Monday Dec 10, 2007

Et tu, Mr. Erekat?

Posted by David Harris

Let me see if I get this straight. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, summarily dismissed the prospect of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

His reasoning? "No state in the world connects its national identity to its religious identity." That, of course, is utterly preposterous. What, for example, do Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Comoros, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen have in common? You guessed it. Islam is the official religion, though many, such as Malaysia, have significant non-Muslim minorities.

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In the Trenches American Jewish Committee (AJC) Executive Director David Harris assesses challenges to Jewish security worldwide.

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Ben: David Harris, as usual, makes those truths "crystal clear". True liberals will agree because they can see that Israel is the real underdog defender against its multi-nation bigotry driven Arab aggressors. Knee-jerk liberals will disagree because they refuse to recognize the obvious reality that even the most humanitarian defenders can wind up oppressing their aggressors when their very survival is threatened. Common sense-based morality demands that the genocidal aggressors rather than genocide-threatened defenders are causally responsible for such oppressive defenses.

Ben: Both this article and the previous one reminded me of Quentin Crisp's observation that he realized that his life work was to make crystal clear what should have been obvious to to everyone. There can be no honest and intelligent analysis/curative approach to the over 60 years Arab-Israel conflict if you deny or ignore the facts that almost all of Israel's Arab neighbors and indwellers including the Palestinian refugees, want to destroy Israel and kill its resident Jews in the process, and have been culturally brainwashed into hating Jews and buying those twin Holocaustal goals. Continued...

Bob: Yes,I agree. But so what? You don't answer: What's to be done --- that's the burning issue.

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