Thursday 5 January 2012

A Tale of Palestinian Nonsense by Barry Shaw.


Mahmoud Zahar, the ugly Hamas Spokesman, he’s the bearded idiot  with a wart on the end of his nose, opened the new year of 2012 with the nonsense that Palestinians in Gaza are prevented from protesting peacefully because there are no Jews in Gaza to demonstrate against. That is why, he explained, they have no choice but to resort to violence. This is true. You couldn’t make this up. Not surprisingly, to those of us who follow the Palestinian narrative, this insanity is perceived as a logical and reasonable argument to Palestinians and their supporters.  It appeals to Israel haters who can use this excuse to accuse Israel of human rights abuses inflicted on Palestinians for occupying Gaza from the outside, rather than the inside.  Don’t even try to figure it out. You’ll only tie yourself up in A Gordian knot of maddening illogicality.

This endless nonsense is promoted by pro-Palestinian public relations groupies with an inexhaustible amount of funding from wealthy individuals or mindless European Governments for whom the mantra “Solve Human Rights Abuses and you Save the World”. Their funding also comes from malevolent sources, such as Arab and Islamic regimes, which have successfully transposed the Arab-Israeli War into the more appetizing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. This new definition allows bleeding heart liberals to side with the underdog and lose sight of reality.

The world has bought into the Palestinian narrative of victimhood to the extent that, for decades, it has thrown billions of dollars into a lie. Anyone with any legal sense will conclude that if you lie to someone repeatedly to extract money based on a falsehood you eventually risk being dragged into court for fraud. And if you have added violence to your lie of victimhood to your crime you will, more than likely, be found guilty of fraud and assault and be thrown into the slammer. Not so with the Palestinians. They are feted, and patted, and sympathized, with by an international community that cannot see past the tears to get to the truth. They have been flavor of the month for decades while the rest of the world’s genuine basketcases are ignored. The money goes to the Palestinian schnorrers with the universal publicity machine.

The world has bought into this nonsense so deeply and so intensely that they cannot admit the truth any more. When the Hamas spokesman (yes, the one with the wart) announced that Gaza was no longer "occupied", the United Nations continues to declare that the Gaza Strip is still under Israeli occupation. Any other policy would almost make the United Nations Human Rights Council redundant, so passionate have they been in inventing and passing resolutions condemning Israel. They perpetuate a lie that even Hamas denies.

In truth, the Palestinians control every aspect of society in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Hamas, in Gaza, runs the courts, the police, the jails, the schools, mosques, the media, and the social services. It has its own economy and banking. It regulates business activities. It levies taxes, controls its borders. It even imposes Shariah law on its citizens. As Abraham Bell and Dov Shefi, two international legal experts, wrote in a 2010 research paper, Hamas runs "a functioning and fully independent local civil government, buttressed by armed forces."  The Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank is thriving compared with other Arab and Islamic nations. Yet, the world still accepts the victimhood fraud.

Their tale of victimhood helps sell newspapers. It is the stuff of poor and biased journalism. It keeps career diplomats and academics in clover. The moneyed societies continue to pump money they don’t have or can ill afford into the fiction mill. The Palestinians are building an empire on it. Many are getting wealthy on the false tale of victimhood. They see the success of this narrative. It serves them well. So well, in fact, they don’t want to change. It’s rather like the guy who drives his big car from his suburban home to the outskirts of the town centre, parks his vehicle, takes out a pair of crutches, limps into town, and starts begging and crying. The naïve and sympathetic of the town throw notes and coins into his lap until it is time for him to drive home and put his feet up at the end of a good days work.

When Republican candidate, Newt Gingrich, recently said the Palestinians were "an invented people" he was quoting numerous Arab figures in recent history. The Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul Hadi, told the United Nations Peel Commission in 1937, "There is no such country as Palestine. Palestine in a Zionist invention." So, at that time, Palestine was the invention of the Jews, according to a top Arab source. Philip Hitti, an Arab professor of history, told the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine in 1946 that, "It is common knowledge that there is no such thing as Palestine in history. Before 1917, when Lord Balfour made his declaration, there had never been a Palestinian question, and there was no Palestine as a political or geographical unit." Even the PLO got into the act of denial. In 1977, Zahar Muhsein, an executive member of the PLO told a Dutch newspaper, "The Palestinian people do not exist." He obviously agreed with Newt Gingrich and went on to say, "The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing the struggle against the State of Israel." The chief witness for Gingrich must be the big boss himself, Yasser Arafat, who told Italian journalist, Arianna Palazzi in 1970, "Our nation is the Arabic nation.  The PLO is fighting Israel in the name of Pan-Arabism.  What you call Jordan is no more than Palestine." Clearly, even the Palestinians deny Palestine. For them, it was a carefully crafted Trojan Horse, designed to destroy Israel, as admitted by Feissel Husseini after the Oslo Accords when Israel reluctantly bought into the bluff.

Why should they change, these Palestinians? They have gotten their tale down to a fine art, and it works for them. They are occupied, they are oppressed, they are exploited, and they are abused by a heartless, brutal, racist, regime. Such emotional outpourings cannot be challenged by cold facts. Their story appeals to the heart, not the head, and a heart is not easily dissuaded, especially if you can knock up some emotive pictures to strengthen your argument. Public opinion is easily swayed by a good sob story.

Just as people who abuse the social service of a welfare state lose the desire to find work and become productive citizens, so the Palestinians are enjoying the status they have achieved as the world’s most appreciated victim. They exploit their inferiority to the extent that they cannot escape their inferiority. It works for them; therefore they are trapped in it. Nobody has demanded that they become a more pragmatic, open, liberal society. They simply throw their money at them as you do to a beggar on the street. Nobody has conditioned their funding on the Palestinians discarding their lies and nonsense. Nobody has insisted that they accept the generous and permanent peace arrangements that would offer them a better life.  They have rejected that. They know by accepting this responsibility they must become a normal, functioning, society, offering freedom to its entire people. They cannot accept that solution. It would expose the lie of victimisation they have been telling their people, that they have a holy duty to destroy Israel, their enemy, and possess their land. To accept a small state alongside Israel would expose the truth that they have overspent on corruption and destructive ventures and not enough in developing a normal, open, society. It would expose a real sense of inferiority to a people who see the success story of Israel. It would make them buckle down to proper nation building and independence, instead of looking with greed and envy at their neighbour's flourishing land.

They have taken the nonsense of victimhood and have deliberately prevented progress. They have wrapped the Islamic cloak around their victimhood. It enables them to play both sides of the deck. They are both victim and hero. They glorify the most heinous acts of terror. Their jihad allows them to turn the most inhumane acts of murder and mayhem into some sort of positive glory tale. Their narrative turns mass murder into praiseworthy heroism to be rewarded in this life or the next. It produces a society twisted into a self hating, brutal, and resentful culture.

They are trapped in their negative stew of victimhood and brutality. It finds expression in the nonsensical statements of people like Zahar, or those who accuse Israel of being an Apartheid state. Their nonsense, to them, makes sense. Sad tales have their impact. The emotional tale of victimhood is their power. Focusing on the “oppressed” will win out every time. They can twist every expression they can find to make a point that drips with emotion and useful sound bites, but they fail the test of truth every time.

Basically, the Palestinian narrative is a tale of nonsense.

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