re: commenter Susan Kerin
Reader comment on item: [UNRWA:] The Refugee Curse

Submitted by John Reisner (Australia), Aug 28, 2003 at 00:07

A specious argument and a typically anti-Semitic device employed by her and Arab propagandists.

Firstly, Israelis are not refugees. The right of return is a law promulgated by a sovereign state and does not involve anything other than obedience to the facts of Jewish history and culture. Does she also presume to deny the Jews their history as well?

Secondly, the sum total of claims do not only rest upon parental birth or habitation. By way of just one example, millions of Europeans have been uprooted after literally hundreds of years of inhabitation because they engaged in aggressive irridentist wars in unison with their ethnic motherland. Needless to say, this happened to the Jews of Europe, Asia and Africa without any such momentous pretext, such as war, being necessary for their co-inhabitants to execute this foul judgement.

No doubt were the Germans to make claims to return Prussia, we would hear stern lectures from everybody about the wages of war. But not so for the Arabs.

A comparison such as undertaken by Kerin is just another subtle swipe at Jews. Pipes has compared refugees with other refugees. She seeks to compare these engineered and self-made refugees with something completely different. In the mind of the anti-Semite, Jews have no real status and any logical travesty may be thus employed to justify their denigration.

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