What is “courageous” about anyone declaring “I hate Israel”?

Great Article Mona, I had just written yesterday about how the enslaved and occupied Palestinians have scored higher on the UNDPs HDI than Egypt. I hope this effort by you, other journalists, bloggers and the civil society help revive Egyptian nationalism and help enable Egyptians to focus on their problems first.

[...] exists there… and then in a fraction of a second, they’ll somehow blame it on the Jews. At the Altar of Palestine, we sacrifice our issues. Mona Eltahawy isn’t alone in what she thinks because indeed, there [...]

[...] Sandmonkeys Blogeintrag zum Thema hatte ich schon verlinkt. Auch MemZ schreibt dazu und hier auch Mona Eltahawy: [...]

First the German entry above translates as:

“Sandmonkey’s blog entry subject to I had linked. Also Memz wrote to that subject and here also Mona Eltahawy”

Doesn’t really translate well, I know, but my German is not what it once was. A “sandmonkey” in English is a bad term for an Arab and is a variation of “sandnigger”.

I assume that the poster doesn’t like somebody, but is also saying something like he, Memz, and Mona had written the same thing.

Armut: Hier Sie muss schribe auf Englisch, nicht Deutsch, niemand versteht Deutsch hier, nur Arabic und Englisch.

Now, my own commentary:

I have little respect or use for so-called “hip-hop artists” either here in the US or abroad no matter what language they speak. Peter,Paul and Mary, Nina, and The Seekers, among others back in the sixties and seventies expressed themselves much better and in a more lasting fashion back then than any of these useless money-grubbing gunslingers do today without all the profanity and expressed hatred.

The only good thing about this genre is that the practitioners, at least in the US, seem bent on killing each other over drugs, money, women and apparently nothing at all. If I were king for a day, I’d put them all in the Astrodome, issue machetes and let ‘em commence hacking. Last man standing owns whatever money, drugs, and women he can scrounge from the carnage. Then again, I am considered overly radical on this subject.

On the subject of the slums in Egypt, Palestine, and pretty much anywhere else… there is really little that can be done. Poverty cannot be eliminated by any method that has ever been tried. Education is a good start, but it fails, because many of the people in poverty-stricken cultures actively work against any attempt to educate their own.

You can see the same things happening in poor areas of the US, though not nearly on the same scale of poverty or despair as can be seen in the Middle East.

Many liberals, and I must include Mona here… sorry Mona, believe that the way to solve these kinds of problems is to throw money at them. This has been tried in the US for a half century or more. It hasn’t worked, though we have spent millions upon millions in food stamps, housing allowance, aid to families with dependent children and all kinds of other liberal feelgood programs.

The liberal media has been showing us starving children, etc. for years and implying demands that the government “do something” about it. They are less than specific about just exactly what they think the government ought to do. My own theory is that the less the government does, the better for all concerned.

Blacks in the US are more poverty-stricken now than they have ever been. Liberal giveaway programs only served to make them lazy and dependent upon Big Brother. The Democrats in this country did more harm to the Blacks and the poor than any of the most evil KKK members could ever have dreamed of. Indeed, the KKK probably would, if given their day, by segregation and getting rid of government giveaway programs, elevate Blacks to a much higher standard of living than they have presently ever attained.

This, unfortunately, would dis-empower people people like Louis Farakahn and Jessie Jackson, so it could never be allowed.

My solution in this country would involve cutting off all government support to anyone capable of working for themselves… which is almost everyone. It would be a painful and expensive process, but eventually, those capable of rising would make it, working twelve hour days, perhaps, but they’d at least be working for themselves.

Those that can’t compete should be handled by traditional charities, not by tax-supported giveaway programs that don’t work. Enough of my conservative ranting.

Mona is right in that it is imperative for those in power in the Middle East to blame either Israel or America for every bad thing that happens. This is how they retain power. If they can control the media, which, thanks to the Internet, they really can’t any longer, they can make certain that public anger is directed somewhere else.

Hear the bell up there in your palaces? Hear it? Ask not for whom the bell tolls….

thanks for your opinion mona.. wondering.. have u been back to israel since 1998?

Dale,

Doesn’t really translate well, I know, but my German is not what it once was. A “sandmonkey” in English is a bad term for an Arab and is a variation of “sandnigger”.

Yep. But he’s probably the most well known Egyptian blogger, nonetheless

This is the blog being referred to in that German entry:

http://www.sandmonkey.org/

Interesting dude, this Sandmonkey fellow…

Well…let me start with one of my basic rants:

1. Muslims killed by Israelis over the past, say, 30 years…maybe, maybe 10,000 (mostly combantants)

2. Israelis killed by Muslims (mostly purposely targeted non-combants)…about 2,000…

3. Iranians killed by Iraqis…about 500,000

4. Iraqis killed by Iranians…about 500,000

5. Darfurians killed by Arab Sudanese…about 200,000

6. Algerians killed by there own people…don’t know…but more than any Jew every killed

7. Muslims repressed, killed and tormented by the Russia…countless (and who in the Muslim world), including Egypt…was and many still are (Iran) licking/licked the boots of these Russians

8. China utterly repressing Muslim expression in the western territories…and who is kissing their asses…Sudan for starters?

