90.7% of PalArabs want to destroy Israel

As Time magazine castigates Israel and Israelis for not truly wanting "peace," a recent poll by AWRAD (Arab World for Research & Development) shows how Palestinian Arabs think.

This poll gives a long list of possible answers and asks which ones are "Essential," "Desirable," "Acceptable," "Tolerable" or "Unacceptable."

Some of the results are at odds with the conventional wisdom, to say the least.

IMRA highlights a few of the results. To put it mildly, they show an unwillingness to compromise that are orders of magnitude worse than the most intransigent, hawkish, right-wing Israeli leaders have ever been:

With regards to the final status of Palestine and Israel please indicate which of the following you consider to be Essential, Desirable, Acceptable, Tolerable or Unacceptable as part of a peace agreement.

Historic Palestine – from the Jordan River to the sea as a national homeland for Palestinians
Essential 78.2% Desirable 12.5% Acceptable 4.3 Tolerable 3.1 Unacceptable 2.0

Two state solution – two states for two peoples: Israel and Palestine according to UN resolutions
Essential 17.7 Desirable 15.7 Acceptable 13.6 Tolerable 15.2 Unacceptable 37.7

The number of refugees returning to Israel should be limited to family members and numbers agreed between Israel and Palestine

Essential 3.7 Desirable 7.8 Acceptable 11.9 Tolerable 16.9 Unacceptable 59.6

Palestine should be demilitarized, including the disbanding of militias and
the standing down of the military.

Essential 7.8 Desirable 5.5 Acceptable 4.0 Tolerable 7.6 Unacceptable 75.0

All of Jerusalem (East and West) should remain in Palestine

Essential 84.1 Desirable 10.3 Acceptable 2.2 Tolerable 1.6 Unacceptable 1.7

Other results include:

A majority saying that Israel should be de-militarized (41% Essential, 26% Desirable)

All the settlers should leave the Occupied Territories and settlements closed
Essential 90.8 Desirable 6.3 Acceptable 1.4 Tolerable 0.8 Unacceptable 0.7

Dismantle most of the settlements, move settlers to large blocks and exchange land
Essential 9.6 Desirable 9.0 Acceptable 10.0 Tolerable 17.9 Unacceptable 53.6

Resist occupation through violence to achieve a state
Essential 36.7 Desirable 18.7 Acceptable 16.8 Tolerable 14.0 Unacceptable 13.7

This is not some Israeli right-wing commissioned poll, but from a Palestinian Arab institution.

All of the conventional wisdom that says that Palestinian Arabs want a two-state solution and to live in peace with Israel is wrong. Other polls are constructed in such a way so that it appears that this is what they want, but that is a means to an end, not the desired end itself.

Which is why this poll will not get any publicity in the mainstream media. This is why there will be no Time articles about how Palestinian Arabs do not want peace and how compromise is not in their vocabulary. The mdeia simply cannot deal with these simple truths, so it will ignore the facts.

And, instead, blame Israel.

(h/t sshender)

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Syrian Palestinians admit they don't want to "return"

BBC reporter Lina Sinjab actually asks Palestinian Arabs what they want - and, more amazingly, they answer the question honestly.

The right of return for Palestinian refugees is a major sticking point in the upcoming US-sponsored Middle East peace talks, but some younger Palestinians - having never laid eyes on their ancestral homeland - say they do not actually want to go back.

As a third-generation Palestinian growing up in Syria, Bissan al-Sharif says she feels rooted in Damascus.

"I don't know if I would leave everything and go and live [in my ancestral village] because I don't know the place," says Ms Sharif.

"It is difficult to go somewhere and start everything from scratch," she says in between drama lessons for her nine-year-old students.

Ms Sharif's family has told her about what life was like in their ancestral home, and she still wants to visit a future Palestinian state, but not necessarily to move there.

"It is an absent part of my identity," she says. "I know that I have a village in Palestine and I feel I have the right to know it. But I live here, my friends and my work are here, this is my world.

"The other side is an anonymous place to me. It is unknown."

With generations of Palestinians now having lived in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, they have established deep roots outside their ancestral homeland.

But it is rare for them to publicly admit these views.

"On the record, because it is politically incorrect to say otherwise, all of them would say 'Yes, we would return to Palestine'. But once you sit with them in private, you hear a very different point of view," says political analyst Sami Mubayyed.

"Why would a businessman leave their comfort zone? Home is where the heart and the money is."

Even the staunchest supporters of the right to return admit that they have split loyalties.

"I feel like I have two countries - Syria and Palestine," says Yasser Jamous, the 23-year-old lead singer of the Refugees of Rap.

The group is made up of five young Palestinians who grew up in Yarmouk refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus.

They rap about a homeland they have never visited.

