Hugo's Peace Plan

Hugo’s Peace Plan...

by Gerald A. Honigman

I called it weeks ago in my “It’s So Bad It’s Good, ” and much earlier yet in my “Watch Out For The Set Up.”

While the State Department--with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the lead--really wasn’t given much choice other than to publicly express disappointment with the results of the Arabs’ Saudi-hosted Mecca Accord, which brought Hamas and Fatah’s Abbas together but blatantly rejected anything to do with actually coming to a peaceful resolution of the conflict with its Jewish neighbor, I predicted that the Foggy Folks’ position would very shortly revert back to normalcy…squeeze the Jews, no matter what.

Sure enough, the ink had just about dried on that good cop/bad cop Arab accord when State resurrected the earlier alleged Saudi Peace (of the grave) Plan.

In case you forgot, here’s a summary of that plan:

Israel, surrounded by almost two dozen Arab states carved out of over six million square miles of territory that Arabs conquered from mostly non-Arab peoples, first agrees to return to its 1949 armistice lines, not borders. Those were the lines where the fighting stopped after six Arab states invaded a reborn Israel in 1948. They were never meant to be permanent borders, as a reading of any of the United Nations’ representatives’ writings at the time clearly show.

Judea must become Judenrein, and so forth.

Among other things, those lines made Israel an average of a mere nine to fifteen miles wide at its strategic waist, where most of its population and industry are located. Most people have to travel farther than that just to go to the mall or to work. And recall that the U. N. stood by and watched as Israel was attacked. It only got involved after Israel turned the tide to limit Arab losses. This became the pattern that would often be repeated.

When the Arabs, led by Egypt’s Nasser, blockaded Israel at the Straits of Tiran in 1967 (a casus belli ), amassed 100,000 troops on Israel’s borders, ordered the U.N. Peacekeeping Force out of Sinai, daily bragged that the extermination of Israel was near (I still have the newspaper reports and pictures of this from May ‘67), and shelled Israel from what was then the Jordanian half of Jerusalem, the Six Day War soon erupted.

After the dust settled, the architects of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 (Eugene Rostow, Lord Caradon, Arthur Goldberg, etc.) saw to it that the final draft of the resolution did not ask Israel to return to those fragile ‘49 armistice lines.

In fact, 242 calls for the creation of secure and recognized borders to replace those lines, and any withdrawal at all was to come in the context of real peace agreements (not “hudna” ceasefires) between Israel and its assorted Arab neighbors. President Reagan and other American officials confirmed this later on as well.

The State Department, however, has been another story…those same folks who fought President Truman and rejected Israel’s rebirth in the first place in 1948.

The Foggy Folks have constantly tried their best to undermine Israel’s attempt to undo the travesty of those ‘49 Auschwitz lines. A reading of my Resolution To Kill The Resolution provides much detail about this.

So, here we go again…

A few weeks after Condi muttered some sanity, she now embraces the Wahhabi “peace” plan.  She couldn’t be doing this unless her boss agreed. And I voted for him.

Mind you that besides calling for Israel to return to its submicroscopic, armistice line existence--before allegedly gaining Arab “recognition” of its right to exist (would you like to know where Arabs can stick that recognition?), the Jew of the Nations must also consent to being inundated by millions of jihadi alleged refugees.

Reality check...

When the United Nations Relief Works Agency--UNRWA--was set up to assist Arab refugees (after the Arabs invaded a nascent Israel in 1948 and their attempt backfired), the very word refugee had to be redefined to assist those people.

So many Arabs were recent arrivals 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 lived in the Mandate for a minimum of only two years prior to 1948.

Do you really understand what this is saying about many if not most of those alleged native Arab aborigines ?

Also recall that for every Arab who was forced to flee the fighting that they themselves started (after all, how dare Jews want in one tiny, resurrected state what Arabs demand for themselves in some two dozen others), a Jewish refugee was forced to flee Arab/Muslim lands into Israel and elsewhere...but with no UNRWA set up to assist them. The latter account for one half of Israel’s Jewish population today.

