Turkish Attacks On The PKK

Hamas, Fatah, & The Missing Kurdish Dual Track

by Gerald A. Honigman

A deal was obviously made to keep the Turks from launching a full scale invasion of the Kurdish north in Iraq. The Kurdish region being the only real long-term success story America can point to in its Iraq adventure, the alternative would indeed be a nightmare.

Let me state right from the start that I have always held that the Kurds, themselves, had to get a handle on their own militants.  And I have always supported good ties with the Turks. But while the latter and others call the PKK terrorists, I only reluctantly concur. I’ll soon get to the reason…

We’ve known for quite some time that Ankara was planning something big to deal with its own home-grown and largely self-inflicted Kurdish headache. Air raids and limited cross-border incursions into the Iraqi Kurdish region hunting Turkish Kurds have thus recently occurred. The casualty toll has been disputed, but there is no doubt that civilians are bearing the brunt of the suffering. The region is mountainous and it’s winter. To pour even more salt on the wound, reports state that sophisticated Israeli drones are being used along with Israeli operators to assist in this operation. Not a pleasant thought.

Here’s the problem…

There is a hypocrisy which stinks to High Heaven when one looks at how the plight of 35 million truly stateless Kurds has been handled on the world stage in contrast to how the quest for the creation of Arab state # 22 has been dealt with…America among the worst offenders.

With the break up of the Ottoman Turkish Empire after World War I, the Kurds--native to the region for thousands of years (Guti, Kardu, Kassites, Hurrians, Medes, etc.)--were promised independence in the Mandate of Mesopotamia. They were sacrificed, however, on the altar of British petroleum politics and Arab nationalism after the Brits received a favorable decision on the Mosul Question from the League of Nations in 1925. Arab Iraq emerged instead with the oil-rich Kurdish region encompassing Mosul and Kirkuk attached to it.

Its navy having recently switched from coal to oil, the British Empire decided it was against its best interests to allow the separation of Kurdish lands from what their oil-rich Arab friends claimed to be purely Arab patrimony. A similar problem was brewing in the Mandate of Palestine; indeed, Arabs would later claim that they would view the birth of Kurdistan as another Israel. So the Brits backtracked and attempted to shaft the Jews and succeeded in shafting the Kurds.

Sandwiched between two regional powerhouses, Ataturk’s Turkey and Reza Shah Pahlavi’s Iran, the only real option left was independence in at least part of Mesopotamia. Denied this, frustrations caused by suppression, massacres, subjugation, and such led to periodic, explosive Kurdish revolts.

Among other things, Kurds found themselves renamed “Mountain Turks” and their very language and cultural identity were outlawed in Turkey and Iraq--with similar goings on in Syria and elsewhere. Since about one fifth of Turkey’s seventy million people are Kurds (the same proportion of Arabs to Jews in an Israel that fits thirty-eight times into Turkey), the birth of the militant PKK was inevitable.

Besides the Jews, if ever a people needed the protection of their own nation state simply for their own survival, certainly it was/is the Kurds.

Regardless, while Secretary of State Rice was delivering her words of wisdom regarding the necessity of creating a 22nd state for Arabs in the region (second--not first--Arab one within the original 1920 borders of Mandatory Palestine...Jordan created in 1922 on the lions’ share) at the U.S. Institute of Peace on August 19, 2004, she totally shot down questions relating to Kurdish anxieties and aspirations in Iraq.


Here’s some of what she had to say about those additional Arab aspirations, however:

The President believes that the Palestinian people deserve not merely their own state, but a just and democratic state that serves their interests….

Despite the bloodshed, barbarism, and turmoil in the Arab areas of Iraq; despite hundreds of thousands of Kurds having been killed by Iraqi and Syrian Arabs over the decades (not to mention the Turks and Iranians); despite Kurds having been marked as traitors because of their close ties to America; despite the fact that the most stable and democratic areas in Iraq are in the Kurdish areas...indeed, despite all of this and more, Condi brushed off a question regarding a Kurdish referendum on independence (which showed that at least 80% of the Kurds wanted this) with the following disdain:

...It’s the role of leadership to convince people that they really ought to stay in the same body.

A sickening disgrace.

So, in an era in which other peoples were gaining national rights, Kurds were once again told by America that they were unworthy of such aspirations.

