Tuesday, February 27, 2007

SERBIA AND ISRAEL: BOTH PLAYED LIKE A FIDDLE II

ADDENDUM 1.

Excerpt from Mark Pearlstein's Comment:

Alija Izetbegovic appointed the Muslim National Council (MNC) of Bosnia to achieve long-term aspirations, to create a Muslim state in the Balkans. This state would defend the Muslim interests throughout Yugoslavia, i.e. Sandzak, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Croatia, Serbia. "Rise brother Muslims, there are enough of us to accomplish our goals, whom the Muslim and those of Muslim blood will not betray. This time will never come again. Now is the opportunity to realize the dream of every Muslim" [quoted in Doc Center, 2002 from the Bosnian Muslim magazine VOX].

Among other objectives the MNC was working for were the creation of a Muslim state within the borders of present day B&H [Bosnia-Herzegovina] and formation of the Muslim Armed Forces.

In October 1991, the MNC defined its political platform:

"The day is nearing when the announced Islamic Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina will be proclaimed. The date, which every Muslim in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sandzak [Raska] is ardently waiting for has been known for a long time to be the 31st December. There are some indications that the Serbs might oppose this historic event...Every individual Serb must be aware of the responsibility of the entire nation, the penalty for crimes will be collective -- for one dead Muslim one hundred Serbs will be liquidated -- for one wounded Muslim (depending on the wound severity) 10-50 Serbs will be executed" [ibid].

The document further elaborates how the Serbs would be treated in the [Bosnian] Islamic Republic.

"All Serbs will have a 12-hour working day. The wages will be proportionate to the loyalty of all employees and as a rule they will be paid 30 percent less than the wages of Muslims whom occupy the same post ... Serbs will receive rations for food, which they will obtain in special shops. Serbs do not have national parties and if the do not abide by the rules of political life, they will not be entitled to political organization or to vote..Serbs are equal to Muslims if, of their own will, they are received into the Islamic faith of their forefathers... A good Serb is a living and obedient Serb or a dead, disobedient Serb" [ibid].

The presidency of the Association of the Islamic Clergy (Ilmia) for B&H [Bosnia-Herzegovina] offered in 1992 in huge print, run in annual Takvim, the following instruction for jihad:

"Jihad in Islam is not only a war in the name of Allah. In reality, Islam is a revolutionary ideology and program that aims at changing the social system of the whole world and order it in harmony with its regulations and ideals.
Islam wants to destroy all the states and governments anywhere on earth which stand opposed to the ideology and program of Islam, regardless of the state or the nation that is in power. The purpose of Islam is to establish the state based on its ideology and program, no matter which nation becomes the bearer of Islam or which nation is undermined in the process of establishing the ideological Islamic state" [ibid].

This magazine [Bosnian Muslim magazine Vox] bears a large measure of responsibility for spreading hatred against the Serbs.

In the first issues of this "youth magazine" the hatred was directed against the Serbs in Belgade and Serbia and subsequently the magazine started publishing threats and predicting more massacres of Serbs in B&H.

The same magazine published documents based on the ideas Izetbegovic presented in his "ISLAMIC DECLARATION"; DECLARATION OF THE SOVEREIGN REPUBLIC OF BOSNIA - HERZEGOVINA; POLITICAL PLATFORM OF THE MOSLEM NATIONAL COUNCIL; WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO SERBS IN THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF BOSNIA - HERZEGOVINA; AND OTHERS..." (From "The Eradication of Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1992-1993")

"Substantial and irrefutable evidence is increasingly becoming available to US intelligence and political agencies as to the extent of the connection between al-Qaida terrorist groups, narco-trafficking and the Kosovo Albanian leadership within Serbia. This was highlighted extensively in the 1995 book by Yossef Bodansky, Offensive in the Balkans: The Potential for a Wider War as a Result of Foreign Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina, published by the International Strategic Studies Association (ISSA), and the 1996 book by Yossef Bodansky, Some Call it Peace: Waiting for War in the Balkans, also published by ISSA. [ISSA is the non-profit organization associated with Defense & Foreign Affairs and the Global Information System.]

"Among the new material being circulated in Washington, DC, is a study compiled by the Documentation Center of the Republica Srpska Bureau of Relations with the International Tribunal for War Crimes in The Hague. The study, entitled Islamic Fundamentalists' Global Network-Modus Operandi: Model Bosnia, offers extensive new material detailing the linkages between al-Qaida and, for example, Bosnian Government officials, and how the al-Qaida cells operate in the area."

See also:

"Bosnian President [Alija Izetbegovic] - Ayatollah Khomeyni's Right Hand Man," July 15, 2003

Sir Alfred Sherman, "False Parallels," Jewish Chronicle, December 4, 1992

"Moderate Democrat or Radical Islamist? Who is Alija Izetbegovic, the man the US sponsored in Bosnia?" posted on Emperor's Clothes, (http://emperors-clothes.com/)

ADDENDUM 2.

Other articles that have appeared in IsraPundit on Kosovo are:

Ted Belman, "Jews and Israel Beware," January 30, 2006, IsraPundit, http://www.israpundit.com/2006/?p=3862. Includes readers' comments that add valuable information

Felix Quigley, "The US Government with NATO joins the Jihad on Kosovo!," February 5, 2007, IsraPundit http://www.israpundit.com/2006/?p=3905#comments. Includes readers' comments that add valuable information

Ted Belman is a Canadian lawyer and editor of the www.IsraPundit.com website

SERBIA AND ISRAEL: BOTH PLAYED LIKE A FIDDLE

by Ted Belman

I promised Francisco Gil-White that I would actually read his article "What really happened in Bosnia?", And so I did.

The comparisons of the destruction of Yugoslavia with the destruction of Israel are chilling and instructive.

The sub-title "Were the Serbs the criminal aggressors, as the official story claims, or were they the victims?" could equally be asked regarding Israel, "Are the Jews the criminal aggressors, as the world claims, or are they the victims?" He conclusively proves that


"Alija Izetbegovic, the leader of a minority Bosnian Muslim faction, the one that NATO supported, who wrote a book calling for the slaughter of infidels so that a Muslim takeover could install an Islamist theocracy in Bosnia."

was the villain of the piece. Yet western leaders, academics, UN, and media all supported him as a moderate (Shades of Mahmoud Abbas having a long history of terrorism to his credit yet the entire world claims him as a moderate.) and accused Milosovec as the "new Hitler" and prosecuted him of war crimes which they couldn't prove. They may even have killed him to end their embarrassment." (Compare to the world claiming Israel committed war crimes and its attempts to prosecute Israel's politicians and officers for same.)

He asks

"Isn't it more likely that the one killing innocent people in the 1990s was Izetbegovic, and not the Serbs? Yes. Consistent with this expectation, every allegation against the Serbs evaporates into nothing the minute one investigates. The overwhelming, crushing bulk of the evidence supports the view that in the Yugoslavian civil wars of the 1990s the Serbs behaved much like did in WWII, when they were the staunchest defenders of the persecuted Jews in all of Europe. The portrait that was painted of the Serbs in the 1990s as "the new Nazis" is not only false, it is absurd. For this reason, the lies we were told about the Bosnian Serbs (repeated to this day) have required spectacular hoaxes, (Jenin, al Durah, Qana to name similar lies about Israel's actions) knowingly perpetrated by the Western mass media."


Alija Izetbegovic


Izetbegovic was an Islamic fundamentalist so why did he get the following support from the west? (For that matter why do the PLO and Fatah get similar support?)

First, because NATO intervened politically and militarily for Izetbegovic. For example, former US Ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, admitted in congressional testimony that the U.S. gave Croatia the green light to violate international agreements by letting Iranian weapons reach Izetbegovic's army.[9]

The US also allied with Iran in order to import foreign mujahideen terrorists into Bosnia, and this was all coordinated directly by Pentagon intelligence.[10]

And NATO repeatedly and massively bombed the Bosnian Serbs, including with bombs encased in depleted uranium. The US and NATO backed Izetbegovic with destruction and death.[11]

Second, because if we are right to say that Izetbegovic was an Islamist fanatic, and that this was no secret in Yugoslavia, then the media lied systematically. It is difficult to explain such uniform media disinformation absent coordination by the covert services of Western powers. If we are right about Izetbegovic, then this constitutes evidence that the West has a controlled media.

Third, because if Izetbegovic's views were entirely misrepresented by politicians and the media, this is evidence that the U.S.-led Empire has a dual policy regarding Islamic fundamentalism, as we claim. The US invokes the threat of fundamentalist terror in order to excuse its military adventures, but - covertly - it also allies with and sponsors Islamic fundamentalists around the world." (How did the 'Palestinian movement' emerge? The British sponsored it. Then the German Nazis, and the US. -- http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov4.htm

Francisco Gil-White writes

"Emperor's Clothes and HIR have charged that, in Bosnia, the US and its NATO allies deliberately trained, financed, and politically supported a faction of Muslim fundamentalists whose goal was to create -- through violence -- a fascist-clerical state. This is what caused the Bosnian civil war.

Put bluntly, what happened is that NATO supported a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide against innocent Bosnian Serb civilians, and then NATO blamed the victims, as if they had been the ones carrying out a genocide.

He makes the case so compellingly that it is impossible for an open mind not to concur. Also the more we understand the Orwellian world Israel lives in, it is easier to accept such reality.

Izetbegovic executed


"a campaign of ethnic cleansing to rid Bosnia of non-Muslims, so that Muslims can be the majority, thence to establish the 'Islamic Order.'

Yet


"That will not sound like what you heard in the Western mainstream media,
because what was repeated there a million times was that the Bosnian Serbs were
supposedly the ones interested in ethnic cleansing, and that Alija Izetbegovic
was defending a multi-ethnic Bosnia."


Similarly, the Arabs want to take over Israel and make it Judenrein. Yet, the UN, the EU, the US elites and the mainstream media, support them. And they do this by claiming that Israelis are Nazis who are guilty of war crimes and intent on occupying Arab lands and imposing an apartheid system.


