Hate speech at University of Oregon

As I mentioned last week, Holocaust denier Mark Weber ended up speaking at the University of Oregon and he publicly stated his sickening, anti-semitic views with campus approval:

A much-hyped lecture by revisionist historian Mark Weber and an accompanying protest of it happened last weekend - just not at the same time.

Originally scheduled for Friday night at McKenzie Hall, Weber's lecture was postponed because his flights were delayed. But the protest of about 50 people went on.

Quakers and local peace activists gathered outside the hall in the cold and listened to speeches from preachers and rabbis. One sign summed up the basic argument of those present: "Support Palestinians, Not Nazis."

Pacifica Forum is a weekly discussion group that meets in McKenzie Hall. Founded by Professor Emeritus Orval Etter, the groups' Web site has links to "Holocaust Revisionism" sites. Mark Weber is the director of the Institute for Historical Review, which describes itself as "the world's leading Holocaust denial organization."

Weber's speech happened on Saturday in the Fir Room of the EMU. Titled "Free Speech vs. Zionist Power," it focused on the influence of the Israeli lobby on U.S. foreign policy.

Weber compared himself to Desmond Tutu, opponent of South African apartheid, and former President Jimmy Carter, who have both come under fire for public criticism of Israel's policies toward Palestinians.

Weber dismissed what he called "silly arguments" presented in editorials and letters in The Register-Guard leading up to his visit, and said "the same arguments used by bigots throughout history" had been used to silence him or discourage people from attending his lecture.

The main point of Weber's speech was that the U.S. stands in opposition to the rest of the world when it supports Israel, and it does so because Jews are a minority with disproportionate power that comprises 11 percent of the nation's elite, including 25 percent of all journalists and publishers. Weber attributed those statistics to political science professor and author Benjamin Ginsburg.

Not only is it dangerous to give such influence to such a small minority, Weber argued, but he said Jews are by nature distrustful of non-Jews and are part of a worldwide separatist movement.

Weber said that history had already been revised by others who ignore that "Jews wielded tremendous if not dominant power in the first years of the Soviet regime."

"Bullshit!" junior Andy Saxton shouted.

"No, he's right," a man in the front row shouted back.

"I wanted to see if he really believed it or if he was just getting paid for it," Saxton later said of Weber's talk. "I think that his speech was anti-Semitic drivel in the guise of political dissent."

Saxton said he is a Democrat and leans "more toward supporting Israel than I do supporting this guy."

That seemed to be untrue of many in the room, even those who came to protest Weber.

"I find myself in 65 percent agreement with you tonight," John Saemann said. A self-described Jewish Quaker, Saemann said he opposes Israel's treatment of Palestinians and many other policies, but disagreed with Weber's broad strokes against all Jewish people.

"When I declared I was a Quaker, I said when I smell anti-Semitism I become an instant Jew," Saemann said.

Many in the crowd raised objections to Weber's past and his association with the National Alliance, a white nationalist organization. Weber served as the editor of that groups' newsletter, which he described as a "white racialist" publication.

But Weber said that was a red herring.

"It's irrelevant," he said.

"If (conservative author) David Horowitz is speaking, no one mentions he was a Communist. What I say should be judged on its own merits," he said.

Catherine Berger, who described herself as a non-traditional undergraduate, called Weber's remarks "a different generation of misinformation."

"My mother is German and grew up under the Nazis. I was told to be here to see if anything had changed, if they had gotten the right ideas, and they haven't. It hasn't changed," she said.

So U of E allows this group of bigots to have weekly meetings using its facilities. If they are willing to talk about all Jews as being a threat to the world in a publicized speech like this, who knows what they say when the press isn't there?

An interesting inference if one accepts Weber's premises: If Jews only comprise 11% of the nation's "elite" and 25% of our journalists, and they still manage to create the entire agenda for the nation, then Weber must feel that the other 89%/75% of non-Jews are really, really gullible and stupid.

He hates goyim more than the Jews do!

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Put not your trust in princes

YNet has a provocative editorial by Sever Plocker, arguing for territorial compromise from a purely economic perspective:

Oil-exporting Mideastern countries earned roughly $600 billion from oil and gas exports. In the years 2003-2006, the export revenues of these countries totaled about $2,100 billion.