Without going back numerous decades to the repeated use and abuse of the Kurds by the State Department, CIA, etc., one thus only needs to look at recent State Department pronouncements along with recommendations from the Baker-Hamilton Commission on Iraq to see such blatant double standards.

You see, what’s missing from all of this is the dual track approach…

While deliberately targeting innocents is never good, in fighting terror one still needs to address legitimate aspirations and grievances.

To this day, most Arabs polled still want to see Israel destroyed…regardless of its size. How dare dhimmi kilab yahud--Jew dog--“sons of apes and pigs” claim part of the purely Arab patrimony!

Yet Israel has agreed to the creation of “Palestine”--Arab state # 22--while knowing that it really makes no never mind, in the long term, whether Abbas’s alleged Arafatian Fatah good cops or the Islamic Jihad/Hamas bad cops run the show. Both of their charters still call for Israel’s destruction. The former are simply willing to temporarily play the Arabs’ well-known post-’67 destruction in phases game to milk the Western cow for all that its worth…and billions of dollars are indeed pouring in.

Yet while America collaborates with Turks to kill Kurdish militants, it refrains from placing demands upon Ankara to allow Kurds in Turkey more cultural and political freedom.

How different, indeed, the American approach with Israel and the Arabs…

While “permitting” Israeli limited action (expecting Jews to pinpoint the exact perpetrators of terror launched daily from Gaza, for example), the State Department is shoving a rejectionist Arab state down Israel’s throat. The two young Israelis recently murdered while on a hike were victims of Israel loosening up on security measures demanded by Dr. Rice.

Keep in mind that Arabs who side with Hamas serve in Israel’s Parliament, Arabic is the nation’s second national language, attend Israeli universities (where they call for Israel’s destruction), etc. and so forth…and this despite the fact that many Israeli Arabs are indeed a potential fifth column. So things ain’t “perfect” here either.

Six million Israeli Jews, surrounded by 200 million Arabs (not to mention non-Arab Iran and such), have much more to fear regarding “instability” and such than Turks do. Yet Ankara, along with powerful American Arabists ( like James Baker & Co.) tied to Arab petrobucks, are allowed to condemn scores of millions of Kurds to perpetual statelessness...or deny them even meaningful autonomy. Hence the Turks’ fears and threats regarding Iraqi Kurds finally gaining control over their own oil.

Why is it okay for Arabs and Iranians to control “their” oil, but not so for Kurds?

And please don’t respond that Kirkuk is composed of mixed nationalities (largely due to Saddam’s forced Arabization of the area). Iran’s major oil fields are in Khuzestan…but it’s been known as Arabistan for centuries…Guess why?

Kurds lived in the area of the Mosul and Kirkuk oil fields for millennia before a Turk or Arab even knew it existed. As for the presence of some Turkmen as well, recall that, besides Turkey, there are a half dozen other Asiatic Turkic states as well.

Arabs… 22, Turks…around 7, Jews…1, Kurds…0--none, zilch, nada.

Recall that Turks have been great supporters of the Arabs’ quest for their additional state. They have severely taken Israel to task for going after Hamas--the organization which openly aims to destroy it--after Jews were deliberately blown up in restaurants, buses, teen night clubs, and the like.

Unlike the Arab good cops and bad cops vis-à-vis Israel, the PKK does not seek the destruction of Turkey--just some meaningful justice for Turkey’s Kurds. Ditto for PEJAK in Iran.

To deal with the PKK effectively, you have to lessen its support and raison d’etre among some fifteen million Turkish Kurds…the dual track an Israel constantly maligned has always ironically pursued.

Fair and just offers and partitions were repeatedly offered to--and rejected--by the Arabs themselves. No solution other than another final solution regarding Israel was or is acceptable...to this day. Israel’s “moderate” Annapolis partners still insist that after Israel returns to its pre-’67, 9-mile wide armistice line existence, that it consent to being swamped by millions of jihadist alleged refugees (most of whom were newcomers themselves into the Mandate). And while seeking to add state # 22 to the Arab League, they still refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish (a la Swedish, English, Irish, Polish, etc.) state.

Israel should not shame itself further with such collaboration with Ankara against the Kurds. While it’s nice to have a regional neighbor one has reasonable relations with, the same rules need to apply for both parties in this relationship.

As the Turks demand yet more political rights for Arabs, Jews should not shy away from making similar demands for Kurds.

Justice cannot expect that Kurds concur with the elimination of the PKK while basic rights for their own people are still largely ignored...the missing component in the necessary dual track.

As for the American State Department…it’s a virtual lost cause regarding this issue.

It will take a future American President, with the insight of a Woodrow Wilson--whose famous post-World War One 14 Points addressed the plight of stateless Kurds--and the strength of a Ronald Reagan, to take charge of American foreign policy once again, pushing aside age-old, Arabist-dominated Foggy Bottom policies which have created the tragic situation we have today.

President Bush's Upcoming Visit To Israel

The Real Question Is…How Long Is Your Driveway?

by Gerald A. Honigman



President Bush is planning a trip to Israel and elsewhere next month. It will be his first visit to Israel as president. He’ll undoubtedly try to further squeeze Jews into believing that he knows Arabs better than they do, and that his Annapolis summit--where Jews were forced to enter via the servants’ door so as not to offend their alleged Arab peace partners--is their best hope for peace.

Four Aprils ago, Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, made a very hard decision.

After decades of supporting Israel’s presence in disputed territories Israel wound up with as a result of fighting a defensive war for its life in June 1967, the Old Warrior decided that the costs outweighed the gains of keeping Jews in Gaza.

While it is true that, despite fluctuating numbers, Jews had lived in Gaza for millennia; that, since the days of the Pharaohs, Gaza had been used as an invasion route into Israel by those aiming to subjugate it; that Gaza had become a hotbed for terrorists aiming to destroy Israel; that Jewish communities set up in Gaza were not on Arab-owned land; etc. and so forth; it is also true that many--if not most--Israelis were looking for a way out of Gaza if proper conditions presented themselves.

As we are currently witnessing, with the post-Annapolis 2007, largely one-sided concrete expectations placed just on Israel’s shoulders, Israel had long been under pressure to take some steps to revive the all-but-dead, roadmap with Arabs in 2004 as well.

Lacking any Anwar Sadat or King Hussein-type to deal with among Palestinian Arabs (i.e. Arab leaders willing to allow for a viable Jewish Israel still existing on the morrow after a peace treaty is signed), Arik decided to make a unilateral move to break the stalemate while also supposedly enhancing Israel’s overall security position. The latter assertion was/is hotly debated.

Many of us feared that this would just bring Arab terror closer to Israel proper. With thousands of rockets and mortars landing in Israeli communities like Sderot after the full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, we were, of course, correct in our concerns. But The General most probably had something else up his sleeve and knew how he’d deal with further aggression from a Judenrein Arab Gaza. Unfortunately, Arik is no longer of this world, in a deep coma after he suffered a stroke almost two years ago.

But, in April 2004, Sharon came up with his Gaza withdrawal plan. In addition to the removal of Gaza’s 8,000 Jews, some Jewish communities in Samaria (the northern West Bank,) were also placed on the eviction notice. The world had been clamoring for such Israeli moves for decades.

Those who had conquered lands hundreds or thousands of miles away from home in the name of their own nations’ security somehow couldn’t figure out the life-threatening problems Israel constantly faced due to armistice lines imposed upon it in 1949 by the United Nations. As is well known by now, those lines made Israel a mere 9 to 16 miles wide at its strategic waist, where most of the nation’s population and industry are located. Most people travel farther than that just to go shopping or to work.

Israel was never meant to be a 9-mile wide rump state...but that’s how it was left when the lines were drawn in ‘49 marking the point where the Jews finally turned back the 1948 invasion of a half dozen Arab armies supplied to the teeth with weaponry left over by the Allies from World War II and led, in Transjordan, by British officers. The UN got involved only later on--to limit Arab losses, not to prevent their initial, blatant aggression. This behavior would be repeated in subsequent decades as well.

Arab settlers from elsewhere in the region then poured into these disputed territories. As leading international legal scholars like Eugene Rostow explain, the latter had largely been unapportioned state lands belonging to the original Mandate, open to settlement by Arabs, Jews, and others as well. After 1949, however, only Arabs were able to move here in the aftermath of Arab Transjordan’s internationally unrecognized land grab.