Genocides don't just happen. The people who commit them have to be incited, and this requires propaganda, which means speeches, newspaper articles, radio addresses, leaflets, books, rallies, etc. You cannot make any of that happen in a week. If you want to have a genocide by early 1992, you have to start preparing for it well before that. Adolf Hitler did not begin exterminating the Jews in 1933, when he took power, but several years later, when the preparatory propaganda work had been done, the political opposition had been destroyed, and the troops that would do the dirty work had been recruited, trained, and indoctrinated. So anybody who wants to believe that the Bosnian Serbs really were carrying out an "ethnic cleansing" campaign against their Muslim and Croat neighbors in early 1992 is practically forced to assert that in 1990 there already had to be at least some Bosnian Serb propaganda about ethnic cleansing against the Muslims and Croats, and probably a lot. And this is naturally the sort of thing that Bosnian Muslims and Croats would have heard about.

We are quite familiar with Muslim incitement and propaganda similar to that of the Nazis aimed at demonizing Israel and Jews and inciting Muslims to kill Jews and "wipe Israel off the map". But that is not enough. You must have storm troopers to impose conformity on your own people with terror.

Izetbegovic reconstituted the Handzar Division, made up mostly of imported (i.e. non-Bosnian) Muslim fighters from Kosovo, Albania, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Africa and other places.[15] This force was modeled after the original Nazi SS Handzar Division, which had been composed of thousands of Bosnian Muslims who volunteered for the Nazis in WWII to go hunt for Serbs, Jews, and Roma in Yugoslavia, and either slaughter them in their homes or send them to the Croatian concentration camp system known as Jasenovac.

Abbas and Haniyeh similarly have their storm troopers. Iran and S. Arabia each have a special police division to impose proper conformity to Islam. All this was known to the US, NATO and the EU. Yet it doesn't diminish their support for Palestinian plans. Orwell's newspeak works because

"when everybody repeats the same thing, people tend to believe it. Is it any wonder, then, that hapless Western news consumers learned to think of Izetbegovic and Co. (and the "Palestinians") as 'the good guys' and of the Bosnian Serbs and Israeli Jews as 'the (separatist) (apartheid) bad guys'?

One of the central issues in the Israel/Arab conflict is entitlement or ownership of the land. Or who is entitled to sovereignty?

In Bosnia, the Serbs were accused of a land grab because they had 1/3 the population but claimed 2/3 of the land. The west claimed this was unfair but was it?

The press was unanimous. The Bosnian Serbs had "taken control," "occupied," and "staked out" a whole two-thirds of Bosnia. In other words, the media accused the Serbs of taking other people's land away from them by force.

The only problem with this representation is that the Serbs never conquered other people's land in Bosnia. They were not 'claiming' anything. It is a simple and easily verified historical fact that the Bosnian Serbs actually owned two thirds of Bosnia to begin with.

Similarly, Israel has a better claim to Judea and Samaria than the Arabs do.

The fact that the Serbs and the Jews were among the last peoples that you could claim were racists or fascist was a small obstacle.

The history of the Serbs (and the Jews) is a history of moral courage. No other people can lay claim to a more dramatic record of fighting racists and protecting minorities. In World War II, nobody in Europe defended their Jewish compatriots more bravely than the Serbs, treating them as their own flesh, and dying along with their Jewish compatriots in concentration camps by the hundreds of thousands. Why? Because, as they chanted in the streets of Belgrade, they preferred death to slavery; they would not collaborate with Hitler's Final Solution.

If justice and facts were on the side of the Serbs (Jews) why was it not a no-brainer to make their case?

Something else that matters here is that, as Karadzic says,

"we had no PR-agency working for us ... their governments did not allow them to work with and for the Serbs." This means the battle of perceptions was not an even playing field to begin with. The NATO powers made sure that the PR-agency hired by the enemies of the Serbs, Ruder Finn, would have the greatest advantage possible, as it would not have to do battle with a competing public relations firm. This was quite important, because if any public relations firm had taken the Serbs as clients, they would have made mince-meat of Ruder Finn.

James Harff, Ruder Finn's director, with ultimate responsibility for the demonization campaign against the Serbs, proudly explained to Jacques Merlino, associate director of French TV 2, that "Speed is vital ... it is the first assertion that really counts. All denials are entirely ineffective."

...Harff employs a file of several hundred journalists, politicians, representatives of humanitarian associations, and academics to create public opinion, and then had Harff explain the stuff above about how denials are entirely ineffective once he has chosen to demonize somebody.

So how did James Harff solve his problem, which was that he needed to make these fascists look like victims? [Back to Merlino's Interview with James Harff]


"At the beginning of July 1992, New York Newsday came out with the article on Serb camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations - the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, The American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress. In August, we suggested that they publish an advertisement in the New York Times and organize demonstrations outside the United Nations.

"That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia.
The great majority of Americans were probably asking themselves in which African country Bosnia was situated.

"By a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with use of words with high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc., which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. No one could go against it without being accused of [Holocaust] revisionism. We really batted a thousand in full."

Monday, February 26, 2007

A Jewish Albatross: The Serbs II / Os Sérvios São um Problema dos Judeus II

Especially in light of the millions of Christians who today stand with Israel as it fights for the right to defend itself, too few Jews have stood up for the Serb Christians. No, the Serbs are not the Jews. Not every nation, when provoked, plays as tenderly as Israel, whose teen soldiers risk their lives going door to door to pluck the one or two actual terrorists out of a household of complicit family members.

A 2000 documentary on England’s BBC2 showed an interview with KLA leader Hashim Thaci, in which he admitted, "We knew full well that any armed action we undertook would trigger a ruthless retaliation by Serbs against our people. We knew we were endangering civilian lives, too, a great number of lives." There was also a sound bite from a Kosovo Albanian negotiator named Doug Gorani: "The more civilians were killed, the chances of international intervention became bigger, and the KLA of course realized that."

Had we not been looking for mini Holocausts under every bed, had we not responded like Pavlovian dogs when hearing that a modern-day Holocaust was under way in Europe’s underbelly, we could have seen through the hoax, as well as what it portended for Israel.

Instead, cover articles ran in Jewish newspapers across America, such as the one in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles that began, "With echoes of the Holocaust and pogroms haunting a collective conscience, the Jewish community in Los Angeles has mobilized forces to come to the aid of Kosovar refugees left homeless and hungry by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic." A full-page ad read: "OUR HELPING HAND EXTENDS ALL THE WAY TO KOSOVO," and the small print informed readers that the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles had made a donation of $50,000 to the Kosovo Refugee Relief Fund of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Only when turning to the letters page did one encounter a dissenting voice. It belonged to self-described researcher and writer Paul Stonehill, who compared the one-sided press coverage to that directed against Israel: “I am sad that because of our misguided policy yet another radical Moslem state will appear in Europe. I am sad that the Serbs, who stood up to the Nazis like very few other people did during the war are bombed by the grandchildren of the Allies. And I am ashamed that some Jews have such selective memory."

In 1999 this selective memory afflicted both the ADL’s Abe Foxman (“We’re glad that we’re doing now what we weren’t doing then [WWII]”), and Elie Wiesel, who approved of bombing Yugoslavia when instead the 1941 words of Adolf Hitler should have been echoing through his head: "As soon as sufficient forces are available and the weather allows, the ground installations of the Yugoslav Air Force and the City of Belgrade will be destroyed from the air by continual day and night bombardment. When that is completed we will subdue Yugoslavia."

Sure enough, within weeks of our offensive, Prince Khaled Bin Sultan, commander of the allied Saudi troops during the first Gulf War, called on NATO and the U.S. to extend its “honorable actions” in Kosovo to Palestine. A few years later, when Kofi Annan sent Helena Ranta to look for evidence of massacre in Jenin, karma came calling. Israel's external adviser on the Jenin inquiry, Cambridge University international legal expert Daniel Bethlehem, warned then, "If the committee's findings uphold the allegations against Israel--even on poor reasoning--this…may make it impossible for Israel to resist calls for an international force, the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state and the prosecution of individuals said to have committed the alleged acts."

When, during Wesley Clark’s clumsy yet merciless 78-day bombardment of the Orthodox Christian Serbs, which didn’t break even for Easter (the way our other bombardments have for Ramadan), the possibility of a precedent for Israel was made clear to then Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon by an Italian ambassador, he asked American Jewish leaders to call for an end to the bombardment against Yugoslavia, citing that the KLA was backed by Iran-backed terror outfits and that an independent Kosovo would be a gateway for the spread of terror throughout Europe.

Whether such an organized Jewish voice emerged is unclear; if it did, it was done quietly, to save face. What has begun to take form since is a humanitarian concern for the remaining Serbs of Kosovo. But its language has been meticulously woven, so as not to backpedal too obviously on our overzealous enforcement of a cheap morality.

But we Jews at least should be trying to set the record straight. Though they were late in coming, entire organizations are devoted to debunking the Muslim-spun mythology against Israel that so many in the media dutifully report. The Serbs have no such face to the outside world, and so they do not get their slice of human sympathy. Nor did the Serbs think to buy clout in the halls of power via lobbyists in the U.S. Congress, where the Albanians, Croatians and Bosnians have been buying influence for decades, from the likes of Bob Dole, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Tom Lantos, Joe Biden, Jesse Helms and Benjamin Gillman, to name just a few. Like the Israelis had for a long time, the Serbs--busy fighting radicals--assumed the ability of the world to see right from wrong, up from down, truth from lie, and didn’t realize they were supposed to be fighting a simultaneous image war. Today, amid a sustained media blackout on the subject of our little 1999 war that has been quietly backfiring and still offers no hint of an exit strategy, Serbian-Americans and others who understand our miscalculation are left feverishly writing letters to editors in response to the many articles that get the Balkans wrong, in a futile attempt to inform the public.

Today, Serbia is the only remaining pocket of multi-ethnicity in the Balkans--where Serbs, gypsies, Jews, Albanian and other Muslims, along with 22 other nationalities still coexist. In fact, when trouble started, many Albanians fled to Belgrade--just as Bosnian Muslims had before them. It’s not unlike the situation of that “racist” state of the Middle East, Israel, with its one million Arab citizens standing in contrast to the surrounding Jew-cleansed Arab lands.

The trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague, meanwhile, was billed as no less than Nuremberg 2. Yet we hear virtually nothing about it. Where are the day-to-day reports of this momentous historical event, dispatches from which should have Americans lining up at the newsstands and scouring their papers for the latest developments? And wouldn’t the biggest trial since Nuremberg at least warrant some punditry?

When one considers also that, more than a year into the trial, the court finally relented from its own one-sidedness and decided it would start trying non-Serbs for war crimes against Serbs as well, the Nuremberg analogy falls apart like a bad joke. How many Jews do we recall being prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials? And as the Chicago Tribune pointed out on the first anniversary of Milosevic’s trial, Nuremberg took only 11 months “to try, convict, sentence and hang 10 of Adolf Hitler’s top lieutenants.” The Milosevic trial is now in its fourth year.

If, as we were told, there was systematic rape by Serbs, where are the resulting children? Or evidence of mass abortions? Jewish women had Nazi babies, and at Nuremberg there was plenty of testimony and plenty of evidence. So far at the Hague, there has been only testimony (much of which falls apart under cross-examination), and virtually no evidence. Such that the court has had to redefine the very word “genocide”--to at least make it fit what happened in Bosnia after it was unable to make it fit Kosovo. (“War crimes case widens ‘genocide,’” BBC.com, April 19, 2004). Hence we arrive at a state of affairs wherein the UN declares 70,000 dead men, women and children in Darfur to not be genocide, but 7,000 dead Bosnian males in the UN “safe haven” Srebrenica--used as a staging ground for attacks on Serbs--is.

While Byzantine art exhibits at New York museums were humming last year, 900-year-old Serb churches, cathedrals and monasteries in Kosovo were being systematically bombed, burned, looted, and urinated on in a single week. The pogroms had been set off by a rumor, later confirmed false by NATO, that Serbs had drowned some Albanian youths. By the end of March, 366 homes and 41 churches were destroyed, according to an AP report, which quoted 23 year-old Ruzhdi Krasniqi, who “smoked a cigarette as he assessed the damage and said he felt ‘OK’ about [it]. ‘I don't want the Serbs to return here,’ he said. ‘They've got no place here.’”

In response to the violence, Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova told an Italian newspaper, "Everyone realizes by now that it is clear that independence from Serbia is vital for Kosovo and its inhabitants."

Though he is a moderate and has had at least two attempts on his life because of it, Rugova seems to have followed the Arafat model: Accept the infidel’s (the West’s) help for as long as it moves you closer to your goal. When you hit the inevitable brick wall with the infidel and he ceases to further your agenda, revert to traditional methods and allow violence to engulf the region, turning your guns against the helpful infidel if necessary. Then propose independence as the only possible solution.

Independence, of course, would mean withdrawing UN peacekeepers. As Balkan-based journalist Chris Deliso wrote last year for BalkanAnalysis.com, “Even though they are inept…the UN contingents cannot be replaced by local enforcers without serious repercussions for Europe and America. With no foreign eyes and ears on the ground, pretty much anything can happen….terrorists abroad look for safe havens in states with little or no central control…Kosovo--with its porous borders, fundamentalist minority, criminal underbelly and proximity to the rest of Europe--is a perfect hiding place.” He concludes, “With successes like that, who needs failures?”

But Americans don’t see how Kosovo relates to them. Until 1999, who had ever even heard of a Serb? It was neither an enemy nor a significant international player. So this people and what happened to their country do not occupy any coherent place in the American psyche.

Without being innocent, a people can still be scapegoated and a falsified history go down in the books. Serbs have apologized repeatedly for the heavy hand that Belgrade wielded in responding to the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Kosovo and Bosnia. They have admitted they are not innocent, while the instigators themselves admit nothing, continue crying out against past Serb crimes, and kill with abandon.

That the Serbs haven’t been innocent cannot continue to be used to mischaracterize the Balkan conflicts and our actions there. Starting with a mistaken premise and working backwards to prove it, then devolving into moral equivalence when it doesn’t work must stop. A reevaluation must begin. Whether it does or not, history’s reckoning will come, such that after an air war against a fictitious enemy, we may have to fight a ground war against the real one.

The world stood by while one-third of its Jews were exterminated last century. This century, the Jews stand by idly with the world as a people’s history is erased. Serbia is reviled, for like Israel, it had the poor taste to not wait for 9/11 to start the resistance against a common enemy.


That’s why, in sounding the call for Serb rehabilitation, I apply a double standard to my fellow Jews. They should be used to it. The Serbs are.
___________________________________________________________
Resumo: A Sérvia tornou-se uma vilã porque, assim como Israel, teve o mau gosto de não esperar por um 11 de setembro para começar a resistência contra um inimigo comum.

Especialmente sob a luz dos milhões de cristãos que hoje estão ao lado de Israel enquanto este luta pelo direito de defender-se, muito poucos judeus levantaram-se para defender os sérvios cristãos. Não, os sérvios não são os judeus. Nem toda nação, quando provocada, joga suavemente como Israel, cujos soldados ainda adolescentes vão de porta em porta, arriscando a vida para capturar um ou dois terroristas de famílias cúmplices.

Um documentário da BBC 2, em 2000, mostrou uma entrevista com o líder da KLA Hashim Thaci, na qual ele admitia: “Nós sabíamos muito bem que qualquer ação armada que nós tomássemos iria iniciar uma inexorável retaliação sérvia contra nosso povo. Nós sabíamos que estávamos colocando vidas civis sob risco, também, um grande número de vidas”. O representante Albanês em Kosovo chamado Doug Gorani saiu-se com essa pérola: “Quanto mais civis fossem mortos, maiores seriam as chances de uma intervenção internacional, e a KLA, obviamente, se deu conta disso”.

Se não estivéssemos procurando por mini-holocaustos em cada canto que olhamos, se não tivéssemos respondido como cães pavlovianos quando ouvimos que um holocausto moderno estava sendo conduzido na periferia da Europa, nós poderíamos ter percebido a farsa e o que ela implicava para Israel.

Ao invés disso, artigos de primeira página eram publicados em jornais judeus por toda Europa, assim como um no Jewish Jornal of Greater Los Angeles que assim começava “Com ecos do Holocausto e das perseguições atormentando sua consciência coletiva, a comunidade judaica de Los Angeles mobilizou forças para vir em socorro dos refugiados kosovares deixados sem lar nem comida pelo presidente sérvio Slobodan Milosevic”. Lia-se num anúncio de página inteira: “NOSSA MÃO AMIGA SE ESTENDE DAQUI ATÉ KOSOVO”, e as letras pequenas informavam ao leitor que a Federação Judaica de Los Angeles fez uma doação de cerca de $50.000 para o Fundo de Assistência aos Refugiados Kosovares do Comitê de Distribuição da União Judaico-Americana.

Apenas quando partíamos para a página de correspondências era possível encontrar algumas vozes dissidentes. Ela pertencia ao autodescrito pesquisador e escritor Paul Stonehill, que comparou a cobertura jornalística parcial com aquela dirigida contra Israel. “Estou triste porque os sérvios que levantaram-se contra os nazistas como poucos outros povos fizeram na Europa, são hoje bombardeados pelos netos dos Aliados. E eu estou envergonhado por alguns judeus possuírem uma memória tão seletiva”.

Em 1999 essa memória seletiva afligiu tanto Abe Foxman da ADL (Nós estamos felizes que estamos a fazer o que não fizemos na Segunda Guerra mundial), e Elie Wielsel, que aprovou o bombardeio sobre a Iugoslávia, quando, ao invés disso, as palavras de Hitler em 1941 deveriam ainda estar ecoando em sua cabeça: “Assim que suficientes forças estejam disponíveis e o tempo permitir, as instalações terrestres da Força Aérea Iugoslava e a cidade de Belgrado serão destruídas por contínuos e maciços ataques aéreos dia e noite. Quando isto estiver completo, teremos subjugado a Iugoslávia”.

É certo que, após algumas semanas de nossa ofensiva, o Príncipe Khaled Bin Sultan, comandante das tropas sauditas aliadas durante a Primeira Guerra do Golfo, pediu que a Otan e os EUA estendessem suas “honrosas ações” em Kosovo até a Palestina. Poucos anos depois, quando Kofi Annan enviou Helena Ranta para buscar evidência dos massacres de Jenin, viu-se o karma judeu. O conselheiro externo de Israel, expert em Direito Internacional de Cambridge, Daniel Bethlehm, advertiu que, “Se os achados do comitê sustentarem as alegações contra Israel – mesmo que de maneira pobre e insuficiente – isto... pode tornar impossível para Israel resistir aos pedido por uma Força Internacional para o imediato estabelecimento de um Estado Palestino e o julgamento de indivíduos aparentemente envolvidos com tais atos”.

Quando, durante os desastrados - mas sem piedade - 78 dias de bombardeio sobre a comunidade cristã ortodoxa da Sérvia, que não foram interrompidos para a Páscoa (da forma como nossos outros bombardeios foram para o Ramadan), a possibilidade de um precedente para Israel foi deixado claro para o então Ministro das Relações Exteriores Ariel Sharon por um embaixador italiano, ele falou a um líder judeu-americano para pedir por um fim ao bombardeio contra a Iugoslávia, citando que a KLA recebia suporte de grupos terroristas ligados ao Irã, e que um Kosovo livre seria o portal de acesso do terror para toda a Europa.

Até onde uma voz judaica organizada emergiu é incerto; se assim o fez, foi feito discretamente, para proteger as aparências. O que tem tomado forma desde então é uma preocupação humanitária com os sérvios em Kosovo. Mas sua linguagem tem sido meticulosamente macia, de forma a não ir de encontro à nossa ultrazelosa imposição de uma moralidade barata.