This year, export revenues of Middle Eastern oil-rich nations will reach another $700 billion; should the price of oil reach $100 dollars a barrel, the revenues will leap forth to $850 billion. Next year, in 2008, the Arab-Muslim Mideast’s oil revenues will cross the $1,000 billion mark. We should remember this number: One thousand billion dollar revenues from oil and gas exports in one year.

Israel’s GDP, that is, the total value of all the products and services produced in Israel, will total roughly $170 billion this year. Or in other words, the Muslim-Arab world’s oil export revenues are at least six times higher than all of Israel’s domestic production….

It’s hard to exaggerate the implication of such figures. They shape a new Middle East, but not the kind of Mideast President Shimon Peres dreamed of. Arab and Muslim oil exporters no longer need Israel’s assistance in order to integrate into the global world. The world is knocking at their doors. The approved investment plans of the Emirates alone are estimated at $800 billion for the next five years.

And we are not there.

A two-hour flight away from Tel Aviv, on the sands of the desert, we are seeing the emergence of an oil- and gas-based Arab-Muslim economic empire never before seen in this region. Its power will grow from one year to the next. It will be a major player in deciding the fate of the global economy.

Yet all of this is happening without us. The Arab economic prosperity, which is so close to our borders, is completely skipping us. It is still not being directed at us. The Arabs have not yet internalized their power and wealth. It came too quickly and too easily. Yet they will internalize it, grasp it, and start conducting themselves accordingly.

For Israel, this is the last chance to “get on the bandwagon” and join this new reality. We must change our national perception: Israel’s economy, with all its technological achievements, will continue to dwarf in the face of the accumulated wealth of the Arab-Muslim Mideast. Our economy will decline to a much greater extent if we do not have any access to this wealth.

Such access can only be facilitated by signing an Israeli-Palestinian agreement to end the conflict. The most blatant Israeli existential interest is to advance the signing of such agreement, and through it normalize our ties with wealthy oil exporters – we can then start trading with them, selling to them, and taking part in their development plans.

The opening of Mideastern markets to Israel could double the annual growth rate of our economy from 5 to 10 percent. The Arab wealth would also enable an economic-financial resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem, once such agreement is reached by all parties. This will require no more than a donation of 5% of the foreign currency reserves of oil-exporting countries or of their annual export revenues. There would still be money left, via wise business investment, to turn the future Palestinian state into a growing region.

Those who prefer to keep dozens of West Bank settlements over the opening of Israeli embassies in Riyadh and Qatar and over opening the Saudi and Libyan market to Israeli exports are anti-Zionist in my view. They understand nothing when it comes to the new Mideastern balance of power. They will leave Israel deep in the shadow, and in practice jeopardizes the foundations of our existence.

This is a seductive argument, one that many Israelis subscribe to.

It is also wrong, shortsighted and dangerous.

While he spends most of the article discussing the undeniable growth of the oil economy, Plocker papers over exactly how Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank would turn the implacably hostile Arab world into a friendly trading partner. More importantly, he completely ignores the character of the resultant Palestinian Arab state that would be his neighbor.

The Arab economic boycott of Israel has been in place, officially or unofficially, since before 1948. Israel’s trade with Egypt and Jordan has not skyrocketed in the time since their respective peace agreements; in fact some Egyptian firms have been penalized by the WTO for still complying with the boycott. Conversely, clandestine trade with Arab countries still nominally at war with Israel continues to grow. Israel would probablybenefit economically by an agreement but the trade would remain clandestine and hidden to the Arab public and would be hampered by the anti-semitism that has not abated at all in the Arab world. There would be no bonanza for Israel.

Plocker somewhat deceptively implies that Israel’s economy is shrinking in the face of this tsunami of Arab growth: “Our economy will decline to a much greater extent if we do not have any access to this wealth.” Of course, Israel’s economy is not declining at all; as even Plocker observes in other columns. He probably means “relative to the Middle East” but this is much different from the doom and gloom he is implying. It is not clear why Israel is threatened by an annual economic growth of 5%, regardless of the growth of the oil rich countries. It is also a fantastic guess on Plocker’s part that Israel’s economic growth would double should trade increase.

