Time for the history re-writers to practice their craft. I'm sure they'll be able to get the Palestinian story to agree with the facts. Time for the Israelis to start their guilt trip again.

Posted by: Salad_In at June 4, 2006 6:48 AM

Three years ago, he said, the conflict was perceived "in a post-colonial framework."

There was a sense "that Europe could cancel out its own colonial history by taking the 'right' side" - the Palestinian side.

I think Stan Greenberg has put his finger on it. One sees less charitable interpretations of the data - for example, that the French themselves are anti-Semitic. And I suspect there were probably a number of factors at work here; but I suggest that Greenberg has identified the main one. The French, and many others, were sold this picture that very cannily exploits their own view of things, their own history and own guilt-feelings. They bought it, because they didn't look very closely.

Posted by: Yojimbo at June 4, 2006 7:06 AM

If you look at the distribution and number of Muslims in France, I wonder just how many Muslims answered this survey.

As their views are totally predicatble it would have skewed the results totally and the actual feeling of monsieur and madame might be significantly antipalestinian.

Posted by: Zathras at June 4, 2006 7:11 AM

As I pointed out a few entries ago, the Israelis did the Palestinians no favours by allowing them to run Gaza as they saw fit. Egypt knows it, and is desperate to avoid a similar Israeli withdrawal from the over-Wall West Bank. The resulting chaos, and above all the inability of Gaza to continue existing without European money, cannot have failed to impact on European public opinion. Now we have to try and make the politicians see sense - as a rule, they take longer than the public to wake up. Meanwhile, all the hysterical people, beginning with Caroline Glick, who compared Sharon and Olmert with Hitler for moving Israel out of that rat-trap of a country would do well to start reconsidering their demand that Israel should have stayed in Gaza for ever and continued to be open to terrorist violence and - more deadly - vicious propaganda of the kind that, even now, is leading the family of a "peace" activist shot dead by an Israeli soldier to start a prosecution against Israeli authorities all the way to military high command, on the absurd conspiracy-theory basis that the soldier had been instructed to murder "peace" activists. Stay the Hell out of Hell and let the denizens of Hell show the world what they are really like when they are peacefully given the opportunity to run their own affairs.

Posted by: Paolo at June 4, 2006 8:16 AM

Looks like Europe might finally be coming to its senses. But the idea that Palestine is colonized by the Jews being analogous to Algeria being colonized by the French, or Pakistan (with India) being colonized by the Brits - has always been downright obscene, and one that the Israelis should help disabuse. Nonetheless, if we see such results from other anti-Israeli members of the EU - Sweden, Germany, Belgium, et al, we might be persuaded that Europe's coming around.

Posted by: Infidel Pride at June 4, 2006 9:07 AM

"who is the moderate in this conflict, and who is the extremist? And suddenly it is the Palestinians who may be the extremists, or who are allied with extremists who threaten Europe's own society."

I asked myself the same question many years ago. It was the Palestinian willingness to resort to terrorism that turned me into a Zionist. I have a deep respect for the way the Israeli population restrains itself in face of the daily terrorist threats. I wouldn't even want to imagine what would happen to Europe's Muslims if Europe faced the frequency of terrorist attacks that Israel has faced.

The article is correct, if is presently much harder to find anyone that is pro-Palestinian, except amongst the extreme-left and extreme-right (neither of which is remotely close to reality).

Posted by: cruzado at June 4, 2006 9:07 AM

As I pointed out a few entries ago, the Israelis did the Palestinians no favours by allowing them to run Gaza as they saw fit. Egypt knows it, and is desperate to avoid a similar Israeli withdrawal from the over-Wall West Bank. The resulting chaos, and above all the inability of Gaza to continue existing without European money, cannot have failed to impact on European public opinion. Now we have to try and make the politicians see sense - as a rule, they take longer than the public to wake up. Posted by: Paolo

Also, since when had foreign aid been an issue in determining people's attitudes towards an aid recipient? I believe the above survey put its finger on it by connecting French opinion of Palis with the behavior they are seeing from their own Muslims in France. It doesn't take long for one with a brain to conclude that if Muslims are behaving in a certain way against the French based on their beliefs, it's not a big leap to assume that they are behaving the same way against the Israelis, and that the latter, despite inate French anti-semitism, isn't necessarily at fault.