As needs to be repeatedly pointed out since Arabs and their supporters repeatedly pretend otherwise, purely Arab Transjordan, comprising all the land on the east bank of the River, had already been created by the British in 1922 from almost 80% of the original 1920 borders of the Mandate of Palestine. Jewish communities dating back from Biblical times in Judea and Samaria--the “West Bank"--had been massacred by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s. The debate today is thus over the birth of the Arabs’ second state in “Palestine”--not their first…state # 22 in all.

During this same time period, the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission documented massive waves of Arabs (scores of thousands in just a few months alone) pouring into the Mandate from Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and elsewhere. Many more Arabs entered under cover of darkness and were simply never recorded--more “native Palestinians.” Thanks to the Jews, the Mandate was economically booming, drawing Arabs in from the entire region.

And while the following has also been repeated ad nauseam, it must be stated yet again for similar reasons…

In the aftermath of the latest attempt on Israel’s life in 1967, the architects of famed UN Security Council Resolution 242 (Britain’s Lord Caradon, Rostow, etc.) carefully worded the final, accepted draft so that Israel would not be expected to return to pre-’67, suicidal armistice lines. Indeed, the resolution called for the creation of “secure and recognized borders” to replace those lines. The bulk of Israel’s official settlements have thus been placed with such a strategic territorial compromise in mind. While some will have to go as a trade off for a real peace agreement (no Arab “hudna“ ceasefires), others will have to stay.

There is an indisputable set of basic facts regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict…

If there will ever be peace between Arab and Jew, Arabs will have to give up their eternal plans for Israel’s destruction. Had they done this, Arabs could have had their second state in Palestine decades ago.

Fair and just plans were presented--and rejected--over the decades by the Arabs themselves…certainly far more than Arabs have ever offered to any of their own national competitors. Just ask black Africans in the Sudan, Kurds in Iraq and Syria, Berbers in North Africa, and so forth. The reality is that Arabs still want that additional state to exist in place of, not along side of, the Jewish one. Hence their continued post-Annapolis rejection of a lone Jewish state while demanding a 22-member Arab League.

Enter George W. Bush...

Standing near Sharon, at an April 2004 news conference being watched on television all over the world, an American President--the first since Truman in 1948--finally took a political stance that might even yet lead to peace if he only regains the courage today he displayed back then. Or if his successor does.

Bush stated, before millions watching him, the two key ingredients for such a recipe:

Israel should not be expected to return to the indefensible armistice lines of 1949 (and he called them just that, not “borders"), and real and fudged Arab refugees would have to go to the proposed new Arab state, not overwhelm the Jews in Israel itself. Recall that half of Israel’s Jews were refugees from Arab/Muslim lands. Einstein was not needed to figure out this recipe.

And that brings us back to the President’s upcoming visit to Israel…

You see, Bush had indeed visited Israel before, but while serving as governor of Texas.

Here is an excerpt from a December 3, 1998 press release from his office quoting him…

“I was able to learn a lot about the security needs of our strong friend and ally, Israel. It’s hard to believe as a Texan how small Israel is, I mean, we’re used to huge spaces. I just got off the campaign where I spent nearly everyday in a King Air trying to get from one stop to the other. Had I gotten on that same King Air and I took off out of Jerusalem it would have been no time before I’d be in either Jordan or in Syria. It’s a small country and it was important for our Israeli host to remind our delegation of how really small it was so I got on a helicopter one day and flew with the foreign minister Ariel Sharon to see first hand how small the population was between, what has been over the course of history, enemy lines and population centers. We went to the Golan Heights where I was able to hear a general brief us on what the war was like to take the Golan Heights and then how important the Golan Heights are to the security of the people living in northern Israel.”

It was on this same helicopter flight that, according to his press secretary, Ari Fleischer, Bush also commented, regarding the tiny strategic waist of Israel, “In Texas, we have driveways longer than that.”

When arriving in Israel this time, as leader of a nation three thousand miles wide and separated from its main enemies by two vast oceans, Mr. Bush may want to pay his old comatose friend a visit.

With all of his human flaws and faults, Ariel Sharon was/is a true hero of Israel reborn--a source of fear for those who planned and attempted Israel’s destruction non-stop. That’s the real reason his enemies hate him so much.

