RUTHFULLY YOURS

The epithet “racism” is bandied about so much these days that most people using the term have no concept about what it really entails.  The R-word as used by the Left and its jihadist accomplices is meant to silence anyone who disagrees with their principles.  Thus, it is imperative that the lies perpetuated by these nefarious groups be continually highlighted.

In fact, real discrimination is at its height in the Muslim Middle East.  The discrimination against the Palestinians in Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait, Libya, and Gaza should be headlined every day in all the major news outlets.

Don’t hold your breath.

Did you know the following?

Palestinians are not allowed to become citizens of Arab countries, in accordance with Arab League Decree 1547 for 1959, “in order to preserve the Palestinian entity and Palestinian identity.” Even in Jordan they can no longer become citizens.

Palestinians face severe travel restrictions throughout the Arab world. They do not receive passports and their travel documents are only accepted by a few countries.

Palestinians cannot vote or run for office in national elections in the Arab world.

Children born to Palestinians do not get citizenship in their host countries[.]

In 1994, Qatar refused to grant Palestinians work visas.  In 2011, Palestinians in Kuwait “were forced to pay a special tax of $1,550.”

In Lebanon, Palestinians are “banned from working as physicians, journalists, pharmacists or lawyers.”  Palestinians are banned from owning property, forced to live in run-down camps, and barred from formal education.  In addition, Palestinians cannot own businesses in Lebanon and are banned from most decent-paying professions, including medicine and law.  An estimated two thirds live in poverty.  The government will not give citizenship rights to Palestinian refugees[.]

In 2003, the situation of the Palestinians was described by Paul Garwood and Maggie Michael.  Thus, “the verbal championing of the [Palestinian] cause is rhetoric to rally the Arab states’ own masses … [but] it isn’t matched by decent treatment of the [Palestinian] refugees [living in Muslim countries].”

In fact, “Palestinians in Egypt suffer restrictions on employment, education and owning property.  When Egypt announced … it would grant nationality to children of Egyptian mothers married to foreigners, it did not include Palestinians.  In Lebanon, nearly 400,000 Palestinians live in 12 refugee camps, where crime is rife and clashes between rival Palestinian factions are common.  Palestinians cannot own property or get state health care.”

One case describes “Zahar [who] was born in Egypt to an Egyptian mother, married an Egyptian and has 10 children.  Yet he and the children are Palestinians under Egyptian law.”  Consequently, they “can’t own a house, land or get a loan from the bank, despite the fact that [he] was born here and [has] no idea what is Palestine [sic].”

“It is an evil hypocrisy,” said prominent Palestinian writer Mureed al-Barghouti, who lives in Cairo.  “The language of the [Arab] governments and media is in one direction and the real practices on the ground are totally the opposite.”

In 2009, Judith Miller and David Samuels explained:

It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the … West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries[.]

In 2010 Khaled Abu Toameh, who has written extensively about the discrimination of Arabs against Palestinians, asked, “How come the Lebanese students who recently talked about Israel’s ‘war crimes’ in the Gaza Strip during Israel Apartheid Week on many North American college campuses had nothing to say about the fact that tens of thousands of Palestinians have been massacred in Lebanon over the past four decades?”

Toameh explains that “while Israel has never stripped its Arab citizens of their citizenship, Jordan has revoked the Jordanian citizenship of thousands of its citizens who are of Palestinian descent.”  Furthermore, the “government of Binyamin Netanyahu is doing more to boost the Palestinian economy in the West Bank than any Arab country.”

More recently, on July 19, 2019, Toameh underscored the reality of the situation.

The Lebanese authorities’ measures against Palestinians again highlight the discrimination Palestinians have long been facing in this Arab country. ‘Palestinians in Lebanon,’ according to a 2017 report by the Associated Press, ‘suffer discrimination in nearly every aspect of daily life…’ Lebanese law restricts Palestinians’ ability to work in several professions, including law, medicine and engineering, and bars them from receiving social security benefits. In 2001, the Lebanese parliament also passed a law prohibiting Palestinians from owning property.

Yet, somehow, Lebanon’s discriminatory and racist measures against Palestinians do not seem to bother pro-Palestinian groups around the world. These groups regularly turn a blind eye to the misery of Palestinians living in Arab countries. Instead, they set their sights on Israel, scrutinizing it for imagined abuses against Palestinians.

The next time impassioned individuals scream racism, it is time to set them straight.  They may claim that the governments of Arab states grant basic human rights to their citizens, but “[a]ccording to annual reports compiled by the State Department, most of the Arab states are ruled by oppressive, dictatorial regimes, which deny their citizens basic freedoms of political expression, speech, press and due process.  The Arab Human Development Report published by a group of Arab researchers from the UN Development Program concluded that out of the seven regions of the world, Arab countries had the lowest freedom score.  They also had the lowest ranking for ‘voice and accountability,’ a measure of various aspects of the political process, civil liberties, political rights and independence of the media.'”

Giulio Meotti explains how “there is a blanket of terrible silence in the Western media” about Human Rights Watch’s unprecedented report about Palestinian authorities’ use of torture to crush dissent.

The rejoinder to anti-Semites like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib is, “Why are the U.N. and other international institutions remaining silent as Palestinians are being thrown out of their jobs in an Arab country while more than 100,000 Palestinians enter Israel on a daily basis for work?  Will we see an emergency meeting of the Arab League or the UN Security Council to denounce Lebanese apartheid and racism?  Or are they too busy drafting resolutions condemning Israel, which has opened its doors wide to Palestinian workers?”

Will these two anti-Semites and their cohorts ever bother to hear the voices of Sunni Muslims in Israel who serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)?  Will they learn of Ibrahim Bari, an African Muslim refugee and officer in the Israeli military or Major Alaa Waheeb, the highest ranked Muslim officer in the IDF?  Will they listen to Ali Wahab, who “believes in the Muslim faith and will never abandon it” but speaks of his “sense of belonging to the State of Israel”?

No, Omar and Tlaib are the racists who incite hatred.  But with education, the rest of us can unequivocally reject their screeds and bigotry.  Let’s put a requiem to their racism by truly describing what goes on.  These tyrannical congresswomen hate the facts because, as the late Rod Serling stated, “to them logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.”  So we need to keep telling the truth.

Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com.