Reply to Helga Weisburger's comments : "Power of Words"
Reader comment on item: Palestinian Word Games

Submitted by Andy (United Kingdom), Jan 5, 2005 at 08:30

A problem with repeating the old mantra "And what, pray, is a Palestinian", a la Golda Meir, has one fault: it uses the same sort of word games that Daniel Pipes is arguing are being used to support the "Palestinian" cause in the "Liberal" media. In America by the way, Liberal is tantamount to calling someone a communist, i.e. the word has become lost its etymology; while in Europe Liberal is a taliman harking back to enlightenment values. So we are caught in an Alice in Wonderland world where "Words means what I say they mean".

I feel it would be more constructive, and serve the greater cause of humanity in general, for even died-in-the-wool Zionists and fellow travellers to admit that many Arabs lived in the territory now occupied by Israel, and that they suffered an injustice by being displaced. It was not difficult to keep the wound of this injustice - to however few or many Arabs there were - festering for over half a century, by word of mouth from grandfather to grandson and by the distorting mirror of propaganda of both sides in the dispute.

Mr. Pipes has posted an article by an academic arguing from demogaphics that many of the Arabs who did live in what is now Israel and the "Occupied Territories" were mainly recent immigrants as a result of the greater economic opportunities offered by the influx of Jews between the wars. If this logic is taken to its conclusion, then we cannot deny the "Palestinians" (recently displaced) their desire to "drive the Jews (recent immigrants) into the sea" as everyone claims they want.

We do not tell the peoples of Europe displaced by the events of The Second World War, such as the Poles, who are returning to claim what is theirs, "Forget it, it's history". They too were "recently" disposessed. The Jews were disposessed 2000 years ago. Unless you mean displaced from Germany under the Nazis.

Modern Jews persuaded the world that they had a rightful claim to Israel through (a) a modern wrong done to them as a people - the holocaust, (b) a thoroughly effective mixture of political lobbying, terrorism and propoganda., (c) the guilt of liberal mined people at the wrong done to Jews in history - a long and horrible story of pogrom after pogrom...

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