I think that Mormons and Evangelicals tend to think and say vicious things against People of the Book without understanding them.
People of what book? “People of the Book” is a phrase Muslims use in reference to Jews and Christians. They would be insulted if we called them that.
The State of Israel was born in 1948 and, instantly, 700,000 Muslims living in Palestine became homeless.
Wow, that’s some history. One is almost compelled to assume nothing took place in between the “birth of Israel” and Palestinians becoming “homeless.” That is because we are not reading history in this opening post; we are reading propaganda that neglects to share uncomfortable historical facts that undermine an agenda. For example, the fact that most Arabs fled the scene in anticipation of war; their neighboring Arab countries would come in and drive the Jews into the sea. As was always the case in Islam, they absolutely refused to live under a Jewish majority (so much for Islamic pluralism). War is what was expected. The Arabs did invade as expected but the outcome wasn’t as the Palestinian Arabs had hoped. Israel won the war. So then there was the weird situation of allowing people who wanted you dead, back into the neighborhood.
Muslims or their predecessor Arabs or other Semitic peoples had been living there since the fall of Jerusalem around 70 A.D. when the Romans sent punitive forces into Palestine. Before that time, Jews and the nation of Israel occupied Palestine for 1,300 years. In terms of total recent occupation of the region, who has the better claims?
There has always been a Jewish presence in Palestine and the Arabs who lived there had a tendency to migrate elsewhere. Palestine was always a stopping point for the desert nomads, which is why it remained a neglected, underdeveloped region for so long. Nobody ever stuck around to develop it. Now all of the sudden they act like it is their long lost homeland that was “stolen” from them. In March of 1918, Sherif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic Holy Places in Arabia said:
“The resources of the country (Palestine) are still virgin soil and will be developed by the Jewish immigrants. One of the most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering over the high seas in every direction.
His native soil could not retain a hold on him, though his ancestors had lived on it for 1000 years. At the same time we have seen the Jews from foreign countries streaming to Palestine from Russia, Germany, Austria, Spain, America. The cause of causes could not escape those who had a gift of deeper insight. They knew that the country was for its original sons, for all their differences, a sacred and beloved homeland. The return of these exiles to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually [to be] an experimental school for their brethren who are with them in the fields, factories, trades and in all things connected with toil and labor.”
It is a common misperception that the Romans had driven them all out 1800 years ago. The Palestinians were considered the mongrels of the desert, having contributed virtually nothing to its growth. For example, as late as 1880, the American consul in Jerusalem reported the area was continuing its historic decline. "The population and wealth of Palestine has not increased during the last forty years," he said.
The Jews were responsible for all that was good in that area. The Report of the Palestine Royal Commission quotes an account of the Maritime Plain in 1913:
“The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts...no orange groves, orchards or vineyards were to be seen until one reached [the Jewish village of] Yabna....Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen....The ploughs used were of wood....The yields were very poor....The sanitary conditions in the village were horrible. Schools did not exist....The western part, towards the sea, was almost a desert....The villages in this area were few and thinly populated. Many ruins of villages were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants.”
Gee, sounds worse than the conditions at current refugee camps. In the same report Lewis French, the British Director of Development wrote of Palestine:
“We found it inhabited by fellahin who lived in mud hovels and suffered severely from the prevalent malaria....Large areas...were uncultivated....The fellahin, if not themselves cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor these and other criminals. The individual plots...changed hands annually. There was little public security, and the fellahin's lot was an alternation of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors, the Bedouin.”
In 1914 Dawood Barakat, editor of the Egyptian paper
Al-Ahram, wrote: "It is absolutely necessary that an entente be made between the Zionists and Arabs, because the war of words can only do evil. The Zionists are necessary for the country: The money which they will bring, their knowledge and intelligence, and the industriousness which characterizes them will contribute without doubt to the regeneration of the country."
Eventually, the State of Israel granted suffrage rights to those Palestinians, but not to any Palestinian who entered to country thereafter.
The refugees had been given an opportunity to stay in their homes and be a part of the new state and about 160,000 chose to do so. The rest decided to flee the region in hopes that Israel would be blown off the map. Israel’s foreign minister said it would have been “suicidal folly” to allow them back in. Who could argue otherwise? This would be like granting the entire Taliban organization US citizenship. It doesn’t matter where you are born. No country is obligated to allow people who seek its destruction, within their borders.
The State of Israel receives more U.S. foreign aid than any other country in the world.
And Arab nations as a group receive almost the same amount, as they are being bribed not to wage war on Israel again. Israel was originally funded so it could protect itself against numerous aggressive nations which they face at every corner of their borders.
Their defense industry is almost entirely propped up by the U.S. Department of Defense, with technology transfers, plans for fighter planes and other conventional weapons. Yet, the state of Israel sends spies to the U.S. to steal defense secrets.
