Thank you for providing evidence of the lies, distortions and deceit you
people use to make your case.
"DoD" <danskisanjar@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:c806fa08-ccad-4f8f-bbea-698222ad6b6b@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
everywhere I went last week — TV, radio, speeches — I was asked
about the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state. I don't recall being
asked about Israel quite so much on its 50th anniversary, which, as a
general rule, is a much bigger deal than the 60th. But these days
friends and enemies alike smell weakness at the heart of the Zionist
Entity.
Assuming Iranian President Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic fancies don't
come to pass, Israel will surely make it to its 70th birthday. But a
lot of folks don't fancy its prospects for its 80th and beyond. See
the Atlantic Monthly cover story: "Is Israel Finished?" Also the cover
story in Canada's leading news magazine, Maclean's, which dispenses
with the question mark: "Why Israel Can't Survive."
Why? By most measures, the Jewish state is a great success story. The
modern Middle East is the misbegotten progeny of the British and
French colonial map makers of 1922. All the nation states in that neck
of the woods date back a mere 60 or 70 years — Iraq to the Thirties,
Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel to the Forties. The only difference
is that Israel has made a go of it.
Would I rather there were more countries like Israel, or more like
Syria? Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East (Iraq
may yet prove a second), and its Arab citizens enjoy more rights than
they would living under any of the kleptocrat kings and psychotic
dictators who otherwise infest the region.
On a tiny strip of land narrower at its narrowest point than many
American town****ps, Israel has built a modern economy with a GDP per
capita just shy of $30,000 — and within striking distance of the
European Union average. If you object that that's because it's
uniquely blessed by Uncle Sam, well, for the past 30 years the second-
largest recipient of U.S. aid has been Egypt: their GDP per capita is
$5,000, and America has nothing to show for its investment other than
one-time pilot Mohamed Atta coming at you through the office window.
Jewish success against the odds is nothing new. "Aaron Lazarus the
Jew," wrote Anthony Hope in his all but unknown prequel to "The
Prisoner Of Zenda," "had made a great business of it, and had spent
his savings in buying up the better part of the street; but" — and for
Jews there's always a "but" — "since Jews then might hold no property
… ."
Ah, right. Like the Jewish merchants in old Europe, who were tolerated
as leaseholders but could never be full property owners, the Israelis
are regarded as operating a uniquely conditional sovereignty. Jimmy
Carter, just returned from his squalid suck-up junket to Hamas, is
merely the latest Western sophisticate to pronounce triumphantly that
he has secured the usual (off-the-record, highly qualified, never to
be translated into Arabic and instantly denied) commitment from the
Jews' enemies, acknowledging Israel's "right to exist." Well, whoop-de-
doo. Would you enter negotiations on such a basis?
Since Israel marked its half-century, the "right to exist" is now
routinely denied not just in Gaza and Ramallah and the region's
presidential palaces but on every European and Canadian college
campus. During the Lebanese incursion of 2006, Matthew Parris wrote in
The Times of London: "The past 40 years have been a catastrophe,
gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the
name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of
sup****t and sympathy so fast. My opinion — held not passionately but
with little personal doubt — is that there is no point in arguing
about whether the state of Israel should have been established where
and when it was" — which lets you know how he would argue it if he
minded to.
Richard Cohen in The Wa****ngton Post was more straightforward: "Israel
itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned
mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of
creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and
some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of
the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and
Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself."
Cohen and Parris, two famously moderate voices in the leading
newspapers of two of the least anti-Israeli capital cities in the
West, have nevertheless internalized the same logic as Ahmadinejad:
Israel should not be where it is. Whether it's a "stain of shame" or
just a "mistake" is the merest detail.
Aaron Lazarus and every other "European Jew" of his time would have
had a mirthless chuckle over Cohen's designation. The Jews lived in
Europe for centuries but without ever being accepted as "European." To
enjoy their belated acceptance as Europeans, they had to move to the
Middle East. Reviled on the Continent as sinister rootless
cosmopolitans with no conventional national allegiance, they built a
conventional nation state, and now they're reviled for that, too. The
"oldest hatred" didn't get that way without an ability to adapt.
The Western intellectuals who promote "Israeli Apartheid Week" at this
time each year are laying the groundwork for the next stage of Zionist
delegitimization. The talk of a "two-state solution" will fade. In the
land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, Jews are barely a
majority. Gaza has one of the highest birth rates on the planet: The
median age is 15.8 years. Its population is not just literally
exploding, at Israeli checkpoints, but also doing so in the less-
incendiary but demographically decisive sense. Arabs will soon be
demanding one democratic state — Jews and Muslims — from Jordan to the
sea. And even those Western leaders who understand that this will mean
the death of Israel will find themselves so confounded by the
multicultural pieties of their own lands they'll be unable to argue
against it. Contem****ary Europeans are not exactly known for their
moral courage: The re****ts one hears of schools quietly dropping the
Holocaust from their classrooms because it offends their growing
numbers of Muslim students suggest that even the pretense of
"evenhandedness" in the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" will be
long gone a decade hence.
The joke, of course, is that Israel, despite its demographic
challenge, still enjoys a birth rate twice that of the European
average. All the reasons for Israel's doom apply to Europe with bells
on. And, unlike much of the rest of the West, Israel has the advantage
of living on the front line of the existential challenge. "I have a
premonition that will not leave me," wrote Eric Hoffer, America's
great longshoreman philosopher, after the 1967 war. "As it goes with
Israel so will it go with all of us."
Indeed. So, happy 60th birthday. And here's to many more.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0508/steyn051208.php3
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