just for himself; inevitably, this led to two teaming up against the player in the lead…for the time being at least. I recall my late father, of blessed memory, getting upset with me and my younger brother over this. We tried to explain that it was nothing personal…but to no avail.

Keep this in mind as we proceed.

As promised, President Obama has pulled all American troops out of Iraq before the end of the year…for good or for bad. Washington’s war in Mesopotamia is now officially over.

I’ve written lots about this subject over the decades, and my work has been showcased in scores of analyses in print and web publications all over the world. Some examples include the heavily Nobel Laureate-sponsored, Fall 1981 academic journal, Middle East Review ; inclusion on the recommended reference list of Paris’s acclaimed Institut d’Etudes Politique (Sciences-Po); my interview in The Kurdistan Tribune; analyses in the Kurdistan Regional Government’s own publication; dozens of op-eds in web publications such as ekurd.net. Kurdishmedia.com, the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria, and others as well; major print newspaper articles; etc. and so forth.

Before continuing, for the reader new to Iraqi politics, a review of the following sample articles should prove to be useful. I’ll start out with the latest, before this current analysis, and then provide several earlier op-eds from different sources as well…

Iraq: What Not To Do … http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/ar.....cle110.htm

State Department Math … http://www.krg.org/articles/de.....9&smap

Why The Double Standards? … http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=9279

Who Won’t Be Making Jokes About WMD … http://www.turkishdigest.com/2.....aking.html

What’s Your Plan B ? … http://www.israelnationalnews.......aspx/5793

Okay, enough of the background stuff…let’s move on.

The power-sharing plan in Iraq’s post-Saddam, American-backed federal games gave representatives from each of the three major religious and ethnic blocks key positions in government–Shi’a Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds.

To no one with functioning neurons’ surprise, no sooner did America exit the scene, there was a return to an upsurge in sectarian violence. Scores of Shi’a were recently blown apart by Sunni suicide bombers.

At the same time that the above was happening, the Sunni Vice President, Tariq al-Hashemi, had taken refuge in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the north–a guest of Iraq’s President, and one of the two main Kurdish leaders, Jalal Talabani. The Shi’a Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, accused him of orchestrating hit squads against Sunni enemies.

As I’ve written often before, if ever there was a counterpart to the now extinct non-nation nation of Yugoslavia, Iraq is it.

Millions of diverse peoples who hated each other were brought together after the break-up of empires in the wake of World War I. And just as the glue which held together the former was manifested in a powerful, feared dictator (Marshal Tito), the same held true for decades in Saddam’s Iraq. When Tito passed on from Earth, Yugoslavia’s days as a unified state were numbered. Likewise, I wouldn’t place bets on the long-term unity of Iraq with Saddam now gone either…short of massive outside intervention, once again, to further others’ interests.

Throughout millennia, Mesopotamia had been fought over by powerhouses to its east and its west.

During the past several centuries, Turks and Iranians faced off in this arena. Don’t be surprised if they both make grabs on it once again. The Turks have already made intrusions into northern Iraq going after Kurds from Turkey taking refuge there.

Keep in mind that the Iraqi (Arab)-Iranian war of the ’80s was largely fought over the oil-rich real estate to Iraq’s east (Iran’s Khuzestan/”Arabistan” province), and the Turks have long felt robbed because of the award of the oil-rich area of Mesopotamia’s (Iraq’s) largely Kurdish north to the British Mandate via the League of Nation’s Mosul Decision in 1925. Add to this mix the fact that Kurds were promised independence after World War I in at least part of Mesopotamia–until the Brits abandoned them and solely embraced Arab nationalism instead–and the fire burns even hotter.

Given the right circumstances, anything becomes possible.

Back to the pinochle deck…

Sunni Arabs have been slaughtering Kurds in Iraq since the 1920s.

In just a few months in1988, Saddam Hussein’s Sunni Anfal Campaign killed almost 200,000 Kurds. When his cousin was presented with this figure, “Chemical” Ali Hassan al–Majid protested, claiming “it could not have been more than 100,000.” Numerous other Sunni Arab genocidal blood baths against Kurds preceded Anfal. The late New York Times journalist, William Safire, for example, did a whole series in the ’70s about an earlier American sellout of the Kurds and its horrific consequences. Another would follow in the ’80s…

In February 2004, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, of Sunni al-Qaida fame, wrote a letter that was intercepted by U.S. forces in Iraq. He’s the guy–until his own death–who was believed responsible for the slaughter of Shi’a in places like Baghdad and Karbala.

In the letter he listed four main enemies. America, of course, was No. 1. But No. 2 were the Kurds. Here’s what he says about them…

Kurds, these are a pain and a thorn, and it is not time yet to deal with them. They are last on our list, even though we are trying to get to some of their leaders. God willing.

Iraq’s majority Shi’a, long suppressed by the Sunni minority and fourth on al-Zarqawi’s hit list, were basically handed Iraq as a result of America’s defeat of Saddam.

While America has struggled to create a balancing act whereby Sunnis, Kurds, and others have equal rights in a united federal state, the reality is that centuries of bloody relations and memories between the various groups have taken their toll. There is little, if any, trust between them–and for good reason.

Despite brief interludes in between despots and during the British Mandate era, in modern times Arab nationalism has always won out over a more inclusive “Iraqi” nationalism…and the latter is the only real hope for the success of a federal Iraq.

As for the Shi’a, now largely in control of the new American-built military, the influence of the Shi’a Islamic Republic of their Iranian neighbor is the looming question at hand. Given the artificial nature of the Iraqi state–as discussed earlier–this becomes even more serious.

Despite hating each other, Arabs of both major stripes still see Iraq as “purely Arab” and have called the potential birth of Kurdistan “another Israel.” How this plays out in a post-Saddam, ascendant Shi’a era in Iraq when confronting incursions by other non-Arab Iranians is yet to be seen. The Shi’a are split regarding ties with Iran.

Since the fall of Saddam, Shi’a Arabs have needed Sunni Kurds as a counterweight to Sunni Arabs–who like to blow both of them up.

Kurds have worked closely with the Shi’a in the recent past. But the Kurds’ insistence on real economic and political autonomy in their own oil-rich region (Kirkuk, in particular) will be a major cause of friction as the Shi’a Arabs increasingly come to run most of the show in Iraq. This was something that the Sunni Arab Vice President addressed recently as well from his safe haven among the Kurds in Sulaimaniyah. And the latter have not ruled out secession if the Shi’a power grab continues.

The Kurds represent the party with the most to lose in this ordeal.

While there is a giant Iranian state to the east, a powerhouse of a Turkic state to the west (and a half dozen others in the adjacent area as well), and almost two dozen Arab nations in the neighborhood, the only place where some 35 million truly stateless Kurds have at least some semblance of autonomy–not independence–is in Iraq. And ironically, they predate their Arab and Turkish conquerors in the region by millennia.

So, the reality is that playing a game of 3-handed pinochle will obviously only get the Kurds so far if it’s not completed.

At some point, it will no longer be two against the lead hand…and that lead hand–Sunni Arabs–which massacred and terrorized both Shi’a and Kurds, while still a serious threat, is now also on the verge of changing identities. While Sunnis, for now at least, still remain more of a physical threat to Kurds, the power in the country has definitely shifted to the Shi’a.

If the Shi’a Arabs opt for the same “purely Arab patrimony” approach to Iraq that their Sunni Arab neighbors followed and bloodily adapted, then the Kurds must assert their own rights to full sovereignty. They lost this chance due to a collusion of British petroleum politics and Arab nationalism in Mesopotamia almost a century ago. Providence has perhaps now delivered to them another opportunity. Who knows if it will ever come again…

No doubt, many other players will be upset about this eventuality–Turks, Arabs, and the Kurds’ cousins, the Iranians, in particular. And if a federal, egalitarian Iraq survives America’s departure, then a Kurdish secession may not be necessary (especially when considering the cost that will surely come with it).

But at some point in 3-handed pinochle each player must finally come down the home stretch and play to win.

Tens of millions of repeatedly used and abused Kurds finally deserve to win…

And finally, would it not be great to see others–both in and out of the region–at long last step up to give the Kurdish people the same support that genocidal Arabs–bent on Israel’s destruction–routinely get from most of the rest of the world in their quest to create a 22nd state of their own?

www.geraldahonigman.com

Long Live Arabistan ! (Revisited)

Long Live Arabistan!

by Gerald A. Honigman

The latest news coming out of Syria told of at least a hundred protestors being mowed down in the streets by Assad’s military. Conservative estimates claim that over 5,000 such folks have already lost their lives this way since the Arab Spring sprung in that country.

Pouring salt onto the wound, the history of such Syrian Arab barbarism, towards both Arabs and non-Arabs alike, has long been known--at least to those who wanted to know. But, too many didn’t…and when they did, acted like they didn’t.

Arab atrocities and subjugation of millions of Kurds, for example, in the Syrian part of geographical Kurdistan date back well over half century. The title of Ismet Cherif Vanly’s book, “The Syrian ‘Mein Kampf’ Against The Kurds…(Amsterdam 1968),” is indeed revealing. And before the elder Alawi Assad went after the Sunni Arab Muslim Brotherhood stronghold in Hama several decades ago (massacring 20,000 to 40,000 people in short order), what was left of Syria’s ancient Jewish community was also living in its own tenuous nightmare. There were others with their own tragic stories to tell as well.

There is no doubt that Syria’s human rights record has been nothing less than atrocious; but again, most of the world simply opted--until very recently this past year--to basically look the other way. If Israel was not the alleged villain, nobody wanted to know anything--not the American State Department, nor the United Nations, nor the Russians, European Union, mainstream media, academia, or whomever. A few of us tried to sound the alarm over the years, but it was mostly wasted effort. Here were a few of my own attempts: “Hunting Quail and Sitting Ducks” (2004) http://www.israelnationalnews.......aspx/3870 ;"Syria…Seriously” (2005) http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/ar.....tan57.htm; and “Wrong War…"(March 2011)
http://www.kurdnas.com/en/inde.....;Itemid=55

Indeed, despite Syria’s deadly hegemonic attitudes and actions towards what it still sees as its Lebanese “provinces;” despite its appalling treatment of Kurds, native Jews, and others as well; despite its recent support for terrorists undermining Iraq’s attempt at democracy; despite the great likelihood that many of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (poison gas and so forth) found a home in Syria; despite Damascus’ support of major terrorist organizations whose aim is the destruction of the Jew of the Nations and giving safe haven to those organizations like Hamas within its own borders; despite its long term record as mass slaughterer of any and all who dissent, author of the infamous “Hama Solution;” etc., etc., and so forth, the cold, hard fact of life is that America would be squeezing Israel right now (even more than it is already indeed doing)--not Syria--if circumstances were just a bit different.

Sad…but all too true.

Had Syria not opposed America in Iraq and become bosom buddies with the Iranian mullahs (the enablers of Hizbullah in Lebanon), the Foggy Folks would be pressing forward with former Secretary of State James Baker III’s earlier pledge to Hafez al-Assad of a total Israeli retreat from the Golan Heights. Baker, Presidents Bushs’ close family friend (whose law firm represents the Saudis, including against American 9/11 victims), was made the younger Bush’s Special Middle East Envoy. I’ve written much about Baker’s Jew problem elsewhere (see the Hunting Quail article above), so I’ll drop it for now.

Shortly after President Obama moved into the White House, he sent his friend Robert Malley for a visit to the younger Assad to reassure him along these lines as well.

Obama has repeatedly stated that Israel should return to the ‘49 armistice lines (which made it a mere 9 to 15-miles wide at its waist), the main provision of the so-called Saudi Peace Plan which the President said Israel “would be crazy” not to accept. The President demands that Israel abandon the promise of UNSC Resolution 242, enacted in the wake of the ‘67 War (which the Syrians were largely responsible for starting), that those fragile “Auschwitz” lines be replaced by real, more secure borders instead. That’s what the whole fuss over building freezes and settlements is all about. A total return of the Golan--used by Syria to repeatedly shell Israel from prior to ‘67--is part of that same deal.

And that brings us back to today’s news of a hundred more Syrians being slaughtered in one day on the streets.

Prominent in the news were reports of Iran flying commercial, not military, airliners into Syria to provide Damascus with arms, other supplies, and men. Keep in mind that Assad’s Syria is a crucial link between the Shi’a mullahs in Iran and the would-be Hizbullah Shi’a masters of Lebanon.

The Syrian-Iranian-Hizbullah alliance got me thinking about the irony of all of this.

All three players habitually target Jews, vilify, and call for the destruction of their sole, virtually microscope state. With the other two’s help, Hizbullah now has scores of thousands of rockets and missiles pointing at Israel.

So, since oil-rich Iran is, in many ways, the main player here, it’s time to once again expose Ahmadinejad and the Twelver Shi’a Ayatollahs for what they undoubtedly are…

When Ahadinejad murdered Iranians in the streets after stealing the election in 2009, besides blowing a little hot air, no one--including the new American President and his State Department--did a thing. They were too worried about Jews building homes in Jerusalem instead--where Jews have been doing such things for over three thousand years.

Back on May 8, 2006, Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in which, among other things, he proclaimed Israel’s alleged original sin and the need to create yet another state for Arabs in the region. He has repeated this frequently over the years.

Having given this some serious reflection, I’ve come up with a way to at least meet some of his demands… well, sort of.

Let’s begin…

As the lion’s share of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine was handed over to Arab nationalism in 1922, with the creation of what would later be renamed Jordan, a more than just partition of the land favoring the Arabs had thus already been completed between the two nationalisms competing for it. Indeed, Arabs wound up with some 80% of the total area.

So, the real place where justice for Arabs has not yet been addressed is in--now hold onto your seats--Iran itself.

During the 7th century CE, Arab Caliphal imperialist armies burst out of the Arabian Peninsula and colonized, settled, forcibly Arabized, and spread the Dar ul-Islam by a conquering sword in all directions.

Judaea--renamed Syria Palestina (for the Jews’ historic enemies, the non-Arab Philistines) by conquering Romans after the Jews’ second revolt for their freedom--became occupied by Arabs at this time.

And so did Iran.

Using southern Iraq as a springboard, southwestern Iran--Khuzestan province in particular--traded back and forth between invading Arab and Iranian rulers. While it became subsequently linked to Iran despite repeated Arab invasions over the centuries, Khuzestan became so extensively Arabized that, in Safavid times (16th-18th centuries CE), the province was commonly known as “Arabistan”. In modern times, not until Iran’s Reza Shah Pahlavi defeated him in 1924, the Arab Sheikh of Muhammarah ruled much of the area.

Arabs remembered all of this very well. Indeed, latter-day, Iraqi-based Arabs, under Saddam’s banner, launched the long and bloody Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. It was fought largely over this oil-rich and strategically important area…Khuzestan for Persians, Arabistan for Arabs.

To deal with this “Arab problem,” Iran has ruthlessly suppressed any manifestations of Arab nationalism by any and all means necessary. By the early 20th century, a proposal had been put forward to even outlaw the Arabic language. Here are some excerpts as to how the British Ahwazi Friendship Society reported the situation on July 29, 2005:

“The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO) released a statement condemning the recent violent repression of ethnic minorities in Iran following the election of right-wing hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. ...Pointing to clashes between security forces and Ahwazi Arabs and Kurds, Nicola Dell’Arciprete, UNPO Assistant General Secretary, said: “The UNPO condemns the Government’s repressive policies against all the Iranian citizens. Iran is a multi-ethnic country in which half of the population belongs to ethnic minorities such as Azeri, Gilaki and Mazandarani, Kurds, Arabs, Lurs, Balochis, Turkmen....”

And more recently still, see this April 2011 account…

http://gulfnews.com/opinions/c.....b-1.786524

Now, recall how Ahmadinejad likes to sit on his high moral horse lecturing Israel about such things.

“Palestine” underwent partition, as did the Indian subcontinent (with the creation of predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, and later Bangladesh as well). Since the current rulers in Iran are so quick to point fingers elsewhere, please tell me why the human and political rights and aspirations of other peoples should not also be addressed in Iran itself?

Had Arabs accepted the additional 1947 partition plan, they would have wound up with about 90% of the territory of the original 1920 Palestine Mandate. They rejected the 1947 division of the remaining 20% of the land left after purely Arab Jordan was created from the rest of it in 1922, because, in Arab eyes, there is no justice other than their own. Jews--like Kurds or Imazighen ("Berbers") or Assyrians or Copts or black African Sudanese and so forth--were entitled to nothing in what Arabs like to call their exclusive “purely Arab patrimony” instead. Note that the vast majority of Arabs themselves were newcomers into the Palestine Mandate, as the Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League Of Nations and other solid documentation testify to.

Ahmadinejad refuses to acknowledge any of this, claims all Israeli Jews were from Europe (tell that to Israel’s former Iranian-born President and chief of staff) and the like; yet, he answers the political aspirations of millions of non-Iranians living on his own soil only with massacre and repression. Again, hypocrisy at its worst.

Turning to the Arabs of Khuzestan/Arabistan in particular, at any hint of unrest, Iran has been quick to act in its own national interests. Arabs have been ethnically cleansed from the area and replaced by others. As just one of many examples, when Arabs of the Nahda (Renaissance) movement bombed Iranian targets several years back in Ahwaz and elsewhere, Iran arrested thousands of them and set out to “fix” the problem by any means necessary. Iranians continuously do likewise to Kurds, Baluchis and others who dare to assert their own political rights. Thousands have been killed as a result over the years in the name of Iranian nationalism. There has been a wave of hangings of Iranian Kurds of late for daring to demand basic rights.

So, this all begs the question of both the man and the nation he represents…

As they continue to bolster their butcher friends in Damascus, why does justice supposedly demand that the sole, resurrected state of the Jews--half of whom were refugees from the “Arab” and Muslim world--consent to national suicide so Arab settlers and colonizers can have their 22nd state, and second, not first, one in Palestine, but millions of Arabs in Khuzestan/Arabistan should not gain independence from Iran?

If a Palestine much smaller than Iran could undergo partition in the name of justice for competing national groups, then why should the same principle not apply for millions of Ahwazi Arabs, millions of Kurds, and other oppressed peoples in Iran as well?

It’s time to stop mincing words and for the duplicity to end…

The next time Ahmadinejad or the mullahs open up their mouths on such issues, there is but one response that they should get, for it is indeed time for that 22nd state for Arabs that they demand to be born…

Long live Arabistan !

http://www.youtube.com/user/HonigmanG?feature=mhee

Newt, "Palestine," and Chanukah Corroborations (Take 2)

Newt, “Palestine,” and Chanukah Corroborations (Take 2)
by Gerald A. Honigman

By now, Republican presidential hopeful, Newt Gingrich’s, remarks about the non-existence of “Palestinians” and “Palestine” (apart from the greater Arab identity) are well known.

Realizing that Arabs already had almost two dozen states (conquered and carved out of mostly other, non-Arab peoples’ lands– including one on almost 80% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine which today is known as Jordan), to negate the Jews’ claims to their sole, minuscule, lone state, yet other Arabs (most of whom were newcomers themselves into the Mandate) decided that it made for better public relations and such to rename themselves “stateless Palestinians” than just calling for yet an additional state for Arabs on the ashes of the Jews’ resurrected one. See these two articles for further explanation http://www.teapartytribune.com.....oes-1-1-3/ and http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=14996

I’ve chosen to weave some of my own additional reactions to this controversial issue in with the fast-approaching holiday of Chanukah–the first war ever recorded fought over religious liberty and fought by the Jewish nation.

One (very important) aspect of that nation–besides its unique culture, language, and so forth–included a religious dimension.

Jews had a very unique set of religious beliefs and ethical standards which they were supposed to adhere to. One could join the nation/peoplehood of the Jews by conversion to the religious faith of that people. The story of Ruth and Naomi in the Hebrew Bible is a moving, beautiful example of this…

“Whither thou goest, I shall go, your people will be my people, and their G_d, my G_d.”

Chanukah begins this year on the evening of December 20th. It changes each year because the Hebrew calendar is lunar. Additionally, the Bible tells us that ” the evening and the morning were the first day”–so Jews measure days from eve to eve in the 24-hour cycle.

With Chanukah less than a week away, I decided to share with my many non-Jewish readers some relevant historical facts that many Jews likely do not even know–let alone non-Jews.

Since in America we are all (regardless of our different religions) well-versed in the Christmas story, I felt that the Judeo portion of our nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage deserves more than just the usual potato pancakes, dreidle, and menorah-treatment we usually give to Chanukah…if that.

So, here we go–and you’ll see how Newt’s comments fit in as well…

The year was 1887.

An Egyptian woman discovered a treasure-trove of over three hundred clay cuneiform tablets that would shake the world of religion and the study of ancient history.

Named for a local Bedouin tribe, the Tel el-Amarna tablets (which can now be found mostly in the Berlin and British Museums) were mostly the official correspondence between Pharaoh Amenhotep IV–Akhenaten–and his governors and vassals from places such as Canaan, Syria, Babylonia, etc. They date mostly from around 1380 B.C.E. and were written in Akkadian, the language of diplomacy of the era.

So, what does all of this have to do with Chanukah?

Patience, please…

Now, guess what repeatedly comes out in this official correspondence between Pharoah and his vassals in Canaan and the surrounding areas?

Complaints about invasions of the “Habiru"…at least one branch of which became associated with the Hebrews.

While some scholars debate some details, most agree that the time–with even newer confirmations by excavations in Jericho–fits into the period of Joshua’s conquests of Canaan.

Like many other accounts in the Hebrew Bible, we indeed have good supporting evidence from elsewhere to support the Jews’ own version of these events. And what makes it even better is that this often comes from those viewing the events from the “other side” of the picture…often their enemies

This is no small point.

Corroboration is very important to any serious scholar. And not many religious texts can match the historical corroboration found in those of the Jews.

Jumping ahead about eight centuries, Babylon became a powerhouse, and the Jews’ remaining southern kingdom, Judah, fell captive to Nebochadnezzar. The northern kingdom, Israel, fell to the Assyrians a few centuries earlier, and many of the folks there largely became known afterwards as “the ten lost tribes of Israel.” There are now people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and elsewhere who trace their lineage back to those earlier Israelis/Israelites.

Returning to the Babylonian ordeal, the Jews would next find a hero in…hold onto your seats…an Iranian ruler, Cyrus the Great, who allowed their return to Judah in 539 B.C.E. Not exactly the current Iranian mullahs’ and President Ahmadinejad’s type–if you know what I mean. And again, while the Hebrew Bible gives the Jews’ own account of this episode, we also have it from the “other side” as well.

Take a look at this ancient quote from an Iranian source, The Kurash Prism, courtesy of the Iran Chamber Society and other historical sites…

“I am Kurash (Cyrus), King of the World, Great King, Legitimate King, King of Babilani, King of Kiengir and Akkade, King of the four rims of the earth, Son of Kanbujiya…I returned to these sacred cities on the other side of the Tigris the sanctuaries of which have been ruins for a long time, the images which used to live therein and established for them permanent sanctuaries. I also gathered all their former inhabitants and returned them to their habitations.”

“Furthermore, I resettled upon the command of Marduk, the great lord, all the gods of Kiengir and Akkade whom Nabonidus had brought into Babilani to the anger of the lord of the gods, unharmed, in their former temples, the places which make them happy.”

Now, check out the Jews’ own version of this in Ezra 1: 1-8 in the Hebrew Bible…

“In the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord inspired King Cyrus of Persia to issue this proclamation throughout his kingdom, both by word of mouth and in writing: “Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia: “All the kingdoms of the earth the Lord, the God of heaven, has given to me, and he has also charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever, therefore, among you belongs to any part of his people, let him go up, and may his God be with him! Let everyone who has survived, in whatever place he may have dwelt, be assisted by the people of that place with silver, gold, and goods, together with free will offerings for the house of God in Jerusalem.”

Corroboration.