Israel’s economy is also far more diversified than that of the Gulf states. Plocker makes a basic error in assuming that the boom in oil prices will continue unabated. It is quite likely that these high energy prices will spur the faster development of alternative energy resources as they become more economically feasible, and the stunning growth that he forecasts would then disappear. The Arab world’s economy is so heavily weighted to energy that it is not a very stable area to subsume Israel’s security interests.

Plocker is an economic editor for Yediot Aharonot so perhaps he can be forgiven for looking at the world through the prism of economics. Even so, how much has Israel benefited economically from its withdrawal from Gaza? The IDF still makes daily forays into Gaza to root our terrorists; Israel is spending money to develop anti-Qassam defenses, Sderot’s economy is close to nonexistent. Israel’s economy has grown since then but how much has been because of the goodwill engendered from the withdrawal and how much would have happened anyway? If Plocker wants to use a purely economic viewpoint to argue for a Palestinian Arab state, these are the questions he should be researching.

Which brings up the weakest part of Plocker’s argument: Israel’s security. It is likely that an independent Palestinian Arab state will, in short order, turn into an Islamist state. Israelis so desperately want peace that they are willing to turn a blind eye to what is happening in the Palestinian Arab world in particular, and the Arab world in general. Only last year Hamas won a popular election and even with the hundreds of millions pouring in to prop up Abbas it is far from clear that a new election would have any different results. An Islamist state on Israel’s eastern and southern borders - with only a few miles between it and the Mediterranean - is not worth any amount of money.

Even if Abbas retains leadership, he has little control over the terrorism that is sure to follow any agreement. Instead of Israeli checkpoints stopping countless terror attacks over the Green Line, Israel would return to being a nation under siege.

Plocker’s wishful thinking comes into full display when he airily says that the powerful oil-fueled Arab states would put billions of dollars into solving the “refugee” problem. Why, exactly, would a peace agreement with Israel make Arab states more likely to help their Palestinian “brethren” when their trillions have failed to do so up until now? On the contrary, the Arab states have made it clear that they want to keep the Palestinian Arabs in as much misery as possible, giving next to nothing to UNRWA and giving more money towards Palestinian terrorism than housing. They have passed laws enshrining discrimination against Palestinian Arabs. They have made it clear that they want to “refugee” problem to fester, not disappear.

And, unfortunately for the Israeli optimists, the reason is because they are still more interested in destroying Israel than helping Palestinian Arabs. While they might allow some Israeli agricultural equipment or medicines to arrive on their lands, they are still living with the ultimate insult to Arab masculinity - the existence of a Jewish state on Arab lands and the constant reminder of their war losses. Economics does not trump the deep-seated bigotry that the average Arab has against Jews having any control over land in the Middle East. Even should Israel help create another terror state next door, there will inevitably be border disputes a la Shebaa Farms and there will always be perceived insults to Arab honor a la Danish cartoons and Israel will always be the lightning rod for Arab anger. No amount of concessions can change that.

Perhaps King David put it best when he said (Psalms 146:3)”Put not your trust in princes…in whom there is no hope.” Israel cannot mortgage its security to the promise of an economic boom that the princes of Arabia may - or may not - agree to.

(cross-posted to Israellycool)

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Some PalArabic news

Palestine Press Agency (pro-Fatah) says that a Hamas jeep recklessly hit and killed a 38-year old woman in Gaza City, bringing our 2007 PalArab self-death count to 568.

The same agency reports that Hamas leaders are preparing to escape to Egypt via tunnels if Israel invades Gaza. Brave fighters!

Palestine Today (pro-Hamas) picks up on a Maariv story (also in YNet) that Israel will deduct from the tax revenues it gives the PA the cost of the damage from rocket fire. Of course Hamas won't feel any of that shortfall.

Ma'an (Arabic) reports that Fatah in Gaza is trying to get a massive rally for Monday to commemorate the third anniversary of the death of Yasser Arafat. Since everyone loves Abu Ammar they are trying to leverage that into a show of support for Fatah in Gaza.