Although Mr Jamous' neighbourhood is identified as a camp, there are no tents or slums in sight. It is a residential area with beauty salons and internet cafes.

The Palestinians who live here are well integrated into society, some even hold government posts.

On the rooftop of a community centre, young Palestinians in their 20s make round plaques imprinted with a picture of Jerusalem.

They aim to produce 60,000 to give to Palestinian families - aimed at keeping the memories of their homeland alive.

Before 1948, Palestinian Arab nationalism was weak to nonexistent. Some intellectuals pushed for the idea of a Palestinian Arab state but the vast majority of actual residents of Palestine did not think of themselves as "Palestinian." The entire concept of nationalism was a new idea, especially for those whose self-identity had been tied for centuries to their families, extended clans, and villages as well as their basic identity as Arabs. In their communal memory, they had never had any independence; rather they had always been under the rule of outsiders. As long as no one bothered their communities, they didn't see any advantage in taking on a new role of being "Palestinian."

Palestinian nationalism itself was an even newer idea; most (but not all) Palestinian Arab nationalists wanted to be part of an independent Syria rather than "Palestine" until 1920 or so, after France and Britain separated Palestine from Syria. Even the Mufti of Jerusalem pushed for Palestine to be considered "southern Syria" until it became apparent that this would never happen.

The Arabs of Palestine did not internalize that there was any difference between them and any other Arabs. Many had only arrived after Zionism took root and when the economy of Palestine improved; conversely, during the 1936-9 riots, a large number of Arabs fled Palestine and went to neighboring countries. To them, the Western-defined borders had little meaning - they were Arabs, not "Palestinian" or "Lebanese" or "Transjordanian." They expected to be able to travel to any other Arab area the way their ancestors traveled throughout the region, based on economic factors far more than any perceived ties to a specific area.

In 1948, they had the exact same expectation. They fled because they didn't think that going to a neighboring area was a big deal and because, historically, Arabs would welcome other Arabs.

That time, however, their Arab brothers started to treat them differently. There were two major reasons for this: one was because of the undeniable hardship that integrating them would cause for the already struggling new Arab states, and the other because they reminded them of the humiliation that the Arab world suffered at being decisively beaten by the despised, dhimmi Jews.

This was the real start of Palestinian Arab nationalism. It had little to do with those who wrote about the theory in the early part of the century - it was an artificial construct imposed from without by Arabs who wanted to use these hundreds of thousands of refugees as political pawns. Their misery was a weapon against Israel. As a UN representative said in 1954, "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. they want to keep it an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations, and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die."

Palestinian Arab nationalism was always a negative movement in the sense that it was more oriented towards the destruction of a state rather than the building of one. It was an artificial construct, where the only commonality that Palestinian Arabs have with each other is their second-class "refugee" status rather than any specific cultural ties. Before 1967, the movement was not interested in "liberating" the West Bank or Gaza from Arab rule - their entire focus was on Israel, as it remains today. The Arab media and Arab leadership played their roles in creating a "people" that, prior to 1948, effectively didn't exist as such.

Since the roots of Palestinian Arab nationalism are so shallow and artificial, especially compared to their very real self-identification as Arabs, it is no wonder that Arabs of Palestinian descent would happily become citizens of their host countries given the choice. Yet their "leaders" have their own self-interest in keeping them as pawns, so this fact is all but unreported. Up until now, consistently, we have only seen credulous Western reporters accept at face value the demonstratively false idea that Palestinian Arabs adamantly refuse to become citizens.

This is what makes this BBC report so amazing and important. Let's hope that this inspires more reporters to ask the real questions of Palestinian Arabs stuck in Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere; let's hope that a reputable polling firm makes a survey of the real attitudes of Palestinian Arabs. The question is simple: If you were offered the chance to become an equal citizen of any Arab country, would you take it?

There can be no real solution as long as the truth is suppressed. And, sadly, many parties have colluded to suppress the truth for sixty-two years.

(h/t Media Backspin)

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Scientific poll of Jew-haters agree - "Zionists" control the media

I found this amusing:

CNN's firing of a journalist for honoring the late Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah is a case of intellectual terrorism and Zionistic clout in western media, a poll finds.

Nearly two-thirds (65.99%) of respondents participating in the latest Press TV poll have described CNN's recent move to sack its Middle East senior editor Octavia Nasr as an instance of intellectual terrorism reflecting the influence of Zionists on mainstream western media outlets.

Meanwhile, over 20 percent of those polled believe that Zionists control the western media.

Less than ten percent of the participants maintain that CNN had the right to question Nasr's integrity.

The "poll," of course, was only of readers of Iran's PressTV, which means that it was already a wee bit weighted towards the antisemitic demographic.