But, hold onto your seats...there’s breaking news !

Amid all of these developments regarding the Middle East, I bet you missed the latest coming out of Venezuela.

President Hugo Chavez has evidently tired of his spat with Washington and has offered to bury the hatchet.

Here’s Hugo’s Peace Plan:

First, to show good faith, the United States must pay billions of dollars in reparations for its capitalist exploitation over the past two centuries of Latin America--its people and its resources. This has sired deep resentment among the Latin Street.

Washington must then rescind its Monroe Doctrine. After all, what right does one sovereign nation have to tell another sovereign nation whom it can or can’t have relations with and what the extent of those relations must be?

The United States must next agree to give back California, Texas, New Mexico, and the entire southwest…lands conquered and forcibly gringoized from Latin Americans.

Finally, Washington must agree to an unlimited return of millions of the descendants of those Latins who were displaced during America’s drive for its Manifest Destiny. Any border fences or walls must also be taken down as well to help facilitate this.

If Washington agrees to all of the above, President Chavez will recognize America’s right to exist in its new constricted borders…despite the obvious problem involving native Americans. Since Latin America has that same problem south of the border, El Presidente decided not to make a point of this.

For the sake of justice and peace for all time, Washington must consent to Chavez’s offer, or it will be seen as being merely the imperialist, exploitative, capitalist, expansionist, war-mongering nation that many already accuse it of being.

So…how do you like them apples?

Well, I guess you know by now that Chavez didn’t really come up with this plan.

But think about it a minute….and then think about what Condi and her boss are setting Israel up for.

The only real difference is that Jews have lived continuously--despite ups and downs--in the land of Israel for over 3,000 years. Their presence and wars for freedom and independence are well documented by the Romans and others themselves. Can Dubya say that about his ranch in Texas?

Arabs conquered scores of millions of non-Arab Kurds, Berbers, Copts, Assyrians, Jews, black Africans, etc. and so forth and then called the latters’ lands “purely Arab patrimony.” And the American State Department has repeatedly supported such garbage. As I like to frequently point out, a roadmap for thirty million truly stateless Kurds is still not on the Foggy Folks’ agenda, while they insist on creating a 22nd state for Arabs.

Condi’s answer is that the Saudi Peace (of the grave) Plan will be a “basis for negotiations.”

Baloney!

What’s to negotiate? Let’s see…

“Okay, Arabs, we’ll meet you half way. We’ll “only” agree to have half as many alleged millions of jihadis as you insist upon shoved down our throats…and that after we’re forced to become a nine-mile wide speck of a state again.”

I don’t think so.

As many of us have been pointing out, the stench of Munich ‘38 is indeed again in the air… peace for all time, with Israel instead of the Czechs as the sacrificial offering.

This is the time to hold our ground and insist on peace terms for Israel that we ourselves would expect…as Dr. Rice pretended she was doing a few weeks back.

Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah both deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state…no matter what their assorted whitewashers say.

Jews shouldn’t be squeezed by their “friends” into suicide the way the Czechs were. And keep in mind that the world soon found itself at war anyway because the Nazis wanted far more than the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia.

Now substitute for the latter Judea and Samaria--the “West Bank”--and Israel today and ask yourselves if delivering the Jews on a silver platter will cure our own jihadist ills.

The Saudis must stuff their “peace plan” in the same place where that earlier “recognition” we discussed must be placed.

Israel must hold new elections and get itself leaders who will offer Arabs peace for peace, recognition for recognition, and negotiate a compromise over disputed--not “purely Arab” territories.

There is much that both Arabs and Jews can gain from each other in a peaceful Middle East.

But the Arabs still have not come up with an honest plan for this to occur.

While it may be easier to turn the screws on six million Israeli Jews than on hundreds of millions of rejectionist Arabs and their other Muslim supporters, is this really something that America wants to do?

If not, the time is now to let the powers that be know this.

And it wouldn’t hurt to think about Hugo’s “peace plan” again when considering Israel’s on-going fight for survival.

[0] Trackbacks   [0] Pingbacks

Hey Yogi! It's Deja Vu Again!

