After reading some very interesting claims on the last Israel/Us Funding issue, JanH started a side point on Israel’s “racism” and pointed to Egypt as an example to follow. I would like to share this viewpoint:
Arab Regimes, Not Israel, Are Guilty of Racism
Morton A. Klein
10 September 2001
It´s an upside-down world, as the old saying goes. At the conference on racism, in Durban, Arab delegates and their allies accused Israel of racism and human rights violations - yet it is the Arab world that is rife with government-sanctioned racist practices, human rights abuses and mistreatment of women.
Jews are continually victimized by Arab racism. The Palestinian Authority, with the active support of the Arab countries, bombs, shoots, stabs and stones Jews for one reason only - because they are Jews. The PA and the Arab regimes insist that the residents of every Jewish community in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and much of Jerusalem must be expelled, for one reason only - because they are Jews. And Jewish holy sites such as the Tomb of Joseph and Jericho´s ancient Shalom al-Yisrael synagogue have been destroyed by the Palestinian Arabs for one reason - because they are Jewish.
Anti-Jewish racism is the theme of the culture of hatred and violence that is promoted in Arafat´s official media, school text books ("One must beware of the Jews, for they are treacherous and disloyal," according to the text Islamic Education for Ninth Grade), speeches by PA officials and sermons by PA-appointed clergymen (in one recent sermon, "Allah decreed that in our lives, we are to humiliate the Jews sooner or later...the Jews are the enemies of Islam"). In PA summer camps, Arab children are taught how to slit the throats of Jews. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, leader of Reform Judaism, recently denounced the PA´s "neo-Nazi language" and warned that the PA is raising an entire generation of children to hate and murder Jews, for one reason only - because they are Jews.
Black Africans are also the victims of Arab racism. The Arab government of Sudan, for example, sponsors militias that massacre and enslave blacks. The Arab government of Mauritania likewise permits blacks to be enslaved.
Christians, too, are systematically persecuted by the Moslem regimes. U.S. courts have even granted asylum to Palestinian Arab Christian refugees on the grounds that they would be oppressed if they return to the PA areas. In PA-controlled Bethlehem, Muslim mistreatment of Christians has caused a steady stream of emigration, with the city´s Christian population having dwindled from 80% to just 20%. U.S. Senator Connie Mack and a delegation of Zionist Organization of America leaders met in 1999 with Palestinian Arab Christians who described, first hand, how the PA routinely harasses Christians, arrests them on false charges and prohibits them from building or renovating churches. Christian cemeteries are frequently desecrated by Palestinian Arab Muslims.
The Coptic Christians in Egypt are subjected to government-sanctioned discrimination in employment and university admissions, as well as occasional massacres by Muslim terrorist groups. The Maronite Christians of Lebanon have been slaughtered and suppressed by Yasir Arafat´s terrorists and the Syrian Army. Saudi Arabia prohibits Christian worship and even objected to crosses being worn by the American soldiers who defended Saudi Arabia against Iraqi aggression during the 1991 Gulf War.
While the Arabs falsely accuse Israel of human rights violations, in fact such violations are rampant throughout the Arab world. Torture of political detainees is "widespread" throughout the Arab world, according to a July 2001 report by the Cairo-based Arab Organization for Human Rights. The PA itself has tortured to death at least 16 Palestinian Arab dissidents. In addition to torturing prisoners, the Arab regimes engage in "repression of peaceful protest, massive arrests, restriction of freedom of the press, closure of newspapers and detention and imprisonment of journalists."
Not one Arab regime has a free press. Not one Arab regime has free, democratic elections. Not one Arab regime permits complete freedom of speech. Convicted criminals are routinely subjected to cruel and unusual punishment in the Arab world. In Saudi Arabia and Libya, thieves are punished by having one hand cut off. Public whippings or beatings are common in many Arab countries.
The treatment of women in the Arab world is likewise appalling. In Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and Palestinian Authority areas, women suspected of violating Muslim fundamentalism´s moral code are often murdered by relatives seeking to avenge their "shame." Such "honor killings," as they are known, "are regarded with leniency by the law" in PA territories, according to Daoud Kuttab, a prominent Palestinian Arab journalist.
Throughout the Arab world, women are routinely treated as second-class citizens or worse. In Saudi Arabia, women are prohibited by law from driving cars. The Palestinian Arab newspaper Jerusalem Times recently reported that sexual harassment of women in the PA territories is worse than in many other parts of the world, because of "the wide spread of the phenomenon, the lack of laws against it, and the feebleness with which laws that do exist are implemented."
Throughout the Arab world "workers face serious violations of internationally recognized worker and trade union rights," the Jewish Labor Committee reports. For example, unions are illegal in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman; collective bargaining is prohibited in Libya, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen; and taking part in a strike is punishable by death in Sudan.