Posted by: Infidel Pride at June 4, 2006 9:16 AM

If the BBC, if Le Monde, if all sorts of other organs of supposed instruction were ever to be truthful about the demographic and cadastral history of the former Ottoman territories that were then assigned, by the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, to the Mandate for Palestine, if they were ever to be truthful about the absence of that phrase "Palestinian people" before the Six-Day War, and the reasons for its invention, if they were ever to be truthful in conveying the fate of Jews in Arab and Islamic lands, if they were ever to see that the "Arab world" consists not only of Arabs but of all kinds of non-Arab and non-Muslim minorities who have been ill-treated and that the Jews were a specific case of a generic problem, if they were ever to make clear to their own populations of Infidels that the Arabs will never make a treaty -- never have made a treaty-- with Israel, or with any other Infidel country, that they will honor because the model of such treaties is that of Al-Hudaibiyya, in which Muhammd made a temporary, ten-year "truce" with the Meccans in 628 and broke that "truce" within 18 months, and that "truce" treaty has become the permanent model of all such treaties made by Believers with Infidels, if the Europeans, so steadily, drop by drop, misinformed about long-suffering and largely inarticulate Israel, if they were to come to see that the "Palestinian people" is a fiction, a name given to the local Arabs who have become the shock troops of the relentless Arab siege of Israel, if they could see that despite the inability of Israel to properly present its case, this does not mean that others cannot see that case for what it is, if they realized that that every concession made by Israel whets, and does not sate, Arab and Muslim appetittes, including appetites for recovery of other lands once part of Dar al-Islam (Spain, Sicily, the Balkans, Bulgaria, Rumania, much of Hungary) but in the end all of Europe, as of all the world (but one doubts that the self-assured countries of East Asia would ever succumb as the confused, unsure-of-themselves-and-their-own-history-and-achievements countries of Europe appear prepared to do), if all of this were to happen, and if the consquences to the historical sense of the West, and to its own moral survival, of the loss of Israel and the possession of what was in Western Christendom known as the Holy Land, were to be taken over by Muslims, were to be understood -- then Europe would not be saving Israel.

It would be saving itself.

Posted by: Hugh at June 4, 2006 10:47 AM

Hugh, you are a poet.

My soul is filled with dread when I think of the horror to come as a result of the entire non-Muslim world's, not just Europe's, failure to acknowledge and then to embrace the truth of that which you speak. The consequences of this failure will reverberate through history to come for more than a thousand years, of that there can be no doubt. It will be a collective memory of the greatest human slaughter of all time. The entire globe will be engulfed in the flames of the coming conflagration. There will be no refuge anywhere to be found on the planet.

Woe to the present generation who in the 20th century has failed to honor the sacrifice of generations past and failed in their duty to leave the planet in better condition for future generations than in the condition that they inherited, for this generation has allowed the jinn of jihad to escape from the bottle to which it was confined by our ancestors with sword and cannon for more than a thousand years. Woe to the present generation who will witness the Face of Shiva.

Posted by: Hulegu Khan at June 4, 2006 11:25 AM

An increasing proportion of Europeans are concluding that "maybe the Palestinians are not the colonialist victims" after all.

So the penny's dropped? Not before time. Nobody asks how the "Palestinians" - Arabs, in other words - got to "Palestine" in the first place?

Islam was a vehicle for Arab imperialism, the imperialism you never hear about.

Hugh, you are a poet.

But that "if" stuff has already been done, though Kipling didn't have such a long first bit followed by such a short second bit.

Posted by: Interested at June 4, 2006 11:42 AM

Infidel Pride: it is exactly because the prospective chaos in the West Bank - or eastern Judea and Samaria, if you prefer - would almost inevitably spill into Jordan, that Egypt is petrified. It would then either face a Jordanian entity ran by Hamas - which is nothing more than the local version of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's own internal enemy - or have to intervene militarily and, whoof, take over the role of unloved controller and occupier that Israel vacated, with all its cost in money and blood and political prestige. Egypt is already worried that Hamas and Al Quaida are operating anti-Mubarak operations out of Gaza. They would a million times rather that the Jews did their dirty work for them, only the Jews are no longer minded to. And they are bloody well right.

Posted by: Paolo at June 4, 2006 2:29 PM

I only have one thing to say

GOOD

its about time and in reality is sooooo long overdue

fight the good fight

Posted by: Taranus at June 4, 2006 5:51 PM

Yes woe indeed, and also an unbelievable struggle, with this resurrected ghost of the same fanatical religion that our ancestors so successfully confined and that had withered in desert poverty and obscurity until oil.

Make no mistake that the coming years will be a test of our civilizational resolve and our will to survive. It will be fought with unspeakable weapons and ferocity that make brutality of the 20th century pale in comparison.

We will be tested, we will have to struggle for our very existence. Ordinary citizens will be called upon to fight in wars both at home and abroad. Parents will make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the nation. There will be defeats and dark days, but if we can steel ourselves and face bravely this enemy, we will win.

We must win, loosing is not an option, if we want to leave our children our great and beautiful civilization to enjoy.

We can win if we identify the enemy and the source of it's ideological and religious power and without hesitation or guilt, boldly say from our lips!

Islam is the enemy of the West and this generation will stop it's dark advance.

