The Saudis And Those Allegedly Crazy Israelis

The Saudi “Peace” Plan...An Offer Israel Can--And Should-- Refuse
by Gerald A. Honigman


According to a Times Of London story on November 16th, President-elect Obama allegedly stated that Israel would be crazy not to accept the resurrected, alleged Saudi “Peace Plan.” Dubya and Condi are trying real hard to force this post-Thankgiving turkey down Israel’s throat as well.

A bit earlier, a stop along President Bush’s Middle East trip--after further pressuring Jews to further accept his vision of Abbas’s latter day terrorist Arafatians as being the good cops—took President Bush to the sands of the Saudis and other Arabian Peninsula nations.

A photo was published worldwide of the President wielding a sword along with Bahraini hosts, and Dubya brought along a New Year’s present—tens of billions of dollars in military aid...Hey, if we don’t sell it to them, the Brits, Germans, French, and so forth certainly will. So goes the argument…

During that visit, Bush asked if perhaps the Arabs might reach out to Israel a bit more. Saudi King Abdullah responded that he didn’t know what else he could do. After all, he came up with his own “peace” (of the grave) plan some time ago...the one Obama now claims Israel would be nuts to reject. Here it is in a nutshell...

If Israel (and not a Jewish Israel) merely agreed to return to its pre-’67, 9-mile wide ‘49 armistice line—not border—existence and agreed to be swamped by millions of “returning” jihadist refugees (many, if not most, of whom were new-comers to the Palestinian Mandate themselves) created because the Arab attempt to nip a reborn Israel in the bud backfired, along with everything else that the Arabs demand for the Jewish State’s suicide, then the Saudis and other Arabs might normalize relations with Israel.

Again, the above is the plan that Obama, Condi, and Dubya consider to be an offer that Israel simply can’t refuse. Of course, they’d accept such a plan for America given similar circumstances (yeah, right)...What’s even more sickening is that they get stuck-in-the-ghetto-minded Uncle Abe (instead of Uncle Tom) Jews like Ehud Olmert and Shimon Peres to sing praises to it as well. Where are those Israeli elections!!!???

The Desert Kingdom has long gotten away with a virtual free pass from America and most of the rest of the world. The same folks—including academics and others who should know better—who routinely scrutinize Israel and the actions it’s forced to take merely to survive, act deaf, dumb, and blind when it comes to the Saudis and too many other Arabs controlling much of the world’s oil and influencing many other petrodollar-connected, multi-national corporations in the process. Together, this power and influence--via their many tentacles and manifestations-- make the much spoken about “Zionist lobby” look pitiful.

Years back, when I was a card-carrying member of the London-based Anti-Slavery Society, persistent reports spoke of slavery throughout Saudi Arabia and other Arab lands…in the oil fields, and other places as well. It was still “above ground” up until the middle of the last century. But it was all treated as though it didn’t exist. Have you ever noticed the many black Saudis and other Arabs? Guess who and what their mothers mostly were?

Hush...

Okay. Let’s get back on track.

What else can the Saudis do to reach out to the Jews? Here’s some suggestions…

On Dubya’s trip, he pledged some twenty billion dollars in state-of-the-art aircraft, missiles, bombs, and so forth to the Saudis, supposedly to bolster them against the Iranian bogeyman.

The problem is, despite all of those Arabs prancing around with their swords, each time they were threatened—by fellow Arabs like Saddam or the Iranians--America had to pull their chestnuts out of the fire with our own blood and money anyway…despite billions of dollars in military aid given previously. Not to mention the Saudis’ gift of most of the suicide/homicide bombers of 9/11.

Previous sophisticated weaponry and aircraft that the Saudis pledged to place to face the Iranian threat were stationed a stone’s throw from Israel instead. Indeed, they’ve been expanding the King Faisal Air Base at Tabuk. Prior to Bush’s new holiday gift, the base contained about 50 advanced F-15S fighter-jets, which were sent to the northwestern facility on the eve of the U.S.-led war against Iraq in March 2003. Other promises related to those sales later proved to be worthless as well.

So much for past and future similar Arab guarantees...

What else could the Saudis do for Israel?

How about honoring the pledges above, for starters.

The Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion is perhaps one of the most flagrantly anti-Semitic doctrines ever written. Guess who was one of the latter day leaders in endorsing and spreading it around?

While the Saudis aren’t the only Arabs still doing this sort of hate-spreading stuff ("peaceful” Egypt still freely indulges), ending such practices is another suggestion for the “what else"…as is ending dehumanizing “kilab yahud”—Jew dogs—even further by routinely also calling them sons of apes and pigs. Extend this further by revising the textbooks of Arab children, hatred in the media, sermons, and so forth which routinely demonize Jews and Israel, and an Arab “peace” might become more believable.

Since America is poised to force a pax Saudia on Israel, are you ready for more?

When Israel was squeezed by President Clinton at Camp David and Taba to cave in to Arafat and abandon its right to defensible “secure and recognized” borders instead of pre-’67 Auschwitz/armistice lines a la resolution 242, while Arafat rejected the plan, Clinton and the State Department’s Arabist “deal” Prime Minister Barak was forced to accept became the new starting point for President Bush’s subsequent Annapolis travesty. With numerous anti-Israel friends and advisors, it will certainly be a President Obama’s as well.

During the era of Clinton’s “Oslo Peace,” the more Israel tangibly conceded to Arabs, the more it bled.

