Hey Hamas—Now Since You Brought The Subject Up...

Well, Hamas, Since You Brought The Subject Up…

by Gerald A. Honigman

Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar gave an interview which aired on Al-Manar TV on January 25, 2006.

Among other things, he stated:

In this region we have faced Roman occupation, Persian occupation, Crusader occupation, British occupation - they are all gone. The Israeli enemy does not belong to the region. It does not belong to the region’s history, geography, or faith.

Irresistible… Typical figments of that legendary Arab imagination at work again.

But repeat a lie enough times and the ignorant--whether innocent or not so--will accept it. So, allow me the pleasure to burst the bubble.

Let’s start with the assertion of how alleged Arab aboriginals--not Jews--faced Roman occupation in “Palestine.” And rather than relying on Zionist sources, let’s let those Roman and Persian occupiers al-Zahar mentions speak for themselves.

There was no country or nation known as “Palestine” during the Roman occupation. In fact, there was never an Arab country of Palestine. The land was known back then as Judaea and its inhabitants were Judaeans… Jews.

Tacitus, Dio Cassius, and Josephus were famous Roman and/or Roman-sponsored 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 for independence in 66-73 C.E. and 133-135 C.E. They make no mention of this land being called “Palestine” or its people “Palestinians.” And as can be seen below, they knew the differences between Jews and Arabs as well and exposed Hamas’ predecessors for the vultures that they were and are, jumping on the Roman bandwagon to gain a share of the kill.

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

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…

Some things change, some things never change. What really needs to change is Israel exchanging helicopters for bombers in its dealings with the butchers of its innocents. But I’m jumping ahead, so let’s return to the Roman occupation…

After the 1st Revolt, Rome issued thousands of Judaea Capta coins which can be seen today in museums all over the world. Notice, please… Judaea Capta… not Palaestina Capta.

Hear that al-Zahar?

Additionally, to celebrate this victory, the towering Arch of Titus was erected showing Roman legionnaires carrying away the giant menorah, other spoils of the Jewish Temple (which Arabs deny ever existed), and Judaean captives. It stands tall in Rome to this very day. I’m surprised Arabs haven’t tried to blow it up yet as they destroyed thousands of Jewish graves, synagogues, and the like in Israel to try to eradicate the age-old Jewish presence. Not that I want to give them any ideas…

When, some sixty years later, Emperor 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.

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.’

Judaea, al-Zahar…not Palaestina.

Roman sources, al-Zahar…not Zionists’.

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 eastern Mediterranean or Aegean area.

So, sorry Hamas & Co....trying to hijack the Philistines’ identity as your Arab brethren have done with airplanes and have constantly tried to do with that of the Jews won’t work either.

Palestine became largely “Arab” the same way that most of the almost two dozen states that call themselves “Arab” today did...by the conquest, occupation, settlement, and forced Arabization of other native, non-Arab peoples and their lands...Berbers, Copts, Assyrians, Black Africans, Jews, Kurds, native Semitic but largely non-Arab Lebanese, and so forth. Muhammad and his successors’ imperial caliphal armies burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E. in all directions spreading Arabism and the Dar ul-Islam by the sword. And any and all who resisted subjugation and/or becoming part of what Arabs like to call today “purely Arab patrimony” were eliminated. Think of earlier variations of the Arabs’ modern day gassings of Kurds, genocide against and enslavement of black Africans, murder of Copts, Jews, and Berbers, and so forth.

As I’ve often written before, imperialism is only deemed nasty by Arabs when they themselves are not indulging in it.

Al-Zahar next spoke of the Persian occupation in the early 7th century C.E.

Let’s listen to what Euthychius, the Patriarch of Alexandria (and certainly also no Zionist), had to say about this in his book of history, the Annals of Euthychius I, 216...

The Persian commander went to Damascus and destroyed the land, and the Jews from Tiberias, Hebron, Nazareth, and Tyre gathered together to help the Persians…the Jews of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, Damascus and Cyprus came together until they numbered an army of 20,000 and came to Tyre to destroy it.

Keep in mind that this was centuries after the Roman decimation of the Jews in their land and the onset of the Great Diaspora.

Of course prior to these events, unquestionable archaeological and historical corroboration from other “non-Zionist” sources testifies to the Jewish presence in the land and region for numerous centuries prior to the Roman occupation.

So much for Hamas’ wishful thinking--or just plain lies--regarding the alleged non-Jewish connection to the region via history and geography.

Let’s move on to al-Zahar’s comments about the alleged non-connection of the Jews’ faith to the region.

Putting it bluntly, when Hamas’ ancestors were still practicing fertility rites and worshipping idols of different sorts and dimensions, over two thousand years before the Prophet of Islam was born, the Jews were introducing the G_d of Eternity to the world from that very region. The Qur’an itself is filled with such references to the Children of Israel.

When Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, fled Mecca to Medina in 622 C.E. (the Hijrah), the inhabitants welcomed him.

Medina had been developed centuries earlier as a thriving date palm oasis by Jews fleeing the Roman assault (the banu-Qurayzah and banu-al-Nadir tribes, etc.), and its mixed population of Jews and pagan Arabs had thus become conditioned for a native prophet speaking the word of G_d.

Muhammad learned much from the Jews.

While the actual timing of his decision on the direction of prayer may never be known, during his long sojourn with the Jews of Medina, his followers were instructed to pray towards Jerusalem.

Early prominent Arab historians such as Jalaluddin came right out and stated that this was done primarily as an attempt to win support among the influential Jewish tribes (the “People of the Book") for Muhammad’s religio-political claims.

It is from the Temple Mount of the Jews in Jerusalem that Muslims believe Muhammad ascended to Heaven on his winged horse. A mosque, the Dome of the Rock, would later be erected on this Jewish holy site after the Arabs’ own imperial conquest of the land in the 7th century C.E.

You see, despite Arab figments and distortions of the truth such as those spouted by Hamas, there is no doubt among objective scholars that the Jews of the region had an enormous impact on both Muhammad and the faith that he founded.

In fact, the holy sites for Muslims in Jerusalem (i.e. the mosques erected on the Temple Mount of the Jews) are now deemed “holy” only precisely because of the critical years Muhammad spent after the Hijrah with the Jews.

The Temple Mount had no prior meaning to pagan Arabs.

While there was some early Christian influence as well, intense scholarship has shown that the faith spelled out in the Holy Law (Halacha) and Holy Scriptures of the Jews had a tremendous influence on the Qur’an, Islamic Holy Law (Shari’a), and so forth.

Muhammad’s “Jerusalem connection” was most likely not established until after his extended stay with his Jewish hosts. Understand that this was no mere coincidence...Muslim religious beliefs regarding Muhammad’s conversations with the Angel Gabriel and the like notwithstanding.

When the Jews refused to recognize Muhammad as the “Seal of the Prophets,” he turned on them with a vengeance. Before long, with the exception of Yemen, there were virtually no Jews left on the Arabian Peninsula. And the direction of prayer was changed away from Jerusalem and towards the Kaaba in Mecca instead...

Some six centuries ago, Ibn Khaldun was one of the world’s most important thinkers and is perhaps the greatest scholar the Islamic world has ever produced. He was also a Zionist.

In The Muqaddimah, he devoted much time and effort to the evolution and development of the Jewish nation, its early struggles with its adversaries, and its later fight for freedom with the mighty Roman Empire and its consequences. He then followed this with an analysis of the Jews’ tragic condition of powerlessness throughout subsequent generations.

The Muqaddimah emphasizes that the Jews were forced to wander in the desert for forty years due to their “meekness.” Ibn Khaldun stressed that this was necessary so that a new generation would arise with a new, more powerful ‘asabiyah (group feeling). The Zionism Arabs condemn today was just the prescription Ibn Khaldun was calling for.

At a time when homicidal Arabs, like al-Zahar, are demanding their 22nd state and second, not first, one in the original 1920 borders of the Palestine Mandate ( Jordan created by the British in 1922 on some 80% of the latter, and most others having been created by the conquest of non-Arab peoples and their lands), chances are more than good that this great Muslim scholar would have approved and viewed the resurrection of Israel as an answer to the unique plight of perpetually victimized, stateless Jews...the end of an even more tragic and extensive wandering and period of meekness and powerlessness in the desert Ibn Khaldun spoke of so eloquently six hundred years earlier.

While much more evidence could be included to expose the Arabs’ lies, I’ve covered this nicely in many of my other writings. Check them out at www.geraldahonigman.com and elsewhere. Besides, if I cover too much now, I’ll cut out the fun for later…

It’s now Spring training time for baseball here in Florida. And regarding Hamas’ assertions regarding the Jews’ alleged non-connections to the region vis-à-vis history, geography, and faith…

It’s one, two, three strikes and you’re out!

And as a footnote, with elections just around the corner, Israel needs to get itself leaders who will truly know how to deal with Mahmoud al-Zahar’s murderous disembowelers of its children…and then act on it.

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So...What's The Real Lesson About the Arabs and Darfur?

If It’s Bike Week, It Must Be Kristof


by Gerald A. Honigman




A few years back during this trying time of the year in the Daytona Beach area of Florida, I penned an article ("Makos, Kristof, and Bike Week") which focused on the hypocrisy and double standards the liberal, left wing press habitually practices towards the Jew of the Nations. Not that I’m in love with extreme right kooks either, but the former have become more of a problem of late than the latter since respected circles--such as those in academia--tend to give them more credibility.

