LOSING THE WAR OF WORDS :RUTH KING
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/losing-the-war-of-words-ruth-king.html
This month will mark the 49th anniversary of the Six-Day War, fought between June 5 and 10, 1967 by Israel against the neighboring states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. It was a war intended to annihilate Israel as stated clearly by Gamal Abdul Nasser in 1965: “We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand; we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood.” His threats were echoed by then Syrian Minister of Defense Hafez al Assad who was to become Syria’s President: “Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse the aggression, but to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is united. As a military man, I believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.”
In their jihadist agenda they received the blessings of the entire Arab world. President Abdur Rahman Aref of Iraq exulted: “The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear — to wipe Israel off the map.”
King Hussein of Jordan, the pluckier papa of the present King Abdullah, was repeatedly asked by Israel’s leaders to stay out of the war, but anxious to shore up his standing in the Arab League he signed a defense pact with Egypt and joined the war against Israel. As a result, he lost control of the West Bank and Jerusalem.
The rest is history. Israel won a decisive victory, inspiring pride and confidence in Diaspora Jews, respect and admiration from military and defense experts throughout the world, and resolve among dissidents in the Soviet Union who organized a powerful army of “refuseniks.”
The 1967 war was won in battle but lost in the war of words. Israel’s media and leaders immediately referred to Judea and Samaria as “occupied territory,” and its Arab inhabitants as “Palestinians.”
After defeat, the Arabs and their protagonists replaced the emphasis on refugees with a myth of victimization under “occupation” by Israel. The media, academics, and politicians bought into the lies and “occupation” is now the buzzword for the morally degenerate boycott and divest movements ostensibly seeking “justice” for the Palestinian Arabs.
In fact, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were under illegal occupation from 1949 until 1967. Jordan’s rule was recognized only by Pakistan and England. In further contravention of international law which decreed that Jerusalem would be an open city, the Arabs trashed Jewish shrines, forbade access to Jews and limited access to Christian churches and shrines. Arabs built settlements throughout the area, but they made sure that the “refugee camps” were maintained in squalor as poster boys for anti-Israel propaganda.
There was no outcry about this illegal occupation, not even from the Palestine Liberation Organization which was formed in 1963 out of an alphabet soup of splinter terrorist groups who all adhered to one main principle of the Palestine National Charter, namely, the destruction of Israel, every inch of which was considered then and now as “occupied.”
The “occupied” Arabs of the West Bank enjoy basic freedoms unavailable to them in any Arab nations.
They might do well to consider some of the “justice” perpetrated on the Arabs by other Arabs.
Remember the city of Hama in Syria? In 1982, according to Syrian media, anti-government rebels “pounced on our comrades while sleeping in their homes and killed whomever they could kill of women and children, mutilating the bodies of the martyrs in the streets, driven, like mad dogs, by their black hatred.” In response, Assad, papa to the present tyrant Bashar, besieged the town of Hama for 27 days. Accounts of the casualties vary from 10,000 to 20,000 civilians. The event was called “”the single deadliest acts by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East”.
It did not stop there. The city of Homs has been under continual attacks. Homes, hospitals, schools, have been destroyed by Syria’s Bashar Assad and by Isis and thousands of civilians have been killed and maimed and dislocated.
Or how about “Black September” the group that massacred eleven Israeli athletes during the Olympic games in Munich in 1972? Did you think “Black September” had anything to do with Arabs suffering under Israeli occupation? Why no! The group is named for a massacre in 1970 prompted by an attempt by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to topple Jordan’s King Hussein and seize control of the country. The PFLP hijacked four jetliners, diverted three of them to a Jordanian air strip, blew them up, and for three weeks held on to dozens of the 421 hostages it seized as human bargaining chips.
King Hussein retaliated with swift brutality. Thousands of insurgents as well as civilians were killed, towns that shielded them were leveled, and the PLO was forcibly expelled from Jordan.
By the way, there was not even a whisper of “dis proportionality “which is reserved solely for any act of self-defense by Israel.
Those who now libel Israel cannot be persuaded by facts and history. The local Arabs have shown, by rhetoric and deed, that the only policy compatible with Israel’s security is a policy that abjures territorial concessions and reasserts Israel’s legal rights to the Golan, Judea and Samaria. Arabs who cannot tolerate a better life under Israeli jurisdiction should be free to leave–with one-way tickets.
Comments are closed.
