Well, see, now, Hugh, when ya put it like that...

Posted by: Jewel Atkins at August 10, 2008 10:31 AM

"when you put it like that..."
-- from a posting above

Yes, the title does seem a little strange until you read all the way to the end.

I give credit cards credit only where credit cards are due.

Posted by: Hugh at August 10, 2008 11:29 AM

Hugh, It's just a shame that the Khadduri book is so expensive: $95 on amazon and the used copies I can trace are not much cheaper.

Posted by: philiph at August 10, 2008 11:32 AM

Hey, philiph, I found you a copy at alibris for the mere price: $389.52
If you are willing to haggle, I am sure they will take off %10! ;)

Posted by: Jewel Atkins at August 10, 2008 12:07 PM

Now that's often the case with such books, such as J. B. Kelly's "Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1797-1880." And that is after the original Clarendon Press edition was exhausted, and another thousand were reprinted.

So here's a plea for some samaritan publisher to republish Majid Khadduri's book. Possibly a good and cheap samaritan publisher in India.

It would help to have such books readily available.

Posted by: Hugh at August 10, 2008 3:00 PM

Please could you tell me which Article of the United Nations Charter elucidates the principle that "the victors [...] keep territory they have won"? I am aware of no such provision in international law.

Do you believe that such a principle SHOULD be applied, generally, in war? Do you believe that, since China's Peoples' Liberation Army defeated the Tibetan Army in 1950, China is legally and morally free to do anything it wants to Tibet and the Tibetans? That the Tibetans have NO right to resist the importation of a replacement Chinese population into Tibet? Please clarify.

Posted by: georgesdelatour at August 10, 2008 4:35 PM

georges

as I understand from other occasions when Hugh has discussed the rules of war, if country A AGGRESSES against country B for no good reason at all, and country B responds in self-defence, THEN if country B manages to win, and at the end of the fight the territory that A used as a springboard for its initial attack finishes up in the hands of B, then it's tough bikkies for A. That was how the formerly independent sultanate which is now southern Thailand, ended up under Thai rule; the sultanate launched a sneak attack, classic jihad style, on Thailand when they thought Thailand was weak and could be gobbled up (Thailand was in a fight with someone else), but miscalculated - the Thais defended themselves successfully, won, and took over.

As regards Tibet, blind freddie can see that the Chinese were totally the aggressors. They had not a shred of a claim to Tibet - geographically, culturally, ethnically, linguistically Tibet is completely distinct from historic China. The Chinese invaded Tibet because they had the power to do so, and because Tibet had good things - minerals especially, but also, in the south-east, forests - which they desired to steal, and which they have stolen, causing untold ecological and possibly even regional climatic damage.

If the Tibetans had been stronger, and had had help, at the time of the Chinese invasion, had the Tibetans in the course of defending themselves ended up in control of portions of 'china' next door to Tibet that have large Tibetan populations, then China would have lost those to Tibet, under the rules that Hugh is talking about.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at August 10, 2008 5:18 PM

No, victors who are aggressors do not keep the spoils.

But the aggressors in 1948 were the five Arab armies that invaded the nascent state of Israel. Indeed, even before the state was declared, in the time of the League of Nations Mandate, the Arabs had been making war on Jews, begining in the teens of the last century. And the aggression -- the Jihad -- continued. It continued with a diplomatic and economic boycott. It continued with a refusal, despite constant Israeli pleas, to make the armistice lines of 1949 into recognized borders (and having refused to do so for many decades, it is absurd for the Arabs to now claim that Israel is obligated to go back and treat those lines as "international borders" when it is the Arab refusal that prevented that). It continued with the 19,000 attacks by the Egyptain fellahin, on Israel (attacks that, often aimed at Jewish farmers - did cause some, though not as many as one might fear, casualties). It continued after the Suez Campaign, or rather, after Israel relinquished the Suez, when promised that peace would be maintained by the U.N. and the guarantees of the Great Powers as to the Straits of Tiran being kept open). In mid-May 1967 it was Nasser who ordered the U.N. peacekeepers out, and who blockaded the Straits of Tiran, and harangued Cairene crowds as he promised them the destruction of Israel and they shouted with hysterical, whipped-up hatred their approval. And so on. And the same record continues after, by force of arms in June 1967, Israel obtained possession of parts of the territory of Eastern Palestine (in the historic sense) that had been assigned to the Mandate for Palestine which, as everyone knows, was not set up to create an Arab state (there were several other mandates for that purpose, and in the end, the Arabs got 22 members of the Arab League, more states than any people -of those who themselves are keenly aware of their claim to be a single people -- on earth).