Coming right after the world famous Daytona 500 NASCAR race in this town, and just before most of the college spring breakers arrive, Bike Week brings with it scores of thousands of motor cyclists from all over the world...and the traffic snarls and noise that accompany them as well...Lovely.

While I’m sure it has nothing to do with the bikers’ thunder, The New York Times’ syndicated columnist Nicholas Kristof seems to vent some of his own particularly hot air around this season as well. A few years back (late February 2004), for example, he wrote a piece about double standards which appeared in our local news version of the problem being described here in which he complained about Israel’s security fence, Arabs allegedly being given no alternatives (to their barbarity), and such. The paper’s editors typically spout the same lines, and this prompted my own response mentioned above.

Like others of his ilk--Thomas Friedman, David Ignatius, Richard Cohen, just to name a few, who are also obsessed with the creation of a 22nd Arab state (and second, not first, Arab one within the original April 25, 1920 borders of the Mandate of Palestine before the Brits gave 80% away right from the getgo to Arab nationalism with the creation of Transjordan in 1922)--Kristof loves to lecture Israel, practically invisible on a map of the world and roughly the size of New Jersey, about the need to bare the necks of its babes so that Arabs, who have conquered over six million square miles of territory in the name of their nation and desires, can have that additional state as well. And regardless of all the hype about differences between the Arafatians and Hamasniks regarding the acceptance of the Jew of the Nations in what they perceive to be their exclusive neighborhood, a mere reading of what each side of this good cop/bad cop coin is telling their own people--not a Gullible West--puts the lie to those alleged differences regarding the Jews. Any differences at all between the two groups have more to do with who will continue to call the shots--both figuratively and literally--and enrich themselves as Arafat and his buddies did than any long term acceptance of an independent Jewish State.

Having said this, Kristof does have a few redeeming qualities...even if he largely ruins them with his own versions of the moral equivalency manure. So, in that earlier Bike Week article, he got on the Syrians’ case about their infamous Hama Solution. Now, at this same season, I recently came across his early March 2006 op-ed dealing with the Darfur genocide. And he actually managed to mention the word Arab (once) as well. Indeed, compared to most of his lefty colleagues, he has shown a bit more responsibility than most in portraying the broader perspective regarding the struggle for political rights in the region. Indeed, his current reports are live from the scene of the action in the Sudan.

Still, despite his revelations regarding the Arab treatment of black Africans who have dared to assert their own rights and have paid dearly for it, Kristof still doesn’t get it...

And again, he unfortunately has plenty of company.

In the September 16, 2003 Washington Post, Ignatius could only address Kurds as terrorists or rebels--while never dreaming of using the “T” word for Arab disembowelers of Jewish babes and grandmas. In Thomas Friedman’s earlier March 26th article that same year in The New York Times, he advised that the Kurds should be told point blank, “what part of ‘no’ don’t you understand? ...You Kurds are not breaking away.” And this sickening hypocrisy is too often mirrored by the crew that has hijacked Middle Eastern Studies on far too many campuses and too often in our own Government as well...especially among the Foggy Folks and others with their hands in the past, current, or future petrodollar till.

All of these alleged liberals apparently accept the Arabs’ notion that they and only they have national rights in the region. So a few, like Kristof, may eventually--after decades of playing deaf, dumb, and blind to Arab atrocities against any and all who don’t accept subjugation or dhimmitude as their fate--write exposés about Arab actions but cannot get themselves to make the next essential leap...that others are also entitled to what Arabs demand exclusively for themselves.

While this crew is rightly concerned about the earlier effects of imperialism and colonialism Western style in the region, it has willingly turned a blind eye to the numerous non-Arab peoples and lands which had been conquered, settled, massacred, enslaved, turned into refugees, and colonized by the Arabs’ own centuries’ old and continuing imperialism still going on at the very moment this piece is being written.

Despite Arab and their sycophants’ complaints about the dangers of divisiveness, what higher code--besides that which the Arabs themselves would like to impose on scores of millions of non-Arabs in “their” region--proclaims an Arab identity to be the only “legitimate” one in a region so culturally variegated as the Middle East and North Africa...Copts, Berbers, black Africans, Assyrians, pre-Arab Lebanese, Druse, one half of Israel’s Jews who were refugees from “Arab"/Muslim lands (the other side of the refugee coin that the Kristofs never mention), and so forth? Yet the new, so-called liberals apparently buy right into this...no questions asked.