Al-Hayat al-Jadida (Fatah) said that Mahmoud Abbas demanded Israel to adhere to its obligations under the "roadmap" and called on the US to pressure Israel to do so. Since the roadmap puts as a precondition that the Palestinian Arabs stop trying to kill Israelis this is beyond hypocritical.

Al-Hayat adds another demand from Mahmoud Abbas - that Israel release 2000 prisoners as a "confidence building" measure as well as demolish roadblocks before the Annapolis summit/meeting/gathering.

UPDATE: A Gaza "policeman" was killed during a clan clash. 569.

UPDATE 11/7: An Islamic Jihad leader died from wounds from Hamas last month. 570.

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Tenure for a bigot

Nadia Abu El-Haj, who teaches anthropology at Barnard College, has received tenure from that institution.

Much has already been written about her book criticizing any archaeology that indicates a presence of an Jewish kingdom in what is now Israel, even though she has no archaeology experience herself. Her pre-conceived notion that there were never ancient Jews in the Middle East is so overpowering that she essentially dismisses the entire field of archaeology as being hopelessly biased against her version of the truth.

This was the only book she ever wrote, and it seems on its own to be pretty powerful evidence that her scholarship is suspect, to say the least. But what most people haven't caught on to is that more recently she has been doing to the field of genetics what she had previously done to archaeology - to reach the identical conclusion. In an article in American Ethnologist she says modern genetics has disproved the idea that the Jewish maternal line originated in ancient Israel (what she calls "Palestine" even when she is talking about a kingdom that predates that term.)

It is an amazing coincidence that she has looked at two disparate fields, neither of which she is an expert in, and reached the identical conclusion - the Jews have no historic right to live in Israel. The fact that she is of Palestinian Arab origin surely has nothing to do with this eerie juxtaposition of separate proofs by assertion.

Perhaps if her only "scholarship" was concentrated in deconstructing archaeology, a case could be made that she is just doing the same as what other postmodernists do. But the fact that she uses her anthropology background as a blunt instrument to pretend to be a scholar in two separate, specialized fields of which she has no real knowledge shows not only that El-Haj is no scholar, but that she has a purely Jew-hating agenda. It is almost beyond belief that such a person, who can only be described as a bigot, can reach such a level at any university, let alone one as formerly prestigious as this one.

Columbia University (of which Barnard is part) certainly has seen its reputation collapse in the past year.

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Suleiman built a synagogue on the Temple Mount?

Arutz Sheva mentions in a meeting between Israeli rabbis and White House officials that

[Chief Rabbi of Haifa and Chairman of the Chief Rabbinate Communications Committee Rabbi She'ar-Yashuv] Cohen also recalled the historical fact that the Muslim Caliph Omar Suleiman built a synagogue on the Temple Mount where Jews prayed, and that it was later destroyed by another Caliph.

Does anyone have a source for this?

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Honor/shame and sexual harassment in Egypt

From AFP:

CAIRO (AFP) — From lewd looks to inappropriate touching, experts say Egypt's growing street harassment of women is a deep-rooted and largely ignored problem shackling the country's progress.

Sexual harassment in public areas is not limited to a specific age category or social class, says the independent Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights (ECWR), which is spearheading a campaign against this "social cancer" in Egypt.

Nor does an outward expression of piety protect from sexual harassment, generally defined as "all unwelcome behaviour of a sexual nature, making women feel uncomfortable and unsafe."

"As soon as I step onto the street, I am surrounded by sexual predators," Rasha Shaaban, 23, from the Mediterranean city of Alexandria told AFP. "I don't feel safe, the problem is getting worse. It has become so bad that I want to leave Egypt."

According to the state National Centre for Social and Criminal Research, sexual crimes are on the rise but while they give no official figures, ECWR says that two women are raped every hour in this country of 80 million and that 90 percent of offenders are jobless men.

There are many contributing factors to the increase in sexual harassment. Rising unemployment may push some men to display their machismo on the streets. The huge cost of marriage and the fact that sex outside marriage is forbidden may also explain the behaviour, experts say.

