Henry Siegman is an Idiot
Less than two weeks before Israel's declaration of
independence, fighters from the Haganah, the
Jewish underground, walk proudly through the
streets on May 5, 1948, in Tel Aviv.
Photo Credit: NationalPost
First let me tell you that Henry Siegman is the director of the US Middle East Project in New York, a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London, an idiot, a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America and he hates Israel. Hating Israel does not make him an idiot. Saying idiotic things makes him an idiot.
There are many self-loathing Jews who want the world to see them as oh-so tolerant of others that they gleefully take the side of murderous thugs and monsters; nothing makes a self-loathing Jew look so fair and equitable as bashing Israel. In 1933 this would have been the same Jew that would have extolled the virtues of Adolph Hitler and would have been telling the world that they got the guy all wrong, that those are pizza ovens he's installing in the camps.
I've come across a few Jew-hating sites that have used the following article of his as proof that Israel is the terrorist and Hamas is the poor defenseless, innocent party:
London Review of Books, Israel’s Lies
Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.
I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.
Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie.
Let me take just one allegation: that it's a lie that Hamas is a terrorist organisation. What words can one use to counter an argument like this? Suppose you met a fellow who adamantly insisted that the world was flat; do you think showing him scientific evidence, charts, or maps would convince him of his error? No, he would already have a canned response to each of your so-called proofs.
And so it is with Herr Siegman. He knows that Hamas' charter demands that Israel be totally destroyed (1) but his canned response? "While Hamas’s ideology formally calls for that state to be established on the ruins of the state of Israel, this doesn’t determine Hamas’s actual policies today any more than the same declaration in the PLO charter determined Fatah’s actions."
Hamas may one day have a change of heart. Ah, yes, hope springs eternal in the human breast. Unfortunately Siegman is assuming that we're dealing with a species similar to our own.
Despite his earlier assertion that Hamas is not a terrorist organization what Siegman is really saying is "Hamas is no more a ‘terror organisation’ (Israel’s preferred term) than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish homeland." Well, under that logic al Qaeda is no more a terror organization than the US military during its struggle against Germany when it carpet bombed German cities killing more civilians in one day than all the Arabs killed by Jews since 1900. Shouldn't it matter what precipitated the US attacks against those cities? Or are we now so opposed to war that there is no excuse for defending oneself?
The Real Problem in the Middle East
If Jews and Arabs were little children and adults saw them fighting over a toy we could easily see how the problem should be solved. First we ask Ahmed what's the problem:
Ahmed: "I want Jewboy's toy."
Then we ask Moishe what's the problem:
Moishe: "Ahmed has 57 toys and a toy chest that is 167 times bigger than mine. This is not only my toy, it's my only toy in the whole world, it's a toy that my great-great-great-great-great grandfather gave to me. It's a toy that 1400 years ago was stolen by Ahmed's people."
The solution would be simple: "Ahmed, you have 57 toys to play with - let Moishe play with the only toy he has in the whole world."
In all of the lands of the Arabs there is no room for one Palestinian. Saudi Arabia alone is 100 times bigger than Israel, but that gracious kingdom cannot accept one Palestinian refugee. Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, all of Israel's neighbors cannot accept one Palestinian child. That's right. Have you ever noticed that when one speaks of Palestinians outside of Israel, they are all living in tent cities and are refugees? No Arab country will accept them. And yet they expect Israel to take them in!
I have no doubt that if I were living in a refugee camp for 25 years and my father before me lived in a refugee camp for 25 years I too would be pissed as hell. But if I had half a brain I would be asking my Muslim cousins why they have kept my family in refugee camps as political pawns for more than two generations.
Arabs Created the Palestinian Refugee Problem
This is not a problem with Israel. Certainly Israel accepted more than 750,000 Jewish refugees that were expelled by the Arabs. They did not keep them in refugee camps for decade upon decade so that they could be displayed to the world, "Oh look at these poor Jews, they were kicked out by Arabs and have no place to live, boo hoo." No, Israel did the right thing and took in their own people. Arabs could have done the same, but they did not. The truth is that Arabs cannot stand one another and if it weren't for Israel there would be no unity among Arabs at all.
The Palestinian problem is an Arab problem made worse for Arabs by Arabs. One should note that there are no movements in Israel for any dispossessed people to return to say, Yemen, and fight an insurgency for a return of their lands. Know why? Because they found jobs, schools, and a life in Israel. They gave up and forgot about all they had in their former homelands. Arabs that call themselves Palestinians would not be fighting Israel today if Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt has simply let those refugees come in, make a living, go to school, have a life.
The Israeli-Arab wars are the fault of Arabs. And the conflict cannot be solved by Russia, China, Europe or the United States. Arabs must absorb their cousins and let them live lives just as Jews expelled from Arab lands found lives in Israel. There is no other solution. Well, I ignore the other solution because it sounds of genocide.
ENDNOTES
Mideast Web Historical Documents, Hamas Charter
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
"The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. "
"There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
"After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying."