9. Serbs killed, raped and tortured Muslims by the truckload…

10. Lebanese slaughter Lebanese and Iran and Syria help

11. Saddam killed more Muslims, especially Kurds and Shia than Israel has in her whole history

12. Saddam about destroy Kuwait

13. Yemens slaughtered Yemens

14. Gazans illegally enter Egypt and cause havoc

15. Muslims attack innocent tourists in the Sinai

16. Should I keep going?

And Israel is THE enemy of the Muslim world…

I like Mona’s piece overall…but stop with the collective punishment joke. Lobbing rockets randomly into neighborhoods and blowing yourself up in busses and malls is not collective punishment?

Mona…name me a reasonable Palestinian leader…name me 5 Palestinian peace activists that have a following AND are not dead…

Geez…I have a headache

The Arab League’s recent Middle East peace proposal demands not only a right for any Palestinian Arab to make his home in the new Palestinian State that the peace plan proposes, but insists on an equal right for Palestinians to live in Israel proper. This would require Israel to accept millions of Palestinian Arabs who would relocate into Israel itself, rather than making their homes in the newly created Palestinian State.

The 1948 war that led to the Palestinian Arab displacement began within hours of the historic United Nations decision to create a Jewish homeland and (it should be noted) the same Palestinian state that the Arab League now demands as the price of “peace.”

Israel was attacked without warning by five Arab nations who refused to accept an independent Jewish state in their midst. Despite repeated assurances from Jewish leaders that non-combatants would remain unmolested, many Palestinian Arabs fled to refugee camps in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, at that time part of Egypt.

They expected to return to their homes in a few days once the Arabs were victorious. But the unthinkable happened. The Jews won. Ever since that time, the Palestinian Arab leaders have kept their people trapped in squalid refugee camps as a political weapon, rather than encouraging them to migrate to other Arab countries where they could make new homes.

This demonstrates the late, unlamented Yasser Arafat’s mastery of a core Marxist-Leninist political tactic, “The National Question.” Based on the works of Lenin, Marxist-Leninists have for decades encouraged the independence aspirations of indigenous peoples and minority groups to bring about the overthrow of the existing social order, and eventual socialist control.

Arafat’s Soviet instructors helped him to see that world opinion could be mobilised behind his cause if the refugees became “Palestinians” rather than Arabs. By becoming “Palestinians,” the Arabs succeeded in turning the Arab-Israeli conflict from a war of annihilation against the Jews into a struggle of dispossessed natives against colonialist invaders.

The Arab League and the United Nations currently count some 4.3 million Palestinian Arabs as “refugees” or the descendants of refugees. This must rule out Arab claims of Israeli “genocide,” since the 700,000 Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948-9 have evidently multiplied by some 600% in less than 60 years.

It should also be noted that only a small minority of the refugees (and of the Palestinian Arab population in general) were actually land-owners. Most were tenant farmers or “fellahin.” Others were urban tradesmen, many of whom had arrived only recently in the area from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, drawn by the economic opportunities presented by the surging Jewish population in the early part of the 20th Century. The idea that the great-great-grandchildren of such arrivals possess any ancestral right to re-occupy homes and land in Israel is risible.

The Arab League’s insistence on a “right of return” shows that the Arabs still refuse to accept Israel as a sovereign nation entitled to control its own destiny. They are effectively demanding not one Palestinian Arab homeland, but two: one east of the Jordan, the other west of it.

The ludicrous “peace proposal” requires Israel to give up two of the basics of national existence: the right to control entry into the country, and the right to define citizenship. Without that ability, Israeli sovereignty is rendered effectively meaningless.

Israel’s Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, clearly articulates the core issue. “Just as Israel is the homeland for 800,000 Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from Arab countries, so a new state of Palestine should be the homeland for Palestinian Arab refugees.”

If the Palestinian Arabs will negotiate peace based on getting their own homeland, they get to decide who lives in their new state, but they don’t get to decide who lives in the neighbouring state of Israel. Why have a “two state solution” if the Palestinian Arabs insist upon a similar “right” to live in both states?
Israel’s current population of 7.1 million comprises 76 percent (5.396 million) Jews, 20 percent (1.42 million) Arabs, and four percent (284, 000) Christians and others. Based on current birth rates the Jewish majority is already shrinking because Arab families are reproducing almost three times faster than their Jewish counterparts.

The “right of return” demanded by the Arab League would soon lead to Jewish Israel being swamped demographically. Admitting millions of descendants of displaced Palestinian Arabs means that within a few decades, Israel would cease to exist. An Arab majority would simply overrun the dwindling Jewish population, using the mechanisms of Israeli democracy to create a single, united Palestinian Arab state without even a shot being fired.

Israel is right to reject such a proposal.

Thank you Mona. You are a true friend of Israel.

It is shameful that the arab regimes use the Palestinian issue to legitimize their oppressive rule over their own people. It is also a shame that the so called isalmists have used the Palestinian issue as well. But this is not the fault of the Palestinians. It also doesnt change the fact that the Palestinians are in fact experiencing injustice. Throughout history, these very same Arab governments are complicit in the suffering of the Palestinians.