Alan Dershowitz has a fine essay on Palestinian statehood. I disagree with Dershowitz on many things, but he's consistently right on Islamism (and on freedom of speech).
Excerpt:
The Palestinian political movement is a terrorist cabal. Under no circumstances should this sick culture get statehood-- Palestinians have never been a state (even under the Ottoman Empire for centuries), and to reward the pioneers in 20th century terror and anti-semitism with nationhood would be an error on a par with the Munich accords with Hitler.
It's noteworthy, as Dershowitz points out, that the modern Palestinian movement passed through the Wolf's Lair.
Excerpt:
Palestinian terrorism has a decades-long pedigree that far predates Israel's nationhood. In 1929, Haj Amin al Husseini--the grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the official leader of the Palestinian people--ordered his followers to murder hundreds of elderly Jews in Hebron and other cities and towns where Jews had lived for millennia.
During World War II, Husseini moved to Berlin where he met with Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann. At Eichmann's trial for war crimes in 1961, it came out that Husseini had personally prevented nearly 1,000 Hungarian-Jewish children from being sent to neutral countries. Instead he insisted that they be sent to Auschwitz, where they died.
In 1948, Palestinians refused to accept the compromise two-state solution proposed by the U.N., and instead they engaged in the Arab states' genocidal war in which 1% of Israel's population, including many civilians, were killed.
In 1968, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, educated to hate anything associated with Jews or Israel, assassinated New York Sen. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. Five years later, Palestine Liberation Organization head Yasser Arafat arranged to have three American diplomats kidnapped and offered in exchange for Kennedy's assassin. When the U.S. refused to release Sirhan, Arafat personally ordered the torture and murder of the Americans.
In 1972, Arafat ordered the terrorist attack on the Olympics in which several Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered. There followed decades of airplane hijackings, synagogue bombings and other attacks that attracted the attention of the world. These attacks continue, the most recent being this week's killing of Egyptian soldiers near the border with Israel, apparently carried out with the complicity of Palestinian terrorists from Gaza.
Rather than condemn this pervasive violence, the U.N. has done everything in its power to reward it, including devoting special agencies entirely to Palestinians and their cause...
The Palestinian political movement is a terrorist cabal. Under no circumstances should this sick culture get statehood-- Palestinians have never been a state (even under the Ottoman Empire for centuries), and to reward the pioneers in 20th century terror and anti-semitism with nationhood would be an error on a par with the Munich accords with Hitler.
It's noteworthy, as Dershowitz points out, that the modern Palestinian movement passed through the Wolf's Lair.
I am not going to comment on the validity of the entire argument: the Middle East is a tangled mess and people have differing and strong opinions on that. However, one part of this argument is not particularly convincing, namely that "Palestinians have never been a state (even under the Ottoman Empire for centuries)."
ReplyDeleteApply that to the American colonies ca. 1776 to see what I mean.
The claims of the Palestinians and the American colonists are utterly incommensurable.
ReplyDeleteThe American colonists never claimed statehood based on having lived in North America "for centuries".
The Palestinians' claim to statehood is as valid as a claim to statehood for the Mississippi Valley or Appalachia. Which is, obviously, risible on its face.