The names of Israel, Judah/Judaea, Hebrew kings, etc. and so forth are also found in the records of the Jews’ ancient neighbors. The Egyptian Pharaoh, Merneptah, left the first non-Biblical record of Israel that has been discovered so far…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merneptah_Stele

There are indeed many examples of this, but the last one I’d like to review for now before tying all of this together with Chanukah is one of my favorites. It involves the Arab claim that they were the original “Palestinians”–the issue Newt Gingrich seized upon recently.

Follow carefully…

There was no country nor nation known as “Palestine” during the time of Jesus. The land was known as Judaea and its inhabitants were Judaeans…Jews.

Tacitus and Dio Cassius were famous Roman historians who wrote extensively about Judaea’s attempt to remain free from the Soviet Union of its day, the conquering Roman Empire. They lived and wrote during, or not long after, the two major revolts of the Jews in 66-73 C.E. and 133-135 C.E. They make no mention of this land being called “Palestine” nor its people “Palestinians.” And they knew the differences between Jews and Arabs as well.

Listen to this quote from Vol. II, Book V, The Works of Tacitus:

“It inflamed Vespasian’s (the Emperor) ire that the Jews were the only nation which had not yet submitted…Titus was appointed by his father to complete the subjugation of Judaea… he commanded three legions in Judaea itself… To these he added the twelfth from Syria and the third and twenty-second from Alexandria… amongst his allies were a band of Arabs, formidable in themselves and harboring towards the Jews the bitter animosity usually subsisting between neighboring nations…”

Note, please, that the Romans called their Arab allies Arabs…not “Palestinians.” And the Arabs mentioned by the Romans above were outside invaders attacking the Jewish nation which was fighting for its freedom and independence against the conqueror of much of the known world. Putting it bluntly, the Arabs were simply acting like vultures moving in for a portion of the mainly Roman kill…

After the 1st Revolt, Rome issued thousands of Iudaea (Judaea) Capta coins which can be seen today in museums all over the world. Notice, please… Iudaea Capta… not “Palaestina” Capta. Additionally, to celebrate this victory, the Arch of Titus was erected and stands tall in Rome to this very day. Open here to see a Judea Capta coin http://q4j-middle-east.com and the Arch of Titus http://www.bing.com/search?q=a.....;form=QBRE .

When, some sixty years later, Hadrian decided to further desecrate the site of the destroyed Temple of the Jews by erecting a pagan structure there, it was the grandchildren’s turn to take on their mighty conquerors.

The result of the struggle of this tiny nation for its freedom and independence was, perhaps, as predictable as that which would have occurred had Lithuania taken on the Soviet Union during its heyday of power. Unfortunately, two thousand years later, the Jews are still in that same struggle.

Listen next to this quote from Dio Cassius:

“580,000 men were slain, nearly the whole of Judaea made desolate. Many Romans, moreover, perished in this war (the Bar Kochba Revolt). Therefore Hadrian in writing to the senate did not employ the opening phrase commonly affected by the emperors, ‘ I and the legions are in health.’”

The Emperor was so enraged at the Jews’ struggle for freedom in their own land that, in the words of the esteemed modern historian, Bernard Lewis…..

Hadrian made a determined attempt to stamp out the embers not only of the revolt but also of Jewish nationhood and statehood… obliterating its Jewish identity.

Wishing to end, once and for all, Jewish hopes, Hadrian renamed the land itself from Judaea to “Syria Palaestina”– Palestine–after the Jews’ historic enemies, the Philistines, a non-Semitic sea people from the islands near Crete. Prior to this time, the coastal region around Gaza was also geographically referred to by the Greeks by that name.

Thus, as Newt points out, the Arabs’ attempt to hijack the Philistines’ identity as they’ve tried with that of the Jews won’t work either.

Corroboration.

And now (drum roll please), let’s see what all of this has to do with Chanukah…

Back in the ’70s, while doing doctoral studies at the Kevorkian Center For Near Eastern Studies (a consortium of Princeton, Columbia, and New York Universities based at N.Y.U’s Washington Square campus), I had the privilege of having Dr. F.E. Peters as one of my professors.

A leading expert of the ancient Near East (along with other related subjects as well), one of his specialties was ancient Greece.

Fluent in the language and immersed in the primary sources, Peters’s The Harvest Of Hellenism largely supports the Jews’ own accounts of their struggle for independence against their latest conqueror, the Seleucid successors to Alexander the Great based in Syria. After the latter’s death, his generals fought for the pieces of the pie. Ptolemy wound up with one of the other main prizes, Egypt.

Follow these scattered quotes from Peters, who devoted a good portion of this over 800-page book to the same subject found in the Jews’ own writings in the First and Second Books of Maccabees.

“The Seleucids, like all other Hellenistic monarchs, with the exception of the Macedonian Antigonids, were worshipped as gods…Jew and Hellene clashed on the issue of conduct…Hellenism could allow almost any eccentricity in private behavior…however…the polis found it difficult to accept a large-scale and public refusal to share in its life and rites.”

Whatever else may or may not have happened in Judaea during the time of Antiochus IV Epiphanies (“the god made manifest”), and while the good professor takes issue with some aspects of the Jews’ own accounts, both he and Jewish tradition agree that the clash he himself wrote about above inevitably led, as mentioned earlier, to the first war ever fought–at least partially–over religious freedom.

Proclaiming yourself a god among pagans was one thing. They could just add Antiochus to a long list.

But to do this with Jews, whose religion teaches that no man–regardless of how great–could be divine was explosive. Add to this his attempt at squashing their attempt to retain their own way of life and religious practices, and the revolt of the Maccabees became inevitable.

Here’s the Roman historian, Tacitus (Volume II, Book V), again, a few centuries later on the same subject, writing after the Jews next took on the Romans…

“The Jews acknowledge one God only, and conceive of him by the mind alone, condemning, as impious, all who, with perishable materials, wrought into the human shape, form representations of the Deity. That Being, they say, is above all, and everlasting, neither susceptible of likeness nor subject to decay. In consequence, they allow no resemblance of Him in their city, much less in their temples. In this way they do not flatter their kings, nor show their respect for their Caesars.”

That above passage, by the way, involving the issue of the deification of man, explains the real schism between Judaism and Christianity today as well.

Corroboration.

At a time when Israel, the Jew of the Nations (which was making history and causing a revolution in religion, ethics, and morality millennia before most other peoples even made their historical debuts), still has to fight for its right to take its place among those newcomers on the world scene, the story of Chanukah and its message of rededication is as important today as it was when Judah the Hammer (the “Maccabee”) and his brothers took on their mighty pagan rulers over two thousand years ago.

Chag sameach!

Happy Chanukah!

http://www.youtube.com/user/HonigmanG?feature=mhee

Leon Vs. Don: A Tale Of Two Secretaries...

Leon Vs. Don: A Tale Of Two Secretaries…

by Gerald A. Honigman

Such blatherings out of the Obama Administration have by now become commonplace.

Even before the 2008 election, Senator Obama was on record saying that Israel would be crazy if it did not accept the Saudi Peace Plan.

The two key provisions of this plan require Israel to return to the ‘49 armistice lines (not political borders)--which made it 9 to 15-miles wide in its strategic waist, where most of its population, industry, and such are located--and allow itself to be inundated by millions of alleged Arab refugees. Note that at least as many, if not more, Jews fled so-called “Arab” and/or Muslim lands than Arabs who fled in the opposite direction due to the invasion of Israel in 1948 by a half dozen Arab nations.

“Peace” plan, alright…peace of the grave.

And Obama’s own personal ideas and approach to “peace making” between Arab and Jew in the region have indeed set the tone for policies his Administration has pursued in the region.

Like his boss in the White House and his counterparts at the State Department, the United Nations, and elsewhere, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently reiterated his predecessor, Robert Gates’, position by joining the chorus in blaming everyone’s favorite victim for its own victimization.

Panetta thus blasted Israel with both barrels at a recent Brookings Institution event, blaming the Jews themselves for their growing isolation and the lack of movement towards peace in the region stating that Israel’s problems with Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and its alleged Palestinian Arab peace partners were mostly of its own making.

Putting it bluntly, to make such statements requires nothing less than a set of blinders to reality.

Lots has already been written about that reality, so--for the sake of space--I won’t attempt to repeat it here.

