By Hugh Ash
COULD it be I’ve heard the first cuckoo of spring – or, more accurately, a cuckoo that’s changed its chirp to that of a wise, old owl?
Because, in a rare break from its traditional Israel-bashing and Palestinian tub-thumping, that bastion of liberal smugness, The New York Times, has acknowledged the ugly, flip side of its pet cause. Temporarily shedding its prejudices, the self-style ‘newspaper of record’ reported how the Palestinian Authority (PA) plumbs the depth of incitement and peddles a diet of incessant, hate-bilge to its people, despite hollow promises to desist.
Jodi Rudoren, the snooty journal’s Jerusalem bureau chief, revealed how Hitler is revered in West Bank schools and kids on TV vilify Jews as ‘barbaric monkeys’ and ‘murderers of Muhammad’ (that’s a new one on me, since the Prophet died in Jew-free Medina in 632 AD).
The report finally noted how PA maps obliterate Israel, a compelling clincher that the Arabs will never countenance a two-state solution, which they’re thrice tried – and abysmally failed – to solve by war in 1948, 1967 and 1973, and vicious blood-letting ever since.
Actually, the story’s so old, it could have grown bushy, white whiskers.
Yet, somehow, it has eluded other NY Times scribes, probing Guardian newshounds and all the BBC’s Mid-East hacks put together. In their defence, maybe they’ve been too obsessed with rubbishing Israel, they simply didn’t notice.
But Rudoren’s ‘discovery’ is bad news for rag-tag, Lefty apologists for Palestinian terror, many of whom cloak their anti-Semitism in chic anti-Zionism, amid the fervent wish democratic Israel is destroyed and replaced by what will inevitably become yet another Islamo-fascist tyranny.
For years these witless dupes have bought into howling porkies, mostly invented by Yasser Arafat, delegitimising the viper’s nest of a region’s only egalitarian state, where people of 100 nationalities and a swathe of faiths are free to practice their credos, sexual orientations and traditions without fear of persecution. In contrast, just try being a Christian or gay in Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Gaza or Saudi Arabia – even if the PA’s propaganda machine has ‘rebranded’ Jesus a Palestinian. The facts that no country called Palestine ever existed and Christianity’s Messiah was incontrovertibly Jewish are conveniently airbrushed from history.
Truth, though, has never been an obstacle to Arab lie-mongers. But their latest claim is the most outlandish yet: Jews don’t deserve a reprised homeland, because they were never there in the first place!
Who says so? None other than those shambolic back-stabbers, the Arab League, who’ve shamelessly exploited the hapless Palestinians for decades and are united only when it comes to opposing any suggestion that Jewish sovereignty in the region has legitimacy.
Which is why the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, pulled an exhibit entitled: ‘People, Book, Land – The 3,500 Year Relationship of the Jewish People and the Land of Israel.’
Due to open at the UN agency’s Paris HQ last Monday, it was cancelled after a zero-hour protest by the motley bunch of heinous nasties, who rule 350 million subjects with iron fists.
So forget Moses, Isaac, Joshua, Noah and other biblical patriarchs. Presumably, they didn’t exist or, like Jesus, were really Palestinians. And ditto the ancient, Jewish kingdoms of Judea and Israel, much mentioned in both Old and New Testaments.
Even the Nazis didn’t dream up such gobsmacking deceit.
More insidious still, the veto is blessed by the Obama Administration, even though the Americans were originally sponsors of the UNESCO event. The flimsy reason? The so-called ‘peace process’ was ‘at a sensitive juncture’, claimed a spokesperson.
The real reason: once-mighty America is led by a wimpish, addled appeaser, who’s allowed Iran, Kremlin-backed Syria, the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood and Hizbollah crazies to turn the powder-keg Middle East into the world’s premier killing field.
So what chance an Israel-PA settlement, a desire shared by most sane folk, especially the majority of Israelis?
As John Kerry has discovered, pigs will fly first. The US Secretary of State knows Israel has done land-for-peace deals before – with Jordan and Egypt – and will do again if conditions are fair. But not so Mahmoud Abbas, head of the PA’s ruling cabal-cum-self-serving mafia. For all his pretence of Western-style governance, Abbas is way passed his rule-by date, having fobbed off elections since his four-yearly term in office expired in 2009. Nor can he speak for the Islamic headbangers of Hamas, who usurped his quasi-democratic credentials in Gaza, murdered PA aparatchiks and stay wedded to a dogma that seeks the destruction of Israel and Jews everywhere. So Kerry, latest bearer of the poisoned chalice of peace-seeker, now realises the stumbling block isn’t territory, borders, refugees or security, but the PA’s scary hate-world, where no state is better than two, if it means accommodating a Jewish one.
And, secular though their country is, Israelis are no more inclined to disavow their right to the most ancient of biblical faiths than the planet’s 57 Muslim-majority nations will renounce Islam or the Vatican cease to be Catholic. Palestinian suffering, then, will continue unabted, so long as they have venal, inept, kleptocratic leaders, who line their own pockets with their people’s blood money – mainly donated by America, the EU and Britain – and peddle unremitting hatred.
Meanwhile, having been duped by nuclear-potty Iran, even gullible Obama is beginning to wonder what’s going on, as every initiative he promotes – such as this week’s farce in Geneva, designed to stem the Syrian bloodbath – disintegrates into chaos.
In a telling interview last week, the President admitted the chances of attaining peace anywhere in the Middle East were ‘no better than 50-50.’
‘We may be able to push the boulder partway up the hill and maybe stabilize it so it doesn’t roll back on us,’ claimed Obama optimistically.
‘I believe that the region is going through rapid and inexorable change. Some of it is demographics; some of it is technology; some of it is economics. And the old order, the old equilibrium, is no longer tenable. The question then becomes: what’s next?’ Answers on a postcard to B.H. Obama, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC.
All ideas welcome.
To read more of Hugh Ash’s comments, follow his award-winning, online blog – Views From The Mallorca Pier – at hughash.wordpress.com