Look at the map of Europe, and its rearrangements, after World War II.

Or look at the map of Europe, and its rearrangements, after World War I. I am particularly fond of pointing to the Sudtirol, once part of Austria, but taken and awarded to Italy, as one of the victors in that war, even though at the time of the forced transfer, the population was 98% ethnic German. But who then, and who now, thinks that Italy has no right to, and should give up, that place now known as Alto Adige? The Italians were under Austrian rule for a long time. They suffered under it. They were not about to give up some land taken from their former masters that, as the Italian anthem beautifully puts it, "rounds the helmet" at the top of the boot. And save for Ms. Klotz and a handful of German-speaking revanchistes in that area, and possibly some in Austria, everyone agrees with, or at least does not find fault with, Italy. I don't. Do you?

Posted by: Hugh at August 10, 2008 7:48 PM

Well put, Hugh.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at August 10, 2008 8:26 PM

The 1948 Arab-Israeli War was the continuation of the 1947-1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine. It is simply wrong to portray that civil war as pure one-sided Arab aggression against blameless Zionists, including, as it does, such events as the Deir Yassin massacre. At the time of the Partition Plan Arab and Jewish numbers were very finely balanced within the proposed Jewish area (55 to 45%, according to Wikipedia). Arabs constituted 67% of the total population of Palestine, Jews 33%; yet the partition was to give the Jewish state 56% of Palestine (again Wikipedia figures - feel free to correct them if you think they're wrong).

It is completely unsurprising that the indigenous Arabs thought this partition unfair and resisted its implementation. To portray that resistance as aggression, in the same sense that, say, China's invasion of Tibet was aggression, is absurd.

Posted by: georgesdelatour at August 10, 2008 11:23 PM

Regarding Italy's annexation of South Tyrol. I am certain that, if it happened in 2008 rather than 1918, all reasonable people would simply ask the locals, "which country do you want to be citizens of?". It seems that most of the locals have come to accept Italian rule. And it probably helps that Italy didn't subsidize the building of Italian settlements to grab the best Tyrolese land and gradually edge the locals out.

Still, France could not hold on to Saarland at the end of World War Two. A plebiscite showed that 67% of its inhabitants wanted to rejoin Germany, which it did in 1957. I think that this was right, don't you?

Posted by: georgesdelatour at August 10, 2008 11:46 PM

Georges doesn't give a damn, obviously, about the fact that there were always Jews living in eretz Israel.

He is trying to make out that the ethnic pot-pourri that comprised the ancestors of today's 'palestinian arabs' - a pot-pourri that includes Islamised Turkified Slavs and Bulgars (18th/ 19th and 20th century imports), Islamised Arabised Berbers from North Africa, and Islamised Arabised Egyptians and Syrians and Moabites from Jordan, and even more outre elements such as Afghans and Turks and Mongol Mamluks and Circassians - are the ancestral aboriginal indigenous people of the land between the Jordan and the sea. Hell, some of them - a great many of them - arrived in the place in the 1930s. Some of them had only been in the place two years or less, in 1948. And it appears that for him the claims of this melange, almost none of it tracing its ancestry even as far back as the first Muslim invaders, trumps that of the Jews - the Jews for whom ONLY eretz Israel, since forever, out of all the territory on earth, has ever had any meaning as a homeland.

While around half the Jewish population of present-day Israel derives from Jews whose ancestors lived right across the Islamosphere, whose presence in places like Baghdad, Egypt and North Africa and Yemen PRE-DATED the arrival of Muslim Arab armies by - oh- about a thousand years; but who still did NOT regard themselves as indigenous to, permanently belonging to, the places where they lived, because their hearts belonged to Jerusalem and eretz Israel.

'georges' resolutely ignores the fact that eretz Israel was NEVER entirely Judenrein, even in the darkest depths of its occupation by Muslims.

