It's Not About Israel

[Guest shiloh357]

It's Not About Israel

by Davd A. Harris

A number of voices in the international community have recently identified the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the root cause of many of the Middle East's problems. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and outgoing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan have been among the most prominent of these voices.

In his article "A battle for global values," (Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007), Tony Blair reiterates what he has expressed in previous public statements: "How can we bring peace to the Middle East unless we resolve the question of Israel and Palestine?" Achieving peace, he continues, "would not only silence reactionary Islam's most effective rallying call but fatally undermine its basic ideology."

Kofi Annan, addressing the UN Security Council on December 12, said, "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just one regional conflict amongst many. No other conflict carries such a powerful symbolic and emotional charge even for people far away."

True, genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinians would remove one of the long-standing conflicts in the Middle East. Moreover, to state the painfully obvious, peace would serve the best interests of those involved.

But to suggest, as Prime Minister Blair in particular does, that such a settlement is a necessary precondition for peace in the Middle East and would take the wind out of radical Islam's sails is unsupported by the facts.

Let's assume for a moment that Israel did not exist. Would that have changed the basic story line of the bulk of recent events in the Middle East?

Would Iraq and Iran have chosen not to pursue an eight-year war that cost more than a million fatalities? Would Iraq have decided not to invade Kuwait in 1990? Would it have rethought its use of chemical weapons against both its own Kurdish population and Iran?

Would Syria have refrained from slaughtering over 10,000 of its own citizens in Hama in 1982? Would it have relinquished its hold on Lebanon, as demanded by multiple Security Council resolutions?

Would Saudi Arabia have stopped exporting its Wahhabi model of Islam, with its narrow, doctrinaire view of the world and rejection of non-Muslims as so-called infidels, across the globe? Would al-Qaida not have attacked the US in 2001, when, it should be remembered, the Israeli-Palestinian issue was never even mentioned among Osama bin Laden's main "grievances"?

Would the danger posed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan magically disappear absent the Israel factor? Would Iran today abandon its hegemonic ambitions in the region? Would the Shi'ite-Sunni split, with its profound political and strategic ramifications, evaporate into thin air? Would the Sudanese government stop its collusion with the Arab Janjaweed militias to end the massive murder and displacement in Darfur?

Political oppression, intellectual suffocation and gender discrimination that explain, more than other factors, the chronic difficulties of the Middle East.

Would the desperate poverty and widespread illiteracy that dampen hope and create a fertile recruiting ground for radical Islamic movements suddenly be alleviated? Would Saudi women instantaneously have the right to drive, would non-Muslims finally enjoy equal rights in all those Arab countries where Islam is the official religion, and would the Baha'i no longer experience persecution at the hands of the Iranian government?

In reality, the destabilizing factors in the Middle East run far deeper than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Strikingly, while most Western political leaders mince their words, the courageous Arab authors of the annual Arab Human Development Report have not. They have spoken of three overarching explanatory factors for the region's unsatisfactory condition: the knowledge deficit, the gender deficit and the freedom deficit.

Unless these three areas are addressed in a sustained manner, the Middle East, which ought to be one of the world's most dynamic regions, is likely to continue suffering from instability, violence and fundamentalism, irrespective of what happens on the Israeli-Palestinian front.

Consider some of the important findings in the Arab Human Development Report and related studies:

• The total number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years is fewer than those translated in Spain in one year.
  
• Greece, with a population of fewer than 11 million, translates five times as many books from abroad into Greek annually as the 22 Arab countries combined, with a total population of more than 300 million, translate into Arabic.
  
• According to a 2002 Council on Foreign Relations report, "In the 1950s, per-capita income in Egypt was similar to South Korea, whereas Egypt's per-capita income today is less than 20 percent of South Korea's. Saudi Arabia had a higher gross domestic product than Taiwan in the 1950s; today it is about 50 percent of Taiwan's."
  
• As Dr. A.B. Zahlan, a Palestinian physicist has noted, "a regressive political culture is at the root of the Arab world's failure to fund scientific research or to sustain a vibrant, innovative community of scientists." He further asserted that "Egypt, in 1950, had more engineers than all of China." That is hardly the case today.
  

According to the 2005 UN Human Development Report, only two Egyptians per million people were granted patents (and for Syria the figure was zero), compared to 30 in Greece and 35 in Israel.

In the 2005 UN report the adult literacy rate for women aged 15 and older was 43.6 percent in Egypt and 74 percent in Syria, while for the world's top 20 countries it was nearly 100 percent.

And finally, according to the current Freedom House rankings, the only country in the Middle East that is listed as "free" is Israel. Every Arab country is at best "partly free" or, worse, "not free."

