Do You Recognize This Head?...The Evolution Of The Suicide/Homicide Bomber
By Gerald A. Honigman (10/14/05)
While the past year has brought other issues back to the front burner on the Middle East scene (the future of the Gaza Strip, now that Israel has withdrawn, and the rest of the disputed territories as just a few examples), it's worth rethinking another all-too-real fact of life that has driven events over recent past years, especially since the onset of the era of the so-called Oslo "peace," and still very much with us. I'm speaking, of course, about the Arab suicide/homicide bomber.
Watching the news the other day as reports came in about the latest suicide bombing against innocents at a hotel in Bali, authorities were asking for help in identifying the heads of the bombers. Among others, young children have also been recruited as human bombs by these alleged Islamic sources of ethical enlightenment. Such are the times that we live in...
Indeed, we have heard much too much about suicide/homicide bombers these days, and when Israel pursues the deliberate murderers of its innocents, this then becomes the next excuse for Arabs to kill yet more innocents.
When it was "just" Jews being affected, the world didn't care much. In fact, in many circles, the Jews were blamed themselves. "Moral equivalency" too often became the name of the game...even in the American media and the State Department as well. Jews were expected to simply sit back and watch their kids get blown apart on buses, in pizzerias, and such. But, of course, the way most Arabs see all of this, there really is no such thing as Israeli "innocents"...They're all simply Jews who have stolen "purely Arab" land. That's the way it's still taught in their textbooks, appears on their websites, is preached in their mosques, and inbred everywhere else as well.
After the September 11, 2001 tragedy, when nineteen Arabs (mostly Saudis) hijacked civilian aircraft and flew them as guided missiles into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing some three thousand Americans and others as well, the situation has become even more of a national concern for our own country. It has also become common place for Sunni Arabs, mourning the loss of their previous murderous control of Iraq via Saddam, to blow everyone else apart who are now trying to build a more equitable Iraq. Officials believe that it's just a matter of time before the United States, itself, once again becomes victimized this way.
There is no doubt that this is a horrendous human tragedy. But while Arabs and their supporters place the blame for all of this on Israel, the truth is actually far more depressing.
Like in many other places, there are conflicting historical and political claims over the land contested between Arabs and Jews as well. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scholarly books written about the connection of the Jews to the land of Israel. The very name Jew, itself, comes from the later name of the land, Judaea, which in turn was named for the Hebrew tribe of Judah--one of Jacob's sons. Judaean equals Jew. Early Muslim Arab historians recorded this in their works, as does the Qur'an itself, the Holy Book of Islam.
Similarly, there are many books which deal with the imperial Arab conquest, settlement, and incorporation of the land of Israel/Judaea/Palestine--and much of the rest of entire region as well--into the two earlier Arab Caliphates based in Damascus and Baghdad. Imperialism is evidently only nasty when non-Arabs so indulge in it.
Suffice it to state, therefore, that a quest for relative justice demanded some sort of compromise over the land in question. Unfortunately, that was too much to ask...
Arabs saw themselves as the only legitimate heirs to a defeated Ottoman Turkish Empire which had replaced the Arabs (and others) as imperial rulers and had ruled most of the region for some four centuries prior to the end of World War I.
After the Allied defeat of the Turks, Arabs subsequently treated the region as "purely Arab patrimony" and acted accordingly. Despite the presence of scores of millions of non-Arab Berbers, Kurds, Jews, Black Africans, Copts, Semitic but non-Arab Lebanese, and others as well, Arabs saw these as purely Arab lands.
As just a few of many other examples of what next transpired, both Berber and Kurdish languages and cultures were periodically "outlawed," churches of the Copts were burned down, Black Africans in the Sudan and Kurds in Syria and Iraq were massacred, and more Jews fled "Arab" lands than Arabs who fled Israel...the other side of that famous refugee problem that few folks ever talk about. Those who resisted this forced Arabization process were simply killed, turned into refugees, and the like...millions over the decades, and continuing to this very day.
Returning to our main topic, the Arab rejectionist response to the question of a compromise with the Jews over the question of Israel/Palestine falls into this same pattern. Arabs rejected any solution which would grant Jews any rights at all. They attacked a miniscule, reborn Israel in 1948...and thus the continuing problem regarding the plight of Arab refugees. But it didn't have to be this way...
Hundreds of millions of people became refugees in the course of the last violent century (not to mention the millions before then). Many were displaced between the two world wars. Scores of millions were uprooted in the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Many more examples exist, like that involving Turks and Greeks; but, as is already hinted to above, one truly stands out in light of the current turmoil in the Middle East: The one half of Israel's five million Jews whose families fled Arab/Muslim lands around the same time Arabs fled in the opposite direction because of the invasion of Israel by five Arab states upon its rebirth in 1948. This does not include another million of these Sephardim who fled to other lands in the Diaspora, notably France and the Americas.
