"Palestinians," and the need for things to be seen aright

Hugh Fitzgerald on the The usage of the slogan "Palestinians":

"She said Asha, a Jordanian of Palestinian heritage, contacted the agency within the last year, but apparently did not take the test for foreign medical school graduates... ." [see: http://kdka. com/topstories/ topstories_ story_187110435. html ]

Jordan is Palestine east of the river Jordan. So the correct way to describe "Dr." Asha is as an "eastern 'Palestinian' Arab of western 'Palestinian’ origin."

The identification of someone according to where one's ancestors came from is, in the case of those trying to make a political point, getting to be transparent. Henry Kissinger may be a "German Jewish refugee"; his son, however, is not. A Hindu who fled what is now Pakistan in 1949 may be a Hindu refugee; his grandson is not. Only in one case do we permit a certain pseudo-group from handing down, as if in the genes, the quality of being a "refugee" -- and this is in the case of the so-called "Arab refugees," who after 1967 were named "Palestinian refugees." That word "refugee" can only apply to those who actually moved from country A to country B. It cannot legitimately apply to their children born in country B, and it certainly cannot legitimately apply to those who moved out of the country in 1948, thinking they would soon be returning in the wake of a successful Arab military campaign.

And then there is one other thing.

What are the people in Iraq called -- or most of them? Arabs, and Kurds.

In Egypt? Arabs, and Copts. (The Copts speak Arabic, but they are not Arabs.)

In Algeria and Morocco? Arabs, and Berbers.

Why then, when it comes to Israel, is the ethnic group "Arab" forgotten? Why is it only there that suddenly the local Arabs must be referred to as "Palestinians, " with their so-called "nationalist" project, to be contrasted with the Jews of Israel?

The transparency of the careful renaming should be obvious. It hasn't been, just as the nature of the war against Israel has also been obscured. In reality, it is a classic Jihad against an Infidel state. And in fact, it began even before that state was declared, and burst into open warfare at the time the state was declared. It continued as diplomatic and economic warfare, punctuated by as much terrorism as proved possible, between 1948 and 1967. During that period there was not a single Israeli soldier in Gaza or the "West Bank." Then it continued after the defeat of 1967, with the goals re-packaged as having something to do with the "nationalist aspirations" of the just-invented "Palestinian people."

Things need to be seen aright. Things need to be seen aright in Thailand and Pakistan, in India and Bangladesh, in Pakistan and Sudan and Nigeria (where the Biafra War was a war, by the Christians, of self-defense against the Jihad conducted against them by the Muslims of the north), in France and Great Britain and elsewhere in the Bilad al-kufr, where Jihad by all means, but chiefly by use of the Money Weapon, along with campaigns of Da'wa and demographic conquest, proceed. And also, and not least, things need to be seen aright in Israel. That remains true whether or not the benighted and not very impressive current leaders of Israel recognize that what they are fighting against and have always been fighting against is a Jihad, even when they had no idea that it was a Jihad. And it is directed at their state not because of its size -- that is irrelevant -- but because it is a Jewish, and thus an Infidel state, on land that belongs to Islam. And it does not matter that the land is a mere sliver, without any natural resources. Nor does it matter that Jews, like the Kurds and Berbers and Armenians and Assyrians and Copts, were also people of the vast area so misleadingly by some now called "the Arab world," or that they might "deserve" a defensible state of their own. The very idea of the Infidel nation-state is abhorrent to Muslims, though of course those who now live in those nation-states will, for now, largely shut up about that abhorrence.

The question is: how deliberately, willfully ignorant will Infidels, and especially those Infidels whose duty it is to instruct and protect us, continue to remain?

Posted by Hugh at July 7, 2007 8:27 AM

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/017298.php