The sad truth is that it is precisely political oppression, intellectual suffocation and gender discrimination that explain, more than other factors, the chronic difficulties of the Middle East. To be sure, there exist no overnight or over-the-counter remedies for these maladies that would allow the region to unleash its vast potential, but they are at the heart of the problem. It would be illusory to think otherwise.

This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post.

[stafy]

It's Not About Israel

by Davd A. Harris

A number of voices in the international community have recently identified the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the root cause of many of the Middle East's problems. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and outgoing UN Secretary General Kofi Annan have been among the most prominent of these voices.

In his article "A battle for global values," (Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007), Tony Blair reiterates what he has expressed in previous public statements: "How can we bring peace to the Middle East unless we resolve the question of Israel and Palestine?" Achieving peace, he continues, "would not only silence reactionary Islam's most effective rallying call but fatally undermine its basic ideology."

Kofi Annan, addressing the UN Security Council on December 12, said, "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not just one regional conflict amongst many. No other conflict carries such a powerful symbolic and emotional charge even for people far away."

True, genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinians would remove one of the long-standing conflicts in the Middle East. Moreover, to state the painfully obvious, peace would serve the best interests of those involved.

But to suggest, as Prime Minister Blair in particular does, that such a settlement is a necessary precondition for peace in the Middle East and would take the wind out of radical Islam's sails is unsupported by the facts.

Let's assume for a moment that Israel did not exist. Would that have changed the basic story line of the bulk of recent events in the Middle East?

Would Iraq and Iran have chosen not to pursue an eight-year war that cost more than a million fatalities? Would Iraq have decided not to invade Kuwait in 1990? Would it have rethought its use of chemical weapons against both its own Kurdish population and Iran?

Would Syria have refrained from slaughtering over 10,000 of its own citizens in Hama in 1982? Would it have relinquished its hold on Lebanon, as demanded by multiple Security Council resolutions?

Would Saudi Arabia have stopped exporting its Wahhabi model of Islam, with its narrow, doctrinaire view of the world and rejection of non-Muslims as so-called infidels, across the globe? Would al-Qaida not have attacked the US in 2001, when, it should be remembered, the Israeli-Palestinian issue was never even mentioned among Osama bin Laden's main "grievances"?

Would the danger posed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan magically disappear absent the Israel factor? Would Iran today abandon its hegemonic ambitions in the region? Would the Shi'ite-Sunni split, with its profound political and strategic ramifications, evaporate into thin air? Would the Sudanese government stop its collusion with the Arab Janjaweed militias to end the massive murder and displacement in Darfur?

Political oppression, intellectual suffocation and gender discrimination that explain, more than other factors, the chronic difficulties of the Middle East.

Would the desperate poverty and widespread illiteracy that dampen hope and create a fertile recruiting ground for radical Islamic movements suddenly be alleviated? Would Saudi women instantaneously have the right to drive, would non-Muslims finally enjoy equal rights in all those Arab countries where Islam is the official religion, and would the Baha'i no longer experience persecution at the hands of the Iranian government?

In reality, the destabilizing factors in the Middle East run far deeper than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Strikingly, while most Western political leaders mince their words, the courageous Arab authors of the annual Arab Human Development Report have not. They have spoken of three overarching explanatory factors for the region's unsatisfactory condition: the knowledge deficit, the gender deficit and the freedom deficit.

Unless these three areas are addressed in a sustained manner, the Middle East, which ought to be one of the world's most dynamic regions, is likely to continue suffering from instability, violence and fundamentalism, irrespective of what happens on the Israeli-Palestinian front.

Consider some of the important findings in the Arab Human Development Report and related studies:

• The total number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years is fewer than those translated in Spain in one year.
  
• Greece, with a population of fewer than 11 million, translates five times as many books from abroad into Greek annually as the 22 Arab countries combined, with a total population of more than 300 million, translate into Arabic.
  
• According to a 2002 Council on Foreign Relations report, "In the 1950s, per-capita income in Egypt was similar to South Korea, whereas Egypt's per-capita income today is less than 20 percent of South Korea's. Saudi Arabia had a higher gross domestic product than Taiwan in the 1950s; today it is about 50 percent of Taiwan's."
  
• As Dr. A.B. Zahlan, a Palestinian physicist has noted, "a regressive political culture is at the root of the Arab world's failure to fund scientific research or to sustain a vibrant, innovative community of scientists." He further asserted that "Egypt, in 1950, had more engineers than all of China." That is hardly the case today.
  

According to the 2005 UN Human Development Report, only two Egyptians per million people were granted patents (and for Syria the figure was zero), compared to 30 in Greece and 35 in Israel.

In the 2005 UN report the adult literacy rate for women aged 15 and older was 43.6 percent in Egypt and 74 percent in Syria, while for the world's top 20 countries it was nearly 100 percent.