Oh good grief, could your agenda be any more transparent than this? And Egypt is emphatically anti-American outwardly, yet receives roughly 2-3 billion a year as a bribe. Palestine receives aid from various sources yet it declares an agenda to have Israel literally DESTROYED. That is its ultimate goal and it has never floundered on this point.
Although Mohamed seized Palestine and all of North Africa by force in the eight century, Christians retaliated with force with multiple unsuccessful crusades.
The Byzantine Empire decided to finally fight back after watching two-thirds of its territory being taken by force by Islamic forces. It requested the help of the Pope, who called for volunteers to reclaim Jerusalem and ease the oppression that the Muslims had been inflicting on the Christians there. The Crusades were defensive in every sense of the term.
Frustrated by their lack of success in the Levant, the crusaders turned against Jews and dissident Christians, as well as Byzantium.
These were isolated events by renegade groups which had nothing to do with a frustration with failure. Where the hell do you get this crap anyway?
In terms of who has the higher moral ground for occupation of Palestine, it is impossible to say, but certainly Muslim occupation for 1200 of the most recent years, Arab occupation of the most recent 2000 years, should say something about the moral right to occupy.
No it doesn’t. That is a stupid argument to make and I am literally shocked to see someone of your stature make it. Aren’t you supposed to be a worthy nemesis to Bagley? This kind of ahistorical rant isn’t doing you any favors.
Muslims are said to be the mortal enemies of the United States.
By whom? Mostly by Muslims themselves.
But, who is propping up the occupier of their homeland?
It isn’t their land.
The destruction of Iraq was probably the worst thing that could happen to the security of the United States. Iraq and Iran kept each other at bay for years in a bitter feud; Muslim against Muslim, but Arab and Iranians. With Saddam gone, and when the United States leaves, the Iranians will simply fill the vacuum. Israel will be forced to strike against nuclear facilities (it has done so in the past), and where are we?
Wow, Iraq has been destroyed? When did this happen? A nuclear-free Iran is always a good thing. But please don’t try to tell us you thought of this little theory all on your own. I have heard this nonsense from more journalists than you can shake a stick at. It has been popular theory since before the invasion.
Before the crusades, Christians could come and go in relative peace to Jerusalem to make pilgrimages. Yes, they were subject to banditry, but so were Muslim pilgrims.
No, that is not true. You’re simply regurgitating the usual polemic. Muslims were not submitted to banditry like the Christians. Muslims were the privileged and Jews/Christians were second class citizens whose rights always hung in the balance and were dependant on their willingness to suffer institutionalized humiliation that is sanctioned in the Quran.
Yes, Christian residents were discriminated against in Palestine in terms of taxation, and had difficulty building churches as freely as desired, and saw their sacred places appropriated, but they could still come and go.
Wow, you almost made that sound as pleasant and lovely as Dan Peterson once tried to do.
Finally, nobody cares less about the Palestinians than Muslims in the Middle-East. Palestinians were rejected citizenship in every country except Jordan. The Palestinian situation has been used as a political tool to award Arab nations billions upon billions in bribes. When Saudi Arabia had a labor shortage in the late 70’s, they refused to use the struggling Palestinians, and instead imported workers from Asia. They care no more about the Palestinians than they care about the Muslims who suffered during the various genocides in Mogadishu, Sudan and Rwanda. Far more Muslims have been killed in Africa by governments far more ruthless than ours, but crying about those grievances doesn’t win them bribe money. So the Palestinians will continue to win the spotlight on magazine covers while producing ignorant political extremists like the author of this thread.
The biggest mystery is how you think any of this tripe is a “defense of Islam”? As if sympathy for the Palestinian plight, and the defense of Islam go hand in hand. Islam is by definition the most intolerant religion the world has known. This is established fact that I can and have demonstrated. It isn't about what muslims have done by contrast with what Christians have done (although Christians come out on top in that comparision too). It is about what Islamic law entails. It is about what the Quran entails and how the legal schools of Islam interpret and have practiced it in history. Trying to highlight the few instances when Christianity engaged in defensive wars as a means to say “Look, all religions can be bad sometimes,” amounts to religious relativism.
By the way, I would have more sympathy for the Palestinians if they were killing themselves instead of killing their own children by using them to kill other Israeli children. Their admitted goal to destroy Israel doesn’t invoke much sympathy either. They do not want to live in harmony with Israel, and they never did. All they are doing is proving Israel is right to reject their citizenship. If Israel truly just went about expelling Arabs indiscriminately, then how do you explain the fact that nearly 200,000 Arabs were not expelled from Israel and that is why Muslims represent a significant portion of the population today?
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein