Makos, Kristof, and Bike Week

Makos, Kristof, and Bike Week

By Gerald A. Honigman
February 28, 2004

I guess this piece had to be written.

Not that I'm superstitious or anything. But what I am about to tell you would have had to have been one heck of a coincidence. I hope I do it justice.

We were driving in the miserable Daytona Beach traffic during "Bike Week," when scores-- if not hundreds--of thousands of Harleys converge on our beachside community from all over the United States and elsewhere.

We had just dropped our youngest off at the movies with her friends and were heading out to meet one of our other kids at her new job.

We stopped to pick her up a sandwich, and while my wife went in to the shop, I decided to read the day's paper. Big mistake.... There's no rest for the weary...at least those of us who care.

There was Nicholas Kristof's op-ed piece, "A Question Of Double Standards," staring at me while I was supposedly taking a break.

Now I know a bit about double standards myself-- real ones, not Kristof's figments.

One of my own articles on the subject has made it into dozens of publications under a few different titles, as major op-ed pieces in newspapers, in Nobel Laureate-sponsored academic journals on reference lists of leading universities around the world, etc. So I think I'm somewhat qualified to respond.

Why is it, for example, that journalists like Nicholas Kristof, Thomas Friedman, David Ignatius, Richard Cohen, and others are obsessed with the creation of a 23rd Arab state--a second Arab one within the original borders of the Palestinian Mandate as Britain received it on April 25, 1920 before Colonial Secretary Churchill chopped off 80% in 1922 and awarded it to Arab allies in the creation of Transjordan, but are deaf, dumb, and blind (or worse) regarding the plight of some thirty million stateless Kurds?

In the September 16, 2003 Washington Post, Ignatius could only address Kurds as terrorists or rebels--while never dreaming of using the "T" word for Arab disembowelers of Jewish babes and grandmas.

In Thomas Friedman's earlier March 26th article in the New York Times, he advised that the Kurds should be told point blank, "what part of 'no' don't you understand? ...You Kurds are not breaking away." And the media's sickening hypocrisy is mirrored by the crew that has hijacked Middle Eastern Studies on far too many campuses and too often in our own Government as well...especially at Foggy Bottom.

But I've digressed. Back to Bike Week...

We resumed our drive in bumper to bumper traffic, and I got thinking about the Kristof travesty. He simply bought right into the standard Arab propaganda lines...Jews taking "Arab" lands, Israel giving poor Arabs "no alternatives," etc.

I haven't been doing enough fishing lately and hardly ever get my late Dad's little boat out anymore. Still, I was considering how great it would be if, by simply saying over and over again that the 25-foot Mako sport fishing boat of my daydreams was mine, I could make it so. The Arabs have done this and many buy into their lies.

Now you're not going to believe what happened next.

I turned off the main road and up a side street to try to escape some of the traffic. Guess what was sitting there, a little ways up the road?... My 25 footer....!!!!!!!!

So, I had to write this. Understand?

Back to Kristof...

Don't get me wrong, for his stripe of journalist, this piece was actually an attempt at some kind of fair play. He actually brought up the "Hama Solution"--where Syrian Arabs slaughtered more than ten times the number of their own "problems" in less than a month than died in over two years fighting Israel in an intifada that Arabs themselves started after rejecting an offer of a 23rd state on over 97% of the disputed territories with a capital in Jerusalem. Ambassador Dennis Ross was present at the Camp David 2000 and Taba negotiations and spelled out that the offer was for a contiguous state, not disconnected "cantons" as Arafat's spin doctors claim, and that over $30 billion dollars was offered as well to seal the deal.

What was that line by Kristof in today's rant about Arabs not being offered any alternatives? The reality that the Kristof Krew refuses to deal with is that nothing short of Israel's consent to suicide will be enough for the Arafat/ Hamas good cop/ bad cop team. They've been caught repeatedly admitting this, calling the Oslo peace process fiasco where the more Israel gave, the more it bled, a "Trojan Horse." And this by so-called "moderate " Arab spokesmen.

Whatever fairness Kristof attempted in his latest op-ed was completely shattered by his closing punch line about Israel's security fence on "Palestinian" land.

So, for Nick's sake, I'll try again. Here goes...

Just who is a "settler" in the Middle East?

Of course, Arabs and their mouthpieces point to Jews. And the latter "illegally stole purely Arab land." Kristof made a variation of this same claim in today's article.

So, unless the "West Bank" is ethnically cleansed of the Jewish presence, as the fiction goes, and those like Kristof buy into, there will be no chance for peace.

Israel's fence, if tolerated at all, must therefore cling to the Auschwitz/armistice lines of 1949 which made it, among other things, a mere 9-miles wide at its vulnerable waist. The press constantly supports this position. Countless editorials and columns have appeared spouting such wisdom.

During the Mandatory period following the break up of empires after World War I, the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission recorded scores of thousands of Arabs pouring into a largely depopulated Palestine from surrounding countries to take advantage of the economic development going on because of the Jews. Many more entered under cover of darkness and were never listed. All of these folks were preceded in the 19th century by many thousands of Egyptians who came with Muhammad Ali's invading armies and never left... more Arab settlers in Palestine setting up Arab settlements. Arafat himself was one of them, coming from Cairo, Egypt. So was Hamas' "patron saint," Izzadin al-Qassam... coming from Aleppo, Syria. These folks later became known as "native Palestinians."

While this is not to say that there were not native Arabs also living in Palestine, it is to say that many if not most of these folks were also newcomers - settlers - themselves.

Again...many of the villages set up in the West Bank and elsewhere were settlements established by Arab settlers. And there were Jews whose families never left Israel/Judaea/Palestine as well over the centuries, despite the tragedies of the Roman Wars, forced conversions of the Byzantines, the Diaspora, Crusades, etc.

In the wake of the '67 War started by Egypt's Nasser's blockade of Israel at the Straits of Tiran and other hostile acts (a casus belli), UN Resolution #242 did not demand that Israel return to the suicidal armistice lines of 1949. It called, instead, for the creation of "secure and recognized" borders to replace those lines.

Furthermore, those lands where much of the compromising would have to be done after Israel already withdrew from the Sinai--i.e. Judea and Samaria/the "West Bank"--were not "Arab" lands as Kristof claims but unapportioned territories of the Mandate, open to settlement by both Jews and Arabs. Leading international legal scholars such as Eugene Rostow, William O'Brien, and others have written extensively about this. The current demand that those lands, where Jews (Judea...Judeans...Jews) have thousands of years of connecting history, now become Judenrein--is thus totally unwarranted.

The route of the security fence that Arafat and Hamas constructed must also take all of this into consideration.

There must be a reasonable compromise regarding those disputed territories--not a unilateral withdrawal forced upon the Jews by the ignorant, anti-Semites, and 21st century Chamberlains in the pockets of Arab oil sheikhs.

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