"Stealing Arab land"? I think not.

Submitted by Farhad Yazdi (United States), Oct 30, 2002 at 15:37

Mr. Nadir Ahmed's remarks strike me as typical of the sort of incoherent, dishonest and historically illiterate nonsense that is continually being offered up to a dangerously gullible American public by members of our resentful Muslim community. If he and other Muslim apologists were truly concerned about injustices committed against the innocent, he would have recognized long ago that the biggest obstacle to any peace for the Palestinians is the belligerent policies of Arafat and other Arab leaders, and - let's be frank here - the utterly arrogant refusal of the Arab world to acknowledge that the Jewish people have the right to live in peace in their own country, the ancient Jewish land of Israel (which historically has always included the West Bank).

The reason the Arabs cannot tolerate Israel's existence is because like so many other lands in Asia, Africa and Europe, it was once conquered, subjugated and occupied by Arab Muslims. Arabs are the ruthless creators of one of the biggest colonial empires in history, subjugating not only the Jewish land of Israel, but the Christian lands of Spain, Portugal, southern France (before being driven out after the battle of Poitiers in 732), the formerly Christian lands of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Zoroastrian Persia. Thus, when Arabs accuse Israel, or America, of "imperialism" or "arrogance", they are engaging in an absurdity comparable to a manure-eater who accuses somebody else of bad breath.

Having made themselves at home in someone else's home, Arab Muslims willfully forget that the nations that have come under their boot over the course of the last 1400 years had previous histories that belonged to other peoples who once lived there, and in some places, like Egypt, still live there as minorities.

If Mr. Ahmed thinks American Muslims should "not support the side of injustice", that seems perfectly reasonable as a basic moral position. Yet this American of Muslim ancestry believes Americans should likewise not listen to the vicious unfairness, the nauseating self-pity and shameless mendacity that is at the very core of so much Arab-Islamic rhetoric. We too should not support the side of injustice, be we should also not allow Muslim-Arab apologists to go unchallenged in defining just exactly what "injustice" is in the context of the Middle East. America may have 200+ years of sins to answer for, but the Arab world has a millenium and a half of such sins to answer for. It is Arab imperialism, and the murderous policies of radical Muslims, not any purported American wrongdoing, that is the main problem plaguing the Middle East and much of the rest of the world.

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