He also ignores the fact that the Jewish population of eretz Israel was only small during that period BECAUSE of the disgustingly cruel treatment to which it was subjected by the Muslim invaders and occupiers. (And why? - because the Muslims knew damn well the Jews had the prior right, and were therefore hell bent on keeping them down. There was even one Muslim ruler who was getting ready to kill ALL the indigenous Jews and Christians in the Holy Land - till he got a message from the King of Abyssinia telling him that if he did so, every mosque in Abyssinia would be razed and every Muslim in Abyssinia executed. Thus - and only thus - was a complete genocide of Jews and Christians in eretz Israel averted...).

I presume georges will be telling us, next, that eretz Israel 'always was, always will be, MUSLIM land'??? But how about that little matter of Beersheba, and Hebron, and Shechem, and Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, and the Sea of Galilee, and slightly more recently, Sepphoris and Safed - all of them Hebrew and Jewish Sacred Sites (as we Australians would put it) that mean absolutely bloody NOTHING to Arabs except by barefaced theft and propaganda. Let's think about those six hundred years, 1267-1967, during which Muslims, arrogant selfish supremacist Muslims, flatly refused to allow any Jew to enter the Cave of Machpelah, the burial place of Abraham. A site, like the Temple Mount, to which Muslims have no historical claim at all - only brute force and barefaced lies.

Let's try a thought experiment. Let's go back in time, 500 years. The Spaniards are busy completing the removal of the Muslim Moors. Would 'georgesdelatour' regard the resistance of the Moors - some of whose families had lived in 'al-andaluz' as Top Dogs for centuries, enslaving, exploiting and mass murdering the natives - as completely justifiable, and condemn the subsequent centuries of the revived Spanish polity as an Evil Occupation of Ancestral Moorish Land?

Or how about Greece, and Serbia? Were the Greeks and Serbs - whose land was occupied by Muslims for 500 years - Bad People for chucking out the occupiers in order to be able to live as free people instead of dhimmis? Oh, those poor, poor Balkan Muslims- after 500 years or so, surely they should have been regarded as Natives, and as totally justified in resisting the Nasty Greeks and Wicked Serbs?

500 years of Muslim occupation in Spain, 1300 years of Muslim occupation of eretz Israel - what's the difference?

Why should Arab imperialism be allowed to trump the history of its victims? Why should anything Arabs conquered, and ruined, be regarded forever and ever as Arab Ancestral Land?

If decolonisation can happen to other Empires, then decolonisation can happen to the Empire of Islam which is in a very real sense the Empire of the Arabs and those they have convinced to bow to Arabia.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at August 11, 2008 3:21 AM

The best estimate is that, at the time of the Balfour Declaration, people who self-identified as Jews constituted around 9% of the population of Palestine, with Muslims and Christians making up the remaining 91%. Immigration intended to transform the 91% majority into a minority was bound to be resisted, bound to lead to conflict; and that conflict in turn often jeopardized the welfare of the 9%. You don't need any specifically Islamic doctrines to explain it (many Palestinian figures, such as George Habash, Edward Said and Hanan Ashwari are actually of Christian background). It's a commonplace of human history that rapid mass transformative settlements tend to be resisted by the locals. Can you cite one example of such a transformation - anywhere in the world - which was not resisted?

Posted by: georgesdelatour at August 11, 2008 9:04 AM

"The victors-–particularly those who have repeatedly been the victims of aggression--keep territory they have won. 'Peace' is what the victor offers the vanquished."

This stood out like a huge flag. I've never figured out why everybody thinks that Israel should give so much as one square inch to the arabs--especially since the arabs, without true provocation attacked Israel--especially when victors in other wars have not been expected to do the same.

And if you take a map and paint every predominantly moslem country one color and Israel another, you can barely see Israel. Ultimately, it isn't the land, so no matter how much is given to the arabs, they will never be satisfied.

Posted by: MadAggie at August 11, 2008 9:33 AM

Can you cite one example of such a transformation - anywhere in the world - which was not resisted?"

Sure. The countries of Western Europe today, with their Muslim populations. In France one out of every three babies born is a Muslim baby; that means that in France, twenty years from now, one out of every three twenty-year-olds will be Muslim. You can calculate for yourself when France will be more than 50% Muslim, but long before that, with an aging population of Infidels, and the young and aggressive and violent Muslims, things will have been decided.

