As Jews celebrate the birth of their nation 60 years ago, the Palestinians and the Arab world have added their own twist to Israel’s conception, commemorating it as a nakba, or catastrophe. Abraham Foxman’s excellent column from Friday exposes the sinister ruse behind the Arabs’ exploitation of nakba:

With this single word, Palestinian-Arab leadership has attempted to encapsulate the entire Palestinian narrative that goes like this: “if only the State of Israel had not come into existence, the Palestinian people would be thriving in a state of their own.” Put another way, the Jewish people, aided and abetted by the Western powers, bear responsibility for all Palestinian pain and suffering. …How elegantly simple their formulation of blaming Israel appears; how neatly straightforward and powerful the image conveyed by “catastrophe” seems. It conjures such recent devastating occurrences as the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the recent cyclone in Burma, and the even more recent 8.0-magnitude earthquake that shook China, all of which brought death, destruction, and displacement. The tragic consequences of these natural disasters are indeed a catastrophe for their victims. Only those human beings who are cruel or indifferent could ignore such suffering. In invoking nakba, the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters want the world to believe that a Jewish tsunami or a Jewish cyclone is the root cause of Palestinian suffering.

What Arabs and Palestinians fail to admit, let alone teach, however, is the central role their own leaders have played over the past 60 years in ensuring and perpetuating Palestinian and Arab pain and suffering. It was Arab leaders, as Foxman notes, that 61 years ago patently rejected the United Nations decision to create a Palestinian-Arab state that would have encompassed territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Indeed, as Barry Rubin noted in the Jerusalem Post recently, in 1948 the West (including Jewish leaders) worked tirelessly and were prepared to make significant sacrifices in an effort to strike a deal with Arab states and the Palestinians. “Whose fault is it that they didn’t use those six decades constructively? And who killed the independent Palestinian state alongside Israel that was part of the partition plan?” asked Rubin. “Answer: The Arab states and Palestinian leadership themselves.” He continued:

The British government provided money and arms to Arab states (for Egypt, 40 warplanes and 300 troop carriers; for Iraq, planes as well as antiaircraft and antitank guns; for Saudi Arabia, a military training mission) while embargoing them to Israel. The British government also tipped off Arabs about the timing of its withdrawals (giving Arabs a head start to seize abandoned installations), subsidized the Arab League, blocked Jewish immigration and let British officers run Jordan’s army in the war against Israel.

Later Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said even admitted publicly that it was clear to the Arabs that “Britain viewed with favor the Arab aims regarding Palestine.” Arab leaders later recognized that the Brits were rooting for the Arabs as much as they were for the Jewish state. America supported the Arab cause too:

It’s well-known that President Harry Truman supported partition and quickly recognized Israel. But in March 1948 the US government offered the Arab states a serious plan to suspend partition, block a Jewish state, and create a new, long-term trusteeship. They considered but rejected it, even after Washington proposed an international peacekeeping force - including Egyptian troops - to maintain order.

Jewish leaders also at the time were willing to make concessions to the Arabs. “Finally, if the Arab side had accepted partition, the Jewish leadership would have accepted the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state.” The West, and the fledgling Jewish state that had every justification for maintaining a hard-line, uncompromising stance, bent over backward to conceive a workable plan that would satisfy Arab and Jewish demands.

Why didn’t any of the plans see the light of day? Why did Arab nations instead choose to go to war with the young Jewish state? Fundamentally, it was because prominent Arab leaders, notably the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini, possessed a deep, unquenchable hatred for Jews that made war inevitable. It was Arab leaders who pushed their states and the Palestinians into war with Israel—who caused the pain and suffering of the Arabs and Palestinians.

“Indeed, there would have been a start down a path toward celebrating the 60th anniversary of the State of Palestine,” says Foxman. “The real disaster is not what the Jews and the world are blamed for, but rather the decisions and leadership of the Arabs. The self-destructive errors first made in 1947 have been repeated over and over by successive generations of Palestinian-Arab leaders, causing pain to Israel and suffering to the Palestinians” (emphasis mine throughout).