The Insult And The Rant…?
by Gerald A. Honigman

You decide.

Recently, as one of my favorite baseball players of all time, Yogi Berra, would say, it was like déjà vu all over again.

Not long ago, yet another example of a scholar--this time, Michael Rubin, a rarity these days who should know better--took Kurds to task in the 3/19/07 Weekly Standard for pressing for independence (or as much secured autonomy as possible), distancing themselves from Arabs who have repeatedly slaughtered them to the tune of hundreds of thousands over this past century. Indeed, he labeled such endeavors “illusions.”

Here’s a chunk of the article to check out…

…(Senator) Biden is correct that federalism cannot be avoided. However, he is incorrect to assume that federalism should be based on ethnic and sectarian division rather than on Iraq’s existing geographical provinces. Ethnic division will not bring security. Rather than embrace peace with his neighbors, Barzani now mimics the strategy of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat--seeking diplomatic legitimacy while refusing to renounce violence.

Rubin’s “Enabling Kurdish Illusions” mostly focused on the PKK’s fight with the Turks and--as can be seen in his analogy of mainstream Kurdish leaders with Arafat (how many Arab school buses, restaurants, pizza parlors, etc. and so forth have Talabani or Barzani ordered blown up?) and other comments--holds that Kurds are asking for too much to want something beyond their perpetual, insecure existence among their various butchers and tormentors.

I subsequently asked Rubin in our correspondence if he holds that Arabs should not get their proposed 22nd state (and 2nd, not 1st, one in “Palestine”) because of the terror of both Hamas and Abbas’s alleged “moderate” Fatah.

I received no reply from him on this or my other points. Rubin labeled them all a rant and then claimed that my suggestion that too often sins of both commission and omission in what is and what is not taught in the classroom are tied to financial support--in one way or another--received by those institutions was an insult.

Forget about his real insult to the plight of 30 million repeatedly massacred, subjugated, used, and abused stateless people that his Weekly Standard article represented. That was of no concern.

Keep in mind that much of Rubin’s analysis was on target, and I do agree that as part of a better Kurdish future, the PKK will have to be dealt with. I’ve written this myself.

I, too, see the Turks as friends and valued allies. Here’s a slice from one of my own articles on this topic, “Are You Ready? Here’s The Plan”:

“…The one place where American military bases will probably be welcome in this strategic part of the world (where they increasingly are not) is in Iraqi Kurdistan...like the one America has at Incirlik in Turkey.

This would accomplish a number of things.

First, under the right circumstances, it could help calm the nerves of the Turks. The latter have their own ideas about what to do upon the breakup of Iraq…or even sooner.

Ankara has long pouted over the loss of Mosul and northern Iraq’s Kurdish oil wealth after the Brits manipulated the League of Nations to tie it to its Mesopotamian Mandate gift to its Arab allies in 1925...at the expense of earlier-promised Kurdish independence.

American bases could help insure that the border remains stable…in both directions.

Hopefully, the leftist, militant Kurdish PKK could be convinced, with an independent Kurdish state or secure and highly autonomous Kurdish region as the prize, to avoid problems with the Turks. American forces and Kurdish Peshmerga would have to show Ankara, however, what the alleged “moderate” Abbas refuses to do for Israel…that Kurds are willing to use force even against their own people for the sake of peace with their neighbors. This goes for dealing with jihadist Islamist Kurds as well, notably those associated with Ansar al-Islam.

While one fifth of Turkey’s population of about seventy million is Kurdish and this population is adjacent to Iraqi Kurdistan, it is obviously in the Kurds’ overall best interests to assure their powerful Turkish neighbors (whose armed forces are already amassed on the border, set to pounce) that a peaceful Kurdish state will not be a major headache for them.

Keep in mind that an Israel that can fit almost forty times into Turkey has a similar problem yet is expected to see yet another hostile Arab state (Arabs 22, Kurds 0 ) created in its very backyard. One fifth of Israel’s six to seven million people are Arabs. Why is this not “destabilizing,” but mere talk of the birth of an independent Kurdistan constantly gets branded this way Stating the obvious, Kurds would help insure peace with their neighbors since it would be their own best guarantee for their sustained independence or secured autonomy.”