"Men take out their frustration, not just sexual, against women," Engy Ghozlan, who runs the anti-harassment campaign at ECWR, told AFP.

But some men, who believe a woman's job is to look after the home, say that those out on the street are fair game.

"When (a woman) walks out into the street in tight trousers and tight belts, she deserves what she gets," said Mohamed al-Sayyed, 32, who works as an assistant at an upmarket hairdresser in Cairo.

"The women who come here are different from the ones in my village," he said.

Sayyed grew up in a village near Menya, in the conservative Egyptian south. "My female relatives would never be seen swaying in the street like this," he said, defensively explaining the occasional wolf whistles "and more" he directs at Cairene women.

One sociologist, Dalal al-Bizri, sees a strong link between growing religious conservatism and sexual harassment.

She told AFP that a puritan view of Islam brought over from religiously strict Saudi Arabia is partly responsible for the "culture of hate" against women.

"In the sermons of wahhabi (ultra-conservative) preachers on satellite television, we hear the worst things about women, like the fact that they should not be on the street but at home... that they have an inferior status," Bizri said.

In the Arab honor/shame culture, it is inevitable that men with low self-esteem will try to boost their egos by degrading women. People who are mentally healthy have no need to put others down but those living in cultures where honor is more important than life need to feel superior to others - whether the "others" are women, Jews or infidels. Any admission that they are no better than women is a fatal injury to their bruised self-esteem.

See also my posting that 40% of all Egyptian women have been sexually harassed.
(h/t Watcher)

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Checkpoint shooting you won't read anywhere else

A 27-year old Palestinian Arab was mercilessly shot in the back at a West Bank checkpoint by the trigger-happy soldiers there.

This checkpoint, like countless others, limits the movement of innocent Palestinians and causes untold misery among the population as they have to humiliated as they pass through.

Of course, since this checkpoint was built and manned by Palestinian Arabs in Qalqiya, this incident will go largely unreported; no "human rights" organizations will count this incident as evidence of oppression, and no left-wing Israelis or Europeans will dare go to monitor the activities there.

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When Zionist lions attack!

From the pro-terror "news" site IMEMC:

Israeli soldiers told the villagers of Al Fourdess village, located to the east of Bethlehem, in the southern part of the West Bank, that a Lioness had escaped from the settlement of Qedumem, built illegally on the village land.

...Palestinian villagers from Al Fourdess added that now they have to fear not only the settler and their violent attacks on the locals, but now they also have to fear the ferocious animals kept as pets by the Israeli settlers.

The last wild Zionist animals that terrorized poor Palestinian Arab villages were pigs and wolves.

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Bahrain Crown Prince: Iran wants nuclear weapons

This is a first:

LONDON, 3 November 2007 — Bahrain’s crown prince has claimed that Iran is developing atomic weapons or the capability to do so, the first time a Gulf state has openly accused Tehran of lying about its controversial nuclear drive. In interviews with correspondents for British newspapers in the capital Manama, Sheikh Salman ibn Hamad Al-Khalifa also urged a diplomatic solution to the standoff between the West and Bahrain’s close neighbor.

“While they don’t have the bomb yet, they are developing it, or the capability for it,” the crown prince said, warning that “the whole region” would be drawn into any military conflict over this issue. “There needs to be far more done on the diplomatic front,” he added, according to The Times. “There’s still time to talk.”

“We need to be very well aware that this could escalate. And we think that is not advisable,” The Daily Telegraph quoted Sheikh Salman as saying.

Of course, Iran denies that Bahrain did any such thing. From IRNA:

Bahrain Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmad al-Khalifa deplored a British daily action in distorting the Bahraini crown prince's words concerning Iran. In a meeting with Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki here on Saturday afternoon, on the sidelines of Iraq neighbors foreign ministers meeting, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmad al-Khalifa said, "The crown prince's words published in a British daily is 'distorted' and we officially reject them."

Referring to the aims of a number of media in creating pessimism and misunderstanding among neighboring countries, the Bahraini foreign minister said, "Ties between Iran and Bahrain are very deep and strong and such efforts cannot stop its growing trend."

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Exactly how are women treated in Saudi Arabia?

