Posted by Tina
Im always delighted when I find an article that relates to comments made to Post Scripts by one of our friends. Today Walter was kind enough to express his thoughts about Palestinians who are providing get out the vote support for Barack Obama.
Id like to share this article (which illuminates the historical perspective) from the American Thinker:
Triple Cross: How Britain Created the Arab-Israel Conflict, by Rachel Neuwirth
Outside of the Muslim countries, no press in the world is as biased, as unfair, and as dishonest and vindictive towards Israel as the British press. The BBC and the newspapers The Guardian and The Independent take the lead in relentlessly vilifying the Jewish state, but Sky News, Reuters, The Economist and numerous other major media outlets do not lag far behind them in their race to see which can defame and malign Israel the most. Israel is incessantly castigated as an imperialist and colonialist power whose people stole their country from its “indigenous” and rightful owners, the “Palestinians.”
Britain conquered Palestine from the Turks in 1917-18. First Her Majesty’s Government promised Palestine to the Jews in the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and then again in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine of 1922, in which it solemnly accepted as “a sacred trust of civilization” to “be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.” Then it repudiated that promise in a “White Paper” of 1939, which announced her intention to allow only 75,000 Jewish immigrants into Palestine over the next five years (this as World War II and the Holocaust was just beginning) and after that to allow no further Jewish immigration without Arab consent. The White Paper also placed severe restrictions on the purchase of land by Jews. And it promised the Palestinian Arabs that Palestine would become an independent Arab state within ten years. All this was in flagrant violations of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine; the League of Nations Mandates Commission noted this, and refused to ratify the White Paper. Britain implemented it anyway — to the extent of refusing to admit to Palestine 750 Jews who had managed to escape Nazi Europe in a leaky boat while the Holocaust was in full swing. The Jews were forced to turn back into the human-shark-infested waters of the Black Sea, where their leaky crate was torpedoed, and all but one of them killed. ** Other Jews who managed to reach the shores of Palestine were deported by the British Navy to the remote island of Mauritius and kept in a detention camp, where many of them died of disease before finally being released after the end of the war. This British measure was strangely reminiscent of an earlier Nazi plan to deport the Jews of Europe to Madagascar, a larger island in the Indian Ocean not far from Mauritius. Still the British detained other Jews who managed to board ships bound for Palestine for years in camps on Cyprus. This was the way His Majesty’s Government kept its promises to the Jews. ** Having already promised Palestine to both the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, Britain after World War II promised it again, this time to Syria! Secret British correspondence, recently discovered by an Israeli scholar, not in the archives of Britain but in those of France, which intercepted British and Syrian communications through espionage, reveals that the British promised to hand over Palestine to Syria in return for making Britain Syria’s “protector” to replace France. The British even assisted the Syrians to carry out a massacre of French civilians and soldiers in order to force France out of Syria.
I urge anyone interested in the history behind the conflict in the Middle East to read this entire article and click on the referenced material as well. Media bias, and in this case perhaps British guilt, have served to smear the Israelis in a most undeserved manner.
As if to add an exclamation point there was this today from the BBC:
US President George W Bush has arrived in Israel to take part in celebrations for the country’s 60th anniversary. He also hopes to inject some momentum into the current peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Mr Bush said on arrival that Israel and the US shared ties in democracy, trade and in fighting terror ** As Mr Bush arrived, at least four Palestinians were killed in Israeli military operations ** But what Israelis celebrate as 60 years of statehood, Palestinians mark as al-Nakba, or the Catastrophe. Some 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes or were expelled in 1948. Many Palestinians also accuse Israel of hurting the innocent and of collective punishment in its attempts to quash Palestinian militants, says the BBC’s Katya Adler in Jerusalem.
There was nothing in the article about attacks committed against Israelis by Palestinians.