‘Washington’s enabling alliance with Israel may be the biggest element in the Arab and Muslim anger, hatred and despair which are focussed on America.’ (BBC correspondent Jim Muir – 19/9/01)


‘If Americans really want to understand why Americans might have been targeted for catastrophe in New York and Washington, we can no longer ignore the fact that we are helping the Israeli military and police to out kill Palestinians by more than a 3 to 1 ratio.’ (Derrick Jackson ‘The Boston Globe’ 21/9/01)

Putting the blame on Israel has given us an easy answer to the problem. Let America disengage from Israel, let Israel accept the demands of the Arab / Muslim world and we in the West will be delivered from the terrorist threat. Islam will be revealed as the compassionate tolerant religion our leaders keep telling us it is and there will be peace and safety once more.





Here are some points in response to this:

Palestinians instigate nearly 100% of the violence, going to Israeli installations and checkpoints to riot and shoot, gunning down Israeli men, women and children in their cars, and blowing themselves up among Israelis in cafes. Virtually the whole world has accepted America’s right to go after the terrorists responsible for the atrocity of September 11th in self-defence. Why should this right not be accepted for Israel?


The official Palestinian media and textbooks have indoctrinated the population with torrents of anti-Jewish hatred, spurring the inflamed public on to violence. The most extreme examples come from Islamic leaders: "We the Palestinian nation, our fate from Allah is to be the vanguard in the war against the Jews until the resurrection of the dead, as the prophet Muhammad said: "'The resurrection of the dead will not arrive until you will fight the Jews and kill them.”- - Dr. Muhammad Ibrahim Madi, Palestinian Television, 30/3/01.


Israel offered a peaceful solution to the conflict under former Prime Minister Barak. For the terms of this agreement and the reasons for its failure see our briefing paper for January 1st 2001, ‘Why No Peace?’ The main reason for its failure was the rejection by Arafat and the Palestine Authority and their adoption of violence as a means to impose their will on Israel.


The record of the PLO has been consistently to back terror regimes opposed to the West and to Israel. Former Israeli liaison to the U.S. Congress Yoram Ettinger made a succinct case this week showing that the formation of a Palestinian state would not be in the best American interest. "The PLO's track record," he writes, "suggests that a PLO state would have bolstered Saddam since 1990; aligned itself with Iran; doomed Jordan during the 1970 Syrian invasion; threatened Kuwait and other Persian Gulf Sheikhdoms; become the prime training ground for international terrorists; provided Russia and China with another Middle East platform; been the most corrupt and oppressive regime in the region; and utilized its initial territory as a springboard to establish a narco-terrorist state from Iraq to the Mediterranean."


Bin Laden himself has said that the main reason for his campaign against the USA is not its policy on Israel but the ‘blasphemous presence’ of Americans stationed on Saudi soil. If it is right for America to change its policy towards Israel in order to save us from terrorism, it is also right to take US troops out of Saudi Arabia and leave that country to defend itself against Iraq and its own militants.


The major problem of the Middle East is that all the regimes of the Arab world and beyond are dictatorships of varying degrees of brutality. Whipping up hatred of Israel has been vital to the survival of these dictatorships by focussing the anger of the population on Israel and the USA rather than on the corruption of their own rulers. The more perceptive commentators from within the Arab / Muslim world are recognising this. Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, writes in The Observer (7/10/01): ‘Attribution of all the ills of one’s own world to either the great Satan, America, or the little Satan, Israel, has been the driving force of Arab politics since 1967. As a powerful undercurrent of Arab culture and politics, it has been around much longer than that. After 1967, however it became the legitimising cement upon which such murderous regimes as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were built.’ Fareed Zakaria has written a brilliant article in Newsweek, reproduced in the Sunday Times (14/10/01) in which he shows how Islamic fundamentalism has come out of the failure of the Arab world to produce a free and creative society: ‘If there is one great cause of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism it is the total failure of political institutions in the Arab world. Muslim elites have averted their eyes from this reality. As the moderate majority looks the other way, Islam is being taken over by a small poisonous element, people who advocate cruel attitudes towards women, education, the economy and modern life in general. I have seen this happen in India, where I grew up. The rich, colourful easy going Islam of my youth has turned into a dour, puritanical faith, policed by petty theocrats and religious commissars. If the Muslims do not take it upon themselves to stop their religion from falling prey to medievalists, nothing any outsider can do will save them.’


Following on from this it is worth pointing out that Bin Laden’s terrorist network is made up largely of disillusioned Arabs who have inflicted the Taleban terror regime on Afghanistan, and earned the loathing of most ordinary Afghans. Israel is not to blame for the fact that women can neither work nor even appear in public in that benighted land. Bin Laden and the terrorist network he supports is.


It is not just Israel that is in the firing line of Muslim hostility. All over the Muslim world minorities are facing discrimination and persecution. Many of these are Christians who feel betrayed and abandoned by the western world, which seems prepared to sacrifice them to their persecutors. If Islam is really the peaceful and tolerant religion which Tony Blair, Prince Charles, the BBC and most of the leaders of the West want to convince us it is, then let the Muslims show this by taking steps to stop the violence being meted out by Muslims against Christians and other minorities throughout the Middle East and in countries like Pakistan, Nigeria, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Sonia,

You have not mentioned the crux of the issue. how did an Arab Land suddenly have a jewish majority overnight? You are deluding yourself and your fellow jews by not accepting the fact that Israel is a nation created through ethnic cleansing. It is sustained through a racist ideology bent on artificially keeping a jewish majority, even if justice and peace be damned.

The people who started this creation did not really realise that it is not a sustainable model. 5 million jews surrounded on 3 sides by 240 million Arabs.

