Hat tip to Pro-Israel Bay Bloggers
It was during World War II that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalm, Haj Amin al Husseini, was the house guest of Adolf Hitler. This vicious anti-Semite lived in Berlin, made radio broadcasts to the Middle East urging his followers to drive the Jews out, and helped organize a Bosnian Muslim SS division, which put his words into action in the Balkans.
Al Husseini inspecting Bosnian Muslim SS division
Now, Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian of the West Bank, has again visited Germany and spread his own anti-Semitic messages, even making an oblique reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which everybody outside of the Middle East knows was a fabrication).
http://proisraelbaybloggers.blogspot.com/2011/06/palestinian-in-deutschland.html
Qumsiyeh
"Protocols"
So who is this Mazin Qumsiyeh, you ask and what is the big deal? After all, he is just another anti-Israeli Palestinian. Qumsiyeh is one of the favorite hosts and lecturers of the controversial Olive Tree Initiative, started at UC-Irvine in 2007 and spreading like a cancer to other UC campuses. Under this program, which is run out of the Social Sciences Department at UCI, Jewish, Muslim and other students spend a couple of weeks in Israel and the West Bank talking to people on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sounds reasonable until you explore deeper and see the tilt to the Palestinian narrative and the involvement of prominent figures of the International Solidarity Movement. And if that were not enough, it has been divulged that the OTI group met with the highest-ranking Hamas official in the West Bank in 2009, Aziz Dweik, currently in Israeli custody.
To the OTI, Qumsiyeh is a "peace activist". Here are some previous postings of mine on Mazin Qumsiyeh.
http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/2010/12/olive-tree-intiiative-and-mazin.html
http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/2011/01/more-on-mazin-qumsiyeh-continued.html
http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/2011/03/mazin-qumsiyehs-response-to-itamar.html
Should funding continue for the Olive Tree Initiative, we may assume that another group of UC students will be meeting with Qumsiyeh come this September in the West Bank.
7 comments:
More questions for the Shalom Elcott led OC Jewish Federation. In addition, these questions need to be answered by the far-left Academics at UCI who support this OTI program of indoctrination in anti-Israel, anti-Semitic rhetoric. With the newly adjusted U.S. Title VI codes, one would think that the promotion of anti-Semitism by the OTI, would be addressed, soon.
Time will tell!
Squid
Gary, as a DEA agent, you are surely familiar with the fact that the word "protocols" (small s) has much wider usage than an obscure fabrication by the Tsar's Okhrana. Doctors and nurses follow protocols, computer programs utilize protocols, sworn agents of government adhere to protocols... It is not, per se, a buzzword.
The citation from Herzl sound beautiful, but its weak spot is precisely that it makes no mention of the number or identity of people who may be living in the land he references. Of course we in America have experience with this -- all that "free land" that financed a good deal of our experiment used to have someone living on it who had to be removed.
Anthropologists now estimate that up to 90 percent of the first nations were killed by smallpox and other diseases, before any deliberate theft of land could be contemplated, so its more complex than Howard Zinn recognized.
In any case, we're not going anywhere, and probably "we" more often than not have some Native American as well as European descent. In addition, two thirds of so-called "white folks" are just passing, ESPECIALLY those with ancestry, even a little, dating before 1830.
But the moral weakness of the Zionist vision is precisely its failure to account for the fact that people WERE living in a good deal of the land that is now Israel. This would have been A LOT easier to deal with, if not for the Grand Mufti whipping up xenophobic hysteria, against Jewish communities centuries old as well as recent arrivals well settled on their own land holdings.
But, Israel does have to face it. Israel cannot last forever in a state of siege. Sooner or later it will lose a battle. Once it does, it probably will not be able to recover. It should get things settled while it is still ahead.
Siarlys,
That's why I called it an oblique reference.
Siarlys,
What you fail to recognize is that the ultimate goal of Israel's enemies is not a lasting settlement, but the destruction of the Jewish state. Israel can make a settlement tomorrow, a Palestinian state can be established, but the goal will remain. The conflict will continue.
We all know that there are many in the middle east who long for the complete destruction of Israel. Some of them claim, and some may believe, that they would allow the civilian Jewish population to remain and not harm them. For all I know, Ratki Mladic may have meant it when he told the Bosnian "good neighbors" that nobody would harm them (although I doubt it). But we all know that events tend to get out of control... and most of them wouldn't have the heart to gun down fellow Arabs just to save some Jewish civilians, however regrettable the resulting atrocities.
But politics is not a zero sum game. If either side could achieve total annihilation of the other, at no cost or an acceptable cost, either one would do so. Yes, if Israel could at the push of a button painlessly make every Arab within 200 miles of its borders disappear, someone would push that button. What Israel has accomplished is to make clear that it is neither fading nor a pushover. But, those pesky Arabic-speaking neighbors are ALSO going to be around, for the indefinite future.
So, everybody needs to slowly, ever so slowly, reluctantly, punctuated by outbursts of defiance, approach what is an available option that everyone can live with. What is most important for the long-term survival of Israel is that the Palestinians be out of refugee camps and dependence on refugee aid -- a reasonable civilian life with some prosperity and hope for advancement.
Keeping refugees in camps for thirty years was a political boon to the armies and leaders determined to wipe out Israel. It will continue to be so if Israel does not continue to trade something to the PA that it can hold up to justify what it gives up to Israel.
Of course Israel needs to remain armed.
Nothing will satisfy the Arab states or the Arab street but the eradication of Israel and the Jews worldwide. Israel will not agree to that. They have a legitimate claim to the disputed land, superior, legally than the Arabs. The 600,000 or so of the now millions of former residents on the land left primarily at the urging of their leaders who saw a quick victory over the nascent state of Israel. (research the newspapers of the time.). At best they are war refugees with the same status as war refugees in all previous wars. In those cases the refugees were absorbed into other kindred countries. The 600,000 or so Jews that were kicked out of Arab countries, also war refugees, were quickly absorbed into the Israeli society. It was and continues to be the surrounding Arab countries who put them in camps and kept them in camps all these years.
That's the problem, NOT what Israel has to give up to make peace.
.
Miggie, I just finished typing, in response to a later post, exactly what you have noted here, that the Arabic-speaking refugees left their ancestral landholdings at the orders of Arab armies, enforced at gunpoint. No argument there, I've been reading about it for years.
In real-world diplomacy, there is what you want, and what you expect to get. A good example is South Africa. Joe Slovo, the Communist Party general secretary and ANC executive member, asked why the ANC wasn't delivering on its 1958 program of land redistribution and a socialized mining sector, replied, we didn't win. I wish we had, but we didn't. The government couldn't wipe us out, we couldn't topple the government, so we both settled for what we could get.
I grant you the Arabic political formulations aren't so philosophical, but they aren't going to get the liquidation of Israel, and a lot of them know it, however much they regret it. Nobody advocated that Israel disarm as part of a peace settlement. Just swap some land, give equal value for the settlements it can't dismantle, trade some land along the Jordan for a widening of the nine-mile limit near Tel Aviv, and let those Arabic-speaking people who are not living in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, get on with establishing civil government on some reliable, permanent, basis in what's left on the West Bank.
Those who want "from the river to the sea" can keep marching at UCSC, while the residents of the State of Palestine build businesses and exports, and inevitably begin a lively trade with "the enemy."
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