But what of the next generation?

Submitted by Peter J. Herz (Taiwan), Apr 19, 2005 at 10:40

While it is indeed encouraging to see that a portion of the Falastin Arab population understands sanity when it sees it, I can't help notice a few dismal lessons of history.

In the 1960's, metropolitan France started to have a sizeable Muslim population when Algerians who had fought for France started to move there after Algerian independence. Probably, these people were grateful for a new home and glad for the various political goods French life afforded. Yet today, as the Muslim population in France climbs, there are reports of increasing violence and inter-communal contempt.

The generation of South Koreans who remembered the Korean War and MacArthur landing at Inchon became about the most fiercely pro-American foreign population on the planet, for whom Kim Ilsong and Kim Chongil were the devil incarnate and the devil incarnate junior. Today, however, a south Korean population that remembers none of that, but instead notes American support for the old soft authoritarian model, the misbehavior of some American soldiers in country, and hears pro-Communist voices that the likes of Noh Taewu and Pak Chonghi rightly silenced entertains a rosy romanticism about North Korea and advocates military alliance with Beijing--the savior of Kim Ilsong in 1950-53.

Conceivably, the descendants of today's pro-Israel 'Twixt River and Sea Arabs could easily be fired by destructive propaganda; especially in a region in which the old Ottoman millet system is alive and well and in which Leftist bitterness at losing the Cold War will continue to simmer in jounralism and scholarship.

Re the solution to Falastin Arabs elsewhere, the best thing is to push the Arab governments to naturalize them. Now that Lebanon's former demographic balance is shot to smithereens and Damascus long saw biblical Ammon, Moab, Edom, Samaria, Judaea, etc. as "southern Syria", the refusal of those states to naturalize the 4th generation Falastin "refugees" in their midst is utterly inexcusable. The same question should be asked of the Gulf States, since so much of their "Falastin" work force is also Sunni Muslim. After all, if our thrice accursed "Great Shaitan" can give voting, property-holding, consular-protected citizenship to the Falastin Arabs who settled on its soil, the failure of countries of Arabic language and Muslim faith to do so is the true stain on Arab honor.

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