A Tale Of Two Nakbas

Is a victim any less a victim because his tragedy has been the longest enduring?

There has certainly been much suffering in this world, and I don't mean to downplay any of it. But, in light of what Arabs accuse Israel of today--and the rest of the world's apparent lapse of memory--it's time to put some things into a much broader perspective.

Listening to news coming out of the Middle East, it's nearly impossible to hear reports about terrorist atrocities against Israeli civilians without also hearing some journalist justifying them in the name of alleged Arab grievances. Richard Cohen, Nicholas Kristof, and others have written that the Arabs have been given "no alternatives." Things are even worse outside of America.

So, when Israel carefully targets the deliberate murderers of women, children, and other innocents--as exemplified in the aftermath of what typically happens after the bombing of an Israeli bus or restaurant--this somehow becomes equated with the next Arab revenge attack against additional Israeli civilians. Furthermore, few and far between are the journalists who even call such Arab acts of barbarity "terrorism."

When Israel puts its sons in danger by going house-to-house in hunting terrorists in their strongholds to purposely avoid civilian casualties, it gets accused of massacres anyway, while the real massacres--deliberately committed against Jewish civilians both in Israel and elsewhere--are virtually ignored. When faced with their own "problems," Arabs have gassed, bombed, and shelled their enemies from afar--a la Assad's Hama Solution in Syria, Saddam's gassing of Kurds in Iraq, Hussein's 'Black September' in Jordan, etc... and with no calls for investigations by the United Nations or trials in Geneva either.

That Arabs consider the rebirth of Israel a catastrophe -- their nakba--is, in reality, merely par for the course. Having conquered and forcibly Arabized millions of non-Arab peoples and their lands in creating most of the twenty-two states they now possess on millions of square miles of territory, at no time did Arabs ever consider that anyone else but themselves had any political rights in the region. This was so when what was promised to become an independent Kurdistan after World War I was turned into Arab Iraq instead (due mostly to the collusion of British petroleum politics with Arab nationalism). Thirty million Kurds thus remain stateless to date.... often at someone else's mercy. And there's still no roadmap for them.

Millions of Berbers in North Africa resisted the Arab onslaught for centuries. Their language and culture are largely outlawed today. Millions in Black Africa have died resisting this forced Arabization as well. The fight goes on in the Sudan as this piece is being written, with millions of Blacks having been killed, maimed, enslaved, turned into refugees and the like.

You see, in Arab eyes, theirs is the only justice.    Continued

Copyright ©2005-2008 Gerald A. Honigman

Sean Hannity, 4/14/05
Justice: For Arabs Only?