Where's the resistance? Where, in Western Europe, is the resistance to this fantastic "peaceful" takeover, by means of the Money Weapon, Da'wa, and above all, demographic conquest?

Posted by: Hugh at August 11, 2008 3:58 PM

georgesdelatour thinks that Said, Habash and Ashrawi were 'Christians'.

It is difficult to imagine a more repulsive trio. Two of them barefaced liars and propagandists, as morally disgusting as Goebbels; and one (Habash) an out and out janissary of the jihad, a fomenter of murderous violence.

And these are the people whom delatour cites as examples of 'palestinian' 'christianity'.

How ...interesting.

Oh, and by the way, had the Muslims not engaged in murder and threats and forcible removals against the yishuv 1914-1917, the Jewish community at the time of the declaration of the Mandate would have been 18 % not 9 % (at the end of WWI the Jewish population in 'Palestine' was half what it had been when the war began; there are historians who have concluded that had the allies not advanced with unexpected speed, the Jews in 'palestine' might all have been disposed of by the Muslims, as the Armenians also were disposed of).

As for the population balance during the 1930s: the British allowed far more ARAB MUSLIM IMMIGRATION than Jewish immigration. So who was playing the immigration game? The MUSLIMS (and, of course, the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Muslims who poured into that part of the world from all over, during the 1890s-1930s, can hardly be called 'indigenous ancestral inhabitants'!). And who, by pressuring the British to make them lock and bolt the gates of 'palestine', prevented a million or so desperate Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe, from fleeing to 'palestine' in WWII? - the MUSLIMS.

Final point. Before you shoot your mouth off any more, georgesdelatour, go read Bat Yeor, 'The Dhimmi'. The 9 % of Jews in 1917/1918 (which would have been 18 %, if the Turkish Muslims had not killed or driven out half of the 1914 Jewish population 1914-1917) would NOT have been given human rights or legal equality in any Muslim-dominated 'Palestine' that might have arisen. Nor would the Arabised Christians, by the way - for which, read 'The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam', or merely contemplate the fate of Rami Ayyad in Jihad Fortress Gaza, last year.

Here's a humble Aussie soldier's summary of the predicament of the Jews in 'Palestine', as observed by him in 1917:

The Desert Column, Chapter 50, Page 183:

"I think this is the 17th (December, 1917). Yesterday we rode by numbers of vividly pretty little red-roofed towns. The inhabitants are very fair skinned, mostly Jews. They are by far the most cleanly people we have yet met. They are very hospitable although they do charge us a hefty/ p. 184 / price for brown bread, honey and tobacco.

"Lots of them have had a hard time from the Turks. They seem to live between two devils, the Turk and the Arab. Apparently the Turk prevents the Arab from massacring them outright, because the Jews are a very handy people to squeeze taxes from..." .

If you want a summary of why the Ottoman Muslims allowed any Jews to survive in, or to immigrate to, eretz Israel, or anywhere else in their dominions, there it is in a nutshell. 'Tolerance', as we think of it, had nothing whatever to do with it. Rather, the Islamic Prime Directive to murder the non-Muslim (and, too, the vicious Judenhass that Andrew Bostom has recently catalogued at length and in detail) was somewhat tempered by the need for hardworking dhimmi slaves from whom to extract jizya.

Presumably georgesdelatour thinks Jews had NO RIGHT to live in their own homeland as anything other than grovelling, terrified dhimmis, to be murdered at will whenever the Muslim mob decided it needed some fun.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at August 11, 2008 6:13 PM

