Where are the bodies?

Submitted by Abu Nudnik (Canada), Oct 7, 2006 at 13:33

Tariq: I went to the Palestine website and there are many errors in it. Firstly, the Israeli education system is mainly secular and at least 70% of Israelis put little or no weight on the Joshua thesis; instead they see the State of Israel as a purely existential necessity. In fact, the majority of the remaining 30% put existential security above ancient prophecy.

Secondly, the website you linked to talks about the people of Israel replacing the "Palestinians" at the time of Joshua. Are the Arabs descendents of Ishmael or of the earlier Canaanites? No one ever used the word "Palestinians" before 1967.

In 1967, the population of the West Bank was 1.5 millions. Today it is 3.7 millions. Genocides reduce populations, they don't increase them! The notion that military incidents, no matter how regrettable and brutal add up to an attempt by the Israelis to kill all Arabs is absurd. There are 300,000,000 Arabs and 5,000,000 Jews! Many of the regrettable deaths occurred in the way they are described. I also have heard from former IDF soldiers of atrocities they saw. Put a gun in the hand of a twenty-year old anywhere in the world and, if there are enough of them, that army is a law unto itself. It takes magnificent leadership to keep the death toll as low as it's been. The comparison to the Holocaust is obscene, dishonest and, even from the website there are simply not enough bodies to justify such an ridiculous comparison.

What you mean is that the Jew's blood is worthless and the Muslim blood is holy. That's why Muslims are so often humiliated: you can't humiliate a humble man and Muslims, due to embarrassment over their economic and social failures, seek to puff themselves up. The fact that this puffiness is phony is seen every time a little pinprick - the cartoons, the "Nike "Allah" (compare what would happen if a Roman Catholic saw the Virgin Mary on a sneaker), the pope's comments, Bush's "crusade" speech - empties the air from the balloon.

Ahmedinijad wants proof. What he means is he wants non-Jew proof, Jew-stories being, to him, nothing but lies. Well I've got some. I mean, I've known people who were there but they're Jews so, to Jimjab those stories aren't real. But I knew a guy who used to read poetry at a joint I frequented. He also wrote plays and screenplays, "one of which John Huston butchered" (that's how they invariably introduced him) and he, a Canadian of Irish Catholic descent, saw with his own eyes the death camps he came to after they were

liberated. It was his job to put on plays to lighten the load, to entertain, to banish the horror. This man, years later, became contemptuous of how some Jewish harp on the Holocaust and took as his hero a very bad actor who lost a few fingers to the Nazi "doctors" at the camp. He wanted only to go back to London to act. "Look me up" he'd said, in such-and-such a pub and, when the dramaturge got there he thought, thirty years later, "what are the chance that pub's still there?" But it was, and the guy he was looking for wasn't there. "Dave?" said the bartender. "Why, he was just here a minute ago. Must've popped out." And to my friend's amusement he saw posters on the wall that testified to the fact that a man with a heart can make his life no matter how little talent he has so long as he can put behind him what he must and face the world and the future with a happy face.

But the Jew's story and Christian story of all events are taken as nothing by people like you. Maggie is wrong when she says that churches and synagogues can't be rebuilt in Muslim lands but she isn't wrong by very much. It depends on the regime. Some have allowed repairs (as long as the special tax raised from Jews and Muslims is paid to symbolize submission) and even allowed new churches. But this is just as often not the case and in every case no church or synagogue may be higher than the mosque. I supposed that's what made the World Trade Center such an attractive target. It brings down every conceit of the West. But, once, Tariq, you've destroyed, can you rebuild?

But on one thing I can help Maggie. She doesn't seem to know very much about the participation of Muslims in the Holocaust. The grand mufti of Jerusalem helped create the Bosnian SS, he lived at Hitler's foot, he wrote a letter to both Hitler and Mussolini in 1941, begging their favor to bestow their blessings on his "solving the Jewish problem" in Palestine and all the other Arab lands in the same way the two fascists were solving their "Jewish problem." Hmm. I thing 1941 is even before the State of Israel, isn't it?

When I was young I was, like many of my generation, judgmental, arrogant, dismissive of others, a coward who, in fleeing my own problems, exulted in all acts of destruction because, to me, if the world could not be as my narcissistic self wanted it (serving me hand and foot) I wanted it destroyed. I supposed I was angry. At seven God took my father died and only five years later my mother too. My fun-loving father and elegant intelligent mother were only 31 and 34, God rest their souls in Paradise.

But I grew up. It took a lot to do it. Kidney failure and years of dialysis, a heart attack and, thank God, a transplant. I hope it doesn't take so much to wake up the world's Muslims.

I haven't lost hope. Unlike many cynics on this site I really do believe there are moderate Muslims but they are very frightened. With good reason. They have seen every head that rises lopped off. That's why the Muslim world is in the fix it's in today. And that's why I support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we don't stand up to the Islamofascists, we can't expect those who live (and die) among them to do so.

By the way, where are all the stories of Muslims killing Muslims? The !0,000 Palestinians killed by King Hussein? The million dead in the Iran-Iraq war? Oh, right! No Jews involved, no story.

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