Mas nós judeus deveríamos estar pelo menos tentando consertar as coisas. Apesar de tardiamente, diversas organizações estão se devotando a destruir a mitologia pró-mulçumana que tantos na imprensa adotam ao pé da letra. Os sérvios não possuem representantes assim no mundo exterior e por isso não recebem apoio nenhum. Muito menos os sérvios pensaram em comprar espaço no hall do poder via lobistas no congresso americano, onde albaneses, croatas e bósnios têm comprado influência por décadas, de figuras como Bob Dole, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Tom Lantos, Joe Biden, Jessé Helms e Benjamin Gillman, para citar uns poucos. Como os israelenses têm feito por um longo período, os sérvios – ocupados lutando contra radicais – tomaram por certa a habilidade do mundo de distinguir o certo do errado, a verdade das mentiras, o bem do mal e não se deram conta de que deveriam estar lutando numa guerra de imagens similarmente. Hoje, por entre um esquecimento proposital da mídia acerca de nossa guerra de 1999 que tem rapidamente se mostrado um desastre sem perspectivas de encerramento, sérvio-americanos e outros que entendem nossos erros são levados a desesperadamente escreverem cartas a editores em resposta aos inúmeros artigos que interpretam de forma errônea o problema nos Bálcãs, numa tentativa fútil de informar o público.

Hoje, a Sérvia é o ultimo bolsão de etnia cosmopolita dos Balcãs – onde sérvios, ciganos, judeus, albaneses e outros mulçumanos, com mais 22 outras nacionalidades ainda coexistem. De fato, quando os problemas começaram, muitos albaneses fugiram para Belgrado – assim como mulçumanos bósnios fizeram antes deles. Não é muito diferente daquele país “racista” do Oriente Médio, Israel, com cerca de um milhão de cidadãos árabes, em contraste com suas comunidades vizinhas limpas de qualquer traço de população judaica.

O julgamento de Slobodan Milosevic no tribunal de Haia, nesse ínterim, foi considerado como nada menos que o segundo Nuremberg. Todavia, nós não ouvimos quase nada sobre ele. Onde estão os relatórios diários de tal momento histórico, informações que deveriam formar uma fila de americanos nas bancas de jornais, buscando informações atuais? E não deveria o maior julgamento internacional desde Nuremberg atrair, pelo menos, a atenção de alguns especialistas?

Quando consideramos também que, mais de um ano depois do início do julgamento, a corte decidiu finalmente sair de sua parcialidade abusiva e resolveu que iria começar a processar não-sérvios pelos crimes de guerra perpetrados contra os sérvios, a analogia de Nuremberg se torna uma brincadeira de muito mau gosto. Quantos judeus foram processados nos julgamentos de Nuremberg? E assim como o Chicago Tribune destacou no primeiro aniversário do julgamento de Milosevic, Nuremberg levou apenas 11 meses “para julgar, condenar e executar 10 dos principais membros do partido nazista de Hitler”. O julgamento de Milozevic já está no seu quarto ano.

Se, como nós fomos informados, houve estupro sistemático perpetrado pelos sérvios, onde estão as crianças? Ou evidência de abortos em massa? Mulheres judias tiveram bebês de nazistas e em Nuremberg havia inúmeras evidências e testemunhos. Até agora, em Haia, só tem havido testemunhos (a maioria dos quais insustentáveis perante um mínimo de análise crítica) e virtualmente nenhuma evidência. Tanto é que a corte teve que redefinir o próprio termo “genocídio” – para pelo menos fazê-lo encaixar-se com o que houve na Bósnia, quando se viu ser impossível fazer o mesmo com Kosovo. (“War crimes case widens ‘genocide’” BBC.com, 19 de Abril de 2004). Assim, nós chegamos a um ponto onde a ONU declara que os 70.000 mortos entre homens, mulheres e crianças em Darfur não chega a ser genocídio, mas 7.000 bósnios mortos em Srebrenica uma “zona de segurança” da ONU – usada como trampolim para ataques contra os sérvios – o é definitivamente.

Enquanto uma exposição de arte bizantina nos museus de Nova York faziam sucesso ano passado, igrejas, catedrais e monastérios sérvios com 900 anos de história eram sistematicamente bombardeados, queimados, saqueados e usados como banheiro numa única semana. A histeria coletiva iniciou-se através de um rumor, depois confirmado como falso pela OTAN, que os sérvios haviam afogado alguns jovens albaneses. No final de março, 366 pessoas foram mortas e 41 igrejas destruídas de acordo com um relatório oficial, que fazia referência ao jovem de 23 anos Ruzhdi Krasniqi, que “fumava um cigarro enquanto via todo o estrago causado e disse que se sentia ‘OK’ acerca daquilo. ‘Eu não quero que os sérvios retornem aqui,’ ele disse, ‘Eles não possuem lugar aqui’”.

Como resposta à violência, o presidente de Kosovo Ibrahim Rugova disse a um jornal italiano, “Todos se dão conta agora que a independência de Kosovo em relação à Sérvia é vital para Kosovo e seus habitantes”.

Não obstante ser um homem moderado, que sofreu dois atentados devido a isso, Rugova parece ter seguido o modelo de Arafat: Aceite a ajuda dos infiéis (do ocidente) enquanto esta servir para colocá-lo próximo de seus objetivos. Quando se chega ao limite inevitável da inocência dos infiéis e eles deixam de prestar ajuda, bastar reverter a métodos tradicionais e deixar a violência tomar conta da região, movendo suas armas contra os infiéis imprestáveis se necessário. E aí proponha a independência como única alternativa.

Independência, é claro, significaria o recuo das tropas de segurança da ONU. Como escreveu o jornalista residente nos Balcãs Chris Deliso para o BalkanAnalysis.com, “Não obstante serem ineptos... os contingentes da ONU não podem ser substituídos por forças locais sem que haja enormes repercussões para a Europa e para a América. Sem olhos e ouvidos estrangeiros na região, qualquer coisa pode acontecer... terroristas no exterior buscam zonas de segurança em países com pouco ou nenhum governo central... Kosovo – com suas fronteiras desprotegidas, minoria fundamentalista, grupos criminosos e proximidade com o resto da Europa – é o lugar perfeito”. Ele conclui que “com sucessos como esse, quem precisa de falhas?”

Mas os americanos não se dão conta de como Kosovo os afeta. Até 1999, quem havia ouvido falar da Sérvia? Não era nem um inimigo nem uma força internacional significante. Logo, esse povo e o que aconteceu em seu país não ocupa nenhum local coerente na consciência coletiva americana.

Sem ser inocente, um povo pode ainda servir de bode expiatório e uma falsa história acaba sendo escrita nos livros. Sérvios já muitas vezes se desculparam pela dureza com que Belgrado tratou as limpezas étnicas de sérvios em Kosovo e na Bósnia. Eles admitiram que não eram inocentes, enquanto os instigadores não admitem nada, continuando a chorar contra crimes sérvios do passado e matando sem nenhum escrúpulo.

Que os sérvios não eram inocentes não pode servir de desculpa para descaracterizar os conflitos nos Balcãs e nossas ações nessa região. Começar de uma premissa falsa e a partir daí utilizar os fatos passados para buscar prová-la, e por fim cair em equivalência moral quando tal estratégia não funciona precisa acabar. Uma reavaliação precisa começar. Até onde ela comece ou não, a lógica da história acabará por vir de maneira tal que após uma guerra aérea contra um inimigo imaginário, nós tenhamos que lutar no chão contra um inimigo real.

O mundo assistiu passivamente enquanto um terço de seus judeus foram exterminados no último século; os judeus agora assistem passivamente junto com o resto do mundo, enquanto a história de um povo é completamente apagada. A Sérvia tornou-se uma vilã porque, assim como Israel, teve o mau gosto de não esperar por um 11 de setembro para começar a resistência contra um inimigo comum.

Daí o porquê de eu, ao chamar pela reabilitação do povo sérvio, uso de uma duplicidade de critérios para os meus irmãos judeus. Eles deveriam estar acostumados a isso. Os sérvios estão.

A Jewish Albatross: The Serbs / Os Sérvios São um Problema dos Judeus

Julia Gorin

Imagine that a country is fighting domestic terrorism by Muslim militants who are carrying out attacks against police, government officials and citizens in a bid to carve out their own state, hoping to provoke a response from the government that will alarm the international community. Imagine that the world duly intervenes, and a peacekeeping force is sent in, paralyzing the nation’s ability to defend itself, and effectively doing the militants’ bidding even as attacks against the non-Muslim population continue. Finally, imagine the intervening internationals severing this nation’s Jerusalem from it and handing it to the provocateurs.

It sounds like a worst-case scenario for the Israeli people, but it is a fate that actually befell the Serbian people, who this year may lose Kosovo as the deadline approaches for determining the status of the province, where Christian churches, monasteries and homes were burned to the ground in pogroms in March of last year. They will lose Kosovo to Albanian Muslims, whose fates are now entirely in the hands of the international Islamist factions with whom they, and we, cast their lot.

As a reprisal of last March looms on the horizon (Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj stepped down when he was indicted for war crimes last week, and the UN Mission in Kosovo was promptly bombed), the reticence about butchered Serbian octogenarians, children and other civilians--alternating with dismissal of these atrocities, even six years later, as “revenge killings”--intimates that terrorized Serbs are an even bigger yawn than terrorized Israelis. That’s why I am calling upon my fellow Jews to break their own conspicuous silence.

In the six years since our bizarre bombing of Belgrade to prevent a genocide that forensics turned up empty (a memo that apparently made it only to European and Canadian presses, leaving a gaping hole in our national dialogue), the sense of something not being said grows palpable. With every explosive report coming from the Balkans--Islamic charities getting busted as terror-funding fronts, terrorist cells being uncovered in Bosnia and Kosovo, explosions on Pristina’s Bill Clinton Avenue, then last year’s coordinated Albanian riots that injured 900, killed 19 Serbs and tried to drive out what was left of Kosovo’s non-Albanian population--more and more people have started to think it, but who has the poor taste to say it?

After all, we were told that a genocide was in progress. We were told of mass graves. A hundred thousand killed and 800,000 displaced, Bill Clinton said.

Soon after the U.S.-led NATO invasion, the 100,000 figure turned out to be closer to 2,000 and included armed Albanian and Serb fighters. “No Bodies at Rumored Grave Site in Kosovo,” read a Reuters headline as early as October ’99, above an article reporting the results of an excavation by international war crimes investigators to check the rumors that Serbs had hidden up to 700 Albanian bodies in a lead and zinc mine. Other “mass graves” turned up empty or hardly massive, and the Racak massacre, the feather that was used to break the NATO camel’s back, turned out to have been staged, according to three forensics teams sent in to investigate--but only after the first team, headed by Finland’s Helena Ranta, initially gave a thumbs-up to “massacre” so that the bombing campaign could commence. (Two years and thousands of lives later, Ranta’s final report confirmed the opposite conclusion.)