Guess who was paying Arab families tens of thousands of dollars each for having a “shahid” member blow up Jewish kids in teen night clubs, buses, pizzerias, and so forth during the Intifada (conducted under Arafat and Abbas’s Fatah good cops’ watch—not that of Hamas’s bad cops)? Maybe Saudi despots, who condemn women victims of rape to hundreds of lashes and humiliation, could revise their policy here also…

The Saudis, like other Arabs, are always quick to claim the whole region as purely Arab patrimony.Hence their additional concern about Iranians and others who call the body of water in the north the Persian Gulf instead of the Arabian Gulf. More than just words are involved here.

Since Arabs claim all that they acquired after Muhammad and successor Caliphal armies burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E., conquering and forcibly Arabized millions of non-Arab peoples and their lands, and then rejected the rights of Jews (one half in Israel who were refugees from “Arab"/Muslim lands), Kurds, Berbers, black Africans, and so forth in a later age of nationalism to resurrected political rights of their own, perhaps the Saudis need to be reminded of another time period in what is now their country…

As I have written elsewhere, when Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, fled enemies in 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 on Judaea (the banu-Qurayzah and banu-al-Nadir tribes, etc.). Medina’s mixed population of Jews and pagan Arabs opened their doors to the future Prophet of Islam.

Muhammad learned much from the Jews. While the actual timing of his decision on the qibla, 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 openly stated that this was done as an attempt to win support among influential Jewish tribes (the “People of the Book") for Muhammad’s religio-politcal claims.

It is from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (which Arabs now claim Jews have no connection to—including Bush’s good buddy, Abbas) 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 Arab imperialist caliphal conquest of the land in the 7th century C.E.

Arab imperialism? Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh…… Only nasty westerners do that stuff--don’tcha know?

There is no doubt among objective scholars that Jews had an enormous impact on both Muhammad and the religion that he founded. The holy sites for Muslims in Jerusalem (i.e. the mosques erected on the Temple Mount of the Jews) are now deemed “holy” precisely because of the critical years Muhammad spent after the Hijrah with the Jews.

Not mincing words, the Temple Mount of the Jews had no prior meaning to pagan Arabs.

While there was some early Christian influence, intense scholarship has shown that the Holy Law (Halakha) 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. This was no mere coincidence…Muslim religious beliefs regarding Muhammad’s conversations with the Angel Gabriel notwithstanding.

When the Jews refused to recognize Muhammad as the chief political honcho, “Seal of the Prophets,” and so forth, he turned on them with a bloody 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.

Now, imagine, since Arabs claim all of Israel because of their previous conquests, that descendants of Arabian Jews staked their own claims as well? How about declaring Medina as a Jewish city?

Certainly, when demands by Arabs for compensation and the like regarding Arab refugees comes to the front burner, Jewish refugees from “Arab” lands—who number more and who left behind far more property and financial assets than their Arab counterparts did due to a war that Arabs themselves started—need to put forth their own demands and need to backed by an Israeli government which will state unambiguously that there will be no fulfillment of the one claim without the other.

What else can the Saudis and other Arabs do to convince Jews that the alleged Saudi “peace” now being promoted by assorted lame ducks and new ducks is indeed not simply a peace of the grave? After all, Muhammad made his “Peace of the Quraysh” too—a temporary hudna designed to buy time until he could conquer his enemies. Arafat loved to talk about this regarding Israel. Dubya’s darling, Abbas, was Arafat’s # 1 lieutenant and choice for Prime Minister. And Abbas & Co. insist that Israel accept all Arab demands as is. So much for negotiating...

There are two words which should comprise a proper Israeli response to such Arab games...and let’s just say they ain’t “Merry Christmas.”

As I’ve pointed out often before, the solution to the Arab-Israeli mess is not as complicated as many others have claimed.

When enemies make peace, they truly negotiate so that a compromise, meeting the needs of both parties, is at least somewhat achieved. One party doesn’t simply just offer a take it or leave it dictate.

The Arab game plan--the alleged breakthrough offer some American leaders say the Israelis would be nuts to refuse--is, in reality, simply a ploy to force Israel to yield in “diplomacy” what hundreds of millions of Arabs have not been able to achieve on the battlefield.

Seen as a starting point for further negotiations, not a take it or leave it gimmick, the Saudi plan might have some value.

Getting rid of the plan’s stipulation requiring Jews to allow their sole state to be swamped by allegedly returning Arab jihadis raised on Jew-hatred is a must, as just one example. Keep in mind that more Jews fled Arab/Muslim lands as refugees in a war Arabs started than Arabs who fled in the opposite direction. The difference? Jews didn’t have almost two dozen other states to go to and weren’t perpetually stuck in camps by their own brethren. Jews absorbed their own refugees in a state about the size of New Jersey, virtually invisible on a world map.

Finally, if the Saudis and other assorted Arab despots want to really reach out to Israel, all they have to do is to grant to Jews in their sole, tiny, resurrected state a miniscule sliver of the same rights they claim for themselves in demanding the creation of the 22nd member nation of the Arab League and second, not first, Arab one in “Palestine” --Jordan carved out of some 80% of the Mandate’s original 1920 borders.

The day Arabs can, at long last, get themselves to do this, they will find an Israel bending over backwards, sideways, and forwards to be a good neighbor--and to the entire region’s benefit.