Again, the above was among what Rubin simply called a rant when I answered his note to me complaining of my “insult.”

When “Enabling Kurdish Illusions” was first brought to my attention, it brought back bad memories.

These included my never receiving a doctoral dissertation advisor for daring to bring up such inconvenient truths in a program led by a tenured chief honcho at Ohio State whose only mention of Kurds--while constantly lionizing the cause of Arab state # 22--was when he mocked their plight while speaking of his travels through Turkey.

But this time, decades later, it was even worse, for I was certain that the fairly recent renewed slaughter and gassings of Kurds would finally open eyes a bit more to the hypocrisy which prevails both on the world arena at large and among academics in particular.

Recall , again, that thirty million Kurds remain stateless today, their promised dream of independence in the new age of nationalism aborted on behalf of British petroleum politics and Arab nationalism.

Caught between a constricted yet invigorated Turkish nationalism led by Ataturk after the breakup of the Ottoman Turkish Empire post-World War I and its eastern Iranian counterpart under Reza Shah Pahlavi, Mesopotamian Kurdistan became the focus of the Kurds’ main struggle. Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) drew his line in the sand beyond which there would be no further retreat. Turkey’s large eastern Kurdish population became “Mountain Turks” from then on…language and culture outlawed, etc. and so forth.

Arabs would do likewise.

Ismet Cherif Vanly’s The Syrian Mein Kampf Against The Kurds (Amsterdam 1968) and the Kurdish experience among Arabs in Iraq are stories that are well known to all who want to know.

To this day, Kurdish kids in Syria are forced to sing songs in school praising their “Arab” identity.

Unfortunately, those who you’d expect would be among the most tuned in have been, instead, among the worse offenders who have played deaf, dumb, and blind to the plight of Kurds while never allowing “Palestine” to move off of the front burner in the halls of academia.

Before going any further, check out this haunting analogy and excerpt from a presentation by a leader of another victimized people in 1937:

Whenever I hear a Zionist...accused of asking too much...I really cannot understand it...Yes we do want a State; every nation on earth...they all have States of their own...the normal condition of a people. Yet, when we, the most abnormal of peoples, and therefore the most unfortunate, ask for only the same...then it is called too much...We have got to save millions, many millions. I do not know whether it is a question of one third...half...or a quarter (indeed, one third of world Jewry would be eliminated within just a few years of his remarks)…

It is not a hardship on any race, any nation possessing so many National States now and so many more National States in the future. One fraction, one branch...and not a big one, will have to live in someone else’s State: Well, that is the case with all the mightiest nations of the world...That is only normal and there is no “hardship” attached to that. So when we hear the Arab claim confronted with the Jewish claim, I fully understand that any minority would prefer to be a majority.

It is quite understandable that the Arabs...would also prefer Palestine to be the Arab State No. 4, No. 5. or No. 6...but when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite versus...starvation.

The presenter was Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky, the patron saint of Israel’s modern Likud Party, testifying before The Palestine Royal Commission in London.

Does this sound just a bit familiar? A rant and no analogy here, Dr. Rubin?

Having seen Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Jews, Armenians, and others in the region live to see their quest for independence eventually fulfilled, it did not take Einstein to figure out how Kurds would react to repeatedly being ignored by the world community and deprived of the same thing…that same world community which today insists that that 22nd state be created for Arabs (on lands conquered and forcibly Arabized from mostly non-Arab peoples) while Kurds remain stateless.

Continued Kurdish frustration, oppression, and subjugation has led to repeated revolts and conflict in Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. And again, while those same Arabs, Turks, and Iranians saw the emergence of their own modern nation states, tens of millions of Kurds were told that they were to simply accept their perpetual victimization…including by such folks as Rubin.

After receiving a favorable decision from the League of Nations tying the oil-rich Mosul region to their Mesopotamian Mandate in 1925, the Brits decided that their future depended more on Arab good will than on promises to the Kurds. An Arab Iraq was created with the oil of the Kurdish north tied to it for strategic and economic viability. The British imperial fleet had not long before switched from coal to oil….

The area around oil-rich Kirkuk and Mosul was the heartland of Kurdistan for millennia--long before an Arab or Turk ever set foot in the region. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the competing Talabani and Barzani factions of Kurds joined forces and took on their latest Arab butchers, including Saddam. Yes, he was around for that long.

A country as artificial and unstable as Yugoslavia was thus sired under similar circumstances (upon the collapse of empires and with groups often at each others‘ throats glued together largely for others‘ interests), with British military support aiding in the suppression of the Kurds’ subsequent responses to this travesty.

Unlike the Brits’ other Mandate, Palestine, which would witness several partitions and partition plans to take into account competing nationalisms (like those which would also result in a Muslim Pakistan and a largely Hindu India), Kurds would simply be ignored in the even larger Mandate of Mesopotamia. Keep in mind that Arab nationalism was rewarded some 80% of the original April 25, 1920 Mandate of Palestine with the creation of what would later be renamed Jordan in 1922. Again, the fight today is over the birth of the Arabs’ second state in “Palestine,” not the first.

Arabs declared the whole area to be purely Arab patrimony, and woe unto those who demanded their own slice of justice in the new nationalist age…be they Jabotinsky’s Jews, Kurds, black African Sudanese, etc. and so forth.

So, back to Rubin‘s piece…

Yes, it was déjà vu yet again…

Back in the ‘70s when I was doing masters and doctoral work in New York and Ohio and also a consultant for a major organization guest lecturing on dozens of universities across several states, I noticed those obvious acts of omission and commission mentioned earlier in the halls of academia itself. While it later became obvious to me what was going on, back then I was still too naïve and starry eyed about the positive aspects of the ivory tower to believe…

But, to reiterate, I noticed that while certain topics and issues never left center stage , others rarely--if ever--were even mentioned. At least Rubin now mentions them…

So, while Arab genocidal behavior towards African blacks--Muslims as well as non-Muslims, and not only in the Sudan--has been going on for decades, too many act now as if Darfur and such are new developments.

Ditto for the revolts of the Kurds for freedom against their Arab and other oppressors, the plight of native Middle Eastern Jews (kilab yahud--Jew dogs--in Arabic), Copts, Assyrians, Berbers, and so forth.

Most often, such subjects were/are simply ignored by the same professors who constantly scrutinize Israel under a high power lens and espouse the cause of the Arabs’ 22nd state.

That same tenured chief honcho I referred to earlier who liked to call Jabotinsky a fascist, all but canonized Hitler’s good buddy, the Mufti of Jerusalem. And this was the same academic who taught a doctoral seminar on the Palestine Mandate and never mentioned the Cairo Conference of 1921 where Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, engineered the future separation of Transjordan--over 75 % of the territory--from Palestine on behalf of the Brits’ Arab allies in World War I. Included, such information would put to the lie the Arab claim that the Jews wound up with the whole shebang. A mere accident from an academic expert in this field? Guess again…

Worse yet, academic freedom only goes one way in such classes. Students risk their future careers (as I know all too well) by asking for such balance.

Another professor, who I suspect was more reasonable, allowed me, as a doctoral Teaching Assistant, to do a one day’s lesson on the Kurds. The Arabs in class were disturbed by this deviation from having the Jews frequently under the lens, so I soon “heard” about it. And note that the T.A. was chosen to do this lesson…No professor dared touch such a topic with a ten foot pole.

This was all too typical in Middle Eastern Studies then, and I suspect it remains so today as well.

And seeing articles such as Rubin’s “Enabling Kurdish Illusions” is not promising in this regard either.

[0] Trackbacks   [0] Pingbacks

Discovery Channel Program, "The Lost Tomb Of Jesus"

So, My Friends, How Does It Feel…
by Gerald A. Honigman

to at least partially walk in another man’s shoes?