Sold on a Holocaust scenario, the American people couldn’t have known what sinister deal they’d signed on to. But my fellow Jews should have smelled a rat. And to my profound disappointment, in the face of a stunning parallel to the Palestinian propaganda war that Jews themselves struggle with, for the most part they have been silent since.

As journalists fanned the early flames of Serb demonization in Bosnia, starting with a widely circulated 1992 photo of a Serb-run “death camp” for Bosnian Muslims that turned out to have been taken from the inside of a fenced storage area, and showed refugees who had escaped the fighting and were free to go at any time, it should have raised some red flags among my tribe--even if only after the fact. After all, what Jew can forget the NY Times photo from a 2000 riot in Jerusalem, showing an Israeli soldier standing over a bloody young man—the caption identifying the scene as an Israeli policeman and a Palestinian? It subsequently came to bear that the bloody “Palestinian” was a Chicago Yeshiva student who had just been beaten by Palestinians. One need only say the word “Jenin” to a Jew for him to recall the vision of Palestinians digging up old graves to increase the body count there.

But just as Palestinians have been a step ahead of Israelis when it comes to PR, so were Balkan Muslims a step ahead of Serb Christians. Such that when, early on, it came to winning American-Jewish empathy, the Albanian Kosovars were victorious over the Serbs.

A 1994 article in a monthly Jewish publication called “Midstream,” which caught on early, cites an interview between a French journalist named Jacques Merlino and James Harff, of the D.C.-based PR firm Ruder & Finn, which was representing Croatia, Bosnia and the Kosovo Liberation Army. After boasting about having set up meetings between Bosnian officials and Al Gore, George Mitchell, Bob Dole and other politicians, Harff described the achievement he was most proud of: “To have managed to put Jewish opinion on our side…At the beginning of August 1992, ‘New York Newsday’ came out with the affair of [Serb] concentration camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations--B'nai B'rith, Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress. We suggested to them to publish an advertisement in the ‘New York Times’ and to organize demonstrations outside the United Nations. That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the Bosnians, we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind.”

It was a sneak PR attack, and the Serbs were out-sassed. If anyone should have looked deeper into the story being peddled, it was the Jewish community—who ask that people do their homework before making rash judgments about Israeli operations in the Palestinian territories and siding with the visibly more pathetic side. But the magic “genocide” wand was waved, and organized Jewry fell into its autopilot never-again trance.

It’s all the more tragic considering the historical relationship between Jews and Serbs, both of whom were persecuted by the Nazis’ Croatian, Bosnian and Albanian brigades during WWII. In 1999, under pressure from the U.S. and amid protest from Israelis who knew better, Israel joined NATO’s war against Yugoslavia, leaving Serbs stunned and angry in an era when most of Europe was already being engulfed by a new wave anti-Semitism. Today, whatever Jews remained in Kosovo before our intervention have been cleansed right along with the Serbs.

And yet last March 18th, the second day of renewed Serb cleansing, the House of Representatives was treated to the following resolution on Kosovo by Congressman Eliot Engel (D, NY), who chairs the Albanian Issues Caucus: “When there is no resolution of the final status, the people in a country become restless…Right now there is rampant unemployment. Right now there is very little hope for a future…Self-determination and, ultimately, independence for the people of Kosovo is the only solution…What we have seen…is this ridiculous plan called standards before status…We put forward benchmarks and we tell the people of Kosovo they have to achieve these benchmarks before we can even look at a resolution and at self-determination.”

The speech easily could be mistaken for one that makes the case for immediate Palestinian statehood as a way to end “understandable” violence against Israelis. The irony of it coming from a pro-Israel Jewish congressman is too thick for comment, and yet it got thicker when in his closing thoughts Engel employed the penultimate moral-equivalence phrase that Jews find so maddening in reference to Israel: “The ethnic violence which happened yesterday is a tragic undertaking, a tragic tragedy, and I must call on both sides to stop the violence.”
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Resumo: Desde o bizarro bombardeio de Belgrado para prevenir um genocídio que nunca ocorreu de fato, aumenta a sensação de algo não estar sendo dito sobre os acontecimentos em Kosovo.

Imagine que um país está lutando contra o terrorismo doméstico de militantes islâmicos que estão atacando policiais, agentes do governo e cidadãos procurando formar seu próprio Estado, esperando provocar uma resposta do governo que iria alarmar a comunidade internacional. Imagine que o mundo intervém desastradamente e forças de paz são enviadas, paralisando a habilidade da nação de defender-se e efetivamente auxiliando os objetivos dos militantes, enquanto os ataques às populações não-mulçumanas continuam. Finalmente, imagine que a intervenção internacional arranque “Jerusalém” daquela nação e a passe para as mãos dos provocadores.

Isso soa como o que de pior pode acontecer para o povo israelense, mas é um castigo que, na verdade, caiu sobre o povo Sérvio que esse ano pode perder Kosovo, já que se aproxima o prazo limite para a determinação do status da província, onde igrejas cristãs, monastérios e casas foram incendiadas em massacres organizados em março do ano passado. Eles irão perder Kosovo para os mulçumanos albaneses, cujo destino está agora inteiramente nas mãos das militâncias islâmicas internacionais para as quais eles, e nós, entregamos a sorte.

Como uma reprise dos acontecimentos de março de 2004 no horizonte (O Primeiro Ministro de Kosovo Ramush Haradinaj renunciou ao cargo, quando foi acusado de cometer crimes de guerra há algumas semanas e a missão da ONU em Kosovo foi prontamente afetada), o silêncio acerca dos octogenários sérvios, das crianças e outros civis brutalmente assassinados – alternando com a alegação de que tais atrocidades, mesmo seis anos depois, não passam de “assassinatos de revanche” –, nos confessa que os sérvios encontram-se em situação infinitamente pior que os israelenses. Daí o porquê de eu chamar meus irmãos Judeus a quebrarem seu próprio silêncio.

Em seis anos, desde o bizarro bombardeio de Belgrado para prevenir um genocídio que nunca ocorreu de fato (uma mensagem que parece ter chegado apenas na imprensa européia e canadense, deixando um abismo profundo em nosso diálogo nacional), a sensação de algo não estar sendo dito chega a ser palpável. Com cada relatório explosivo que chega dos Bálcãs – ONGs islâmicas sendo descobertas como fontes de financiamento do terrorismo, células terroristas sendo descobertas na Bósnia e em Kosovo, explosões na Avenida Bill Clinton, em Prístina, os tumultos albaneses organizados no último ano que feriram 90, mataram 19 sérvios e tentaram expulsar o que restara da população não-albanesa em Kosovo – mais e mais pessoas começam a pensar a esse respeito, mas quem possui o mau gosto de trazer tudo isso à tona?

Ora, nos falaram em um genocídio em progresso. Nos falaram em covas coletivas. Cem mil mortos e 800 mil expatriados, de acordo com o que disse Bill Clinton. Mas logo após a invasão da OTAN liderada pelos EUA, os números caíram de 100.000 para ser um pouco menos de 2.000, incluindo soldados albaneses e sérvios. “Não há corpos no local da suposta cova coletiva em Kosovo”, lia-se num destaque da Reuters ainda em outubro de 1999, referindo-se aos resultados das escavações dos investigadores internacionais de crimes de guerra, para checar os rumores de que Sérvios haviam escondido pelo menos setecentos corpos albaneses numa mina de Zinco. Outras “covas coletivas” foram encontradas vazias ou muito pequenas, e o massacre de Racak, a última gota que acabou destruindo a liderança moral da OTAN, acabou sendo nada mais que uma encenação, de acordo com três times de especialistas forenses enviados para investigações – mas apenas depois do primeiro time, liderado pela finlandesa Helena Ranta, inicialmente confirmar o “massacre” para que os bombardeios pudessem começar. (Dois anos e milhares de vidas depois, o último relatório de Ranta confirmou o oposto de sua primeira conclusão).

Apresentado como um cenário de holocausto, o povo americano não poderia imaginar em que trama sinistra eles estavam se envolvendo. Mas meus colegas judeus deveriam ter pressentido a farsa. E para a minha mais profunda decepção, em face à terrível propaganda palestina de guerra que os judeus lutam para desmentir, eles, em sua maioria, ficaram calados.

Enquanto os jornalistas iniciavam as primeiras chamas da demonização dos Sérvios na Bósnia, começando com uma foto amplamente divulgada de um “campo de concentração” para muçulmanos da Bósnia, que não passou de uma foto tirada de dentro de um armazém cercado e mostrava refugiados que escaparam às lutas e eram livres para ir onde quisessem a qualquer hora, isso deveria ter servido de alerta para minha comunidade – mesmo que tardiamente. Depois de tudo, que judeu poderia esquecer a foto no NY Times de um tumulto de cerca de 2.000 pessoas em Jerusalém, mostrando um soldado israelense junto a um jovem ensangüentado – todos descrevendo a cena como um soldado israelense e a vítima palestina? Passada a euforia inicial, descobriu-se que o palestino ensangüentado era um estudante Yeshiva de Chicago, que acabara de ser espancado por palestinos. É preciso que se diga apenas a palavra “Jenin” para um judeu, para ele lembrar-se de palestinos cavando covas antigas para aumentar o número de mortos.

Mas assim como palestinos sempre estão um passo à frente dos israelenses no que se refere a Relações Públicas, os mulçumanos dos Bálcãs estão à frente dos sérvios cristãos. Tanto é assim que acabaram por ganhar a simpatia judaico-americana, os Kosovares Albaneses foram vitoriosos sobre os Sérvios.