It is not only desirable that such a state comes to an end, it is utterly inevitable. In 300 years, Israel like the christian crusader state before it, will be a mere blip in the history of the holy land.

Sonia

Thank you for an intellectually rigorous and sensible critique of this appalling argument above. If we don't take these liars and medievalists on, they will be free to drivel out the same nonsense on and on. I have just returned from a recent visit to Israel and the West Bank and found far less poverty and misery in Bethlehem than in most of the Arab world. So, much for a brutal occupation eh? On the 58th anniversary of Israel's creation, we should also be remembering the fact that Palestinians are really former East Bank Jordanians who had no misgivings about living under Jordanian rule, that 50% were thrown out of their homes by the Arab armies (not the Israelis) and that under Olmert's unilateral plan, they will receive all of Gaza, plus 58% of the West Bank. That's more than the jews were originally offered in 1948 and 100% more than East German refugess were ever offered after the 1945 expulsions.

This article is not even worth reading beyond the second paragraph. The Zionists accepted the UN partition, the Arabs did not. We can make good reason as to why they did not, but then to complain that the Zionists did not abide by a partition which had been rejected by the Arabs is just a nonsense.

The delusions, conspiracy theories and ridiculous distortions of history are the worst enemies of the Palestinian. Those Muslims who inject hate-filled anti-semitic ranting into the debate just undermine the Palestinian cause and discredit the Ummah.

Akram: you seem to forget that what was once a Byzantine and, prior to that, a Jewish state became an Arab Muslim land through military conquest. All imperialisms are equally savage, brutal and racist. An Arab Muslim imperialism is destined for the dust-bin of history as surely as the Ottoman Empire, the British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Russian and Chinese Empires.

The issue of ethnic cleansing in 1948 is a complex one and there is no simple explanation. In some areas it is clear that the Zionists forced people out at gun point, in others the inhabitants fled at the presence of the Zionist troops, in others they panicked after Deir Yassin, in others they departed despite the Zionists asking them to stay. Yet in other areas no one left at at all and they remained where they were unmolested by the Zionists.
Certainly for the most part the Zionists were not unhappy about this development as it removed an internal threat to their rear. But to accuse them of ethnic cleansing as though it was an integral part of their policy is misleading, it was ceratinly nothing like Bosnia with vast massacres.
Figures like Saeb Erakat have acknowledged that Palestinian propoganda efforts back-fired and caused panic, especially the exageration of the Deir Yassin massacre. There are also claims on both sides that Arab propoganda urged the population to clear the area to allow the Arab armies to operate freely against the Zionists.
Jews had become a sizeable minority at least due to land sales by the notables to the Zionists and that the British allowed them in for a period. In some distinct areas like Jerusalem Jews were already the majority group by the middle of the 19th Century, and an absolute majority by its end two decades before the Mandate.
While we may argue about the nature of the Nakhba and the degree to which the Zionists sought the eradication of the non-Jewish population. We cannot contest the fact that Jews were totally cleared from Arab held land at the end of the 1948 war, regardless of their support ( or lack of it) for Zionism or the length of their presence in that area. Although the numbers of Jews driven out are significantly less than those of non-Jews from what became Israel, the intention to carry out ethnic cleansing by the Palestinian leadership is clear.
It is also an uncomfortable fact that the Palestinians were replaced by Arab Jews expelled from Arab lands in virtually equal number for no other reason than they were Jews.
I suggest that neither side can claim the moral high ground and we would do well to admit culpability for our own actions before accusing others.
In a final note, following the Oslo agreement Israel agreed to compensate Palestinians for their losses from the Nakhba on the proviso that Arab states also compensated the Jews that were expelled. The Arab states responded that the world community had to compensate the Arab Jews for any losses(even though generally the Arab states had asset stripped the Jews before their departure), and as a consequence the Palestinians are not able to be compensated under this proposal.

Does anyone else notice how most of the comments so far on this page (especially S. Benari, jay, Abdul Rahman and Sonia) are more balanced and reasonable than the actual article posted?

People must:

Accept that there will always be an Israel.
Accept that there will soon be a Palestine alongside it.

And then try to move onto another issue. It's sad to watch organizations trying to make the Palestinian question a fundamental pillar of Islam. Islam has five pillars, and "digging yourself into a hole over the Palestinian question" isn't one of them.

Has anyone noticed how many zionists post on this website under assumed Muslim names?

No - there is no point in assuming there will always be an 'Israel' as it's existence is dependent on (a) US largesse, (b) US power and (c) acceptance by neighbouring countries. (a) and (b) together cannot last forever. As soon as any of (a) and (b) are not true, that is the end of the racist Jewish state.

Has anyone noticed how many 'Muslims' post on this website under Hindu names?

It seems that Bilal Patel is a great Islamic scholar and anyone who disagrees with him is, by definition, not a Muslim.

Has anyone noticed ALL these mass murderers all post approximately the same time since their hatred & fundamentalism is not seen here for days on end? israel will go back to the sewer from where it came from, no-wonder they are flooding here to sponge off the West, especially the UK. The UN has NO right to partition any country, israelis are 90% E Europeans & cannot give their real names so that is why they false flag. What “history” do you have – NONE!!

Some of the posts here give me a slight hope that Arabs and non-Arabs may be able to solve their problems without the deaths of millions. If Muslims around the world are able to win the war they face with the medievalists within their own religion then they could quite literally stop world war four.

The conflict between Semite / Humanity vs. settler is THE cause of the worlds problems. Settlers consider Human beings to be below scum, its actions only prove this. Especially anyone with ANY knowledge will know how WW1 & 2 was a smokescreen for settlers to "claim" land that it has no genetic or otherwise connection to. These rabid fundamentalists are the SOLE cause of the world problems.