generalspeaking

The Palestinian Fig Leaf

The naked truth is so very often unpalatable to those who prefer their realities manufactured in a way that complements their own deep-seated beliefs. And in those instances opinion is readily manipulated by those whose agenda fits neatly into place with that of the accepting group. One big happy family of like-minded people and groups sanctimoniously subscribing to a theory that has little base in reality but which appears quite acceptable, resulting in facade replacing truth.

Attacks by Islamist jihadis are held by the Western-based leftists to be justified because these Islamists have been so severely affected by the unjustified and inhumane behaviour of those whom they attack. They are merely expending their raging energies in an attempt to demonstrate the extent of their anguish over being wronged, time and again. They have been exploited beyond the capacity of human beings to complacently accept. They demand equality.

Fed up with being victims, Islamists work now to achieve victory over the unjust world view of Western democracies. Islam itself is paramount, the sole legitimate faith; it reigns supreme over any other human construct of ideology, politics, social structure, or purported religion. And for far too long Muslims have had to submit to the dictates of the more powerful non-Muslim world community.

The two outstanding issues pointing to the corrupting effects of Western thought and its constructs are the trivialization of the monumental importance of Islam in the world today, and the slight respect, amounting to intolerable disrespect by the non-Muslim world to Islam. Added to that is the plundering of the Arab world's natural resources, in an energy-mad world. And the added insult of a Western nation achieving domination over a geography held by Islam.

The one dominating issue the world is led to believe fixates the Arab and the Muslim world is the unfairness, the lack of justice meted out to the Palestinians. Palestinians as the whipping boy of the Western world. And Israel presents as the West's proxy in an otherwise-Muslim geography. Unless and until Israel relents and decides to re-locate, humbly restoring to the Palestinians that which Islam has decreed is theirs, relations between Islam and the West will remain remote.

Remote to the point of ongoing jihadist assaults on Western targets. As though Arabs and Muslims have not always and continue to prey on their own; as though massive murderous onslaughts by one tribal or sectarian bloc against another was not always part of the world of Islam. Which brings us to the reality of the Palestinian situation. Which, presented from the Muslim point of view, is that of a nation held dear by the world of Islam, insistent that justice be done on their behalf.

This is the same Muslim world in the Middle East whose member-states have always viewed the Palestinians as human dross, beyond the pale, contemptible and undeserving. Loathed and feared, in fact, for their violent propensities. Where Lebanon and Syria and Jordan all felt they had reason to launch well-planned and -executed raids against the Palestinians to uproot them from their refugee camps in their territories. Never a thought to absorbing them, since they were far more useful permitted to fester as aggrieved victims.

Jordan deliberately undertook to cleanse its soil of its inconvenient Palestinian-refugee camps, destroying the lives of thousands during "Black September". Lebanese Christians, for whom the Palestinians represent trouble-prone halfwits, sent their Syrian Army-backed militias to massacre thousands of civilian Palestinians in Beirut's refugee camps. During these cleansing efforts no other Arab states protested the plight of the poor Palestinians.

The Palestinians, grateful to Saddam Hussein for demanding that Israel immediately withdraw from 'occupied Arab land in Palestine', backed Iraq when it invaded Kuwait. And Kuwait had its revenge when Desert Storm threw Iraq back across the border, at which time thousands of Palestinian workers were slaughtered and hundreds of thousands expelled from Kuwait; a deed acknowledged by Yasser Arafat as monstrous.

The message that Arab states would like the Palestinian Authority to get on with its business of settling its dispute with Israel doesn't yet appear to have impinged on its consciousness. Why would it, when that same source always encouraged Palestinians to resist? Of course it doesn't much help that Saudi Arabia is reluctant to surrender its primacy of authority, inciting the PA to insist on its 'rights'; of return, of borders, of Jerusalem.

It is, however, past time for the stale-dated insistence that the plight of the Palestinians is the source of all the sinister plots to endanger the existence of the West, to be abandoned. No need, after all, for the Arab states to keep committing to that fiction, since the West itself, through the auspices of its left-leaning academics, unions, and human-rights activists have taken up the cudgel on their behalf.

Labels: Human Relations, Human Rights, Israel, Justice, Middle East, Peace

posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 07, 2010