But, what I will do is pose an alternative assessment to the Obama-Panetta critique presented by another former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

While the ever hostile State Department--which fought President Truman over the very recognition and resurrection of Israel in 1948 from the get-go--immediately jumped in to do “damage control,” here’s what Rumsfeld had to say on August 6, 2002 when questioned by reporters at a news conference about the disputed territories Israel came to occupy after it was attacked by Jordan and blockaded by Egypt in 1967…

“If you have a country that is a sliver and you can see three sides of it from a high hotel building, you’ve got to be careful what you give away and to whom you give it to.”

Now think about that a bit…and picture the jaws that dropped among the press corps.

Rumsfeld also elaborated on the nature of the threat Israel faced from its so-called “peace partners.”

It’s probably no coincidence that Rumsfeld’s boss, President George W. Bush (despite some later disagreements he had with Israel himself), gave Israel an important letter upon its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza which stated that it was not expected to return the ‘49 armistice lines nor obliged to allow itself to be swamped by millions of Jihadi refugees...just the opposite of what Obama’s beloved Saudi Peace Plan demands. Earlier, when pondering the minuscule size of Israel and the dangers that it faces, he commented that his native Texas had driveways larger than Israel’s width.

Light years difference, here folks…both between the two occupants of the White House and those whom they appointed to key positions impacting foreign policy. And note, Dubya is the man whom Hebrew Lefties (who’ll vote for Farakhan’s messiah yet again in 2012) love to ridicule and hate.

Decades earlier, right after the Six Day War in June ‘67, another Secretary of Defense initiated an earlier assessment for President Johnson.

Here’s how Johnson himself summarized the situation on June 19, 1967, about a week after hostilities ceased…

“A return to the situation on June 4 (the day before outbreak of war) was not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities.”

He then called for…

“new, recognized boundaries that would provide security against terror, destruction, and war.”

Here’s a brief excerpt from a document General Earle Wheeler, of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prepared for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on June 29, 1967…

“Israel would require retention of some captured Arab territory to provide militarily defensible borders.”

As I and others have often written, the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242, adapted in the wake of the war, called for Israel to finally get real, more secure borders to replace the armistice lines which did nothing but invite repeated attacks from Arabs who reject Israel, regardless of its size. Those disputed territories mentioned above had largely become “Arab” due to the latters’ own earlier aggression in 1948.

The Reagan Administration had virtually the same thing to say about these matters.

Here’s Reagan on September 1, 1982…

“In the pre-1967 borders (sic), Israel was barely 10-miles wide… the bulk of Israel’s population within artillery range of hostile armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.”

And in 1988, Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Shultz, declared…

“Israel will never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders.”

Please keep in mind that at virtually the same time that Panetta was lecturing Israel that it wasn’t baring the necks of its kids enough for the peace of the grave plan the Obama Administration insists that it accept, yet another colleague of the “moderate” PA chief honcho, Mahmoud Abbas, was swearing that his crew will never recognize Israel as a state of the Jewish people…which Abbas has also stated himself over and over again.

In this region, you see, the score--at the minimum--must always be, Arabs 22, all others 0. And if Israel caves into the demands of Panetta and his boss, the score will likely be Arabs 23 to 0 instead. There is no doubt that that is what the Arabs truly have in mind. Those are indeed the stakes here…

The Secretary stated that Israel must be more forthcoming to those who would see it destroyed--regardless of its size. Translate that to mean that Israel must agree to that total withdrawal to the ‘49 Auschwitz/armistice lines, accepting inundation by Arab refugees, and so forth, for those are the “stumbling blocks” which the Arabs insist Israel remove before returning to “negotiations.”

Here’s Panetta’s by now (in)famous words…

“Just get to the damn (negotiating) table.”

The problem, however, for anyone with functioning neurons, is that “negotiations” for Arabs means something very different than what most people think. For Arabs, the Jews are expected to do all of the giving while they just do all of the taking. There is no compromise in this exercise, and that’s why such “negotiations” were doomed to failure from the start.

The real problem now involves an American Administration which supports this one-sided Arab vision about how the game must be played out. The Arabs expect Israel’s suicide as the end result, and openly state this to their people. At least some Jews resist this...but not all.

Even Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, goes far in accomodating most of Obama’s and his Arab buddies’ wishes in this regard. Jews wanting to live beyond the tiny ghetto of a state Israel was left as via the ‘49 armistice lines are routinely harassed by Barak’s troops, while Arabs who attack Jews are more often than not simply ignored. There is no doubt that Barak is Barack’s man…and there is no doubt that if The One gets reelected in 2012, he will do everything possible to topple Netanyahu.

Turning to the problems Panetta cites elsewhere, Israel’s issues with Turkey are directly related to the Turks’ own blatant hypocrisy in the region.

The increasingly Islamist Turks expect Jews to cave in to all that the Arabs demand--including not defending themselves from being attacked (that’s what the flotilla incident was all about)--while doing all that they can to suppress and subjugate one-fifth of Turkey’s own native Kurdish population, which pre-dates the Turks themselves in the region by millennia. The Jews have bent over backwards in trying to have good relations with this powerful Muslim, but non-Arab, nation--to the point of providing Ankara with military technology used to further suppress the Kurds…a disgrace. The latter are the truly stateless people in the region--not yet more Arabs seeking their 22nd state.

As for Jordan, ditto the above. But the irony here is that Jordan was carved out of almost 80% of the original April 25, 1920 Mandate of Palestine in 1922.

Since Panetta brought the subject up, it cannot be repeated often enough that there has indeed been an Arab state in “Palestine” for almost 100 years now.

What is therefore being demanded is a second state for Arabs, not first, in “Palestine"--the name the Roman Emperor Hadrian bestowed upon Judea after the Jews’ second major revolt for freedom in 133-135 C.E. The renaming of the land was Rome’s way of trying to extinguish the embers of Jewish national existence once and for all. Roman and Roman-sponsored ancient historians wrote all about this--Pliny, Tacitus, Dio Cassius, Josephus, and so forth.

After the earlier first revolt, Rome issued Judea Capta coins in honor of its victory. Open here to see one of such coins…

http://q4j-middle-east.com And to further commemorate its victory over the Jews, it built the towering Arch of Titus which stands tall in Rome to this very day… http://www.aviewoncities.com/rome/archoftitus.htm

“Syria Palestina” was thus named for the Philistines, the Jews’ historic enemies. They were the “Sea People” of ancient Egyptian records, Samson and Delilah and David and Goliath fame, and so forth. And they were Greeks who came from the islands off of Crete…not even Semites, let alone Arabs. The latter mostly arrived in the land of the Jews in the 7th century of the Common Era during the massive waves of Jihadi attacks launched by Muhammad’s successors as they burst out of the Arabian Peninsula spreading the Dar ul-Islam in all directions.

So, the situation involving “Jordan” is a bit tricky--to say the least.

Its population consists mostly of Arabs who lived, or came to live, in the Mandate in the early 20th century. The Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission and other sound sources recorded vast numbers of Arabs pouring into the Mandate from surrounding countries due to (unlike elsewhere) the economic development going on in Palestine. And many others entered via the porous borders at night, never to be recorded at all.

So many Arabs were recent arrivals--settlers--themselves into the Palestinian Mandate that UNRWA had to adjust the very definition of “refugee” from its prior meaning of persons normally and traditionally resident to those who had lived in the Mandate for a minimum of only two years prior to 1948. By the way, there was no UNRWA or any other organization set up to assist the Jews who were forced to flee “Arab” lands, leaving far more wealth and property behind than Arabs fleeing the fighting in the opposite direction.

The other main part of Jordan’s population are the Bedouin followers of the Hashemite Arab rulers who were gifted with most of the Mandate of Palestine by the Brits while in the process of getting their own derrieres booted out of the Arabian Peninsula by the rival clan of Ibn Saud--hence, Saudi Arabia today.

On more than one occasion, Jordan’s rulers’ derrieres were saved by their Jewish neighbors.

To name just one incident, when Syrian Arabs attacked Jordanian Arabs in 1970 to support the PLO Arabs’ attempt to overthrow Hashemite Arabs ("Black September"), Israel took effective measures which resulted in the swift Syrian withdrawal of its forces.