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Gaza—The Only Thing Israel Owes It Is An Ultimatum

Israel Owes Gaza Nothing…Except An Ultimatum
by Gerald A. Honigman

In May 1948, Egypt was one of a half dozen Arab states which tried to nip a nascent, resurrected Israel in the bud. And for the same reasons Arabs and Arabized have slaughtered, subjugated, and committed genocide against Kurds, black Africans, Berbers, Assyrians and others besides “their” kilab yahud--Jew dogs--who dared insinuate that they too--besides Arabs--have rights in a region proclaimed by the latter as purely Arab patrimony. One half of Israel’s Jews today consist of Jews who pre-dated Arabs in that region but who fled to Israel…the refugees no one talks about. Over another million of these folks fled abroad to the Americas, France, and elsewhere.


Armed to the teeth with weapons left over by the Brits from World War II, Egypt seized Gaza while a British officer-led Arab Legion in Transjordan (created itself in 1922 from almost 80% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine) seized Judea and Samaria on the west bank of the Jordan River. Transjordan, now controlling both banks, soon renamed itself Jordan. Its occupation of those non-apportioned--not purely Arab--parts of the Mandate was recognized by only two other states.


The same above Arab pair--along with Syria and a few others as well--took another shot at their 1948 goal in June 1967. Big mistake…


Egypt blockaded Israel at the Straits of Tiran (a casus belli), amassed 100,000 troops, tanks, and aircraft on Israel’s border, and convinced Jordan to jump on board. It then ordered the United Nations peacekeeping force out of the area so it would be able to invade the Jewish State unimpeded. Like a fireman who flees the moment a fire starts, the U.N. simply complied. It would repeat its uselessness this way many times later--stepping in only after Israel turned the tide of repeated Arab aggression, not preventing it or punishing the aggressor. Indeed, it did just this in 1948. That’s how Israel wound up with mostly Auschwitz/armistice lines, not borders. Ralph Bunche, America’s U.N. rep, understood this quite well.


That’s how Israel wound up in Gaza and in the “West Bank”…in all of six days. I have all of the newspaper articles from that time period stored in a box.


As has been written many times, during the almost two decades that Egypt and Jordan occupied those areas, no one clamored for the creation of a second state for Arabs within the borders of the Palestinian Mandate. In 1947, Arabs were offered about half of the 20 % of the territory left after the creation of Transjordan and rejected this partition. Some 90% of the total area wasn’t enough. They had to have it all.


That was over sixty years ago--and nothing has really changed regarding the same Arab mindset that refuses to grant scores of millions of non-Arabs living in the region even a tiny sliver of the same political rights Arabs insist upon for themselves. That, in a nutshell, is the Arab-Israeli conflict. 


A few years back, a now comatose Prime Minister Sharon--under intense pressure from Washington--agreed to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, a coastal area which had been repeatedly used since the days of the Pharaohs to invade the land of the Jews. It was also the land of Goliath’s non-Semitic, Aegean “Sea People,” the Philistines (as in Palestine), who gave both Egyptians and Jews earlier shared headaches.


Sharon’s withdrawal plan was highly controversial, but there was enough potentially positive aspects to it that it seemed to at least some folks worth a try. The problem is that all of the worst case scenario results soon emerged instead.


Gaza was a test--and the Arabs flunked it horribly.


Being the target of repeated Arab attempted destruction, Israel was under no obligation to return any territories used for those purposes before treaties of real peace--not hudna and such ceasefires--were signed.

Borders and territorial possessions all over the world have historically changed for far less than what Israel has faced…including America’s. And does anyone remember the Falkland War the Brits fought with Argentina? Now imagine the Brits (along with numerous other hypocrites) lecturing Israel--as they constantly do--about what the Jews allegedly need to do in their own very backyard (not thousands of miles away from home) regarding Arabs who deliberately disembowel and slit the throats of their kids and other innocents.


With the withdrawal of Jewish organic farmers and so forth (Gaza thus becoming Judenrein), did the Arabs offer Israel any semblance of peace?


The only thing Arabs did was to congratulate themselves about how nicely their well-known destruction in stages scenario for Israel was playing out.


Before the setback in ‘67, they called for a one fell swoop plan for the Jews’ demise. Afterwards, this was replaced with a strategy to force Israel--via diplomacy (arm twisting by its “friends“)--back to its 1949, U. N.-imposed, microscopic armistice line, not border, existence. The final draft of U.N.S.C. Resolution 242 was drafted, in a rare display of true justice, to rectify that wrong after the Six Day War. Any withdrawal of Israel from territories was to be in the context of real peace treaties and to secure and somewhat defensible real borders--not armistice lines. It was expected that the travesty of the ‘49 lines would be rectified as Israel withdrew from territories--not all territories. Indeed, the U.N. fought very hard over the precise wording of 242 for just this reason. A reading of its architects, such as Lord Caradon, Eugene Rostow, and others, makes this very clear. Here’s Lord Caradon…


It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That’s why we didn’t demand that the Israelis return to them.


Nevertheless, for a very cold peace, Israel handed Egypt back the best tank trap it had, buffering itself from latter day Pharaohs, as well as oil fields it developed, major airbases, and some real semblance of strategic depth.

Gaza was the latest piece to fall in the post-‘67 Arab destruction in stages game plan.

Indeed, Gaza was a failed test.


Arabs had an opportunity to prove doubters such as myself wrong…and we really wanted that to happen, though knew better.