Muslims are it's victims

Women are it's victims.

Freedom, science and art would perish under it's crushing embrace.

Even if we are forced to glimpse the face of Shiva, we must take up the challenge and defeat this monster.

Posted by: El Cid at June 5, 2006 12:07 AM

Paolo

Egypt already has a Palestinian Authority neighbor run by Hamas - the comrades of the Muslim Brotherhood. That is a problem that Cairo has to worry about - it doesn't have the luxury of worrying whether Jordan folds into that camp, or for that matter Iraq.

Remember that for years, Egypt tolerated a Muslim-brotherhood like regime in Sudan, which was allied to Osama and Egypt's native sons - Mohammed Atef and Ayman al Zawahiri, and did not try to get them extradited, nor did it try to topple the Sudanese regime: having a non-Arab neighbor as a result would have been worse from Mubarak's point of view.

While the Israelis have left them responsible for the Philadelphia corridor to ensure that weapons don't get to Hamas, the Egyptian border patrol will have to ensure that Hamas doesn't get to the Muslim brotherhood. In other words, they'll have their hands full.

Posted by: Infidel Pride at June 5, 2006 12:36 AM

This is very good news. Frankly I've always thought the Europeans supported the "Palestinians" because they thought that support would protect them from terrorism.

Posted by: Roxane at June 5, 2006 1:03 AM

Look, Infidel Pride, I am not making it up. It's common knowledge, and if you bothered to follow the news, you would know it too.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/722346.html
Now will you please stop arguing like those clever people who denied the possibility of motion, only for Socrates to get up and start walking up and down?

Posted by: Paolo at June 5, 2006 1:10 AM

Paolo

If you don't want to argue, I won't. But there are lots of holes in your theory above (particularly, and glaringly, Sudan) that are worth pointing out.

Posted by: Infidel Pride at June 5, 2006 2:16 AM

I think Hugh broke some grammatical rule there. I don't know which rule, precisely, but I'm pretty sure that single sentences shouldn't have 13512351235125 words in them.

But since they stopped teaching grammar (or the purpose for language) in my high school by the time I arrived there, I don't know (or care).

Posted by: Hyman Roth at June 5, 2006 5:49 AM

"Maybe the Palestinians are not the coloinialist victims after all".

A brilliant deduction, Europe!! Welcome to the world!!!!!!

ps-Not that this proves these people have figured anything out here beyond this relatively obvious point.

Posted by: pythagoras at June 5, 2006 2:33 PM

I saw this today and a picture of the Jewish Israeli Demonstrators, the face in front of the camera (Rami) was sporting one of those fashionable unkempt goatees, Rami a strange name for a Jew, but what do I know, he certainly looked to me like a European, blue eyes, reddish hair, light skin.

Israelis and Palestinians Hold Joint Anti-Occupation Protests Simultaneous protests were held on Saturday in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv and the Palestinian city of Ramallah calling for an end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that began 39 years ago. In Ramallah demonstrators called for an end to the blockade on the Palestinian people. The Tel Aviv protest was organized by a series of Jewish peace and student groups.

* Israeli student organizer named Rami: "Yes, we have a similar sister demonstration in Ramallah right now going on with thousands of people marching there with the same massage of peace that we can cooperate, we can work together, we can destroy the occupation together, destroy the racism and do something together."

Source
Same source gave sympathetic air time to the "first Hijabed" member of parliment so she could whine, and engage in the favorite Muslim pasttime of disinformation and dissimulation.

By the way she described herself as a British Muslim, and I've seen Jews describe themselves as American Jews.. why is that.. I've never seen a Catholic say that I'm an American Catholic or a protestant say they are American Baptists (or methodists).. American and British are adjectives, the Muslim, Jew is a noun and denotes the core identity and loyalty. I am an American, not hyphenated (even Afro Americans have American as their core identity not Amerigo-Africans). If I didn't consider myself an American, first, last, foremost and exclusively then I would have to migrate to a place where I felt at home, and If I couldn't use a noun (American) to describe myself then I have no business sojourning here.

If I thought Britain was a more desireable place, then I would migrate, change nationalities and loyalties and consider myself one thing and one thing only -a Brit.

Posted by: Nariz at June 5, 2006 8:20 PM

The people of europe who are anti Israel are moral cowards.

It is easy to condemn a regime that demonstrates so much self restraint when dealing with terror and constant provocation.
It is much more difficult and more demanding of bravery to stand in front of an arab miltia that is about to murder black Africans in the sudan.

now that the truth is slowly sinking in people are begining to think.

I used to work at a office which was all very PC, there was a gay chap there who used to wear oneof those arab scarves, I sent him a link to a story about gays being murdered.......he never wore that dammed scarf again, moral high ground !

Posted by: apostate_islam at June 6, 2006 5:38 AM