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The dishonesty of Dalia Mogahed

Dalia Mogahed is an adviser to President Obama who was one of the two people behind a poll on worldwide Muslim attitudes in 2008 that spawned a very flawed book, "Who Speaks for Islam?"

She responds to a Lee Smith piece in Tablet that portrays her as very influential in the White House and also criticizes the poll. While I am not qualified to comment on her influence with Obama, the other part of her response is interesting to me.

She cuts and pastes from a Gallup FAQ about her book:

In the book Who Speaks for Islam?, we define the "politically radicalized" as respondents who A) answered a "5" when asked to rate the extent that 9/11 could be morally justified on a 5-point scale, where "1" is "cannot be justified at all" and "5" is "completely justifiable," and B) said they view the United States unfavorably. A population-weighted average of 7% fit these criteria. We labeled those who said 9/11 could not be completely justified as "moderates." We further broke this group down into those who were pro-United States and those who were anti-United States.
The decision as to where to break out the "politically radicalized" from the rest was data-driven. It was based on several analyses of where the data clustered for a natural breaking point. The analyses showed that the people who responded with a "5" (completely justifiable) to the question on the justifiability of 9/11 as a group were distinctly different from the groups who responded with a "1", "2", "3" or "4." The idea here is not that we are judging who or what a "moderate" or "radical" is, but rather assigning labels to statistical groups that we clearly define.
The term "moderate" is more of a placeholder label than a value judgment. It is similar to calling one clustering in the data "group A" and another "group B." We simply used labels that a broad audience can easily understand and remember.

This is how Gallup justified calling people who thought that the 9/11 attacks were "mostly" or "partially" justified as "moderate."
It is the bolded sentence that is dishonest. Mogahed and Gallup are claiming that the word "moderate"is not a value judgment, and that they could have just as easily called the groups "group A" and "group B."
In fact the way that the poll was publicized in press releases shows that it was used exactly as a value judgment. Look at how Gallup synopsizes the research in its web page:

What Makes a Radical?

March 13, 2008

The authors of the book Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think examine what separates the “politically radicalized” from the moderate majority.

Muslim Radicals: It's Politics, Not Piety

March 13, 2008

Experts react to Gallup findings revealing that views on politics, rather than personal piety, separate radical and moderate Muslims.

Clearly, Gallup is positioning the book as a referendum on who is a "radical" and who is a "moderate" with all the implications of those terms.

In addition, even though the authors and Gallup are claiming otherwise, it is impossible to separate the meanings of words with the purported neutral meanings that the authors claim for them. Using their standards, they could have called the two groups "extremely radical" and "somewhat less radical," or even "people who like daisies" versus "people who like roses." It is a self-serving and ultimately dishonest argument that the choice of appellations is somehow neutral when they have real meanings in the English language.

Perhaps Mogahed would not mind me terming all Muslim women who cover their hair and advise presidents of the United States as being "inveterate liars," as long as I clearly defined my terms ahead of time and say that calling her a liar is in no way a value judgment.

h/t zach

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Pew poll shows Palestinians are big Bin Laden fans

A new Pew Research poll shows that Palestinian Arabs identify more with Osama Bin Laden than any other polled group, save for Nigerian Muslims.

While only 28% of Jordanians and 23% of Egyptians (and only 2% of Lebanese) declared their confidence in Bin Laden, 51% of Palestinian Arabs showed confidence in him.

PalArabs also showed greater confidence in Hassan Nasrallah than any other polled group (65%), more confidence in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than any other group (45%) and more in Mahmoud Abbas (52%.)
Their answers show them to be much more extremist in their views than any Arab country polled.

The pragmatism that ordinary Palestinian Arabs had shown seems to be disappearing at an alarming rate, and one can guess that the incitement that they see on their own TV shows and other media is a large part of the problem.

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70% of poor, impoverished Gazans have Internet access

According to the latest Near East Consulting poll, over 70% of Gazans have Internet access - a higher percentage than people in the West Bank!

Only 8.4% of Gazans use Internet cafes, though. Which is probably a good idea, since those cafes have a habit of blowing up.

At any rate, I wonder how the Gazan rate of Internet access compares with those in the "poorest parts of Africa." You know, the places that Jimmy Carter says have better nutrition than Gazans.

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30% of Arabs in the territories want to emigrate

The latest published Near East Consulting poll shows that some 30% of Palestinian Arabs would like to emigrate from their homes.

34% of Gazans, and 26% of West Bank Arabs would like to move away.

Of course, no Arab country wants them, and their leaders don't want them to leave.

So when the PLO says that "What is important is that individual refugees decide for themselves which option they prefer – a decision must not be imposed upon them," it really means that "you guys must continue to be used as pawns until we destroy Israel completely, just as we have used you for the past 61 years."

It's all in the interpretation.

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