Comments on The Belmont Club,"Promises"

The Arabs have been selling old rope for ready money for over 60 years now. They simply can not conceive that the bluff is finally being called. Remember that the first thing the British did with Mandatory Palestine was to carve off 60% of it to create the Emirate of Trans-jordan for the Hashemite Abdullah of the Hejaz. Remember also that the second thing the British did with the Mandate of Palestine was appoint Mohammad Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. We can thank the Jewish Lord Samuels for that particular gift that keeps on giving. Also remember that before WW-I the territories that became Mandatory Palestine had a fairly small population which was not always dominated by Moslems. A good overview of the competing historical demographics arguments can be found at Mid-East Web.

Look at it this way, the British created out of whole cloth an Arab state in Palestine where there had never been one and they gave it to the most prestigious Arab family available and they did this over a quarter century before Israel was created. The British then gave the leadership of the local Sunni Moslem community's religious and educational life to an open anti-Semite who also had over a quarter century to develop a communal identity that could support a national movement. Then when a Jewish state was created on a small portion of the territories the United Nations offered the Arabs a second nation state within the old Mandate, and the Arabs refused. Now in 1948 the big waves of decolonization were in the future and there were less than a third as many counties as exist today, so being offered a second State was actually a big deal. Five years later the Jordanians, who had absorbed most of the proposed second Palestinian state, the first being in fact Jordan, kicked out the Mufti al-Husseini.

Billions of dollars get milked from the Western world in the following decades creating and sustaining a Palestinian refugee community despite the fact that their existence as refugees is largely the responsibility of the Arabs and not of the Jews. Now it is clear that millions of people sincerely believe themselves to be the descendants of displaced Sunni Palestinians. It is also clear that for a sizable percentage of that group, maybe 20%-40%, it is unlikely that there ancestors had more than a passing connection with the native resident Sunni population. It is impossible for the 100,000 Moslem residents of 150 years ago to become the 10,500,000 Palestinians claimed to exist today. Indeed it is impossible for the 650,000 claimed refugees of 1948 to have become the almost 800,000 refugees of 1953.

Israel is simply unwilling to commit suicide to support this fraud. The terrible thing is that between the enormous constituencies that have been built to enable the Palestinian grievance industry and the real threat of nuclear warfare involving the Iranians the cost of ending these messianic fantasies might be paid for with rivers of blood.

-------
Robohobo,
The rhetorical trick that Arabs can't be Anti-semites really should be rejected. It is accepting the left wing technique of thought control by language control. Yes Jews and Arabs are both considered semites. Ethnic groups do not in fact map identically to language groups. Most modern Jews are probably descended from either Central Asian Khazars or Mediterranean, especially Late Roman Empire, converts. Until the second century Judaism was gaining converts rapidly. Christianity won out over Judaism in replacing the moribund Jovian cult by combing Jewish ethics with Mithraism and other popular mystery cults, while dropping circumcision. The original semitic Jewish population was scattered in tribal groups throughout the Middle East. Most of them were forcibly converted to Islam, after the men were killed. Yathrib (now Medina) was a Jewish city and most Arabs have some Jewish ancestry. There were several semitic groupings in historical times. Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic are closely related. Aramaic was the common tongue and what Jesus spoke in his death cry.

Given all that pedantry it does not change the fact that the term Anti-semitism was designed in a European setting to refer to an animus specifically directed against Jews. The trait in question can be exhibited by people from any background, including by Jews. If Marie Claude was discussing Francophobia, and assuming that such a phenomena was widely discussed and had lethal consequences in the past, it would not add to the argument to point out to her that Napoleon Bounaparte was really an Italian and that your great great great grandmother fled with the Huguenots to Acadia.