And finally, according to the current Freedom House rankings, the only country in the Middle East that is listed as "free" is Israel. Every Arab country is at best "partly free" or, worse, "not free."

The sad truth is that it is precisely political oppression, intellectual suffocation and gender discrimination that explain, more than other factors, the chronic difficulties of the Middle East. To be sure, there exist no overnight or over-the-counter remedies for these maladies that would allow the region to unleash its vast potential, but they are at the heart of the problem. It would be illusory to think otherwise.

This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post.

What is the piont to this post?

[Guest shiloh357]

What is the piont to this post?

The point is that, contrary to what you hear in the media, Israel is not the problem in the Middleeast. Every bit of unrest in the Middleeast is blamed on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the conflict is blamed on those Jews who insist existing on their biblical, covenant Land.

According to conventional wisdom, resolving this conflict, which usually means strong arming Israel into making stupid, suicidal concessions to terrorists in the name of "peace" (which the terrorists had never promised would follow aforementioned concessions), will resolve most if not all instability and hostility in the Middle East. The Arabs have hoodwinked the west into believing the key to world peace is to bringing "peace" to the Middleeast, and this amounts using the western nations to dictate Saudi policy to Israel, and forcing Israel to captitulate to insane demands that no other nation would ever agree to were they facing a similar threat.

The point is that all of the problems of the Middleeast cannot be laid at Israel's doorstep, and that most of what is wrong with the Middleeast has absolutely nothing to do with Israel. Islam would still be just as violent, intolerant and dysfunctional as it is today, with or without Israel.

[stafy]

What is the piont to this post?

The point is that, contrary to what you hear in the media, Israel is not the problem in the Middleeast. Every bit of unrest in the Middleeast is blamed on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the conflict is blamed on those Jews who insist existing on their biblical, covenant Land.

According to conventional wisdom, resolving this conflict, which usually means strong arming Israel into making stupid, suicidal concessions to terrorists in the name of "peace" (which the terrorists had never promised would follow aforementioned concessions), will resolve most if not all instability and hostility in the Middle East. The Arabs have hoodwinked the west into believing the key to world peace is to bringing "peace" to the Middleeast, and this amounts using the western nations to dictate Saudi policy to Israel, and forcing Israel to captitulate to insane demands that no other nation would ever agree to were they facing a similar threat.

The point is that all of the problems of the Middleeast cannot be laid at Israel's doorstep, and that most of what is wrong with the Middleeast has absolutely nothing to do with Israel. Islam would still be just as violent, intolerant and dysfunctional as it is today, with or without Israel.

Arh! Now your talking something I can understand. So basically your saying that a world without god would still be screwed up. Unfortunatly we don't have the privalage of having a world without God to find out if your theroy would be true.

[MorningGlory]

What is the piont to this post?

The point is that, contrary to what you hear in the media, Israel is not the problem in the Middleeast. Every bit of unrest in the Middleeast is blamed on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the conflict is blamed on those Jews who insist existing on their biblical, covenant Land.

According to conventional wisdom, resolving this conflict, which usually means strong arming Israel into making stupid, suicidal concessions to terrorists in the name of "peace" (which the terrorists had never promised would follow aforementioned concessions), will resolve most if not all instability and hostility in the Middle East. The Arabs have hoodwinked the west into believing the key to world peace is to bringing "peace" to the Middleeast, and this amounts using the western nations to dictate Saudi policy to Israel, and forcing Israel to captitulate to insane demands that no other nation would ever agree to were they facing a similar threat.

The point is that all of the problems of the Middleeast cannot be laid at Israel's doorstep, and that most of what is wrong with the Middleeast has absolutely nothing to do with Israel. Islam would still be just as violent, intolerant and dysfunctional as it is today, with or without Israel.

Arh! Now your talking something I can understand. So basically your saying that a world without god would still be screwed up. Unfortunatly we don't have the privalage of having a world without God to find out if your theroy would be true.

Where do you read "a world without God would still be screwed up" in Shiloh357's post?????

[Guest shiloh357]

What is the piont to this post?

The point is that, contrary to what you hear in the media, Israel is not the problem in the Middleeast. Every bit of unrest in the Middleeast is blamed on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the conflict is blamed on those Jews who insist existing on their biblical, covenant Land.

According to conventional wisdom, resolving this conflict, which usually means strong arming Israel into making stupid, suicidal concessions to terrorists in the name of "peace" (which the terrorists had never promised would follow aforementioned concessions), will resolve most if not all instability and hostility in the Middle East. The Arabs have hoodwinked the west into believing the key to world peace is to bringing "peace" to the Middleeast, and this amounts using the western nations to dictate Saudi policy to Israel, and forcing Israel to captitulate to insane demands that no other nation would ever agree to were they facing a similar threat.

