Gerald A. Honigman

Hey Kristof...You're Late!
March 23, 2009
 

While The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof is no stranger to these positions throughout the year, he frequently comes out with his gems of Middle East wisdom right around Bike Week here in Daytona Beach, Florida, when tens of thousands of  Harley enthusiasts arrive to also spread their hot air exhaust around town. This year Nick was a few weeks late

Like others of his ilk--Thomas Friedman (better of late), David Ignatius, Richard Cohen, just to name a few, who are also obsessed with  creating  a 22nd Arab state (second, not first, Arab one within the original April 25, 1920 borders of the Mandate of Palestine before the Brits gave some 80% away to Arab nationalism creating Transjordan in 1922)--Kristof loves to lecture Israel, practically invisible on a map of the world, about the need to bare the necks of its kids so that Arabs, who conquered over six million square miles of territory from mostly non-Arab peoples  in the name of their nation, can have that additional state as well.

Kristof's latest jewel published in the Daytona Beach News-Journal on March 20, 2009, "Like Minds Cluster When Grazing From The Daily Me," compared academics Juan Cole and Daniel Pipes as sources of information regarding the Middle East.

Kristof prefers Juan Cole...shocking (not)!

I have never met Cole, but I had--unfortunately--studied under a number of his academic clones in my own graduate school days.

While also--but a bit more subtlety than President Obama's dear friend, Rashid Khalidi, Juan Cole, et al--promoting the themes of nasty Zionists and the need to create Arab state # 22, Carter Findley never mentioned the plight of some thirty-five million Kurds who remain stateless to date. They had been gassed and slaughtered by Arabs repeatedly and had their one best chance at statehood aborted by a collusion of British petroleum politics and Arab nationalism after World War I. Indeed, the only time Findley ever mentioned Kurds in his doctoral seminar was when he mocked their plight in Turkey.

In Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog of February 11, 2009, he proclaimed Israel's new incoming government as being prone to racism, apartheid, and so forth. Nothing new...his positions from the get-go. That has been how one gets ahead in Middle Eastern Studies for quite some time now. Israel is routinely placed under the high power lens of moral scrutiny, while a blind eye is turned to literally millions of victims of Arab massacres, gassings, genocide, enslavement, dhimmitude, subjugation, and so forth. And woe unto the student who dares to question such duplicity. Been there, done that...unfortunately.

Turn the clock back several decades again as we return to Findley's doctoral seminars.

I'll never forget one Greek Orthodox woman who I'm sure has a great position at some university today...can't think of her name, but remember her well. Unlike myself, she wasn't denied a Ph. D. dissertation advisor to finish her doctoral work. Geez...I wonder why?

Her idol was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who spent World War II in Berlin at Hitler's side and organized a division of Muslim Nazis, 'the Hanzar.' He also played a first-hand role in instigating the genocide of Europe's Jews, Serbs and Gypsies.

When she presented her research on the Mufti at our seminar, all the above was either white-washed or ignored altogether. Findley, of course--her mentor and featured guest at her wedding--sat through it all approvingly.

Now, contrast this with my own research about Ze'ev Vladimir Jabotinsky…the man most responsible in the early Mandate era for Jewish defense against Arab slaughter. Findley had no problem emphasizing his alleged "fascist connections" and so forth.

Unlike too many of his pipe-dreaming Zionist opponents on the Left, Jabotinsky was not delusional about what the Arabs' true intentions were regarding the resurrection of the Jew of the Nations--regardless of its size. A reading of his Appetite Versus Starvation speech in the early 20th century reveals a man truly concerned about justice for Arab and Jew alike. If the so-called Arab World had produced such "fascists," the Arab-Israeli conflict would have been resolved long ago. But none of this makes a difference to the Juan Coles...Kristof's sources of enlightenment.

Jabotinsky's heirs are now set to take office in Israel. I hope they do justice to his memory.

So, the Rashid Khalidis, Juan Coles, Nicholas Kristofs, and so forth now bemoan the end of the so-called peace (of the grave) process because at least most Israeli Jews have finally woken up to the reality that the end game for both the West's alleged Fatah good cops of Abbas and the bad cops of Hamas is the same regarding Israel. The façade of a difference is largely about who will gain access to the billions of dollars in foreign aid that is and will be pouring in. Arafat's stashed $$$ millions or more are legendary. Hamas is simply more honest.

Daniel Pipes has long approached the Middle East with a far more realistic and objective appraisal of the facts at hand. He has been virtually prophetic regarding such things as 9/11, militant Islam, and so forth.

On the other hand, the Juan Coles of the Ivory Tower have blamed solely Israel and America as the culprits.

The fact that the vast majority of conflicts today, for example, involves militant Islam and/or real Arab racism is of no concern to them.

What does the fight in the Philippines have to do with Israel?...Thailand?...Kashmir?...the Balkans?

What do the murder and subjugation of Egyptian Copts, North African Berbers, Assyrians, those Kurds mentioned above, or Arab genocide in black Africa's Sudan have to do with Israel?

The truth is that Israel--one half of whose Jews who are from refugee families from the "Arab World" where they were known as killers of prophets and kilab yahud, Jew dogs--is on the front lines of the age-old war the Arabs and Arabized have continuously waged for over thirteen centuries now, the conflict of the Dar ul-Islam versus the Dar al-Harb.

Here's a few examples of the real problem, the one largely Arab petro-dollar sponsored, Arab, and hypocritical Lefty professors like Cole won't touch with a ten-foot pole...

The Sudan's ex-president, Gaafar Muhammad al-Nimeiry, stated during the earlier slaughter of nearly a million blacks (over a million more since):

The Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into... black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission ("Arabism and Pan-Arabism in Sudanese Politics," Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 11, no. 2, 1973, pp. 177-78).

While Kristof's Juan Cole mentors are passionate about such things as Rudyard Kipling's late 19th-century poem, "The White Man's Burden," supposedly typifying continued Western colonialist and imperialist attitudes towards the Third World, why are such Arab racist attitudes and mindset ignored?

Is it that the Arab Man's Burden is kosher but the White Man's isn't ? Recall, again, Cole's recent blog worries about alleged Israeli "racism."

Consider also this quote from the Syrian Arab Constitution...something, I'm sure, Juan Cole's students never heard a peep about...

The Arab fatherland belongs to the Arabs. They alone have the right to direct its destinies.... The Arab fatherland is that part of the globe inhabited by the Arab nation that stretches from the Taurus Mountains, the Pacht-i-Kouh Mountains, the Gulf of Basra, the Arab Ocean, the Ethiopian Mountains, the Sahara, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea.

Can't tell for sure--are any Eskimos included in this Arab plan of conquest?

The Juan Cole-type "scholarly" reaction: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil...After all, these are Arabs we're talking about--not Jews. And besides, it's all just made up fascist Zionist propaganda anyway...

As I like to remind folks and as exemplified above, Arabs have habitually referred to most of the region as purely Arab patrimony--the Arab-Israeli, Arab-Kurd, Arab-black African, Arab-Berber, and other such conflicts in a nutshell.

So, summing it up, here's a rule of thumb for those truly interested in a realistic and objective analysis of what's really going on over there...

When it comes to sources such as Juan Cole or Daniel Pipes, whatever Kristof tells you, choose the opposite.