In short, besides--once again--Israel caving in to all that Arabs who want it destroyed demand, there is not much else that the Jews can do to make the latter happy…and thus make the Jordanians less nervous as well.

What’s really needed is something that won’t happen...a reasonable compromise worked out over the territories, and for the Arab portion to become part of the Arab state which already exists on the lions’ share of the Mandate of Palestine...Jordan. Instead, Arabs demand that a second state be carved out for them in the land at the Jews’ expense--and now have an American Administration strongarming the Jews to make this happen.

That brings us lastly to Panetta’s reference to Egypt.

I guess it’s Israel’s fault that Egypt has allowed huge quantities of munitions and such to enter into Gaza to be used to attack and terrorize Jews in Israel via countless tunnels dug on its side of the border…Imagine if this situation was reversed. Keep in mind that Egypt supposedly has had a treaty of peace with Israel since 1979.

I guess it’s Israel’s fault that the one Arab leader who truly sought peace with his Jewish neighbor--Anwar al-Sadat--was slaughtered by Muslim Brotherhood clones in Egypt--the same dudes now set to take over the country after the recent elections.

I guess it’s Israel fault that a stream of non-stop anti-Semitism pours out of the Egyptian media, academia, mosques, and other sources daily--let alone “anti-Zionism.”

And I guess it’s Israel’s fault that Egyptian military vehicles deliberately squash the heads of native, non-Arab Copts who dare to protest their subjugation.

Egypt, the largest Arab nation which--since the pre-Arab days of the Pharaohs--has millennia of history attacking Jews in Israel (check out the Merneptah Stele http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merneptah_Stele ) and which was handed over oil fields that the Jews developed. Egypt, which was given back every centimeter of land Israel won in a defensive war for its very life in 1967 (after Egypt blockaded it and amassed 100,000 troops on the armistice lines)--including the best tank trap Israel could have ever asked for(the Sinai Peninsula); etc. and so forth…

Yes, that Egypt.

But no, Secretary Panetta, Israel again has nothing to apologize to for. The sad fact here is that for Egypt too, it’s ditto time yet again as per the above assessment.

Israel has been more than a good neighbor, and it has repeatedly been victimized by Egypt for it.

Imagine any other country tolerating tunnels from across its borders by which death and destruction routinely enter into the land. There is no doubt that Egypt has not been held accountable anywhere near enough for this. And there are many other issues as well. Yet, it’s the Jews whom Panetta (read Obama) singles out for chastisement…

Sadat, of blessed memory, made his peace with Israel after the ‘73 Yom Kippur War because he finally realized that the Arab goal of destroying it would result--at best--in the ultimate Pyrrhic victory.

The Bible speaks of a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph arising in ancient Egypt, which led to the enslavement of the Hebrews later on down the road.

Unfortunately, those in the ascendancy in Egypt today know not Joseph’s descendants either.

The decades have passed, American billions of dollars in military and other aid have swelled the heads of Egyptians, and the memories of war--except among the upper levels of the officer corps--have all but vanished.

Combine the above with the recent electoral victory of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist forces in the country, and there is indeed much to worry about in Egypt.Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel is all but dead, and the latter now faces a far more powerful Egyptian military than ever before...thanks to America. Also keep in mind that the Hamas rulers of Gaza are another offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

But whatever the future holds in store regarding ever changing developments in terms of Iran, the Arab Spring, and such, one thing is crystal clear--or at least should be--regardless of the propensity of those affiliated with the Obama White House to blame the Jews...or, more specifically, those Jews with their heads still at least partially above the sand, like Netanyahu:

Expecting Israel to simply cave in to all that its enemies demand to further expose itself, a la Panetta and his boss’s prodding, is undoubtedly not the answer.

www.geraldahonigman.com

Prince William, The Falklands, and Those Expansionist Jews

Prince William, the Falklands, and Those Expansionist Jews...
by Gerald A. Honigman

The AP article on November 14th spoke of Great Britain’s Prince William, second in line to the throne, being deployed to Las Malvinas.

The latter largely became known as the Falkland Islands the same way that Judea and Samaria became renamed the “West Bank”...as a result of British imperial shenanigans.

To distinguish the western part of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine from the Emirate of Transjordan the Brits created in 1922 for their Arab allies on the east bank of the Jordan River (some 80% of the total area), the name “West Bank” came into use. This was further reinforced after Transjordan grabbed that non-apportioned area of the Mandate for itself after it invaded a re-born Israel in 1948. Holding both banks of the river, the Emirate renamed itself Jordan soon afterwards.

If there is a difference, it’s that long before there was either an Argentina or Great Britain, Jews were living, making history, and changing the world forever in the moral and spiritual legacy they left behind in Judea and Samaria.

David was born in Bethlehem and was crowned King of Israel in Hebron and had children there. He would later make Jerusalem his capital--over three millennia ago. Jerusalem is mentioned over six hundred times in the Hebrew Bible--not even once in Arab Islam’s Qur’an.

Earlier, Abraham made Hebron known to the world in the first place by purchasing a burial plot there for many of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people. Hannah dedicated her son, Samuel, to the service of G_d in the care of the High Priest, Eli, in Shiloh, and G_d renewed the promise of the Promised Land to Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, at Bethel. Jacob made peace with his brother, Esau, at Penuel and by doing so was thus transformed by G_d into his higher self--Israel--in the process.

The oldest known version of Biblical scripture ever found was located in the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in the Judean Wilderness, and the Jews held off the mighty Roman Empire for years at the fortress of Masada. The list goes on...

All of those places above are in Judea.

While most of the world was still worshipping stone idols and practicing human sacrifice and fertility rights, the Jews--despite their own imperfections--were spreading the knowledge of an ethical G_d who demands justice, loves mercy, and commands that man should love his neighbor as himself to the rest of mankind.

Have you ever wondered why Jews are so disproportionately represented in movements for human rights and social betterment throughout history? Look no further than what you just read above. They have indeed been--as G_d instructed them to be millennia ago in Zion--"a light unto the nations.”

So, Royal Air Force pilot, Prince William, has now set off to defend Her Majesty’s claim to islands almost 8,000 miles away from home--land first acquired almost two centuries ago. At the same time, the Brits were expanding their empire far and wide elsewhere as well. Think about that a bit when you consider London’s finger wagging at Jews simply wanting to live beyond the 9 to 15-mile wide ghetto of a state Israel was left as via the 1949 armistice lines which the Brits--and others--now expect Israel to return to.

When Jews dig in the soil of Judea, Samaria, and Israel--despite their forced exile, Diaspora, and forced Arabization of the land and its people after the Jihadi invasions of Muhammad’s successors in the 7th century C.E.--Jews continuously find their own roots and history. They are indeed home...

What do the Brits find when they dig on the Falklands? Or the Russians in Chechnya? Or the United States in Samoa?

Yet all of those (and many more) nations’ leaders act as if Jews are being unreasonable when they claim that they should once again be allowed to live in East Jerusalem and elsewhere--where Jews indeed owned land and lived up until the Arab massacres of the 1920s and 1930s.

Regardless of the conflicting Argentinean and British claims to the territory Prince William is now assigned to, the plain fact is that the archipelago sits a few hundred miles off the coast of Argentina--and thousands of miles away from Great Britain. Yet the latter fought a war and acquired them in the first place in the name of its own sovereignty.

Judea and Samaria are in Israel’s backyard.

Keep all of this in mind in light of the hypocrisy and double standards which Israel will undoubtedly continue to be subjected to in the days which lie ahead.

www.geraldahonigman.com

Slick Willy, Bibi, and ($$$) Grateful Arab Petro-Potentates

Slick Willy, Bibi, and ($$$) Grateful Arab Petro-Potentates…

by Gerald A. Honigman

Hey, I voted for the guy…twice.

I had high hopes for the Man from Hope. But, then again, I voted for Mr. Peanut--Apartheid Israel--Jimmy Carter too.

Can’t say I haven’t given Democrats a chance…

So, what I have to say next is not coming from the mouth of some right-wing extremist, and it’s not for nothing that William Jefferson Clinton has come to be known as Slick Willy.