You seem to think that population statistics are all that matter. Or rather, are the end of the matter. Very well then, let us watch in Europe. As Europe islamizes, as more and more peoples of Europe have birth-rates that mean they do not replace themselves, while the aggressive Muslim population have birth-rates three and four times as high, even if not quite as high as they once were. One-third of the babies now born in France are Muslims, which means that in 20 years one out of every three 20-year-olds will be Muslims, and you can continue to do the math into the inexorably -- unless intelligent measures of self-defense are taken -- grim future for the civilization of Europe and for the West. And as opinion polls taken in England show, a very large number of even university-going Muslims think that murder on behalf of "religion" (and we know what religion) is justified, and furthermore, other opinion polls of the general population of Muslims in England -- you can find these discussed at JW by googling -- -- have birth as more and more young Muslims declare that they think Shari'a should be imposed, Given the history of the last century, that is the history of German aggression for which France and indeed all of Europe paid heavily, had France had a more than colorable claim to the Saar, indeed maintained, and with reason, that retention of the Saar was indispensable for its security, as the “West Bank” is for Israel, given that the Jihad against it has no end, then of course I would support France retaining the Saar, whatever the percentage of the German-speaking population there wanted or didn’t want. France got back Alsace-Lorraine, and look at Alsace-Lorraine today. Italy did not give up the Alto Adige, and look at the Alto Adige today. Israel’s great mistake was not to have understood Islam,and to have applied to itself standards of conduct that are absurd, and that no other nation in the world requires of itself. By the Mandate, by the rules of warfare, by common sense, Israel out in June 1967 have explained to the world that it now had taken possession of that part of the Mandate, that is of Western Palestine (all of Eastern Palestine, and a good deal more land, went into constituting the original Emirate of Transjordan, the English-created consolation prize for the Hashemite Abdullah, whose older brother had been given Iraq as his prize), and that it was now part of Israel, and that was that.

End of story.

It will come to that in the end. Despite the idiotic behavior and misunderstanding, or incomprehension of Islam, by so many Israelis who simply do not want to know, do not want to recognize, the truth of a permanent conflict. But there it is.

And they should do exactly as they are entitled to.

As for your repetition of this phrase “indigenous Arabs” – it cuts no ice with me because, unlike you, I know something of the demographic record, and where so many of those supposedly “indigenous Arabs” came from. They came from all over. In the 1820s, many Egyptians arrived with Mehmet Ali, and stayed. Others came with Abdel Kader, after the French crushed his resistance, and they settled down, not “since time immemorial.”
Why, there are some Berber villages still in Israel, peopled by the descendants of those North Africans. And then, in the early decades of this century, many Arabs came, especially from Egypt and Iraq, attracted – just as Arabs flocked to the oil states during the 1970s and 1980s because of the oil boom (think of all the Egyptians who went, for example, to Libya and to Iraq, or all the “Palestinian” Arabs in Kuwait)—by the economic activity created by the Zionist pioneers, who started their heroic efforts (see, on this, “Palestine, Land of Promisee” by the American agronomist from Liberty, North Carolina, the celebrated Walter Clay Lowdermilk).

In the 19th century, as every Western traveler confirmed, the Holy Land, as they of course knew it, was a place of ruin and desolation. See Lamartine, see Melville, see Mark Twain, see a hundred or a thousand others. In 1850 the total population of Jerusalem, the only place beyond tiny village size in the entire Holy Land, had a grand total of 15,000 people. A plurality were Jews, and the Christians were hardly all Arabs. Indeed, there were dozens of different nationalities and pilgrims and clergy who had come to stay. As for the rest of the Holy Land, its total population in 1850 could not have exceeded 100,000 or, perhaps, just a little more. One cannot count the Bedouin who wandered, after all, from Egypt, through the Holy Land, to the Arabian desert – wandered all over the place, and could hardly be assigned to this or that fixed above.

Many Arabs came to “Palestine” (that is, to the place known to Western Christendom as “Palestine” between the end of the 19th century and right through the Mandatory period, -and they came without check. During the period of the Mandate, when the British severely restricted the admissison of Jews despite the fact that, as Mandatory power, Great Britain had solemnly committed itself to “facilitating Jewish immigration” and “close Jewish settlement on the land” (see Article Six of the Mandate), at a time of their greatest peril (why, Macdonald, in his White Paper of 1939, set out a limit for Jewish immigration into Mandatory Palestine of 15,000 a year, for five years, after which the Arabs would have a total veto, which would mean an end to all such immigration. Churchill thundered against it, as a betrayal of promises made to the Jews. And during the war, when the Black Sea ports remained open, and many might have escaped – perhaps a million – through Rumania, they were condemned to death by the closing off of Palestine, with its Mandate set up by the League of Nations with the exclusive goal of creating the Jewish National Home – the British kept Jews out (even though during the war Palestinian Jews volunteered, in Iraq, and in Egypt, and even in Syria, for the most dangerous, practically suicidal missions against the Germans), while Arabs continued to flow in, from Egypt, from Iraq. Your “indigenous Arabs.”