Last Tuesday I quoted Saudi King Abdullah as telling a reporter that "Islam has given the most rights to women in the world and they are strong and important participants in our society."

Today, the Arab News, to its credit, publishes an article by a Saudi woman that takes issue with this idea:

When Is a Saudi Woman Considered an Adult?
Maha Akeel, Arab News

It is surprising and frustrating to see that women in Saudi Arabia, despite all their achievements, continue to be treated as underage dependents who need and are forced to be managed by their male guardians.

It is necessary at this point of Saudi women’s history to address this important issue.

We cannot claim that a Saudi woman has all her Islamic and civil rights when the system insists on considering her immature, irresponsible and dependent on her male guardian no matter how old she is, how highly educated and intelligent she might be or what she has achieved in her professional career. At what age and under what circumstances is a woman in Saudi Arabia considered an independent, sane, responsible adult?

We see story after depressing and humiliating story in our daily life and reported in the newspapers of how women struggle to go about their normal life without unnecessary complications, let alone fighting for their rights in the courts or other government institutions. Why does a young intelligent, ambitious woman needs her guardian’s permission to enroll in a university or apply for work? Does the system even realize that this male guardian does not necessarily have the best interests of the woman when he denies her the right to an education and a job?

At what age is a woman considered old enough to decide to marry whom she chooses legally even if her male guardian objects because he might have ulterior motives for not giving his permission, or might force her to marry someone she does not want? Why is it that the system and society do not raise objections to a father marrying his 13-year-old daughter to a 70-year-old man but objects to a 40-year-old woman deciding to marry someone suitable against her father’s wishes because he would like to continue benefiting from her teacher salary? Or why does a court forcefully divorce a happily married couple because some male relative of the wife objects to the marriage while in another case a woman is forced to stay married to a man she does not want? Where is taking the woman’s own opinion in the matter? Doesn’t an adult, mature woman have a say in matters concerning her own private life? Why is it only the man’s wishes are looked at?

If these are some extreme and rare examples of male guardians abusing their authority over the women in their care, what about the daily obstacles women face if they want to purchase property, apply for divorce, gain custody of their child, or travel abroad? In all these cases, she needs a male guarantor or a male representative or permission from her male guardian. A working woman with sufficient salary and funds cannot purchase a car in installments without a male guarantor signing the papers with her. A woman cannot argue her case without a male representative or finalize legal procedures because judges do not recognize her ID card and insist on two men identifying her. A woman, even a 70-year-old woman, cannot travel abroad without the written, signed and notarized permission of her male guardian, who might be her son or nephew. Is this the respect we give our mothers, and we know how highly respected mothers are in Islam?

Simply going to school or to work or going to a hospital for medical emergency or even shopping is an ordeal for women because we have to worry about how we will get there without that “reliable” male driver we so depend on who might be a criminal or a pervert. How can we trust a woman to raise a child, teach our children and treat our illnesses but we cannot trust her to be a responsible adult behind the wheel? We have asked for our right to be licensed to drive a car like any other Muslim woman in the world because we know there is no religious basis for denying us that right.

Yet, we are told that society would not accept women driving on the roads. Assuming that is true, what is being done about that? Are there any real proposals from society to make driving by women easier and safer such as, for example, discussions in schools, training women to be police officers on the roads and in police centers, setting an age limit or hours of the day or specified zones for women to drive in or even, resorting to the same requirement, having her male guardian’s permission to drive?

Again, the issue is at what age and under what circumstances does the system and society recognize a woman as a responsible, independent adult who can make her own decision and choices and have full rights as a citizen?

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Anniversary of Balfour declaration

Israel Matzav does a great and thorough job discussing the history and importance of the Balfour Declaration from November 2, 1917.

The Palestine Post had this to say at the 25th anniversary, during the depths of the Holocaust:

Notice how even then, as Jews argued that the immediate establishment of a state would save countless lives from the Nazis, they still bent over backwards to point out that Jewish immigration to Palestine helped the Arab community and did not displace a single person. Notice also that even then it was assumed that the Palestine spoken of in 1917 included Transjordan. (See also my posting on Eastern Palestine.)

