A hearty second

Submitted by Peter J. Herz (Taiwan), Dec 21, 2004 at 23:58

The USA not only needs to make recognition of Israel's right to exist a precondition of aid given to the PA, but also cleaning up the textbooks the schoolchildren read. The sole advantage of a controlled media and publishing industry is that the things published give a clear and unambiguous picture of what the powers-that-be in that society think. The USA owes it to itself to note that it has subsidized people who hate it and urge its destruction long enough. Indeed, aid to the Falastin Arabs is the classic case of enabling the recipient to engage in destructive behavior. For this reason alone, it needs to stop. If China could deny UN peacekeepers to Macedonia when the latter wished to open relations with Taiwan, the US can and should play a few games of its own in the international community. One would be that without clear and visible changes in the PA's attitude, it cannot expect any more green American dollars.

When the issue of Falastin Arab "refugees" (now in their third and fourth generation) is raised, the USA should loudly mention that it has subsidized people who hate it for far too long, and that it is high time that the Arab states do what the USA did with its Palestinian Arab immigrants: give them passport-holding, consular-protected, voting, and down-the-line citizenship. It should be loudly pointed out that the US-born children of non-naturalized Falastin Arab immigrants are, by US law, automatically US citizens with all rights that status entails. It should be shouted from the housetops that there is nothing barring an American of Palestine Arab origin from owning property in his own name, receiving an education, residing wherever he wishes, or even running for office or serving, should he obtain the needed votes. The fact that the Falastin Arabs are kept from citizenship even after three generations in most Arab-majority countries shows that those countries have no honor at all.

And, should anyone accuse Israel of being a "settler state", we can politely remind all Romance-speaking people in France to move back to Italy; all Han people in China to move back to the North China Plain; and all Anglophones in the British Isles to get back to Germany and Denmark. Russia can leave Siberia to the Tunguses while we're at it; and all who identify with Arab and Muslim culture can head for the Arabian Peninsula to leave the Maghreb to the Berbers, the Nile Valley to the Copts, and the Fertile Crescent to Christians and Jews able to speak an Aramaic dialect. We can then move on to tell 60 millions-plus Thai speakers to withdraw to a strip of territory between Dein Bien Phu in Viet Nam and Guilin in China to leave their lands to their "rightful" Mon-Khmer owners. We can also tell all Iranian and Indo-Aryan peoples to withdraw to Central Asia, and leave the region between Kurdistan and Sri Lanka to the Dravidians. If any gripe that too few places will hold too many people, we can always say it's respecting the currently understood concept of historical justice.

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