I’m convinced that Arik had lines in the sand beyond which he would not cave…despite all the pressure from his American friends, Condi’s tantrums, and so forth. On the other hand, the entire Jew of the Nations is now at risk given the nature of the current crew running Israel’s show. They’ve replaced lines in the sand with heads in the sand.

Annapolis and its aftermath will likely expose Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, Jerusalem, and so forth with the same fate Sderot is now facing….and probably worse.

Forcing suicidal concessions upon Israel in light of the rejectionist good cop/bad cop enemies it still faces--despite all of the State Department whitewashing being done on Abbas and his latter day Fatah Arafatians’ behalf--will only backfire on America itself in the long run.

The quarrel between Hamas and Fatah is more about who will ultimately control the billions of dollars in aid and weaponry “Palestine” will receive rather than over any acceptance of their Jewish neighbor. Arafat’s Swiss bank accounts are legendary…

When visiting an Israel next month which can fit thirty-four times into his own home state of Texas, it would be proper for the President to keep all of this in mind.

The Problem With Darfur Is...

The Problem With Darfur’s Muslims Is…

by Gerald A. Honigman

They’re Not Arabs. Like Iraq’s Kurds or North Africa’s Amazigh (Berbers).

The title of a recent AP news brief read, “EU May Not Heed Darfur Call.”

While the European sycophants of medieval Arab oil sheiks, who recently sentenced a gang rape victim to jail and two hundred lashes, have and will be pouring in billions of dollars in aid and such to support the birth of Arab state # 22 ( 2nd, not 1st, Arab one in “Palestine”), predictably, all they mostly have to offer to support victims of out right Arab murder and racism is hot air.

After the Arabs burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E. and slaughtered, conquered, and forcibly Arabized millions of non-Arab peoples in the process, the Sudan (Nubia, etc.) held out for quite some time. In other parts of non-Arab North Africa, native Jews aligned with “Berbers” to resist this conquest as well.

Back in the ‘60s when I was starting college, the Arab-Israeli conflict, as usual, never left center stage. After the ‘67 Six Day War--when Israel turned the tables on the latest Arab attempt on its life big time--Israel lost its status as David to the Arab Goliath for daring to refuse to go silently into the night while the rest of the world once again looked on…as the latter is doing today with other Arab victims.

At virtually the same time in the ‘60s, the first modern civil war broke out between the non-Muslim black south and the Arab and Arabized north in the Sudan.

Sudan President Nimeiry’s stated during the slaughter of over a half million blacks at this time (and over a million more 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).”

Rudyard Kipling’s late 19th century poem, The White Man’s Burden, supposedly typifies Western colonialist and imperialist attitudes towards the Third World. If that’s the case, then what does Nimeiry and the example below, expressed in the Syrian Arab Constitution of the Ba’th, typify…?

] “...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.”

Arabs habitually refer to most of the region as “purely Arab patrimony”…the Arab-Israeli and other such conflicts in a nutshell.

The more recent full scale outbreak of violence in the Sudan has an even more revealing twist.

While earlier violence there and elsewhere could largely be seen as modern extensions of the fourteen century -old clash between the Dar ul-Islam and the Dar al-Harb, the one in the Sudan’s Darfur (as those in Arab-occupied Kurdistan and much of the rest of North Africa) is mostly about Arab racism and chauvinism…pure and simple. You know, those folks who like to scream about “racist Zionism.” Over a thousand years earlier, this led to the overthrow of the Syrian-based Arab imperialist Umayyad Caliphate.

So, in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, it’s Arab versus black…regardless of religion. Ditto for Arab versus Kurd, Amazigh, and so forth.

In Sudan’s largely non-Muslim south, it’s a combination of both Arab racism and the conquest of the Dar ul-Islam…as exemplified also in the expected subjugation and dhimmitude of Egyptian Copts, Lebanon’s Christians, Near Eastern Assyrians, and Israel, the Jew of the Nations, home to whom Arabs call “their” kilab yahud…Jew dogs.

Think carefully about all the above…especially in light of the additional bare-the necks-of-your-kids-even- further concessions Israel is expected to next make for the sake of a post-Annapolis “peace (of the grave)” with those still dedicated to its destruction--regardless of what the American President and his Secretary of State shamefully proclaim.