Like France’s Sarkozy, President Obama, and others as well, former President Bill Clinton (you know, the guy who proved he could multi-task while smoking cigars, having oral sex, and talking to Congressmen on the phone in the White House) doesn’t like Israel’s Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu very much.

Truth be told, regardless of his human flaws, in many ways Bibi indeed shines when compared to those now flinging manure his way.

You see, the real problem that many have with Netanyahu goes beyond his individual self. It has lots to do, instead, with too much of the Gentile world having to deal with any Jews who dare to demand something beyond perpetual fragility in their individual and collective existence.

The whole issue regarding building freezes and settlements, for example, which has Clinton, Obama, Sarkozy, & Co. all hot and bothered, has to do with whether or not Jews get to have a state larger than an oversized ghetto or not. Recall that the very word ghetto itself was born of the experience imposed upon Jews by others in the Diaspora. And much of the world still resents Napoleon’s precedent-setting freeing of the Jews from it a few centuries back.

The UN-imposed armistice lines of 1949, marking the spots where fighting stopped after a half dozen Arab nations invaded a resurrected Israel in 1948, were never meant to be Israel’s permanent political borders. They left Israel a mere sardine can of a state, with most of its exposed population concentrated in the nine to fifteen-mile wide mid-section of the country. The issue finally came to a head after the Arabs’ renewed attempt on Israel’s life in 1967, starting with their blockade of the Jewish State--a casus belli.

As has been repeated too many times (but with no choice, since folks like Slick Willy pretend they know nothing of it), at the end of those hostilities in June ‘67, the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242 promised that Israel would never have to return to its former, indefensible, armistice line existence again. Real, more secure borders were promised at the end of the peace-making process--not a return to the status quo ante. All of the architects of 242 confirmed this, as did Presidents such as Johnson and Reagan.

Now, while Obama is simply wrong in claiming that his own demand of Israel to forsake the promise of 242 for a reasonable territorial compromise over the disputed territories to appease the Arabs does not deviate from prior American policies (his own immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, gave Israel a letter stating that it was not expected to return to the ‘49 armistice lines-- and he called them just that…not “borders” ), Slick Willy carries most of the blame for this nasty development. Let me explain…

At Camp David and Taba in 2000 (after already having Arafat to the White House numerous times), Clinton, having a willing accomplice in another of too many Hebrew pipe-dreamers, Prime Minister Ehud Barak (now Bibi’s Defense Minister--with visions of becoming Prime Minister again if Obama has his way), pressured Israel into relinquishing the small semblance of justice 242 had finally granted it.

With some presidential arm twisting--Ehud Barak agreed to basically give up almost all of the disputed territory in question in Judea and Samaria--aka the “West Bank"--where Jews had thousands of years of history and had lived clear up until the 1920s and 1930s when Arabs massacred them and the newly-formed Jordanian Arab state forbade their residence in.

While Arafat refused Clinton’s offer (which included a $ 33 billion aid package in a contiguous state, not disconnected “cantons,” according to Middle East Envoy Denis Ross, who witnessed it all), that offer--in which Israel was now on record (despite statements that it was “a one- time deal")willingly abandoning the more secure, defensible borders promised by 242--then became the new starting point for all subsequent negotiations afterwards.

Complicating matters further, the rival French version of 242--the one that was not accepted as the final draft--completely ignored the issue of the necessity of territorial compromise. France was all set to force Israel back to its pre-’67, 9-15-mile wide existence, leaving it once again perpetually ripe for invasion and bisection by enemies sworn to its demise.

For his part, Clinton is probably still upset that he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize for his peace efforts over this.

But, fear not, for Slick Willy’s efforts did not have him walking away empty-handed. Among other things, they resulted in scores of millions of dollars being delivered to him from his Arab buddies for his library, Foundation, and so forth.

Back in late September of this year, Foreign Policy Magazine quoted Clinton as saying that Bibi was responsible for killing the peace process since he “… moved the goalposts upon taking power, and whose rise represents a key reason there has been no Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.”

While it is true that Bibi, a bit more than Ehud Barak (but actually not by much-- unfortunately), dares to insist that the final draft of 242’s promise of more secure borders is not something that should simply be tossed out of the window, ignored are the facts that even Israel’s allegedly “moderate” latter-day Arafatian peace partners of Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas still insist that, even if Israel returns to the ‘49 armistice lines, they will never recognize Israel as a state of the Jews.

Furthermore, Arabs also insist that Israel--after returning to those Auschwitz Lines--next consent to allowing its Jews to be overwhelmed by millions of allegedly returning Jihadi refugees. Recall that more Jews fled so-called “Arab” lands than Arabs who fled in the opposite direction due to a war that Arabs started themselves upon their invasion of the sole, minuscule, reborn Jewish state in 1948. Unlike Arabs, the Jews did not have numerous other states to choose from.

And Slick Willy knows all of this, as does Sarkozy, Obama, and the State Department--now with Clinton’s wife at the helm (who also likes to badmouth Israeli leaders who don’t grovel and prostrate themselves low enough to others’ demands).

Obama picked up on Clinton’s Camp David and Taba “peace” moves big time even before taking office in 2008.

While still Senator Obama, he was quoted as saying that Israel would be crazy if it refused the alleged Saudi Peace Plan--the one that Clinton evidentally regards as the harbinger of the messianic age as well. You know, the plan which calls for Israel’s total return to the ‘49 lines and its inundation by gadzillions of Jihadis afterwards.

Ugh! Those unreasonable, crazy Jews…

Obama repeated his “crazy” statement after assuming the presidency and brought it up even more recently when he tried (like Slick Willy) to portray Netanyahu as some sort of unreasonable extremist because Judeans--Jews--were insisting that they had a right to live in Judea…what the building freeze and settlements issues are all about. It backfired on him big time, however--to the point that even one of his staunchest supporters, Senator Harry Reid, sided with Bibi rather than Obama on this issue.

Regardless of all the above, there is no getting around these next statements if true peace is ever to come between Arab and Jew in the region…

If well over one million Arabs are allowed to live in Israel without fear for their lives or getting their derrieres booted out, then Jews must once again be able to live in parts of Judea and Samaria as well. Those were not “purely Arab” lands and were non-apportioned territories of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine. Recall that what is now the Arab nation of “Jordan” was itself formed from almost 80% of the Mandate’s territory in 1922.

What Slick Willy, Obama, and others are taking Bibi to task for (hey, Obama will have a library and such someday too, and if Clinton already has received scores of millions of dollars from Arab benefactors, just imagine what awaits Barack Hussein Obama…arguably the most dangerous American President Israel has ever encountered ) is the creation of a second state for Arabs (if not a third…if the Jews get overwhelmed in what’s left of Israel) in Palestine--not a first--and state # 22 (if not actually # 23 !) for Arab nationalism in all. And they demand that that additional Arab state not have to make any hard compromises itself regarding the legitimate, basic needs of its alleged Israeli peace partner.

Compromise is always the key to lasting peace between parties in dispute…if peace is what is truly being sought.

The architects of the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242 thought and fought long and hard over these issues, and their wisdom is as valid today as it was over four decades ago regarding Arab-Israeli peace making.

Despite the attacks on Israeli leaders who show some backbone in insisting upon justice for their nation and people by the likes of Slick Willy, Sarkozy, and President Obama, the words of 242’s chief architect, Great Britain’s Lord Caradon, and leaders such as President Johnson are as essential today as they were when uttered back in 1967. Here’s Lord Caradon…

It would have been wrong to demand Israel return to positions of June 4, 1967 … those positions were … artificial … just places where soldiers of each side happened to be on the day fighting stopped in 1948 … just armistice lines. That’s why we didn’t demand Israelis return to them.

And President Johnson on June 19, 1967…

A return to the situation on June 4 (the day before outbreak of war) was not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities.

He then called for…

new recognized boundaries that would provide security against terror, destruction, and war.

Despite all of the relentless pressure, Israel must insist that the emergence of any 22nd state for Arabs not come at its own demise, exposing the necks of its children (which Arabs indeed deliberately target) even further than it has already…regardless of what the likes of sleazebag Slick Willy have to say.