The “peace offering” Arabs gave Israel in return was to elect Arabs to power in Gaza who didn’t even feel it necessary to play Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah’s Palestinian Authority’s phony game of acceptance of a Jewish neighbor. Actually, Abbas and his crew don’t do this either and still refuse to speak of a Jewish Israel. Arabs can claim almost two dozen Arab states (created mostly from non-Arab peoples’ lands), but how dare Jews speak of one miniscule state of their own…


Yet, to prop up the West’s sweet-talking, latter day Arafatian darlings, Mahmoud Abbas (one of Arafat‘s chief lieutenants) & Fatah had to be made the good cops by an American State Department long hostile to even the very idea of Israel (opposing President Truman on its rebirth and so forth) to the Hamas bad ones to twist the arms of the Jews. In reality, both have the same long-term plans for Israel. Check out their own official assorted websites, books, speeches to their own people, and so forth if you doubt this. In the Internet age, this is easy to do. Check out the Hamas Charter while you’re at it…and the PLO/P.A.’s as well.


While attacks against Israel from Gaza were launched before Hamas gained control there, they increased afterwards…hundreds of rockets, mortars, and such being launched against Israel proper after the complete, unilateral Israeli withdrawal.


Instead of a hand being offered to an Israel which could indeed be very generous in peace, Arabs elected those who openly (to their credit--no game playing here) call for Israel’s total destruction…the same folks who were blowing up school kids and others on buses, in restaurants, teen nightclubs, pizza parlors, and such a while back. They even set up a museum commemorating their heroism complete with fake Jewish body parts hanging from ceilings for all to sing praises to.


Think about what Israel really needs to do with such an enemy. Does America’s own Powell Doctrine ring a bell? Here’s some of what Wikipedia has to say about it…


“…Powell expanded upon the Doctrine, asserting that when a nation is engaging in war, every resource and tool should be used to achieve decisive force against the enemy, minimizing US casualties and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the weaker force to capitulate. This is well in line with Western military strategy dating at least from Carl von Clausewitz’s On War.”


Lately, there was supposedly a ceasefire in effect. Hamas got tired of losing too many of its folks to Israel’s pinpoint strikes. Yet, during this “ceasefire,” Israel ceased, but the Arabs still fired.


Because of this, the Jews stopped the flow of goods and services to the people who elected those who want both Jews and the Jewish State dead and who cause death, maiming, and destruction in nearby Israeli towns and cities.


How unreasonable of those Jews!


Just ask the U.N.’s Ban Ki-moon, the European Union’s Benita Ferrero-Waldner, NGO Oxfam’s Jeremy Hobbs, and so forth. They simply expect Jews to keep on out-Christianing Christians by turning cheek after cheek after cheek…not that any “Christian” country would ever put up with such murderous manure that Israel is simply expected to accept from Arabs.


Tit for tat responses have never worked well with Arabs. They know there’s hundreds of millions of them and about six million Israeli Jews. Now, why am I nervous about that number? Arafat used to claim that the Arab mother was his best weapon.


To be taken seriously, Israel must treat Gaza’s Hamas and those who elected it according to America’s own Powell Doctrine. If firing rockets, mortars, and such at one’s cities is not considered acts of war, then what is? If calling for the death of a nation and its people and acting on those threats are not acts of war, then what is?


If ever a nation had reason to level an enemy, then who if not Israel? It certainly has the means.

Not doing so and trying to be humane to the inhumane only brings hypocritical charges leveled against Jews anyway.

There are few innocents in Gaza. Arab non-combatants hide murderers who in turn use the former as human shields after they deliberately attack Jewish civilians--all contrary to the Geneva Conventions, by the way. Think Perfidy Clause and such…Sad, but true.


Yet, none of this matters to the U. N., the European Union folks, Oxfam, the State Department, and so forth. Arabs and Arabized are still committing atrocities, waging genocide, and so forth in black Africa and elsewhere, and all they can do is insist that Jews allow the re-supply of those who would butcher them if they had the chance. No doubt…


Egypt has allowed hundreds of tunnels to be dug from its territory to supply Gaza with the means to kill Jews.


Imagine if this was reversed. Pharaoh now supposedly has a peace treaty with Israel. Here’s an idea…let them smuggle food and so forth instead. Furthermore, why smuggle? Let Pharaoh supply his Arab brothers with those supplies. By the way, Israel has been permitting essentials to cross into Gaza anyway.


Jews aren’t obligated to supply their executioners and wannabes with anything.


Would any other people be expected to do this? Should be a no brainer, right? But it’s that Jew thing again...

Israel needs to hold elections as soon as possible…before its current non-leaders can cause even more damage.


David Ben-Gurion, Golda, Jabotinsky, and Begin must be rolling in their graves.


Prime Minister Olmert is soon scheduled to have some additional last minute arm-twisting done by another soon leaving official, Secretary of State Rice. Dubya, too, will likely join the gang up on the Jews party.


Hey, Clinton received many millions of bucks for his Library and such from the Arab oil spigot as a gift for forcing Jews into the deadly Oslo debacle and agreeing to forsake 242‘s promise of secure borders, why not the scion of the Bush oil family too? He’s certainly been acting that way these past few years…and I (reluctantly) voted for him.


Like many other State Department types, Rice’s career of squeezing Jews is sure to pay off later. Just ask James Baker III (Dubya‘s virtual uncle). As I like to remind folks, Condi already has one oil tanker named after her in the Chevron fleet. Shafting Hebrews and Arab potentate derriere-kissing have been lucrative business decisions for decades…


Israel must have new leaders who will act as if their private parts are still intact--regardless of the consequences. If America threatens to cut off aid, then so be it.


With a man who has dozens of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel friends, advisors, and supporters ready to move into the White House (he’s already sent one of these folks, Robert Malley, as his senior foreign policy advisor to Lebanon‘s slave master, Syria), Israel must be ready to draw its lines in the sand beyond which it will no further budge.


Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, and such must not be subjected to what Sderot and Ashkelon now frequently receive…and that’s exactly what is realistically to be expected if Israel does in Judea (i.e., land of the Jews) and Samaria (aka the West Bank) what it did in Gaza. A three thousand mile wide America will be shamed if it forces Israel into another Munich 1938 style “peace.”


Israel must insist on reasonable but effective territorial compromises regarding the remaining territories in dispute…be they the Golan Heights or the West Bank. Presidents Johnson and Reagan along with Secretary of State Shultz (an amazing exception to the Foggy Bottom rule), military commanders, and others understood this quite well. It appeared that President Bush II did too…at least for a while.


Arabs (even those few Israel has “peace treaties” with) still refuse to accept the permanent reality of a’49 armistice line, 9-mile wide Israel--let alone anything beyond the virtually microscopic. Think about that purely Arab patrimony thing, the Dar ul-Islam vs. the Dar al-Harb, and so forth. And, again, think gassed Kurds, Darfur, and southern Sudan while you’re at it…


Given all the above, as for Gaza…Israel must send an ultimatum, not supply it.


And the U. N., Oxfam, the European Union, and other assorted hypocrites and practitioners of the double standard?


Let them go to where they’re really needed but to where they never will…to relieve the real--not mostly self-inflicted--plight of scores of millions of non-Arab peoples still being slaughtered, enslaved, subjugated, and so forth throughout the region on behalf of Arab nationalism and its “purely Arab patrimony.”

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President Obama and Jerusalem

If I Forget Thee…Buraq’s Mount And President Obama

by Gerald A. Honigman

As an Independent, I did not vote for our new, in-coming President.

Seeing problems with both mainstream political party candidates and platforms, President-elect Obama’s long list of virulenty anti-Semitic and /or anti-Zionist friends and supporters (not that there’s really a difference…one singles out Jews for “special treatment,” the other the Jew of the Nations) nevertheless convinced me that this could not all be merely coincidental. Then the news of the suppressed L.A.Times video tapes broke adding even more fuel to this fire.

Regardless, America has chosen, and only time will tell if it was the right choice for all kinds of reasons.

The reality, however, is that President Bush’s team is still trying to convince Israel that it has something other than a grave-style “peace” to look forward to with Dubya’s and the State Department’s alleged latter day Arafatian Fatah “good cop” buddies as opposed to the at least more honest Hamas bad guys. To any truly objective observer, the evidence against this is overwhelming…

While it keeps getting shoved onto the back burner for fear of the intense heat that it will generate, there is no doubt that Jerusalem will be one of the most difficult issues to resolve in any so-called peace process between Arab and Jew. Senator Obama seriously flip-flopped on this very issue earlier in his campaign, so it’s time to take a look at some blunt facts regarding this issue, despite the risk of ruffling even some friendly feathers.

While Christians, Muslims, and Jews all have ties to Jerusalem, these ties are in no way equal.

In religious Jewish sources, for instance, Jerusalem is mentioned over 600 times. It is not mentioned even once in the Qur’an. It is alluded to in the latter in passages about the Hebrew Kings, David and Solomon, and the destruction of the Temples of the Jews. Arabs, however, including Abbas’s alleged “good cops,” deny a Jewish Temple ever existed there and call the Temple Mount “Buraq’s Mount” instead, after Muhammad’s supposedly winged horse. But a mention of Jerusalem itself is nowhere to be found in the Muslim holy book…interesting, since it was recorded in many other places besides the writings of the Jews themselves for over 1,500 years before the rise of Islam.

Religious claims of both Christians and Muslims to Jerusalem exist primarily because of both of their links to the Jews.

Political claims–based upon facts on the ground–are more complicated. Even so, throughout over three millennia since King David conquered the city from the Jebusites, renamed it, and gave it its Jewish character, no other people except the Jews has ever made Jerusalem their capital, despite its conquest by many imperial powers, including that of the Arab caliphal successors to Muhammad as they burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century C.E. and spread in all directions. Damascus and Baghdad were the seats of Arab imperial power, and Mecca and Medina were the holy cities. While not to say that Jerusalem was ignored by its Muslim conquerors (i.e. the Umayyads built the Dome of the Rock/Mosque of Umar deliberately on the Temple Mount of the Jews, making it Islam’s allegedly third holiest city), it is to say that Jerusalem was and is in no way the focus for Islam that ithas been for Jews and Judaism.

Since David made Jerusalem his capital and it became the site of his son Solomon’s Temple, Zion became the heart and soul of Jewish national and religious existence. Jews from all over the early Diaspora made their pilgrimages and sent offerings to its Temple. “By the Rivers of Babylon we wept…” and “If I forget thee O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning…” were just a few of the many Biblical expressions of the Jews for Zion.

Such yearning persisted throughout subsequent millennia in the Diaspora as well. “Next Year in Jerusalem” sustained the Jew throughout countless degradations, massacres, and humiliations culminating in the Holocaust.

There is no Muslim parallel to these claims, regardless of efforts to portray Palestinian Arabs (most of whom were new arrivals in the land themselves) as the new Jews. Jews, from a hundred different lands, did not have almost two dozen other states to potentially choose from and suffered dearly for this statelessness. Most Muslim Arabs demand sole rights over Jerusalem the same way they demand sole rights over Tel Aviv: In their eyes, only they have legitimate political rights anywhere in what they consider to be “purely Arab patrimony” and regard as part of the Dar ul-Islam as a result of the earlier Arab imperial conquests mentioned above.