Um artigo de 1994 numa publicação mensal judaica chamada “Midstream”, que chegou à verdade antes do resto da imprensa, cita uma entrevista entre um jornalista francês chamado Jacques Merlino e James Harff, da firma de Relações Públicas Ruder & Finn em Washington DC que estava representando a Croácia, Bósnia e o Exército de Liberação de Kosovo. Após orgulhar-se de ter arranjado reuniões entre os oficiais em Bósnia e Al Gore, George Mitchell, Bob Dole e outros políticos, Harff descreveu a realização de que mais se orgulhava “de ter conseguido trazer a opinião judaica para o nosso lado... No início de agosto de 1992, ‘New York Newsday’ apareceu com o assunto dos campos de concentração sérvios. Nós saltamos diante da oportunidade imediatamente. Nós fomos mais espertos que várias organizações judaicas – B'nai B'rith, Anti-Defamation League, O American Jewish Committee, e o American Jewish Congress. Nós sugerimos a eles que publicassem um anúncio no ‘New York Times’ e que organizassem demonstrações em frente à sede da ONU. Aquilo foi um golpe tremendo. Quando as organizações judaicas entraram no jogo em favor dos mulçumanos, nós podíamos prontamente igualar os sérvios aos nazistas perante a opinião pública”.

Foi um ataque rasteiro de RP e os sérvios transformaram-se em vilões sem chance de defesa. Se alguém tivesse de olhar mais a fundo dentro da estória que se formava, esse alguém deveria ser a comunidade judaica – que pede que os países cumpram seus deveres elementares antes de fazerem quaisquer julgamentos acerca das operações israelenses na Palestina, tomando sempre a causa visivelmente mais patética. Mas a varinha mágica do “genocídio” foi empunhada, e a comunidade judaica caiu no transe autopiloto do nunca mais.

Tudo isso é ainda mais trágico, considerando-se as relações históricas entre judeus e sérvios, ambos perseguidos pelos nazistas croatas e brigadas bósnias e albanesas durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Em 1999, sob pressão dos EUA e protestos dos israelenses mais esclarecidos, Israel juntou-se à guerra da OTAN contra a Iugoslavia, deixando sérvios chocados e raivosos numa era em que toda a Europa estava sendo encoberta por uma nova onda de anti-semitismo. Hoje, os poucos judeus que restaram em Kosovo antes da nossa intervenção foram exterminados junto com os sérvios.

Ainda assim, no último 18 de março, o segundo dia da renovada limpeza étnica dos sérvios, a Câmara dos deputados ainda recebeu a seguinte resolução acerca de Kosovo do Congressista Eliot Engel (D, NY), que preside sobre os casos dos Albaneses: “Quando não há resolução do status final, o povo de um país se torna inquieto... Neste momento há desemprego crescente. Neste momento há muito pouca esperança para o futuro... Auto-determinação e, ultimamente, independência para o povo de Kosovo é a única solução... O que nós já vimos... é ridículo esse plano de parâmetros antes de status... Nós estabelecemos objetivos e dizemos ao povo kosovar que eles têm que alcançar tais objetivos antes de nós olharmos para uma resolução que lhes garanta auto-determinação”.

O discurso poderia ser facilmente confundido por um que advoga a imediata formação de um Estado Palestino como forma de terminar toda a violência contra os israelenses. A ironia de tal discurso vir de um congressista judeu, abertamente a favor de Israel, é muito óbvia para ser comentada e ainda tornou-se mais óbvia quando ao finalizar seus pensamentos, Engel empregou uma das maiores frases de equivalência moral que mais revolta os judeus quando utilizada em referência a Israel: “A violência étnica que aconteceu ontem é um trágico retrocesso, uma terrível tragédia, e eu devo pedir a ambos os lados que parem com a violência”.

All Muslims Are Moderates

by Baron Bodissey


There are no moderate Muslims. There are no extremist Muslims. There are only Muslims. Got that?

That’s according to the former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamed, the man who became notorious when he said that “today the Jews rule this world by proxy.”According to an article in Malaysia Today, Dr. Mohamad considers the labels “moderate” and “extremist” to be unfair when applied to Muslims:


Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad today asked Muslims to do away with false assumptions when declaring themselves as moderate followers of Islam because the religion is indeed moderate.


The former prime minister said Muslims did not need to defend themselves as moderate or liberal Muslims as this gave a picture that were only partial followers of Islamic teachings while others (teachings) were deemed extreme.


“Islam is already a moderate religion…there is no need for us to show that were are more liberal Muslims than others. We are Muslims… period,” he said when opening the 45th Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Muslim Welfare Organisation of Malaysia (Perkim) here.


Dr Mahathir, who is also Perkim president, said that even if some Muslims were labelled extremists, it was not because of the teachings of Islam but a lack of understanding of them or the religion being manipulated by irresponsible followers.


“There is nothing extreme about Islam if we follow its teachings as contained in the Quran,” he said.


Let’s get behind Dr. Mohamad. I recommend that Muslims everywhere simply follow the Koran as it as written.

- - - - - - - - - -

Let them take the book at face value. It will ask them to kill unbelievers and subjugate the survivors. It declares that a woman’s value is half that of a man. It specifically instructs the believer to have nothing whatsoever to do with Christians and Jews.


Especially those Jews, the sons of apes and pigs.


Let’s hope that Muslims everywhere follow Dr. Mohamad’s advice.


Then everyone will know that Islam is inherently a moderate religion.


Then they will know that there are neither moderates nor extremists.


There are only Muslims… period.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

What Every American Needs to Know About Jihad

From Jihad Watch
Is Islamic jihad just a harmless form of spiritual struggle -- as is often argued by Western apologists for radical Islam? Is Jihadi violence simply a twisted, hijacked version of Islam, rejected by traditional Muslims? The David Horowitz Freedom Center's new Terrorism Awareness Project, which seeks to educate Americans, and especially college students about jihad, confronts questions such as these. It has produced a powerful new flash video, What Every American Needs to Know About Jihad. This video is adapted from a new pamphlet by Robert Spencer, which puts the threat of jihadist ideology into historical perspective. As Spencer makes clear, the religious imperatives of jihad demand the subjugation or killing of infidels and form the poisoned logic of Islamists' expansionist war against America and the West.

To view the flash video, click here.
To read Spencer's essay, click here.

How do they train "scholars" in Iran these days?

By Thomas Lifson

A learned professor from Iran tells us how tricky Jews like Walt Disney (a Congregationalist) were to create Tom and Jerry to propagandize Europeans that Jews (Hitler broke the code and revealed that Jews were really mice) are not that bad. Nevermind that Disney had nothing to do with Tom and Jerry, who were the product of MGM's animation studio headed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.
You have to see this to believe it:

Note: the learned scholar could have gone much further if he had noticed that Hanna had been a business partner of the brilliant Jay Ward, responsible for many clever television animated series, starting with (gasp!) Crusader Rabbit, the first cartoon produced specifically for television in the history of mankind.

Jay Ward, for animation buffs, is a true icon, slyly witty and wildly creative. Tributes to his work pop up from the likes of Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. Ward was, by the way, a native of Berkeley, California, a graduate of UC Berkeley, and in his later life owned a successful real estate firm in Berkeley. These were the days, by the way, when Berkeley was a Republican stronghold and boasted one of the finest school systems in America. On both points, Berkeley has turned 180 degrees.

If anyone deserves the honor of being attacked by the esteemed Iranian scholar, it is Jay Ward. But his scholarship too sloppy, ill-informed, and stupid. And those burka-clad women seen taking notes as he spews his garbage will never realize the the depth of the peril coming their way through cute animated figures.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Watch the video
Hear the testimony of those who knew Ernesto Guevara, alias Che, and of those who suffered from his many crimes. Of his racist comments against Cubans and Mexicans. The real story of this criminal told by those who knew him, not the false story told by Hollywood's pro-Castro crowd. (The video is in Spanish)


Guevara:Anatomía de un Mito (cubaliberal.org)


Profile: Ernesto "Che" Guevara (English)

Che Guevara - mais mito que realidade

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

É a demografia, estúpido!/ It's the Demography, Stupid!

"Esqueça os desastres ecológicos e as causas ambientalistas - o suicídio demográfico é a principal razão pela qual o Ocidente corre risco de extinção. "
10/03 - É a demografia, estúpido! (Final)
09/03 - É a demografia, estúpido! (2a. Parte)
08/03 - É a demografia, estúpido! (1a. Parte)
_______________________________________________________________
The real reason the West is in danger of extinction

Sunday, February 18, 2007

"A Esquerda Estúpida"

Ségolène Royal

Pergunta:
O que um Estado gigante, abarrotado de funcionários públicos e de desempregados cheios de benefícios absurdos que já fazem os impostos consumirem 64% das riquezas produzidas no país, faz para combater a estagnação?
Ora bolas! A resposta é óbvia! Cria mais impostos e aumenta ainda mais os gastos públicos para aquecer a economia.
Faz sentido? Não!? Pois é, e eu que achei que a baboseira keynesiana só não estava morta aqui na América Latrina...

Num show de populismo que envergonharia até alguns - poucos, eu sei, muito poucos - brasileiros ("I want for the children in these suburbs what I want for my own children,"), a titia-candidata-socialista-gatona-de-meia-idade-francesa apresentou suas brilh@ntes propostas para aquecer a moribunda economia francesa:


- Aumentar o salário mínimo em 250 euros (para €1,500) e o seguro-desemprego (5%)

- Pagar 90% do salário do desempregado durante o primeiro ano sem trabalho

- O Estado vai disponibilizar empréstimos de €10,000 sem juros para desempregados com menos de 18 anos (22% dos jovens franceses estão nessa situação)

- Taxar a renda dos franceses que moram no exterior

- Manter a jornada de trabalho de 35 h semanais

- Promete construir 120.000 moradias populares às custas do governo, com um custo estimado em 35 bilhões de euros (isso pra um governo que só no ano passado teve um déficit de 50 bilhões...)
.
.
.
E pensar que achavam que seu ponto fraco era a falta de experiência e sensibilidade ao tratar de política externa...

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Heil Jihad! Parte 2












Grand Mufti with Hitler







Syria, Lebanon and nazi Germany

Despite all of this, according to the western media, the left and the Arabs, the Israelis/Jews are the nazis...