You are certainly disingenuous, by the way, when you want to take as your point of departure for population statistics November 1917, for you surely know that during World War I the Jewish population of “Palestine” fell by fully half, as Jews left because of Turkish oppression and the promise of more (the Aaronsons, who provided intelligence for the British, in the opinion of the most authoritative British intelligence officers, such as Col. Meinertzhagen, were far more useful and important in the Allied cause than the few hundred train-attacking ill-trained followers of the Hashemites about whom T. E. Lawerence, that mythomane (see Richard Aldington’s 1956 myth-destroying book), pretended had been so important.

And finally, there is this to consider. The deceptive phrase “the Arab World” came in only after World War II, essentially as a result of steady ARAMCO propagandizing on behalf of the Arabs. It is a deceptive and cruel phrase, because it overlooks the real nature of the vast lands – some 14 million square miles if we include all 22 member states of the Arab League – in the Middle East and North Africa. In those lands the non-Arab and non-Muslim “indigenes” continued to live. There were more than a million Jews, for example, living as virtual chattel slaves in Yemen, and as dhimmis – subject to humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity, elsewhere, though under British rule in Iraq there had been a brief flourishing of Jewish life in Baghdad, and under the French, in North Africa, after the passing of the loi Cremieux in 1870, Jews were no longer treated under the Shari’a but according to French law, and that helped protect them. The same thing with Lord Cromer in Egypt, for Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, and others who, for a time, made Cairo and Alexandria far more cosmopolitan and lively than they have been ever since Nasser seized their property and booted so many of them out, and certainly more than those now dull dull dull places, enlivend by so little save some of the Copts, and a handful of the less reverent or fanatical Muslims, will ever be again.

What about all those non-Muslim and non-Arab peoples? Let’s leave aside the Jews, and talk about all the others. How have the Berbers been treated by the Arabs, ever since the French left? You know how: they have been subject to linguistic and cultural imperialism, and you know about the riots in Tizi Ouzou, and you can go to Berber websites and see what they think of their treatment at the hands of the Arabs. What about the Kurds? You know that Saddam Hussein alone did not massacre 182,000 Kurds. His Arabs did it for him, and as Kanan Makiya wrote, puzzled apparently, not a single Arab outside of Iraq uttered a syllable of protest at the Arab massacre of the Kurds. And what about the black African Muslims in Darfur? The Arab states, especially Egypt, are slyly running diplomatic interference for the Sudan, even as they make deals with it, and support the Arabs in Khartoum up to the bloody hilt. I won’t even bother to discuss, for you must know, how the non-Muslims have been treated. Have you studied the history of what has happened to the Copts, is happening to them right now, in Egypt? What about what is happening to Christians – Maronites – in Lebanon ever since they lost their French protector, and also were out-bred by the Muslims who threaten the last Christian redoubt in the mountains of Lebanon, where the Maronites, who were there before the Arabs arrived bearing Islam as their gift, had managed to hold out? What do you think will happen to the Christians in Syria, if their protector, the syncretistic Alawites, ever lose their hold on power, and the real Muslims,who constitute 70% of Syria’s population, take control? You know what would happen. And what has happened to the Chaldeans and the Assyrians in Iraq, without Saddam Hussein, who knew they were no threat to him – the Shi’a clergy were – and he actually protected them, with his iron rule, which was a Sunni despotism disguised as a Ba’athist and “secular” regime, and that “secular” part required that the Ba’ath Party be open theoretically to all – Sunni, Shi’a, Kurd as well as Arab, and even the Christians, who were no threat. Indeed, Christians constituted the household staff – the cooks, the tasters, the waiters, the drivers – for Saddam Hussein, becaue they could be trusted. But now that Saddam Hussein is gone, and Muslims have been “liberated” to act as Muslims will, towards non-Muslims, how’s it going for those Christians?

You know.