Regardless of whatever theology one clings to, Jesus’ historical experiences in Roman-occupied Judea and Jerusalem were those of a Jew living under very precarious conditions. Thousands of his countrymen had already been killed, crucified, etc. in the subjugation/pacification process. The contemporary Roman and Roman-sponsored historians themselves–Tacitus, Josephus, Dio Cassius, etc.–had much to say about all of this. Consider just this one telling quote from Tacitus…

“Vespasian succeeded to the throne…it infuriated his resentment that the Jews were the only nation who had not yet submitted.”

These oppressive conditions led to open revolts and guerilla warfare by the Jews to rid the land of its mighty pagan conqueror–wars which would eventually lead the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, to rename the land itself from Judaea to Syria Palaestina (Palestine) in 135 C.E. in an attempt to stamp out any remaining hopes for Jewish independence and national existence. Judaea was thus renamed after the Jews’ historic enemies, the Philistines, a non-Arab, non-Semitic sea people from the eastern Mediterranean or Aegean region, to drive home the point.

For a modern analogy, imagine little Latvia as it was engulfed by the Soviet Union in the latter’s heyday of power. Or a Hungarian freedom fighter or Greek partisan taking on the Soviets or the Nazis. Think of the sympathy and admiration normally given to such situations…

Now contrast this with the treatment Jews received over the ages for longing for this same freedom and dignity. Whatever Jesus did or did not mean in his alleged statement, “render unto Caesar…,” this passage and others in the New Testament have been used to belittle this same desire for freedom and independence among the Jews.

Judaea Capta (not Palaestina Capta) coins were issued, and the towering Arch of Titus in Rome was erected after the first major revolt in 70 C.E. and shows, among other things, the Romans carrying away the giant Menorah and other objects from the Jewish Temple that at least many if not most Arabs and other Muslims claim never existed. It stands in Rome to this very day to commemorate Rome’s victory over the Jews and Jewish Jerusalem.

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-politcal claims.

It is from the Temple Mount 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 Arab imperial conquest of the land in the 7th century C.E.

There is no doubt among objective scholars that Jews had an enormous impact on both Muhammad and the religion that he founded. The holy sites for Muslims in Jerusalem (i.e. the mosques erected on the Temple Mount of the Jews) are now deemed holy 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 Holy Law (Halakha) and Holy Scriptures of the Jews had a tremendous influence on the Koran, Islamic Holy Law (Shari’a), etc. Muhammad’s Jerusalem connection was most likely not established until after his extended stay with his Jewish hosts. This was no mere coincidence…Muslim religious beliefs regarding Muhammad’s conversations with the Angel Gabriel 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. To say that Jerusalem has the same meaning for Muslims as it has for Jews is simply to tell a lie.

In modern times, Jews constituted the majority of Jerusalem’s population from 1840 onwards. When Jordanian Arabs–whose nation itself was formed from 80% of the original mandate for Palestine issued to Britain on April 25, 1920–seized East Jerusalem after their invasion of reborn Israel in 1948, they destroyed dozens of synagogues and thousands of Jewish graves, using tombstones to pave roads, build latrines, and so forth.

When the Jews were denied access to their holy sites for almost two decades, the whole world remained silent. After Israel was forced to fight a defensive war in 1967 due to its being blockaded by Egypt’s Nasser at the Straits of Tiran (a casus belli) and other hostile acts, Jerusalem became reunited. Access to all peoples and faiths subsequently became unhindered. It was at this moment that much of the world next chose to rediscover Jerusalem…demanding its redivision, internationalization, and so forth. Now there is “justice’ for you! Sickening…but, unfortunately, not really shocking or unexpected in the Jewish experience.

For centuries, Jews were forcibly converted and/or expelled, massacred, humiliated, demonized, inquisitioned, ghettoized, declared the “deicide people,” etc., to one extent or another, in both the Muslim East (where they were known as kilab yahud–Jew dogs) as well as the Christian West. They are determined that their rights in the sole capital of the sole, microscopic, reborn state that they possess will not be sacrificed on behalf of any would-be 22nd state (and 2nd, not first, Arab one in “Palestine”) created for Arabs.

As President Obama gets ready to take office, let’s hope he keeps such things in mind when the topic of the Arab-Jewish conflict in the Middle East soon resurfaces–as it surely will.

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I Hate To Say I Told You So...McCain Vs. Obama

I Hate To Say I Told You So…
by Gerald A. Honigman

But I told you so.

Writing as a former registered Democrat now Independent who saw problems with both mainstream political parties’ real and perceived positions, I penned several articles prior to the election warning Republicans of the mess they’d find themselves in if they persisted in catering primarily to their ultra-conservative base.

Being a student of the ‘60s, I was part of the infectious zeal for change that swept across university campuses…Real change--but reasonable change. So, definitely putting it mildly, there was no love lost between radical SDS-types and myself.

Such zeal--indebted to earlier groundwork by cherished mentors--gave rise in the next decade to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, more effective (but still too loose) rules governing the use of dangerous pesticides (FIFRA), the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and its various offshoots, the first serious movement towards the development of alternative energy sources, etc. and so forth. That our nation’s rivers and water sources are much cleaner today than they were before--as just one example--is a result of this zeal…and our children are much better for it, regardless of those who still wish to put smiley faces on dioxin canisters.

I will always be proud to have been part of this movement to turn us into better stewards of this world in which G_d blessed us to live.

As a science teacher going on three decades now, I have taught these lessons to thousands of students …taught, not preached. For me that means looking at issues from different angles, yet not shying away from the bottom line. If we waited for 100% conclusive evidence for practically anything before we acted to prevent potential problems, we’d all be in much deeper trouble.

