RUTHFULLY YOURS

geraldahonigman.com
From time to time, I will post thoughts and articles…Jerry

I am a Florida educator who has done extensive doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs, created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and have publicly debated many Arab and other anti-Israel spokesmen. My articles and op-eds have been published in dozens of newspapers, magazines, academic journals and websites all around the world.
As a doctoral student in the late ’70s, I had my academic career nipped in the bud because I believed in academic freedom (not to mention the fact that this was, after all, America). I naively expected that the same lenses of moral scrutiny–which were routinely used to critique and dissect Israel in the classroom–would be applied to the so-called “Arab”/Muslim World as well. As I learned the hard way, that was indeed far too much to expect. I asked too many of the wrong questions. I was the most advanced doctoral student in the program at Ohio State University at the time, was a T.A. (Teaching Assistant), and the department used me to secure additional funding.

Somewhat earlier, I had received my M.A. and was an advanced doctoral student at the Kevorkian Center For Near Eastern Studies, a consortium of New York, Columbia, and Princeton Universities based at N.Y.U.’s Washington Square campus. A prolonged illness and financial matters led to an interruption in my studies, and I next found myself based in Columbus in a fulltime job. A professor subsequently heard one of my presentations and suggested that I resurrect my doctoral work at Ohio State. I reluctantly agreed to do this…and you’ll see why I had reservations shortly.

Unfortunately, Middle Eastern Studies was fast becoming the most politicized field in academia…even more so since my earlier years at the Kevorkian Center. Universities were receiving money and other support from Arab countries, their supporters, and the like.

Palestinians need to start taking responsibility for their own existence and stop relying on the world to take care of them while they use the money freed up — by the international community — to launch jihad and intifadas.

No entity should forever be permitted to devote its resources to terror while the world is expected to owe them everything: financial support, jobs, citizenship, and even building the infrastructure that they keep destroying. The moral of the story is that if you do not want to lose wars, it would be better not to start them.

The longer financial aid and the pampering of Palestinians continue as an “insurance policy” ostensibly to prevent terrorism, the longer the suffering, dependence, terror and conflict will go on. It is time for Palestinians to learn that threatening terror is not a way to earn a living.

A British woman, Kay Wilson, apparently realized that when a Palestinian terrorist “plunged a knife into her chest”, left her for dead and then murdered her friend, it was British taxpayers who had paid for it.

“Is the UK funding the terrorists who tried to murder me?”, she asked.

Yes, it is. “According to data collected by Israel’s Defense Ministry, the PA spent a total of 1.237 billion shekels ($358 million), or about 7% of the PA’s total annual budget, on terrorist stipends last year.”

International payments to Palestinians that are used to pay terrorists in jail, as well as their families, serve both as a “reward for bad behavior” and also as a powerful incentive for youths to become terrorists.

They are a jobs program.

Some Palestinians are complaining that Arab countries are discriminating against them, and even going as far as calling themselves victims of “shameless Arab Apartheid” against Palestinians.

Such an accusation is unfair to many Arab countries, especially Egypt, which has sacrificed the blood of hundreds of thousands of its citizens to support the Islamic jihad against Israel.

A prominent Tunisian-born French movie producer, Saïd Ben Saïd recently issued one of the frankest denunciations of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. The real culprit, he argued, was the prevalence of anti-Semitism fueled by Islamic extremists across the Middle East. Ben Saïd was forced to pull out of an Arab film festival last year because he had worked with Israelis.

A Lebanese director, Ziad Doueiri, did something even “worse”: he filmed some scenes on Israeli land!

“No one can deny the misery of the Palestinian people, but it must be admitted that the Arab world is, in its majority, antisemitic. This hatred of Jews has redoubled in intensity and depth not because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but with the rise of a certain vision of Islam”. — Saïd Ben Saïd.

Fifty years have passed since many Arab countries were humiliated by Israel in 1967 in a war the Arabs started, with the explicit goal of destroying the Jewish State and throwing the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. Today, Israel has solid diplomatic relations with two of these countries — Jordan to Egypt — while Saudi officials speak with their Israeli security counterparts about the Iranian threat.

But although the Middle East is engulfed in a new wave of internal destabilization, and Iran has recently experienced a new wave of protests in which people chanted “we don’t want an Islamic Republic”, the great taboo for the Arab and Muslim world is still that of cultural exchanges with the hated “Zionists”.

A prominent Tunisian-born French movie producer, Saïd Ben Saïd, after being forced to pull out of North Africa’s most prestigious film festival, recently issued one of the frankest denunciations of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. He revealed, in an op-ed for the French daily Le Monde, that an invitation to preside over the jury of the Carthage Film Festival had been rescinded because of his work with the Israeli film director, Nadav Lapid, and for having participated on a panel at the Jerusalem Film Festival earlier this year. The real culprit, Ben Saïd argued, was the prevalence of anti-Semitism fueled by Islamic extremists across the Middle East:

“No one can deny the misery of the Palestinian people, but it must be admitted that the Arab world is, in its majority, antisemitic… This hatred of Jews has redoubled in intensity and depth not because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but with the rise of a certain vision of Islam”.