By commemorating the myth that the Jews inflicted nakba on the Arabs and Palestinians in 1948, Arab and Palestinian leaders today, driven by the same hatred for the Jews as their forefathers, are practicing a more outrageous form of the same policy. The West is madly making concessions to Arab states throughout the Middle East and Jewish leaders are prepared to practically sever arms and legs to appease the Palestinians. Arab and Palestinian leaders, meanwhile, show no interest in making peace with the Jewish state and perpetually, through pr campaigns such as nakba, cultivate and intensify hatred for the Jews among Palestinians.

The end result, as it was in 1948 and as the Trumpet has long forecast, will be war!

Global Warming: The New Communism

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer weighed in on the global warming debate this week not by examining the science, but by exposing its role as a means of social regulation in Western societies. He identifies the rise of carbon legislation as a replacement for the failed Communist and socialist models, but with the same results:

For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class—social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies—arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism). Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher’s England to Deng’s China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but—even better—in the name of Earth itself. … And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment—carbon chastity—they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

He warns that this attempt to redefine government in the name of carbon regulation is already in the legislative arena:

Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe. There’s no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

For more information about the carbon credits fiasco and the growing religious fervor of global warming advocates, read “Global Cooling Is Coming!” from the June/July 2008 Trumpet.

Rhetorical Retreat

More than a few have lambasted the efforts of the politically correct, multiculturalist, Islam-appeasing peacniks in the mainstream media and government circles seeking to water down the rhetoric employed by the media and government officials when discussing Islamic terrorism and America’s war on terror. Bret Stephens’s column in the Wall Street Journal last week highlights one of America’s latest rhetorical retreats:

The Department of Homeland Security thinks it’s a bad idea to use the word “liberty” when describing America’s foreign policy goals. Nor does it much like the terms “Islamist” and “jihadist.” Heaven forbid the federal government cause needless offense in the current war against, well, whoever. Such are the recommendations on “Terminology to Define Terrorists,” a nine-page, “Official Use Only” memo issued in January by Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. It purports to represent the suggestions of a “wide variety” of unnamed American Muslim leaders consulted on the subject.

Instead of consulting Muslim authorities on how they thought their radical counterparts ought to be framed in discussions and reports about Islamic terrorism, perhaps U.S. authorities should have consulted the family members of the victims destroyed in 9/11—one wonders what they might label the suicide bombers, and the movement they represent, that toppled the twin towers that fateful morning!

Now, thanks to the DHS brain trust, we are offered a “Global Struggle for Security and Progress.” Perhaps with further moral and intellectual refinement, we can someday embark on a General Effort Against Negativity and Ungoodness. In “1984,” George Orwell famously created Newspeak, “the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.” How things haven’t changed. The Homeland Security memo begins by declaring that “Words matter,” whereupon it proceeds to suggest that some words matter so much it’s best not to use them at all. Instead, the memo proposes a “strategic terminology” to dictate the utterances of public officials regarding the so-called Global Struggle.

Perhaps the Department of Homeland Security ought to pay a little less attention to rhetorical strategies designed to appease Muslims and pay more attention to dealing with the real problem.

In the new dispensation, much of which has reportedly been adopted by the State Department, using the word Islamic is out because it potentially “[concedes] the terrorists’ claims that they are legitimate adherents of Islam.” Use of the word jihad is said to “glamorize terrorism.” Islamist – a neutral and broadly accepted term for those who espouse Islam as a political system – is frowned upon because “the general public . . . may not appreciate the academic distinction between Islamism and Islam.” Using the word Salafism, the religious variant of Islam espoused by al Qaeda, may have the unfortunate effect of demonizing those Salafists who aren’t violent. The term moderate Muslims may include those who aren’t religiously observant, and thus offend those Muslims who are. “Mainstream Muslim” is supposedly better.

The most interesting capitulations have to do with the dhs’s preference for the term “progressive,” rather than “liberty.”

“The struggle is for ‘progress,’ over which no nation has a monopoly,” reads the memo. “The experts we consulted debated the word ‘liberty,’ but rejected it because many around the world would discount the term as a buzzword for American hegemony. But all people want to support ‘progress,’ which emphasizes that there is a path for building strong families and prosperity among the current dislocations of globalization and change. And progress is precisely what the terrorists oppose through their violent tactics and through their efforts to impose a totalitarian world view.”