Forget about anti-smoking actions to protect our kids, as just one example. Think about what just that one industry did to protect its own selfish interests at all others’ expense for decades.

If additional errors are to be made (and they will be) after too long of an era of gross and greedy actions, let them be on the side of caution. Once persistent carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic man-made chemicals are unleashed into ecosystems to work their way up assorted food chains, there’s no issuing a recall. And those type of short-sighted, greed-centered actions were done a plenty in the past--especially during the last century. I like to explain this to students as putting into practice being a part of--not apart from--the world in which we live.

A close friend of mine and I fight like cats and dogs over these issues. He won’t want to hear this but, whether he’s right or wrong (he’s wrong), his position is nevertheless precisely why Republicans got trounced in the recent elections.

In Sarah And The Wolves, I warned Republicans of the dangers of downplaying environmental and ecological concerns--so important to millions of newly-registered college students, Independents like me, and so forth. I also reminded them that Teddy Roosevelt--one of the true fathers of America’s modern conservation movement and friend and wilderness companion of John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club--was a Republican. Conservative and conservation should not just sound alike…

I must have received a dozen e-mails and brochures from various organizations warning against Sarah Palin’s alleged war against wolves, polar bears, beluga whales, and such. Sarah And The Wolves was my warning that Republicans were once again sending the wrong message to millions of voters for whom such issues had indeed become very important.

What’s even more pathetic is that Senator McCain is not oblivious to all of this. He opposed drilling in ANWR, is not an oil man like some other executive folks we know, and Giuliani, Lieberman, Schwarzenegger, and so forth are his associates. In other words, he’s no unreasonable right wing kook.

The problem thus became a sin of omission not commission.

Not wanting to alienate even further his already alienated ultra conservative base, McCain basically remained silent on the above concerns at the same time that Palin (whom I basically like) was advocating such things as the slaughter of wolves in the only state where they still remained in a natural balance with prey populations and not endangered.

While some still laugh at and belittle such concerns, ecological and environmental issues indeed rank very high with millions of others…especially young, newly-registered, and Democrat-targeted voters.

True, the economic mess couldn’t have erupted at a worse time, but McCain--more than any other Republican--had enough of a well-earned reputation both on national security issues and as a maverick to perhaps have weathered even this storm given all of the nasty, negative skeletons Obama has in his own closet. But added to two unpopular wars and the turmoil in the economy were these other worrisome issues--so the scales tipped beyond repair.

Surpassing the attacks Democrats capitalized big time on regarding ecological and environmental concerns was even a more divisive issue they scared millions on. I wrote about this in another pre-election piece, the A-word (Sweeping It Under The Rug…).

While I’m no fan of abortion and certainly don’t advocate it as a means of birth control, numerous newly-registered young women (and men) were led to believe that a McCain-Palin victory would bring back the days of butchers with coat hangers in back alleys. McCain, again, expended far too little effort to mitigate this perceived problem in order to appease his already distant, non-compromising base.

As it turned out, the economic mess sealed the Republican coffin anyway. But imagine a scenario which actually existed a few months earlier.

What a shame it would have been in that potentially much closer election to have lost it for reasons such as those described above.

There is one truth that Republicans better quickly wise up to…

They now face, as in the ‘60s, a charged electorate with new faces and multiple agendas. And at least some of those agendas represent issues which deserve the support from any would-be occupant of the White House.

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The Real Problem With The Obama-Khalidi Connection

Tales From The Inside…The Real Problem With Obama’s Khalidi

by Gerald A. Honigman

This is the weekend when Americans set clocks back an hour for daylight savings time.

Thus, I guess it’s only fitting that, given all the current fuss about the Los Angeles Times’s refusal to make public even a transcript of Senator Obama’s love fest with Professor Rashid Khalidi and his ilk (no doubt, Jews included), I’ll turn the clock back as well…but almost three decades.

You see, Fox News means well, and while most of the mainstream media in general is either ignoring the story or downplaying it, Fox--and even the McCain people themselves--miss the real problem.

It’s not that Obama indeed has far too many friends, advisors, admirers, and so forth who are anti-Semites and/or anti-Zionists (not that there’s really a difference--one deliberately targets Jews for “special treatment,” the other, in a post-Holocaust world, carefully revises the target to the Jew of the Nations), it’s that those folks demand that all others see justice only through their own eyes. While I was a doctoral student decades ago, this problem was already well under way.

Having to be employed full time for financial reasons while doing my earlier, nicely progressing doctoral work at the Kevorkian Center For Near Eastern Studies, a consortium of Princeton, Columbia, and New York Universities based at NYU in the ‘70s, my bread and butter job later required a move to the Midwest. As hindsight is always the best sight, I realized later how huge a mistake that was…especially in those days. The Kevorkian has since gone the way of Khalidi’s Columbia and too many other Middle Eastern Studies programs today.


Part of my Columbus-based job involved guest lecturing at dozens of universities and colleges across a multi-state region to try to minimally balance resident anti-Israel professors. The Mid East Studies Association was already hijacked by Khalidi’s buddies, and the only Jews that got/get ahead were/are those who out-Arab the Arabs in their hatred and vilification of Israel. In age when budgets were tightening, all remembered who buttered their own bread as well…and this undoubtedly affected what was and wasn’t presented to students in the classroom. Mucho bucks have been donated to such programs via the Arab petro-spigot.

To simply get a somewhat fair--not “pro-Zionist"--hearing about Israel, students are usually forced to take courses offered by the resident Jewish Studies Department. And, as should be the case--but in stark contrast to what will be described below--they will get an honest appraisal of the imperfectly human quest of a resurrected Jewish nationalism.