And so, if we are anywhere to have non-Arab and non-Muslim peoples permitted to establish states of their own, surely they will have to found those states in places where there are Arabs already. So what? Do you think it is a legitimate objection to an indepdnent Kurdistan that it might include Arabs who would be under Kurdish rule? Why? Don’t the Arabs have 22 states, in the land area of which there have been, for centuries, all sorts of non-Arabs? And if a Berber state were to be carved out of part of Morocco and Algeria, would that state not include some millions of Arabs? So what, again? If you agree in principle that the non-Arabs of North Africa and the Middle East, or at least the larger such peoples, deserve states of their own,then in those states there will be Arabs who will just have to get used to the idea of not ruling the roost . And that includes the Arabs who are going to have to get used to the idea that Israel is here to stay, and that Israel is entitled, both under the terms of the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, and by all the rules of warfare, to hold onto the “West Bank” and—though I doubt that Israel wants to—Gaza as well. Indeed, Israel had a case, not under the Mandate but under the rules-of-warfare argument, to have held onto the Sinai, but was iinsufficiently prepared for the hectoring by Carter and Brzezinski, and indeed, had long before convinced itself, for some idiotic reason, that it would, “for the sake of peace,” (a peace that passeth understanding, once one knows all about the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya, and what it signifies), give up “land” to Egypt. It was quite unnecessary, quite stupid, and quite unjustified.

Posted by: Hugh at August 11, 2008 6:39 PM

On George Habash, that 'christian', see Mr Spencer's review of Oriana Fallaci's "The Force of Reason":

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16788

The review begins:

'A common thread runs through some of Oriana Fallaci’s 1970s interviews with world leaders:

'Golda Meir: “I think the war in the Middle East will go on for many, many years.... Because of the indifference with which the Arab leaders send their people off to die, because of the low estimate in which they hold human life, because of the inability of the Arab people to rebel and say ‘enough.’”

'What was the cause of that indifference, that low estimate and that inability?

'Yasir Arafat: “No! We don’t want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else.”

'Whence his unwillingness to negotiate or compromise?

'Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: “[Muslims and Hindus] are not brothers. We never have been.... We’ve never arrived at a harmonious relationship.”

'Why not?

'By her own account in her new book, The Force of Reason, it was years before Fallaci herself discovered the answer to these questions.

'She explains {NOTA BENE - dda} that George Habash, the Marxist {NOTA BENE - 'marxist', *not* Christian - dda} leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, explained it to her in 1972, but she did not grasp the full import of his words.

“Our revolution is a part of the world revolution. It is not confined to the reconquest of Palestine,” Habash told her, but he wasn’t spouting Marxist dogma.

{Got that, everyone? George Habash's ipsissima verba - 'our revolution is part of the world revolution. It is not confined to the reconquest of Palestine'. Nuff said. - dda}.

“Palestinians are part of the Arab nation,” he continued.

“Therefore, the entire Arab nation must go to war against Europe and America. It must unleash a war against the West. And it will. America and Europe don’t know that we Arabs are just at the beginning of the beginning. That the best is yet to come.

"That from now on there will be no peace for the West ... To advance step by step. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet.”

'THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE PLANET'. This guy was, in the end, neither a 'marxist' NOR a 'christian' - for this is the language of Arab supremacism and imperialism, which is the language of Islam, of Jihad.

Got that, O apologist for Islam and jihad, georgesdelatour, hiding yourself so mendaciously behind the name of a French painter? Churning out the taradiddles about the 'two tiny peoples' and 'indigenous Arab resistance to the invading Jews', and all the other rubbish!

You won't fool me; because *I know* what George Habash told Oriana Fallaci?

Now, back to Mr Spencer's review of 'The Force of Reason'.

"In The Force of Reason, Fallaci chronicles how fantastically successful that [Arab/ Muslim] strategy has been—so successful that before this century is out the Mediterranean Sea could become an Islamic lake, with countries on the Northern side joining those of the South in the global Islamic umma.

"She writes with verve and passion about short-sighted Europeans who are more concerned about violating multiculturalist sensibilities than fighting for their own survival—and who decline even to acknowledge that what they are in is indeed a fight for their survival.

"The Force of Reason reads as an explanatory postscript to the remarks of those leaders of the 1970s.

"Why did the Arab leaders value life so cheaply, as Meir noted? Because of the Islamic notion that Paradise awaits those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (Koran 9:111).

