RUTHFULLY YOURS

Newt, you’re completely correct, and this is one of the bravest and most intellectually informed things any of the Republican candidates have said so far.

Contrary to what you might hear from leftists, labour leaders, students and manipulative Arab activists carefully pulling on the emotional heart-strings of gullible westerners, the Palestinians as an identified group trace their ancestry not — as with the Jews — back thousands of years, but to 1920.

Until then, Arabs living in what we now know as Israel regarded themselves as Muslim or Christians, and not as Palestinians.

For centuries they had been subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and as Arabs did not recognize any particular national boundaries, and felt commonality with Muslims in Algeria or Yemen rather than Christians who lived in the next village.

Ottoman maps and records, and the writings of foreign travellers, do not speak of Palestine or Palestinians.

It was the British, who had taken the region from the Turks during the First World War, who in 1920 formed Palestine, just as they artificially created nations all over their empire.

The local Arabs were stunned, and resistant.

The Muslims explained that this “Palestine” meant nothing, and that they were southern Syrians, loyal to Damascus.

It was the vehemently pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic Amin el-Husseini, the so-called Mufti of Jerusalem who, when he wasn’t praising Hitler as the new messiah and demanding the Nazis extend the Holocaust to the Middle East, developed the idea of the Palestine homeland, partly because the French had taken Syria.

From the 1920s on, this new phantom would come to dominate the Arab narrative.

Where no nation had existed, one had to be born. To the point where, today, we are obliged to listen to young men and women born in Canada, shouting at us about the plight of their Palestinian ancestors, and how they want nothing more than to return to the country and the land to which they belong. Oh Palestine, I was told by a protester in Toronto just a few months ago, we need you as a child needs a mother.

Not much of a mom though, and not often at home or looking after the kids. Of course people who once lived in the area no longer live there, and of course there were crimes committed and injustices perpetrated.

But nothing on the scale of the million Jews expelled from the Arab world, who can trace their lineage with far greater depth and longevity than the alleged Palestinians.

But Palestine is fashionable, the Jewish/Christian temple never existed, the Jews all came from Poland, and lies become truth.

Newt, for all of your failings, you had the courage to speak truth to power this week, and for that we all should be grateful.

Any pal of honesty is a pal of mine, if not stine. [!!]