__________________________________________________

Arab-Palestinian Holocaust Denial

is expressed openly in the Palestinian Authority. Senior Palestinian historians, Issam Sisalem, and Jirar Al Kidwah, Head of the Public Library and Arafat’s advisor, teach that the story of the Holocaust was a Jewish lie in order to gain world sympathy, which lead to the creation of the State of Israel. http://pmw.org.il/asx/PMW_HolocaustENG.asx

An Arab-palestinian religious leader argues that the Jewish leaders were responsible for the murder of the Jews in the Holocaust. "Dr." Muhammam Ibrahim Maadi. http://pmw.org.il/asx/PMW_MadiHolocaust.asx

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, THE NAZIS AND AL-QA'IDA

by John Loftus

This is a fascinating view into John Loftus' experiences researching Nazi criminals and pursuing Arab terrorists. Of particular interest is his discussion of the linkage between Al-Qa'ida and the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that was founded in the 1920s, funded early on by Adolf Hitler and more recently by Saudi Arabia. He has also been active in the attempt to get some of the information out of government vaults to where it can do some good in helping in the fight against terrorists.

[Editor's Note: To date, Think-Israel has printed a significant article on the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe ("The Muslim Brotherhood's Conquest Of Europe") and a Blog-ed on "A Rare Look At Secretive Brotherhood in America".)

The "Rare Look" article includes some information on a Muslim Brother -- Yusuf Qaradawi, whose name also crops up in articles on the riled and indignant Arabs who demonstrate against the Danish cartoons of Mohammed (See Danish Cartoons.) What interesting linkages!] READ MORE

Heil Jihad! - Quando o Islã e Nazismo se Unem

Mitos e Fatos - Conflito árabe-israelense

Grão Mufti junto com oficiais nazistas numa revista de tropas




Diz o pesquisador Roger David Carasso que os “árabes aprenderam sua técnica de desinformação com os nazistas”, mas como a foto acima mostra, isso não é nem de longe a única coisa que eles têm em comum.

A história de Mohammed Amin al-Husseini (o Grão Mufti de Jerusalém) é o ponto da história que explica o começo do "nacionalismo palestino", o movimento islamo-fascista de dominação e extermínio que altualmente se faz passar por um movimento de libertação nacional.

Já que o que não falta são artigos e documentos sobre a colaboração do líder religioso islâmico com o nazismo e sua responsabilidade por diversos massacres perpetrados contra os judeus nativos da região, não vou me alongar no assunto.

Abaixo segue uma pequena lista retirada de um artigo escrito por Jorge Pontual, sobre as contribuições do líder religioso islâmico:


-Em 1929, ele foi acusado de instigar o massacre dos judeus que residiam há milênios em Hebron. Foram mortos 68 judeus e os sobreviventes fugiram da cidade.

-Em abril de 1936, Husseini comandou a Grande Insurreição, que começou com uma greve geral. As exigências, apresentadas às autoridades britânicas, eram a proibição da imigração judaica e da venda de terras a judeus. Houve ataques aos kibbutzim e outras colônias judaicas

-A partir da subida de Hitler ao poder, em 1933, Husseini tentou convencer os nazistas a apoiarem o movimento árabe muçulmano contra os judeus.

-O Grande Mufti propôs a criação do Partido Nazista no Oriente Médio, mas Hitler não concordou, porque o partido era exclusivamente para arianos, árabes não podiam ser aceitos.

-Na Alemanha, Husseini foi recebido por Hitler em 28 de novembro de 1941. O líder árabe propôs uma declaração a ser assinada pelos líderes do Eixo a qual afirmava que: "A Alemanha e a Itália reconhecem o direito dos países árabes de resolver a questão do elemento judeu, como é exigido pelos interesses nacionais e étnicos dos árabes, tal como a questão dos Judeus foi resolvida na Alemanha e na Itália".

-Hitler prometeu a Husseini a "destruição do elemento judeu" nas terras árabes. Documentos nazistas descobertos recentemente no arquivo militar de Freiburg por dois pesquisadores da Universidade de Stuttgart revelam que Hitler planejava ocupar a "Palestina" e exterminar os 500 mil judeus que ali viviam, contando com a aliança dos árabes comandados pelo Grande Mufti. Entre as atividades de Husseini durante a guerra estão:

* Uma fatwa proclamando jihad dos muçulmanos de todo o mundo contra a Grã-Bretanha

* Programas de rádio com propaganda nazista dirigidas aos árabes

* Organização de espionagem e terrorismo em áreas muçulmanas da Europa e do Oriente Médio

* A criação das unidades muçulmanas da SS nos Balcãs

* Treinamento de religiosos muçulmanos para acompanhar as unidades SS. As unidades SS muçulmanas chegaram a ter dezenas de milhares de soldados, na maioria muçulmanos da Bósnia, que combateram os guerrilheiros comunistas nos Balcãs.

-O Grande Mufti colaborou ativamente no extermínio dos judeus no Holocausto (responsavel direto por aprox. 20 mil mortos).

-Segundo depoimento no julgamento de Nuremberg dado pelo lugar-tenente de Adolf Eichmann, Dieter Wisliceny, "o Mufti foi um dos iniciadores do extermínio sistemático dos Judeus da Europa e foi um colaborador e conselheiro de Eichmann e Himmler na execução desse plano. Ele era um dos melhores amigos de Eichmann e constantemente o incitava a acelerar as medidas de extermínio. Ouvi ele mesmo contar que, acompanhado por Eichmann, visitou incógnito as câmaras de gás de Auschwitz ".

-Husseini interveio pessoalmente para conseguir que Himmler cancelasse a troca de 5 mil crianças judias polonesas por prisioneiros de guerra alemães, que estava sendo negociada com a Cruz Vermelha. As crianças estavam internadas no gueto de Theresienstadt e foram removidas para campos de extermínio e assassinadas.

-Uma das operações terroristas organizadas por Husseini foi o envio de cinco pára-quedistas para jogar toxinas (arma bacteriológica) no reservatório de água de Tel Aviv, durante a guerra. Os cinco foram capturados com 10 recipientes que continham veneno suficiente para matar 250 mil pessoas.

-Depois da guerra, o Grande Mufti conseguiu fugir de Berlim, mas foi capturado em Paris. Escapou da prisão e se refugiou no Cairo. Embora sua captura para ser julgado em Nuremberg tivesse sido pedida, os britânicos temiam a reação dos árabes, e permitiram que ele continuasse em liberdade. De seu refúgio no Cairo, o Grande Mufti foi um dos principais instigadores da guerra contra a independência de Israel em 1948, para a qual criou uma força árabe, o exército da Guerra Santa (Jaysh al-Jihad al-Muqaddas). Em 2002, Yasser Arafat disse numa entrevista ao jornal palestino Al Quds: "Nosso herói é Hajj Amin al-Husseini. Tentaram muitas vezes se livrar de Hajj Amin, que consideravam um aliado dos nazistas. Mas ele morou no Cairo, participou da guerra de 1948, e eu fui um dos soldados dele".

-Em 2 de novembro de 1943, Himmler enviou um telegrama a Husseini: " Para o Grande Mufti: o Movimento Nacional Socialista da Grande Alemanha tem, desde sua criação, inscrita em sua bandeira a luta contra os Judeus do mundo. Por isso acompanha com especial simpatia a luta dos árabes que amam a liberdade, contra os invasores judeus. No reconhecimento deste inimigo e da luta comum contra ele repousa a firme fundação da aliança natural entre a Grande Alemanha Nacional Socialista e os muçulmanos que amam a liberdade em todo o mundo. Neste espírito lhe envio neste aniversário da infame declaração Balfour (NT: a promessa britânica de um lar nacional para os judeus na “Palestina”, em 1919) minhas saudações calorosas e o desejo de sucesso na sua luta até a vitória final. Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler".

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Mais Sobre o "povo palestino"

"Não há essa coisa de nação árabe palestina . . . Palestina é o nome que os romanos deram a Eretz Yisrael com o expresso propósito de enfurecer os judeus... . . . .por que deveríamos nós usar esse infame nome que pretende nos humilhar?

"Os ingleses escolheram chamar essa terra em que eles mandavam de Palestina, e os árabes escolheram-na como o nome de sua suposta nação, embora eles nem soubessem pronunciá-la corretamente, tornando-a na Falestina, uma entidade fictícia”.

Golda Meir citada por Sarah Honig, Jerusalem Post, 25/11/95

"Minha posição é a de oposição a qualquer solução que envolva uma retirada de Israel de Judéia, Samária e de Gaza, e contra a criação do assim chamado “estado palestino”. Na minha opinião, a área da Palestina já foi dividida em um estado palestino judaico (Israel) e um estado palestino árabe (Jordânia)." (Um Muçulmano Sionista - (Publicado originalmente em IsraPundit.com - 09/12/2003 - Tradução de Daniel Benjamin Barenbein)
Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Diretor do Instituto Cultural da Comunidade Islâmica Italiana (FrontPage magazine.com :: The Anti-Terror, Pro-Israel Sheikh by Jamie Glazov )

Palestina nunca existiu . . . como entidade autônoma. Não há uma língua conhecida como palestina.

Não há nenhuma cultura distinta palestina.

Nunca houve uma terra conhecida como Palestina governada por palestinos.

Palestinos são árabes, indistinguíveis dos jordanianos (outra invenção recente), sírios, libaneses, iraquianos, etc.

Tenha em mente que os árabes controlam 99,9% das terras do Oriente Médio. Israel representa um décimo de um por cento dessa massa de terras. Mas isso é demais para os árabes. Eles querem tudo. E isso é porque em última análise luta Israel hoje em dia.. . . Não interessa quantas concessões os israelenses possam fazer, nunca será o suficiente.
"Mitos do Oriente Médio", Joseph Farah, editor árabe-americano e jornalista, WorldNetDaily.Com, 11 Outubro de 2000

WHAT IS "PALESTINIAN LAND" AND WHO ARE THE "PALESTINIANS"?

Palestinian people do not exist

Myths of the Middle East

THE SMOKING GUN: ARAB IMMIGRATION INTO PALESTINE, 1922-1931

THE HISTORY AND MEANING OF "PALESTINE" AND "PALESTINIAN"

TERRORISM WITHOUT "OCCUPATION": SOME LESSONS FROM THE EARLY ARAB POGROMS

THE ORIGIN OF THE OCCUPATION MYTH

ARAB REFUGEES: THE BIG ARAB LIE

What is a Palestinian?