Let me present just a few personal examples…

Having been invited to be one of several presenters at a Columbus Citizen-Journal-sponsored event before hundreds of people on the Middle East regarding American foreign policy considerations in the region, I prepared accordingly.

As I was slated to be the last to present, I listened carefully to the others, but when I heard an Ohio State University professor switch gears to present about how those nasty Zionists stole poor Arabs’ land--Obama’s friend Khalidi’s same line--I had no choice. I tore up my presentation, threw it into the air, and unleashed both barrels in response.

After the presentation, I was approached by another professor who introduced himself as a representative of OSU’s Middle Eastern Studies program. After a chat about where I did my earlier studies, he asked me if I’d consider resurrecting my doctoral work. I laughed and asked him if he had heard what I heard coming out of the mouth of his colleague. Why would I put my fate into such an academic program’s one-sided hands?

I was assured that there were others at OSU who could serve as my Ph.D. dissertation advisor. On that note, while still working full time, I reentered academia.

Not wanting to drag this painful tale of woe out, let me just say that my initial gut reaction proved to be all-too-correct.

The tenured chief honcho who covered the modern Middle East certainly knew who buttered his bread…and into his hands I was placed.

While teaching advanced classes on Arab-Israel themes, he never once mentioned such things as Britain’s Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill’s crucial Cairo Conference of 1921. It was that Conference which led to gift of almost 80% of the original 1920 territory of the Mandate of Palestine to Arab nationalism in 1922 with the creation of what would later be renamed Jordan. And the latter fact was never mentioned as well…! This in a graduate studies class.

While also--but a bit more subtlety than Khalidi--promoting the theme of nasty Zionists and the need to create Arab state # 22 (2nd, not first, one in Palestine), Carter Findley never once mentioned the plight of over thirty million Kurds who remain stateless to date, who have been gassed and slaughtered by Arabs (and others as well), and who had their one best chance at statehood aborted by a collusion of British petroleum politics and Arab nationalism. My work on this subject can be found on the recommended reference list of Paris’s acclaimed Institut d’Etudes Politiques--Science Po. Indeed, the only time Findley ever mentioned Kurds at all was when he mocked their plight in Turkey.

To his credit, the other professor ( I was his T.A.) invited me to do a presentation to students on the Kurds. Notice, however, that he too wouldn’t touch this subject himself with a ten-foot pole. Afterwards, the Arabs in class caused such a commotion that I caught hell for merely presenting the plight of another non-Arab people--besides Jews--who were seeking a tiny slice of justice in a region proclaimed by Arabs to be purely Arab patrimony. The Arab genocide against blacks in the Sudan, subjugation and murder of Copts, Assyrians, Berbers, and so forth were going on back then as well…and, again, not a peep out the Findleys, Khalidis, and their brother Hebrew hypocrites over any of this.

As just one last personal example of the problem Obama’s Khalidi-type friends and advisors present, let me return to Findley’s graduate seminars again.

I’ll never forget one woman who I’m sure has a great position at some university today. I can’t think of her name, but I do remember her well.

Her idol was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who spent World War II in Berlin at Hitler’s side and organized a division of Muslim Nazis, “the Hanzar.” He also played a first-hand role in instigating the genocide of Europe’s Jews, Serbs and Gypsies. After World War II, he actively recruited Nazi officers into Arab governments of the Middle East.

When she presented her research on the Mufti at our doctoral seminar, all the above was either white-washed or ignored altogether…and Findley, of course--her mentor and featured guest at her wedding--sat through it all approvingly.

Now, contrast this with my own research about Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky…the man most responsible in the early Mandate era for Jewish defense against Arab slaughter. Findley had no problem emphasizing his alleged “fascist connections.”

When it came time for me to prepare for the last leg of my doctoral work, guess who was denied a dissertation advisor? So much for that other professor’s earlier assurance that not all teachers were of the same “persuasion” of the one whom I shared a stage with that night in Columbus. Wasted time, thousands of dollars, etc…Left hanging in the wind, we moved to Florida not long afterwards.

The above is too often the story on campus these days as well.

A little bit of good news is that now there are at least some watch dog organizations and endeavors like Professor Daniel Pipes’s Campus Watch and David Horowitz‘s Academic Bill of Rights. Still, academia largely proceeds full speed ahead, intimidating all who dare to disagree and dismissing critics simply as right wing fanatics.

Israel continues to thus be placed under the high power lens of moral scrutiny by academic practitioners of the double standard, and woe unto all who beg to differ.

So, my friends, the above is the real problem with Osama’s Khalidi-type friends and associates.

Being “pro-Arab” is not the concern--as Fox, meaning well, has nevertheless presented the case.

The problem has always been that for Arabs, anyone who claims that scores of millions of non-Arabs (whom Arabs once conquered during their own imperialist expansions) also deserve a slice of the justice pie in the region is by definition anti-Arab. There is no justice other than Arab justice.

Whether Obama’s alleged statement about Israel’s “genocide” against Palestinians (Arabs by another name--most of whom came from elsewhere) and other gems reported to be on that unreleased LA Times video tape are true or not, Obama’s admiration, association, and so forth of, by, or with the likes of Farrakhan, Rezko, Khalidi, Wright, Jackson, Brzezinski, Mr. “Apartheid Israel” Peanut, Malley, Soros, McPeak, Khalid Al Mansour, etc. and so forth have to be beyond coincidental.

And this should be the cause of real concern--even for those all-too-many let’s jump onto the cattle cars for relocation again Jews.

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