Yes, racism and human rights abuses are terrible problems in the Middle East - not in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, but in Gaza, Amman, Cairo and Damascus. It´s time for the leaders of all civilized countries to speak out about where the real racism is to be found - in the Arab world.
History:
"""Jewish Resistance to Invaders
It is this land which the Romans, incensed by the fury of the Jewish resistance to their oppressive rule, later (135 B.C.E.) called Palestina, an illegal imposition by a foreign power, derived from the Philistine Indo-Europeans of Aegean origin who settled in the southwest maritime plain of Canaan and, after their defeat by King David around 1000 B.C.E., eventually disappeared. Thereafter, the Romans and succeeding invaders destroyed and obliterated this land so that for almost two millennia there could have been -- and was -- no "Palestine" or "Palestinian" identity.
With the Arab conquest, the Roman-Byzantine province of Palestine, by then fragmented, further degenerated into the Junds of Filastin and Urdun, mere subdivisions within the wider domains of the Damascan Caliphate. Filastin was, therefore, never a country but the fading vestiger of its Judean precursor and generated no corresponding identity. Following the Crusaders, even these shadowy descriptions disappeared as the area was repeatedly invaded and further fragmented into subdistricts now identified only by the sub-capitals from which they were ruled. The manner of its division and rule under the Ottoman Turks shows that by then this region had ceased to play any distinguishing role in the life and culture of the Arab-Islamic world.
During these sterile centuries, the Land of Israel/Palestine persisted only as an abstract Judeo-Christian concept -- the subliminal image of its Jewish past. Even the Arabs have confirmed this truth, not least by their hostility to the creation of Mandated Palestine in what, for them, had become merely a southern part of Syria. Ironically, this mandate for regenerating the Jewish homeland, provides even for the PLO the only real definition of Palestine in their history. In short, the Jewish homeland was destroyed almost from the moment that it was called Palestine, so that Palestine never became an established reality. All this leads to three conclusions of paramount importance:
1. The Jewish homeland is the first and only indigenous, self-defined entity to have emerged in a region which otherwise was merely an arena for conflict, or within the subject domain of foreign powers. This entity is uniquely rooted in Jewish national history, which constitutes the very essence of its being. Indeed, the case for Zionism is not that Jews are justified to a "homeland in Palestine," but rather that Palestine's reconstitution is itself justified primarily by the Jews' right to recover their homeland.
2. As the Peel Commission observed, "Palestine had dropped out of history," so that the Palestine Mandate did not preserve an existing entity but, through Zionism, recovered the Jewish homeland from its biblical foundations.
3. The dimensions of this state were expressly designed to reflect this biblical precedent, its only precursor, which at various times had covered both banks of the river Jordan (from the Hebrew "Yored Dan" -- descending from Dan). It therefore emerged as a composite of various configurations induced by internal and external pressures on the Hebrew kingdoms, its actual borders being determined by those of then existing entities.
The False Image
Hence, modern Palestine was created for the Jews, who had never surrendered their title to the land nor ever acquiesced in its foreign domination. Moreover, this Palestine included, for the same historical reasons that justified the Mandate itself, the topographical area of "transjordan," which Britain later caused to be illegally differentiated as the unprecedented Arab state of Jordan. That collective sovereignty in this land (of which "TransJordan" is a natural part as defined by the history of the Jewish nation which gave it birth), is the prerogative of the Jewish people, a truism enshrined in all documents leading to and including the Palestine Mandate.
Unfortunately, revival of the slave name "Palestine" has enabled the creation of a false image. Arabs could never claim Eretz Yisrael but, by portraying its historically disparate peoples as an indigenous nation, they now lay claim to an imagined Arab Palestine. Yet a true nation finds its expression in common ideals, institutions and achievements, for an y evidence of which we would search non-Jewish "Palestine" in vain. A true nation is united by a sense of kinship and a kindred ethos, whose group consciousness has been molded by a common history, culture and tradition, by a common language and common institutions, all of which are distinctive from others among whom, or next to whom, it lives and who are uniquely associated with a particular territory. No Arab "Palestinian" entity qualifies on these terms. No such entity existed or recognized itself or was recognized as such by others. The local non-Jewish population not only failed to achieve their own specific identity, but even failed to contribute to the well-being and preservation of the country pioneered by the Jews. The encapsulation of these peoples within the newly revived Jewish homeland gives them the semblance of a political unity without historical foundation and which they had not previously sought nor claimed.
Due attention to the true historical setting therefore plays a crucial role in correctly appraising and defining the parameters relating to the Arab/Israel conflict and in the search for a solution reflecting the true balance of historical/legal rights to the Land of Israel.""
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once - Buckaroo Bonsai