O Que é um Palestino?

Paz, nem pensar

A História e o Significado de Palestina e Palestinos

Que ocupação?

The Lie About the "palestinian people" and "palestinian land" II

When Was the Name Palestinian Applied to the Arabs?
Palestine was under arab-muslim control for only a brief period of time even though after the muslim conquest Arabic became the language of most of the population . Noted scholar David George Hogarth made this point back in 1877: “When we look back at the history of the early caliphate, we find the period of genuine Arab empire extraordinarily short... Arabs governerd Arabs, though Arabs on an imperial scale for much less than a century, just the Umayyad Damascus period and no more”. This becomes evident when we examine the 1,174-year rule of conquerors: Umayyids (112 years), Abbassids (163 years), Egyptians (157 years), Christian Crusaders (103 years) and Turks (743 years). Only the Umayyid Abbassid dynasties can be identified as “Arab”.
What’s more, Hogarth acknowledged that sovereign Arab rule lasted “for much less than a century”. In like manner, the muslim chairman of the syrian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 stated that “the only Arab domination since the conquest in A.d. 635 hardly lasted, as such, 22 years”. Furthermore, throughout the entire period of rule, the terms Palestine and Palestinian were not used for any muslim people, Arab or otherwise, although before the Crusader rule Arabs used the term Filastin for the Roman division of “first Palestine” (which included Judea and Samaria), and distinguished it from Urdnm (“Jordan”). Otherwise, the Arabs generally referred to provincies by the names of their capital cities.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Arabs rejected the term Palestinian because it was thought to refer to the Jews. This was evident when the 1917 Balfour Declaration referred to the land of Palestine as the place for a “national home for the Jewish people”. The Arabs reacted to the document, stating that there was no no such thing as Palestine except in referece to the southern part of Greater Syria. Under the British Mandate, the name Palestine was pratically restricted to the land on the western side of the Jordan River, because the British had established on the eastern side the emirate of Transjordan.

In 1950 this emirate annexed the western Arab inhabited part of the western Palestine and changed its name to the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. However, during the Mandandate period, the Arab political representation, headed be the Mufti of Jerusalem, was not called the “Palestinian Committee” as is it today, but merely “The Arab Higher Committee”. And finally, when the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry convened in Jerusalem in 1946, the dinstinguished Arab historian Professor Philip Hitti testified: “There is no such thing as Palestine in [Arab] history, absolutely not”. He likewise opposed the use of the name Palestine on area maps because it was “associated in the mind of the average American, and perhaps the Englishman too, with the Jews”.

The use of the term Palestinian with application to the western Arab population of Palestine cannot be found in any dictionary, encyclopedia, or history book until after the State of Israel started to become a reality. The use of the term Palestinian for the country’s Arabs began in the early 1960’s as Arab leaders sought to create a unified identity. However, it does not appear that there was any serious nationalistic movement until the Six-Day War of 1967. Even then the primary goal of the Arabs was terrorism aimed at the destruction of Israel rather than the recovery of a homeland, since the territories captured by the Israelis in that conflict were not theirs but those of Egypt (Gaza Strip), Syria (Golan Heights), and Jordan (West Bank).

The term Palestinian(s) does not appear in the fundational documents related to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflicts of the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War (Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338). Such an omission tells us that at that time, the Arabs described in these resolutions were not thought of as Palestinians. The usage of the term became more proeminent in the mid 1970’s when it became politically expedient for the PLO to apply the term Palestinian to hte Arab population in exclusion of the Jews. The PLO leadership realized that it would be much better to describe their effort to destroy Israel as a struggle for freedom rather than as a pan-Arabic effort. Since the formation of the Palestinian Authority in 1993, the Israeli-Arabs, in a show of solidarity, have also changed their identity and adopted the name of Palestinians.
Since that time, the term has been used to refer exclusively to the Arabs residents of the West Bank and has become commonly accepted through its use by the international media.

What Is the Origin of the Modern Palestinians?
The Palestine of modern history began in the late nineteenth century, in the dying years of the Ottoman Empire, wich had ruled the region for some 400 years as part of Greater Syria. The Ottomans had not sought to colonize the country; rather, they had focused their attention only in Jerusalem for bureaucratic purposes, abandoning the rest of the land to desolation. The feudal system that had existed for hundreds of years maintained agricultural farms along the fertile Coastal Plain, employing poor tenant farmers or imported workers.

Starting about 1878, harsh conditions forced many groups to immigrate into Palestine, where work was available. According to historical surveys, these migrant workers, from wich the Palestinians of today are descendend, came form many nationalisties: “Balkans, Greeks, Syrians, Latins, Egyptians, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Persians, Kurds, Germans, Afghans, Druzes, Circassians, Bosnians, Sudaneese, Samaritans, Algerians, Motawila, Tartars, Hungarians, Scots, Navarese, Bretons, English, Franks, Ruthenians, Bohemians, Bulgarians, Georgians, Persian Nestorians, Indians, Copts, Maronites, and many others”. Of the 141,000 mostly Turkish muslims settled in the land in 1882, at least 25% (35,280) were newcomers. This local element (mostly from non-Arab countries) working for the foreign-based landowners constituted the “Palestinian” poplation.

Palestinian nationalism, or the desire for a governement and an independent Palestinians state, was non existent. Even though Palestine had been under islamic rule intermittently for 1,174 years, no feelings or bent toward nationalism had ever been recorded on the part of its Arab population. On the contrary, muslim Arabs felt more united with their co-religionists in other countries than with the Jewish and Christians inhabitants of the land they occupied. The religious centers of Islam lay far to the east in Mecca and Medina , and while early muslims had sought to reduce the formidable influence of Christian culture, no attempt had been made to erase the ancient and national Jewish connections with the Land, and especially with Jerusalem. In fact, Jews were recognized as the ancients inhabitants of the land, in keeping with the accountts of biblical history found in the Qur’an.

This continued to be the case largely throughout the entire period of the muslim domination. But, in the last half of the nineteenth century, with the openings of the Middle East to Western travelers and Christian missionaries as well as Europe’s intellectual and cultural influence among younger Arabs, a minority of these people began to seek educational, economic and national independence. However, this independence was sought not form “zionists occupiers”, but from the Ottoman Turkish Muslim overlords!

This nationalistic ideology raised questions about what constitutes a nation and its boundaries. In the debates that ensued, there is no evidence that this Arabs seeking national independence ever thought of themselves as Palestinians. In fact, Daniel Pipes, a writer for the Middle East Forum, says this:

Some said the residents of the levant are a nation; others said Eastern Arabic speakers; or all arabic speakers, or all Moslems. But no one suggested “Palestinians”, and for a good reason. Palestine, then a secular way of saying ‘Eretz Yisra’el or Terra Sancta, embodied a purely Jewish and Christian concept, one utterly foreign to Moslems, even repugnant to them... Instead, Moslems west of the Jordan directed their allegiance to Damascus, where the great-great uncle
of Jordan’s King Abdullah II was then rulling; they identified themselves as Southern Syrians.


At the march 1919 Paris Peace Conference an agreement that promoted the development of a Jewish homeland was signed between Zionist leader Chaim Weizman and Arab leader Emir Faisal. The language of this document spoke of “the Arab state and Palestine”, clearly reflecting the understanding that Palestine was part pf the Middle East designated for the Jewish homeland and separate from the part claimed by Arabs. However, a different opinion had been expressed a month earlier in february, before the conference convened in Paris. At the First Congress of the Muslim-Christian Association, which had met in Jerusalem to choose its representatives for the peace conference, the following resolution was adopted: “We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national , religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds”. Nevertheless, both opinions indicate that Arabs did not view Palestine as having an independent Arab status.

This thinking changed the next year when the British began to delineate Palestine and the French overthrew the Hashemite king Amin Husseini, thereby abolishing the notion of a Southern Syria. Isolated by these events, the Muslims of Palestine had to make the best of a bad situation . A proeminent Jerusalemite declared at the time, “after the recent events in Damascus, we have to effect a complete change in our plans here. Southern Syria no longer exists. We must defend Palestine”. To what extent this thinking may have been shared by other Arabs is unclear, but when the Peel Commission in 1936 proposed the partition of Palestine, another local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the commission: “There is no such country [as Palestine]! Palestine is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Palestine is an alien to us; it is the Zionists who introduced it. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”

Despite such denials , a non-Jewish Palestine did not exist at the time, having been created by the British in 1922 when they separated the land east of the Jordan (which now comprises the present-day country of Jordan). Indeed, a majority of Jordan’s population are Palestinian, and most of the palestinian-Arabs in the West Bank hold Jordanian passports. Even though this “Palestine” has been said to have ceased to exist as an entity when the State of Israel and the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan were established, there had remained among Arabs a recognition that Jordan was the Palestinian state. For example, in interviews with the Arab press in 1981 and 1984, the late King Hussein (grandson of Abdullah) stated: “The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan”. Yasser Arafat has stated the same thing: “What you call Jordan is actually Palestine”. Also, the war between Arafat’s PLO (when resident in Jordan) and the Jordanian government was considered a “civil war”.

Today, however, the Palestinians demand for international recognition as a distinct people who can receive foreign diplomats, fly the palestinian flag, elect Yasser Arafat as president, and claim Jerusalem as its capital – all actions of an independent state – have served to create a “fact” from fiction. This Arab nationalism began only in the early twentieth century, and then only in in reaction to the dominant Turkish rule, not Jewish immigration. It wasn’t until the establishment of the State of Israel ( and increasingly so since the 1967 Six-Day War and the Oslo Agreement of 1993) that palestinian-Arabs have claimed the land as their historic homeland and themselves as people distinct form other Arab peoples. Researcher Roger David Carasso is to the point when he explains the purpose of such palestinian revisionism:

The Arabs learned their disinformation tactic from the Nazis: if you lie long enough, and loud enough, people will actually believe you. As a result, most people now believe there is something called “palestinian” people, a total fabrication, complete with a phony history and a phony culture. There is only one truth here, that are 1.75 million people, a hodgepodge of Arabs and Turks, intentionally or maybe unwittingly, masquerading as a “people”, and made into “people” by the PLO and many in the world community who relished attacking the Jews in yet another novel way