Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (309932)	10/20/2002 1:37:00 PM
From: H-Man	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

What Grace Halsell Didn't Know About the Middle-East by Carl Pearlston Grace Halsell obviously knows very little of either Middle Eastern history or its politics to make the despicable charges and all-too obvious miss-statements of fact that she does in her contemptible piece, What Christians Don't Know About Israel. It should have been entitled, 'What Grace Halsell Doesn't Know About the Middle East.' It is filled with distortions, errors, and lies. The article was originally published in the anti-Israeli Palestine Chronicle, a mouthpiece of Palestinian propaganda, which parrots the usual anti-Israeli sentiment that has become all too popular among the leftist elites. The board of Palestinian Chronicle is a veritable 'who's who' of anti-Israel activists, such as Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and former Minister of Higher Education for the Palestinian Authority, and radical leftist American-hater Professor Noam Chomsky. The Palestinians were not indigenously there for 2,000 years with the Jews as late-comers after WWII, as she so casually states. If she had done any homework, she would have found that Jerusalem has had a majority Jewish population since the days of Jesus and before. Mark Twain noted in his 19th century visit that the Holy Land was largely desolate and unoccupied, an uncultivated wasteland. Joan Peters in From Time Immemorial discusses the census records of the Ottoman Empire, disclosing the high Jewish population and low Arab population during the 19th and early 20th centuries. She documents the rise of Arab immigration into the area with the rise of Jewish immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Arabs were attracted by the jobs made available by Jewish land development and cultivation on land that was purchased. The Jews planted trees and made the desert bloom; this attracted Arabs, who now call themselves Palestinians. They didn't then, they described themselves as 'Arabs.' There was a Jewish Palestinian symphony orchestra in the 30's and 40's. During WWII, there was a Jewish Palestinian Brigade who fought with the British Army. In contrast, the Arabs, under the Grand Mufti, formed a battalion of SS for Hitler. The Arabs did not begin to claim the title of Palestinians until the PLO was created in 1964 by the Egyptian Yassar Arafat. She loosely tosses off allegations of torture and genital mutilation of Palestinian prisoners, all based apparently on her interviews with only Arabs. Apparently she is not aware of the many civil rights groups in Israel, which are all too eager to press charges against the IDF for mistreatment of prisoners, including international organizations like 'Human Rights Watch' and 'Amnesty International.' To my knowledge, no such allegations have been lodged with any of these organizations of such torture and genital mutilations. Apparently, Ms. Halsell doesn't bother to verify or corroborate or check any charges made against Israel, but prefers to accept them at face value. In all-too typical hyperbole, she equates the extermination of six million Jews in Europe to the deaths of Palestinian Arabs in the four wars waged on the Jewish state by the surrounding Arab nations and peoples, from 1948, 1967, 1973, and the current one beginning in 2000, all having as a goal the extermination of that state. Even before there was the state of Israel, the Arabs refused to recognize the right of Jews to exist in the Middle East. In 1929, Arabs rose up in a pogrom against Jews all over Palestine; they killed over a hundred in Hebron, which had a thriving Jewish community. Then she has the supreme gall of trotting out that anti-Semitic staple that the Jews control not only the news media, but also control the political decisions made behind the scenes. That would certainly be news to all the Jewish organizations who have been vociferously complaining about the anti-Israel bias of the news media. She also brings up the anti-Semitic libel that, according to the Talmud, Jews can kill non-Jews with impunity. Will she next repeat the libel printed in the Saudi press about Jews baking Purim pastries with Christian blood? It is clear that when Grace Halsell's facts are checked, that she clearly had a lot to learn herself about the Middle-East.