The point is that all of the problems of the Middleeast cannot be laid at Israel's doorstep, and that most of what is wrong with the Middleeast has absolutely nothing to do with Israel. Islam would still be just as violent, intolerant and dysfunctional as it is today, with or without Israel.

Arh! Now your talking something I can understand. So basically your saying that a world without god would still be screwed up. Unfortunatly we don't have the privalage of having a world without God to find out if your theroy would be true.

Where did you get that out of what I said???? No, you don't understand at all. Maybe you need to work on your reading comprehension skills. What I said is that the problems in the Middleeast cannot be blamed on Israel, like we see happening so often in the liberal media.

The Muslim world has found a convenient scapegoat in Israel. They have found that the Muslim world does not have to take responsibility for itself if they simply portray every act of violence, every murder, anywhere on the globe committed by Muslims, as being a product of frustration with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. They have discovered that the west particurlary the liberal facet, is all too ready to accept their lies. Some people hate Jews more than they love the truth, and anything that seeks to discredit Israel gets two thumbs up from them.

[stafy]

What is the piont to this post?

The point is that, contrary to what you hear in the media, Israel is not the problem in the Middleeast. Every bit of unrest in the Middleeast is blamed on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the conflict is blamed on those Jews who insist existing on their biblical, covenant Land.

According to conventional wisdom, resolving this conflict, which usually means strong arming Israel into making stupid, suicidal concessions to terrorists in the name of "peace" (which the terrorists had never promised would follow aforementioned concessions), will resolve most if not all instability and hostility in the Middle East. The Arabs have hoodwinked the west into believing the key to world peace is to bringing "peace" to the Middleeast, and this amounts using the western nations to dictate Saudi policy to Israel, and forcing Israel to captitulate to insane demands that no other nation would ever agree to were they facing a similar threat.

The point is that all of the problems of the Middleeast cannot be laid at Israel's doorstep, and that most of what is wrong with the Middleeast has absolutely nothing to do with Israel. Islam would still be just as violent, intolerant and dysfunctional as it is today, with or without Israel.

Arh! Now your talking something I can understand. So basically your saying that a world without god would still be screwed up. Unfortunatly we don't have the privalage of having a world without God to find out if your theroy would be true.

Where did you get that out of what I said???? No, you don't understand at all. Maybe you need to work on your reading comprehension skills. What I said is that the problems in the Middleeast cannot be blamed on Israel, like we see happening so often in the liberal media.

The Muslim world has found a convenient scapegoat in Israel. They have found that the Muslim world does not have to take responsibility for itself if they simply portray every act of violence, every murder, anywhere on the globe committed by Muslims, as being a product of frustration with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. They have discovered that the west particurlary the liberal facet, is all too ready to accept their lies. Some people hate Jews more than they love the truth, and anything that seeks to discredit Israel gets two thumbs up from them.

Israel and god are one and the same. ( in context of your post ) You don't mention god. It is not possible and I"m not having a go at you, just openning the discussion so you can hear where I am coming from. Your post in it's current state shows spiritaul ignorance, if one was to think of discussing Israel and Palestinian, and leave out god then one is spiritaul ignorent. Sorry, you just can't do that, that is the same as saying there is no god, hence my reply. ( A world without god ). Israel is God's chosen "throne" here on earth and Palestinian is Satin's "throne", and the two in a matter of speaking carry out there battle on earth throught us humans, hence the conflicts in the middle east, so to open a post about this subject matter as you have done and then leave out GOD is spiritaulality stupidity, welcome to the club I've also have come up with the occassional piece of stupidty myself. But throught these moments of rash thought we grow in our faith. It's ok to be wrong as long as we grow in our faith in him whom we trust.

Or perhaps you just didn't write what you meant to say, it is easy to misinterprete what people write, as oppossed to what they where thinking. So all is well and I leave you to ponder and reply.

[Guest shiloh357]

Israel and god are one and the same. ( in context of your post )

Wrong. That is a very weak and inaccurate position.

You don't mention god. It is not possible and I"m not having a go at you, just openning the discussion so you can hear where I am coming from. Your post in it's current state shows spiritaul ignorance, if one was to think of discussing Israel and Palestinian, and leave out god then one is spiritaul ignorent. Sorry, you just can't do that, that is the same as saying there is no god, hence my reply. ( A world without god ).

It is not "my post" but rather an article by David A. Harris, and the that it doesn't mention God is neither here nor there. You are trying to make an issue out of a non issue. Oh and by the way, "God" is spelled with a capital "G."

[Old Timer]

Thanks for the post, Shiloh. It sheds some light on all these

[apothanein kerdos]

The book of Esther doesn't mention God Stafy. Shall we dispose of it?