Problem is, as Stephens notes, the term “progressive” comes with more than a little baggage itself.

It seems to have escaped the authors’ notice that the most formidable totalitarian movement of the 20th century – communism – was, by its own lights, “progressive.” It seems to have escaped their notice that the essence of a totalitarian system is the denial of liberty (often in the name of progress). It seems to have escaped their notice that “progress” is a word that signifies nothing. Exactly what is one progressing to? It also seems to have escaped their notice that Muslims themselves might aspire to live in conditions of political, economic and social liberty, U.S. “hegemony” notwithstanding.

“The inanity here is so mind-boggling,” concludes Stephens, “that it seems almost deliberate, and causes one to wonder just which ‘American Muslim leaders’ the U.S. government is consulting.”

Sadly, such capitulation in the face of the enemy is not isolated. Fact is, over the past few years the terrorists have quite cunningly exploited Western political correctness and multicultural dribble in an effort to further their violent campaigns against us. To see how they’ve done this, read “The Terrorists’ Megaphone” and “American Lawyers: Terrorists’ Weapons.”

Elsewhere on the Web

Unlike many Christian churches, Pope Benedict xvi is quite unwilling to subscribe to the women’s liberation movement now firmly rooted in Western society. While more than a few groups are prepared to ordain women priests and ministers, Benedict prefers the more conservative, traditional approach. “The Vatican is slamming the door on attempts by women to become priests in the Roman Catholic Church,” reports Canadian Free Press. “It has strongly reiterated in a decree that anyone involved in ordination ceremonies is automatically excommunicated. A top Vatican official said in a statement Friday that the church acted following what it called ‘so-called ordinations’ in various parts of the world.”

Frank-Walter Steinmeier promised that Germany would stand up for the security of Israel last week. “‘The Shoah, the millionfold murder, the immeasurable pain Germans inflicted on Germans and other Europeans of Jewish faith is part of our history. Daily remembrance and daily dealing with the Shoah … is, will and must be part of our future,” said Steinmeier. Because of Germany’s past, Germany has an obligation to “take a stand against the Iranian president’s talk time and again.” Steinmeier’s message is very similar to what Angela Merkel said in Israel earlier this year. The Trumpet has often drawn attention to a Bible prophecy that says Germany would become one of Israel’s “lovers.” This prophecy is being fulfilled right now, as the most important politicians in Europe cozy up to Israel. They are not to be trusted. For more information on where this will lead, read our article “The Outcome of the Israeli/German Relationship.”

America is afraid to stand too strongly at Taiwan’s side for fear of upsetting China. Cognizant of waning American support, many Taiwanese are now seeing the need to cultivate closer ties with China if they are to survive. That is why they have turned to Ma Ying-jeou, a man who told Newsweek that his ultimate goal—once conditions are right—is reunification with the mainland (Oct. 16, 2007). Ma’s vision for Taiwan-China relations will not protect Taiwan’s freedom, however. Beijing remains committed to establishing its dominance over the Taiwanese people. Importantly, many mainland Chinese are also looking forward to the benefits of improved cross-Strait ties, as this article from Xinhau relates.

And Finally …

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad taunted U.S. President George W. Bush on Friday, telling high-ranking Iranian military commanders that like all other American presidents, George W. Bush will take his dreams of attacking Iran with him when he leaves office. America has never emerged victorious from any war it has waged, he said.

I’m not sure about you, but I seem to remember World War ii concluding pretty decisively. But that mustn’t count to Ahmadinejad, because Hitler’s destruction of 6 million Jews apparently never happened.

Additionally, the Iranian president said that while Washington may never abandon its “chimera” of waging war against Iran, the Bush administration would do well to remember that Iran will “not only respond to any attack, but will also cut the hands of aggressors.” “Whenever Bush entertains his chimerical thoughts, his military commanders paint him a lucid but terrifying picture of the consequences of striking Iran,” he said.

Setting aside the gravity of the Iranian president’s remarks for a moment: President Bush’s chimera—that’s impressive, Mr. Ahmadinejad!