"Why did Arafat reject all hope for peace and call openly for Israel’s destruction (at least in the days before he learned how far he could go by dissembling on this point)?

"Because of the Islamic idea that infidels must not rule in any land that has once been ruled by Muslims.

"Why did Bhutto dismiss any possibility of Hindus’ and Muslims’ living in peace with as much finality as Arafat did when speaking of Israelis and Arabs?

"Because of that same jihad ideology that has no place for Muslims and non-Muslims to live together in peace on an indefinite basis as equals.

"For the [non-Muslim] leaders of the 1970s, jihad was no concern, and for those of today, it is the conflict that none dare to name.

"Fallaci chronicles her travails after the publication of her post-9/11 manifesto, The Rage and the Pride, likening the mainstream media to Medieval inquisitors and herself to a heretic whom they thirst to destroy for her abominations. For today’s chattering classes, supporting America against the jihadists is a crime more heinous than even the mass murders of September 11. In Europe today, Fallaci asks acidly, “If I hate Americans, I go to Heaven, and if I hate Muslims, I go to Hell?”

"In today’s PC world, yes. But her book attests to the fact that the force of reason is still very much alive, and powerful."

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at August 11, 2008 7:23 PM

The precise passage featuring George Habash, from 'The Force of Reason', p. 131-133.

"The enlightenment came in Beirut when I interviewed his [Arafat's] rival, George Habash: the man who carried out the bloodiest terrorists' attacks in Europe. His [Arafat's] rival. Because, while a conscientious bodyguard protected him by pointing his submachinegun at my head,

' with absolute clarity Habash explained to me that the Arabs' enemy was not Israel alone: it was the whole West. America, Europe: the West.

'And now read carefully, please, don't miss a word of what he said.

"Our revolution is a part of the world revolution. It is not confined to the reconquest of Palestine,' he said.

'The time has come to admit that we want a war like the war in Vietnam. That we want another Vietnam, and not only for Palestine but for all the Arab countries.

'Then he said, 'The Palestine problem is not an aside problem. A problem separated from the Arab Nation's realities. Palestinians are PART of the Arab nation. Therefore the entire Arab Nation must go to war against Europe and America. It must unleash a war against the West. And it will. America and Europe don't know that we Arabs {note: he says 'we Arabs' - NOT 'the communists' or 'the people' - 'we Arabs' - dda} are just at the beginning of the beginning. That from now on there will be no peace for the West.'

'Finally he said, "To advance step by step. Millimetre by millimetre. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet". THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE PLANET.'"

That isn't about the 'liberation of "Palestine". THAT is about ARABS pursuing Total World Domination!!

And Fallaci adds:

"Oh yes, my eyes opened because of George Habash. The trouble is that they didn't open completely, and know why? Because...I believed Habash referred only to the terrorist attacks, the massacres'.

'I didn't understand that talking about the war on the West, about the strategy-to-be-expanded, he did not mean the war waged with weapons, and that's all.

'He also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, *the religious war* {my emphasis added: dda} waged by stealing a country from its citizens. Step by step... The war waged through immigration, fertility, ...The Islamic holidays, the five prayers' interruptions, the halal meat, the face covered also on the identity papers...The Islamic marriage, the polygamy, the stoning of women, the assets to remove from the museums and from the archives and from the libraries, to go on..."

Combat jihad + stealth jihad. NOT to 'liberate 'palestine'. But to subjugate the entire world to Arab despotism, that is, to Islam which totalises, absolutises, rationalises Arab despotism.

I think, thanks to Oriana Fallaci, we know all that we need to know about George Habash, whom georgesdelatour seems to approve of as a 'christian' leader of the 'palestinian' 'resistance'.

And knowing that, I think we know all we need to know, about 'georgesdelatour'.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at August 11, 2008 7:43 PM

The other one, the real one, the painter Georges de la Tour, who could not possibly have been produced in a Muslim society, and whose works in the Louvre will hardly survive the islamization of France or of Europe -- oh, maybe they'll be sold off to the Americans, in their Fortress North America -- is something else again. Especially if you like candle-light. Bougie nights.

Posted by: Hugh at August 11, 2008 7:45 PM