Before I begin, let me first state that I don’t want to ruffle the feathers of my Christian friends, but it would be nice if they treated others the same way. You’ll see what I mean shortly.

An AP story on February 27th announced that the Discovery Channel would air “The Lost Tomb Of Jesus” on Sunday, March 4th.

The program deals with two ancient stone boxes from Roman-occupied Judaea which Oscar-winning director, James Cameron, and some researchers claim holds the bones of the Christian Messiah/Son of G_d /G_d incarnate--Jesus of Nazareth--and his human family. Of course, the mere assertion brings into question sacred Christian doctrine of the divinity of Jesus and his essential resurrection. Without the latter, he was just another dead Jew, one of thousands crucified by Rome in its conquest of the region--Judaea included. The Arch of Titus stands tall in Rome to this very day in honor of that conquest.

As expected, many Christians are quite upset, and some are trying to pressure the Discovery Channel from airing the program. I, as a Jew who grew up with Christians knocking at my door telling me I was going to Hell because I did not believe as they do, can understand their feelings quite well…actually better than they themselves do.

While the odds of these ossuaries actually holding the remains of the Jesus and Mary Magdalene are very slim, there is still much good history that such a program potentially offers to its viewers.

Arabs, for example, love to proclaim that Jesus and his followers were “Palestinian Arabs” and not Jews.

The program’s harshest critics argue that Mary and Jesus were very common names of Jews found on many other ossuaries and in other places as well during this time period…not really “news,” but in this day and age--with Israel constantly vilified--such a reminder is timely and worthwhile.

While some contest the translation of the Hebrew names found at the site, if they are indeed correct--which they may very well be--then we do have, at the least, an interesting find placing a Jesus, a Mariamene, a Judah son of Jesus, etc. in the same family grave.

Will the producers and such make money from this? Of course--like everyone else does with projects of interest.

So, this all begs the question…

Why should the Discovery Channel’s program be axed, but not the hundreds of television and radio programs all across America and elsewhere dedicated to converting Jews and proclaiming that their faith is lacking and deficient? Not to mention the forced conversions Jews were constantly subjected to by Christians over the ages before television existed. Perhaps these paraphrases can help explain…

“Ye do not get to the Father except through the Son”; “Why do you not hear the words I tell thee? It is because you are of your father, the devil, and you do your father’s deeds”; etc. and so forth--right out of the Christian New Testament. Not that long ago, a prominent Southern Baptist leader proclaimed, “G_d almighty doesn’t hear the prayer of a Jew.” His views are still shared by numerous millions today.

While many Christians protest abuses and intolerance within Islam, they really do need to reflect upon their own history and current beliefs and actions as well. The road to Auschwitz was carefully paved over the millennia by such Christian beliefs. One of the first pictures of a Jew that we know of in Europe was entitled, “Aaron, son of the devil.” Does that sound familiar?

As I frequently like to point out, a reading of the Roman historians, who wrote right around the time of Jesus, is very useful to see the Jews’ problem with what Christians made of Joshua--Jesus--of Nazareth.

Here’s Tacitus (Volume II, Book V, The Works Of Tacitus ), writing after the Jews took on the Roman Empire for their freedom and independence:

“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.”

Read the above carefully, my dear Christian friends.

It’s not that Jews are stubborn, blind, and such--as you constantly claim. How about less so-called “love” and a bit more respect for the very people who gave the world the very knowledge of G_d in the first place?

For the Jew, no human--no matter how great--could be equated in any way with G_d. That is something pagans all around the Jews did…not Jews. In fact, Jews bent over backwards to show the imperfections of even their greatest leaders--Moses and David--to avoid any semblance of deification…just as Tacitus pointed out above. In any of their surrounding neighbors’ lands, both men would have been turned into gods.

Many a program has been devoted to the historicity of stories associated with the Hebrew Bible--known as the Old Testament to Christians. They aired without demands by Jews to squash the message.

Watch or don’t watch the Discovery Channel program, love it, hate it, critique it, or whatever.

But also learn to walk in your brothers’ shoes.

[0] Trackbacks   [0] Pingbacks