And for those (especially head-in-the-sand Lefty Hebrews) who think that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is any better when it comes to this subject and Jews in general, fagedaboudit…

When Bill lost his bid for office in Arkansas decades ago, it was widely reported by credible sources that she screamed at a non-Jewish man associated with the campaign, calling him a “f_ _ _ ing Jew b_ _ t _ _ d.”

So, my advice to Bibi is to take heart, and not worry about what the likes of such folks as the Clintons say.

A wise Rabbi (Hillel) who lived a few millennia ago said…

“If I am not for myself, then who will be? But if I am only for myself, then what am I?”

Note, please, that man is not expected to commit suicide to help others…especially when the others want you dead.

That goes for Jews too--regardless of what Arabs and their assorted mouthpieces and petro-dollar addicted cheerleading squads have in mind.

www.geraldahonigman.com

Secretary Rice...Whom Are you Kidding?

Secretary Rice…Whom Are You Kidding?

by Gerald A. Honigman

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took the Obama Administration to task on November 1st, claiming that his policies have set back peacemaking between Arabs and Jews in the region.

Rice particularly took aim at Obama’s handling of Jews living beyond the “Green Line"--the armistice lines (not final political borders)imposed upon Israel after the assault of a half dozen Arab nations upon its rebirth in 1948. Regarding such construction, she offered…

“I do think focusing on settlements on that particular way was a mistake…the parties then were able to have a reason not to sit down.”

Before those interested in justice for all parties in conflict in the Middle East wax too nostalgic for the alleged good old days of Rice at the helm at State, a few reminders are in order. Let’s begin…

Firstly, please recall that Dr. Rice has had an oil tanker in the Chevron fleet named after her for her associations with the company. Now, while other folks can also claim this, please understand the implications here.

While Rice is certainly not the only person from petro-dollar industries who has moved through the revolving doors of businesses linked to Arab oil potentates into the State Department and other key branches of government, that truism only makes my point even further… And folks speak about the supposed clout of “the Zionist Lobby” instead. The latter is child’s play compared to the former’s influence.

Rice’s intimidation of Israel’s Ehud Olmert into constantly taking steps to endanger Israel’s Jews is legendary. She pressured him into having Israel supply the State Department’s alleged “good cop” latter-day Arafatians of Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah with arms which were then used for such things as slaughtering students in libraries at yeshivas. She pressured Israel to loosen its check points which were then followed by Arabs slaughtering Jews in their homes.

Rice’s earlier meetings with Israel’s Sharon government were no better.

While Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was still of this world, reliable reports told of Rice screaming demands at his ranch that Jews must provide Arabs with weapons, ease up on checkpoints, engage in additional withdrawals, further expose the necks of Jewish students and other innocents, and so forth.

One particular incident is especially noteworthy in light of Rice’s recent statements criticizing Obama over his settlement issue stance.

Check out these excerpts very carefully from the Mideast Briefing of the G2 Bulletin of World Net Daily on 01.12.2005 titled, “Condi’s Screaming Fit"…

“Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was overheard screaming at Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz during her recent visit to Israel.

What was the issue under discussion?

Mofaz was protesting the latest demand on Israel that would deprive the Jewish state of the ability to prevent the passage of terrorists and arms into Gaza.

During an earlier visit, Rice had likewise vented her anger at Mofaz, so this was not unexpected. But observers say what was different this time was the brutality and forcefulness of the demands.

Some Israeli officials are coming to the conclusion that the more they give, the higher the demands – not only in the political and security stakes, but also the decibel levels.

Increasingly, relations between the two countries are strained over misunderstandings. Israel felt certain it had agreement with the U.S. on the establishment of its borders and keeping settlement blocs. Yet, more than once, the Americans have denied the existence of this type of understanding.

Now Israel is trying to figure out if Sharon overestimated his friendship with the Bush administration.

From the Israeli point of view it is clear that Rice does not have muchappreciation for the Jewish state’s security needs or respect for its sovereignty.”

Okay, so is there any real element of truth in what Dr. Rice is now claiming?

Well, yes…but I don’t believe it’s any thanks to her.

Back in July 2004, I wrote a widely-published analysis which got into what I’m alluding to in far greater detail than space will now allow. Please check out April Magic. Here’s one version of it in Israel National News http://www.israelnationalnews.......aspx/4468
and Part II of the same op-ed at http://www.israelnationalnews.......aspx/4477 .

The bottom line (minus important details) is that when Israel’s Ariel Sharon agreed to a controversial unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2004 (and we all know the kind of “peace” Israel got from Gaza’s Arabs in return), President George W. Bush gave him an official letter which stated two important points--which the current occupant in the White House simply chooses to mostly, if not entirely, ignore…

Standing near Sharon, in a news conference being watched on television and heard on radio all over the world, an American President—for the first time since President Truman in 1948—finally took a political stance that might still yet lead to peace if its positions are adhered to.

The President spelled out the two key ingredients for such a recipe…

Israel should not be expected to return to the indefensible armistice lines of 1949 (and he called them just that--not “borders"); and real and fudged Arab refugees would have to go to the proposed new Arab state, not overwhelm the Jews in Israel. In any case, half of Israel’s Jews were refugees from Arab/Muslim lands. There were more Jews who fled the latter because of the combined Arab attack on Israel in 1948 than Arabs who fled in the opposite direction because of the war that Arabs themselves started.

Einstein was not needed to figure this out.

But Arabs had long been given reason, via the world’s actions, to hope that Israel would yet become an updated Czechoslovakia 1938, where Israel would be sacrificed for “peace for our time,” with the West Bank as its own Sudetenland. All that was missing was a new, proper Neville Chamberlain and conditions allowing for another Munich sellout to achieve “peace.”

President Bush’s words, as simple as they were, are still the magic ingredients necessary if there is ever to be peace between Arab and Jew in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, they proved to be fleeting.

No sooner than they were spoken, Colin Powell’s State Department began to water them down. Again, no surprise here. The Foggy Folks fought President Truman over the very rebirth of Israel a half-century earlier.

In January 2005, Dr. Rice took over leadership at State. Prior to this, to make matters worse, something even more disturbing had transpired. America’s Iraq prison scandal erupted. This-- added to an already increased level of Arab animosity surfacing regarding our invasion of Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and so forth--led the State Department to quickly search for additional ways to appease the Arabs.

Puff…

Gone, apparently in an instant, was the magic of April.

Both the State Department and the President himself soon made statements which basically retracted much of what he had said and promised to Sharon earlier. Furthermore, this appeasement at Israel’s expense only intensified when Rice--who is now criticizing Obama--became the head honcho of the Arabists wielding far too much influence at the State Department.

There was, however, one important exception to this otherwise unfortunate turn of events…

The official letter Israel received from the President in 2004 remained…even though the Obama Administration has basically laughed at it. But I can’t see how Dr. Rice can make any claims to it.

Like Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Rice also trashed any Jewish leaders who would not prostrate themselves low enough to the State Department’s demands regarding Jews wanting to live beyond the nine to fifteen-mile wide ghetto of a state that they were permitted via the ‘49 UN-imposed armistice lines. This, of course, is what the building freeze and settlement issues are all about. It all comes down to whether Israel gets the territorial compromise--giving it more secure and real borders promised to it in the wake of the ‘67 War via the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242--or not.

While the Obama Administration deserves serious criticism regarding its approach to Arab-Israeli peacemaking, the reality is that new folks simply took their cues from their predecessors.

Dr. Rice’s own disrespectful handling of Israeli leaders wanting to insure that their own endangered, minuscule nation was not sacrificed for the creation of the Arab’s 22nd state is well documented. Recall her screaming episodes mentioned above over just such crucial issues.

No, despite Rice’s recent, welcome comments, she has little wriggle room to pretend to insinuate or take any credit here.

The only Israeli leaders Rice got along with were those willing to prostrate themselves to the State Department Arabists’ demands. In this, she is no different than the current crew running the show. Indeed, that is precisely what Obama’s recent open mic response to France’s Sarkozy was all about in their mutual trashing of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

www.geraldahonigman.com