In 1947, on the eve of the UN Partition vote, the Arabs decided to strike on this anniversary, As usual, the strike ended up helping the Jews more than it hurt them:

But while the real Palestinian Arab people took advantage of a nice day off by visiting Jewish shops, their self-declared thought-leaders looked at things a little more violently, figuratively bashing Balfour's head with Arab hammers:

The Jewish claim on Palestine does not depend on the Balfour Declaration, of course, but it was an important moment in modern Zionist history that illuminates much about the conflict.

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60 years ago: US probing Saudi oil profits

In 1947 there was concern in the Senate that perhaps the Saudi King Ibn Saud was skimming too much profit off of each barrel of oil he exported.

The US was being charged for oil at the time $1.65 a barrel, 15 cents more than the French.

It appears that at the time the King took some 43 cents for each barrel, but at least one observer felt that he was really skimming far more.

From AP, published November 3, 1947 in the Palestine Post:


Yesterday, oil closed at over $94 a barrel.

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Today's Arab fantasy, part 2 - US planes nuked Syria nuke plant

From the Jerusalem Post:

The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two strategic US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a nuclear site under construction.

The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes.

The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed.

This feeds the longstanding Arab fantasy that Israel is just a puppet of the US (the exact opposite of what they tell gullible Westerners.) The idea that dhimmi Jews can effectively defeat the mighty Arabs is too painful to the Arab psyche to even contemplate; instead they have always told themselves that it was US power that inflicted damage.

The tactical nuke part is a nice touch. This may have been fabricated in expectations that IAEA inspections that may find traces of radiation, and this way they can claim that it was a US nuke that caused it. Or it just might be another way to lick the bruised wounds of their egos.

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Today's Arab fantasy, part 1

From IMEMC:

The Al Aqsa Foundation for rebuilding Islamic Holy Sites, warned on Thursday from the dangers of new Israeli excavations carried only fifty meters away from the southern wall of the Al Aqsa mosque, and only a few meters away from the walls of the Old City.

The Foundation stated that the excavations are shaking the ground and causing damages to Palestinian houses near the site.

Also, the foundation reported that the Israeli authorities are conducting these excavations in order construct trade and tourism facilities, and that some of these facilities start underground. The excavations re also carried out to create a tunnel to link these facilities with Al Mughrabi Wall and the Western Wall.

In an urgent press release, the Foundation said that its field teams toured on Wednesday some of the entrances of Silwan town, especially the main entrance which is only a few meters away from the Mughrabi Gate, and observed the excavations which are carried out by huge machines and are heavily shaking the ground which inflicts serious danger to the foundations of the Al Aqsa Mosque, and endangering the houses of the residents in Silwan.

So how close is Silwan to the Temple Mount? Another anti-Israeli site provides a helpful map:

Since the Arabs know that screaming about "excavations" can bring world Muslims to riot, and since they also know that most people don't know enough about geography to see the absurdity of the claims that excavations that occur so far away threaten so ca-called "Al-Aqsa" mosque, they can lie with impunity and get away with it.

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Big Satan, little satan

My earlier posting about the critical review given to "The Israel Lobby" by left-wing writer Stephen Zunes gave him too much credit. His major points came directly from Joseph Massad, the infamous Columbia associate professor who is effectively anti-semitic.

It is instructive to look at the argument a little closer, seeing that it is from an intellectual Arab perspective that is being parroted by gullible or malicious left-wing useful idiots like Zunes.

Massad wrote his critique of the "Israel Lobby" paper last year for Al-Ahram:

The underlying argument has been simple and has been told time and again by Washington's regime allies in the Arab world, pro-US liberal and Arab intellectuals, conservative and liberal US intellectuals and former politicians, and even leftist Arab and American activists who support Palestinian rights, namely, that absent the pro- Israel lobby, America would at worst no longer contribute to the oppression of Arabs and Palestinians and at best it would be the Arabs' and the Palestinians' best ally and friend. What makes this argument persuasive and effective to Arabs? Indeed, why are its claims constantly brandished by Washington's Arab friends to Arab and American audiences as a persuasive argument? I contend that the attraction of this argument is that it exonerates the United States' government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its policies in the Arab world and gives false hope to many Arabs and Palestinians who wish America would be on their side instead of on the side of their enemies.