Greater New York City alone now has tens of thousands of Syrian Jews. They were known as kilab yahud--"Jew Dogs"--in those Arab lands...So much for what Arabs like to claim was their alleged tolerance of "their Jews" before the rise of modern political Zionism. And in regards to the latter movement (the national liberation of the Jewish people), how dare anyone else but Arabs demand a tiny sliver of national dignity in the region!
As those of us involved with these issues have to repeat far too often, at virtually the same time that the partition of the Indian subcontinent was taking place, the Arabs rejected a similar plan that would have created a second state for themselves in historic Palestine. Jordan had already emerged on some 80% of the original territory of the Mandate issued to Great Britain in the wake of the Paris Peace Conference on April 25, 1920. Colonial Secretary Churchill had separated all of Palestine east of the Jordan River and handed it over to Britain's Hashemite Arab allies in the creation of Transjordan in 1922.
Take a careful look at what Sabri Jiryis, a prominent Palestinian Arab researcher at the Institute for Palestinian Studies in Beirut, had to say about all of this in the Lebanese newspaper, Al-Nahar, on May 15, 1975:
"While it is estimated that 700,000 Arabs fled the 1948 war...against this...Arabs caused the expulsion of just as many Jews from Arab states...whose properties were taken over...a population and property exchange occurred and each side must bear the consequences."
Much more evidence for this exists in books written by Arab kings, officials, and others as well.
So, why is it that over a half century later, Arabs--who have received billions of dollars in aid from the United Nations, the European Union, America, oil revenues, other international funds, and elsewhere as well--still have not relieved the plight of their own refugees...a problem which, by their own rejectionist attitudes, they largely created themselves? They have, after all, almost two dozen states on some six million square miles of territory--lands that belonged mostly, as we have already discussed, to other non-Arab peoples before they were conquered in the name of the Arab nation. Jews absorbed their own refugees into a sole, tiny state roughly the size of New Jersey.
The answer to the above question can perhaps best be illustrated by Arab actions.
Some years back, with the status of the disputed territories Israel found itself in control of in the aftermath of the 1967 War still unresolved, Israel offered to knock down the dilapidated refugee camps and replace them with new housing and better living conditions.
It's worth remembering that Egypt and Jordan occupied these territories from 1948 to 1967 and not only did nothing about this problem but never discussed the creation of that additional Palestinian Arab state here either.
So, how did the Arabs respond to that Israeli offer?
They demanded that Israel do nothing to remedy life in the camps.
Again, why?
It's really not hard to understand...
Quite simply, and as it has been known for decades, Arabs have used their own refugees as pawns in their perpetual war to delegitimize Israel. For them, there is no justice nor suffering besides their own.
Arabs don't want the refugee problem solved--not as long as it means that a viable Israel will still exist on the morrow. That's why they tacked on the "right of return" of millions of real or alleged jihadist-raised Arab refugees to the so-called Saudi peace plan a few years back, and Arafat walked away from an offer to get some 97% of the disputed territories, half of Jerusalem, and other major Israeli concessions as well at Camp David 2000 and Taba. The two Abus currently in charge of the "moderate" Palestinian Authority make the same demands. That's why they refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish State. Also keep in mind that so many Arabs were in fact newcomers themselves into "Palestine" that the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) had to redefine the very word refugee to accommodate them. Recall, as well, that if surrounding Arab states hadn't invaded a miniscule, reborn Israel in the first place in 1948, there would hardly have been any Arab refugees.
The result of both the Arafatian and the Saudi so-called "peace plans" still envisions Israel's Jews being overwhelmed so that a second Arab state within the original 1920 borders of Palestine will replace Israel, not live side by side with it. This should come as no surprise since all Palestinian (and many other) Arab maps, school books, web sites, and the like omit Israel as well. This is also why talk about creating a "provisional Palestinian Arab State" under these circumstances is scary. Faisal al-Husseini, the late showcase moderate of the PLO, said that while he'd accept any land diplomacy would yield, a purely Arab Palestine from the River to the Sea was the real goal...the same old "destruction of Israel in stages" strategy dominant since after the "one fell swoop" alternative collapsed due to failure in the 1967 Six Day War. Al-Husseini's successor "moderates" are leopards with the same spots. Their long-term goal for the Jewish State is no different than that of Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
Thus, tragically, this conflict still really has no end in sight, despite what Mahmoud Abbas' cheerleading squad has to say...including in our own country. And the horrendous human costs specifically associated with suicide/homicide bombings for both sides have been created and sustained by the Arabs themselves.
Reasonable compromises have been repeatedly offered--and rejected--to end the Arab-Israeli conflict...certainly more than anything Arabs have ever offered to the numerous native, non-Arab peoples they have conquered and forcibly Arabized in carving out most of the almost two dozen states they now call their own.
(Printer friendly version) Email: Gerald A. Honigman
