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Before you begin reading this, please have on screen, paper, or wall, a reliable full-scale map of the Middle East, one stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan, from the Caspian Sea to the Gulf of Aden. You will note that the territory covering 5.25 million miles belongs to states of the Arab League..


Not being an Arab or a Muslim, I can only wonder why young people raised in those societies do not ask these questions, encouraging their governments to change their policies. More than that, I marvel at the fact that some of  apparently share the assumption that Arab and Muslim leaders are entitled to over one-tenth of the world’s land surface, while questioning the right of Jews to land about one-ninth the size of Syria. Do they really believe that Arabs and Muslims are innately so much worthier than Jews?


Much has changed in the Middle East during the past six decades, but one political feature remains disturbingly constant. The Arab League formed in 1945 to prevent the emergence of Israel, launching the most lop-sided war in human history, a war that continues hot and cold to the present day, pitting multiple non- and anti-democratic regimes against the Jewish State.


Scapegoating Israel and the Jews became a means of deflecting attention from the mounting failings and weaknesses of those regimes, very much the way that scapegoating the Jews served some Christian and anti-Semitic rulers in their time. Arab leaders who sought peace with Israel, such as King Abdullah I of Jordan and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, were assassinated by rivals. Religious and secular factions competed with one another over whose aggression against Israel was bloodier and more intimidating.


Moreover, the war against Israel required the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs to permanent refugee status,  The Arab world fueled its war against Israel with the permanent misery of Palestinian Arabs—and ascribed that misery to the oppressor Jews in a more perfect moral inversion than any literary Satan ever proposed. Postmodernism adores moral inversions, which may be why some Harvard professors have so eagerly joined the “devil’s party.”


But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: Look again at the full-scale map. Keep it in sight. Don’t let any course or discussion of the Middle East proceed except in its presence. And if the need arises, ask why Arabs and Muslims think they deserve odds greater than 640:1.


just sayin

doug


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