From the funhouse mirror perspective he is essentially right - the US policies towards the Arab world would hardly be different without the Israel lobby. His problem is not primarily with Israel but with America.

The record of the United States is one of being the implacable enemy of all Third World national liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to Africa and Asia, except in the celebrated cases of the Afghan fundamentalists' war against the USSR and supporting apartheid South Africa's main terrorist allies in Angola and Mozambique (UNITA and RENAMO) against their respective anti-colonial national governments. Why then would the US support national liberation in the Arab world absent the pro-Israel lobby is something these studies never explain.

Massad is where leftist intellectualism and Muslim fundamentalism meet. The "national liberation" movements that he refers to must mean the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots. There is no doubt that Egypt, Syria and the rest of the Arab countries are autocratic dictatorships with little regard to human rights, but there is equally no doubt that the alternatives would be worse from anyone who is not a Muslim terrorist or sympathizer.

The US supported the independence of Jordan, Syria, Egypt and all the others who emerged from the Ottoman Empire and colonial rule. Massad doesn't seem interested in Arab independence - he is interested in replacing these independent states with fundamentalist ones, all in the name of "liberation." He skillfully uses leftist talking points to help build an Arab world that is fully aligned with terror.

This following paragraph is particularly enlightening in more ways than one:

Finally we come to the financial argument, namely that the US gives an inordinate amount of money to Israel -- too exorbitant a cost that is out of proportion to what the US gets in return. In fact, the United States spends much more on its military bases in the Arab world, not to mention on those in Europe or Asia, than it does on Israel. Israel has indeed been very effective in rendering services to its US master for a good price, whether in channelling illegal arms to central American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, helping pariah regimes like Taiwan and apartheid South Africa in the same period, supporting pro-US, including Fascist, groups inside the Arab world to undermine nationalist Arab regimes, from Lebanon to Iraq to Sudan, coming to the aid of conservative pro- US Arab regimes when threatened as it did in Jordan in 1970, and attacking Arab nationalist regimes outright as it did in 1967 with Egypt and Syria and in 1981 with Iraq when it destroyed that country's nuclear reactor. While the US had been able to overthrow Sukarno and Nkrumah in bloody coups, Nasser remained entrenched until Israel effectively neutralised him in the 1967 War. It is thanks to this major service that the United States increased its support to Israel exponentially. Moreover, Israel neutralised the PLO in 1982, no small service to many Arab regimes and their US patron who could not fully control the organisation until then. None of the American military bases on which many more billions are spent can claim such a stellar record. Critics argue that when the US had to intervene in the Gulf, it could not rely on Israel to do the job because of the sensitivity of including it in such a coalition which would embarrass Arab allies, hence the need for direct US intervention and the uselessness of Israel as a strategic ally. While this may be true, the US also could not rely on any of its military bases to launch the invasions on their own and had to ship in its army. American bases in the Gulf did provide important and needed support but so did Israel.

Massad now gives a powerful argument for Israel as an effective ally of the US. He even understates Israel's ability to do anything unilaterally, making the assumption that both the Six Day War and the Osirak raid were really American initiatives carried out willingly by their Israeli puppets.

Ultimately, his hatred of America is far greater than his hatred of Israel (which is legendary.) Although it appears that he was born in the US he clearly considers the United States to be the real source of evil on the planet, with Israel just an appendage.

This is not particular to Massad - the entire Arab world looks to the United States as the "big Satan" even as they are happy to keep taking money and weapons from us. Israel is a lightning rod for their hate, and the fact that dhimmi Jews control what they consider Arab land is certainly a contributing factor for their misoziony, but if Israel didn't exist their hatred for America would not be abated at all.

It is interesting that leftists have adopted this anti-American, pro-terrorist line of thinking at the same time that the Arab intellectuals have started framing their arguments in leftist terms. It is also ironic that if the "liberation movements" that Massad champions would win control of their countries, Massad and his fellow Christian Arabs would be at the mercy of the jihadists.

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