So, thirty million truly stateless Kurds are to simply accept such things as their kids being forced to sing songs praising their non-Kurdish and allegedly Arab identities in Syria, to live amid Sunni and Shi’a Arabs who are blowing each other apart by the thousands in a state as artificial as the former Yugoslavia--Iraq--and so forth. Kurds were promised independence in that former Mandate of Mesopotamia but got sacrificed on the altar of British petroleum politics and Arab nationalism instead.

Dr. Ismet Cheriff Vanly, a leading Kurdish nationalist, had much to say about this earlier last century. Here’s a small slice from his book, The Syrian ‘Mein Kampf’ Against The Kurds (Amsterdam 1968): “If a Kurd says that he is a Kurd and not an Arab, he will be publicly insulted and arrested.”

Related to this, I have written elsewhere about the Uncle Boutros/Uncle Tom effect that Bat Ye’or’s dhimmitude has had on millions of subjugated, non-Arab Jews and Christians in the region.(http://www.paktoday.com/mwtoday/tom17.htm)

Dr. Boutros Boutros Ghali was the late President Anwar Sadat of Egypt’s Coptic foreign minister who counseled that for Israel to be accepted, it must become an Arab country...no room for any other identities in the region.

Dhimmitude at its worst.

Of course, the way the Arabs like to define things--as Dr. Vanly explained above (and keep in mind that the Kurds are fellow Muslims, like many of the Arabs’ black African victims in the Sudan, Chad, Mauritania, and elsewhere)--all of these folks, in Arab eyes, have no identity other than Arab. And to survive, the Uncle Boutroses have learned to play the nauseating game.

What would a true “liberal"--or any decent human being--really say about all of this? Yet the new breed can only see an admittedly imperfect Israel and the struggles of its people to survive amid this murderous and rejectionist Arab mess.

The Third World likes to continuously chastise the West for its condescending attitudes. I agree with much of that criticism. Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The White Man’s Burden, and all that stuff...

But while the Kristofs of the liberal media are quick to agree, why are they mum about such things as President Nimeiry’s statements during the slaughter of over a half million blacks in the Sudan in the 1960s and 1970s (and continuing ever since) that “...the Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into...black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission(Arabism and Pan-Arabism in Sudanese Politics, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 11, #2, 1973, pp. 177-78)?

Or why no response to this all-too-typical Arab approach as expressed in the Syrian Arab Constitution of the Ba’th?:

“...The Arab fatherland belongs to the Arabs. They alone have the right to direct its destinies...The Arab fatherland is that part of the globe inhabited by the Arab nation which stretches from the Taurus Mountains, the Pacht-i-Kouh Mountains, the Gulf of Basra, the Arab Ocean, the Ethiopian Mountains, the Sahara, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea.”

Can’t tell for sure...are any Eskimos also included here? I don’t think so...at least not yet. But think about Mindanao in the Philippines.

Keep in mind that these are the same folks who like to condemn expansionist Zionists who dare to assert that Jews deserve a state more than nine miles wide. Hamas’ leaders recently complained about such things as well.

While we’re on the subject, again recall that the Arabs burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century C.E., and in the name of their own caliphal imperialism carved out that “purely Arab patrimony” they like to speak of by conquering, forcibly Arabizing, colonizing, and settling mostly non-Arab peoples’ lands. And, again, no comment from the Kristofs and Cohens or editorials from The New York Times or Washington Post. Those are reserved for Jews constructing a fence to keep Arabs from disemboweling their children or insisting that their sole, microscopic state should not have to forsake its own contiguity and security so that Arabs can have more of what they want in their own proposed 22nd. And as any with half a brain figured out long ago, what the latter really want is a state in place of Israel, not along side of it.

As just one more of many other examples of how very different lenses are used to scrutinize Israel and the rest of the neighborhood in which it lives (and while Kristof is admittedly better at this sort of thing than most of his colleagues), why, over the years, have the reports of the London-based Anti-Slavery Society and others about continuing slavery of black Africans by Arabs largely been ignored? Only recently are we starting to hear more about the Sudan and such things. Why? Just imagine if the Jew of the Nations was so indulging...

While Kristof should be commended regarding his concern over the fate of black Africans at the hands of genocidal Arabs spreading not only the Dar ul-Islam--for many of the victims are also Muslims--but a racist Arabism as well, he needs to take this quite a bit further. This is something that Kristof and the rest of his buddies refuse to do.

But the Arab-Israeli mess has always come down to one thing...the same exact problem I’ve reviewed above.

That problem has never been about how big Israel is, but that Israel is.

And the solution to this problem requires nothing less than a revolution in the age-old Arab mindset regarding the rights of any and all others in what they claim to be only “their” region.

Since this is not happening any time soon, Israel better wise up and play the game to win and not just tread water...despite the pressure it will be under from even its “friends.”

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