Monday, May 16, 2011

FOOLS RUSH IN

You would have to be living on another planet to believe that those "demonstrators" from Syria and Lebanon trying to invade Israel were not completely manipulated by Syrian dictator Assad and Hezbelloh and their patron, Iran.  As anyone who has been paying a bit of attention for the last several decades would know, Syria is a brutal dictatorship and the area of Lebanon controlled by Hezbellah is not free. 

Demonstrations, not to mention invasions across borders, do not occur in those areas because a bunch of free people decide on the basis of their own free will that it is time to go express themselves.  As we see everyday now, Assad does not hesitate to kill and maim those he does not want demonstrating.

These regimes are under pressure.  There is a long history amongst Arab leaders of turning their people's focus on Israel to divert attention from the repressive conditions under which they live. 

As Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic explains it: "Syria is one of the least-free nations on the planet. Demonstrations are not allowed to take place unless the government orders them to take place. Such is the situation on the Golan Heights today. Iran, too, needs a diversion, both for its Syrian client, and for itself. Of course it has a self-interest in igniting anti-Israel fervor."

I doubt any of this will occur to the likes of CNN and other media when they report on the situation.  The narrative adopted by most of the media is that Israel is the bad actor, the Goliath, and the Palestinian "refugees" are David.  One should fully expect the media to report consistent with the narrative they have long adopted. 

Matching the reporting with this narrative reflects laziness.  The reporters and analysts do not have to think.  They do not have to look for real facts and real motivations involved in the particular situation.  In other words, they don't have to do all that much reporting and analyzing. 

Illustration:  Reports have characterized the invaders as "Palestinian refugees."  I wonder how many of these folks were actually "Palestinian."  If they were citizens of Syria living on the Golan Heights when Israel and Syria went to war in 1967 and Israel captured the Heights from Syria, then they are Syrian.  Unless, of course, they were refugees from the 1948 war, when they were referred to simply as Arabs, and Syria did not allow them to become citizens and integrate into Syrian society.

In any event, it is doubtful that they are "refugees" unless they are using a massive amount of Botox.  "Refugees" are people who have been displaced from their home country under certain circumstances.  One can argue over who fits the definition of a "refugee."  However, it is commonly accepted that the children of refugees not born in the original country are not refugees, and neither are their grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and the like.

My grandparents left Poland and Russia.  My parents and I are not refugees from those countries.  The children of Vietnamese who left Vietnam when it went Communist and who now live, work, vote, and go to the university in Sacramento do not consider themselves refugees.

To truly be a 1968 refugee from the Golan Heights one would have to be at least 44 years old.  To be a refugee from 1948, one would have to be at least 63.  From what I saw on television, a lot of the folks invading Israel were younger than that, unless that Syrian Botox is the best ever. 

Of course, if the receiving countries had not kept them in camps all these years, the true refugees would have been settled and their children and grandchildren would have been well-integrated as citizens today, just like millions of refugees all over the world, including about 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab nations. [See my April 16th post entitled "Knock Knock" for my suggestions on how the situation could have been handled  In short, I would have used it to give these poor pawns a brief view of a free, prosperous, and democratic country.]

There is only one body in the world that defines "refugee" to apply to generations that follow those that leave a country.  That is the U.N.  And there is only one people of all the displaced peoples in the world for whom the U.N. applies that definition.  That is the Palestinians.  And one of the reasons is that unlike Israel and many other countries who resettle and eventually grant citizenship to refugees, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and other Arab countries have refused to do so. 

These countries have kept Palestinian refugees and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in camps for generations, refusing to grant them the rights of citizens.  And the U.N. has made an industry, complete with long careers for U.N. personnel, out of them.

I feel sorry for these Syrian/Palestinian/refugees.  They are being used by Assad and Iran as fodder in an exercise to divert and deceive.  They are being used by their Palestinian leaders as tools in a campaign not to achieve an achieveable objective, the creation of a Palestinian state living in peace beside a Jewish state, but rather in an unachievable dream to destroy the Jewish nation and replace it with another Arab one. 

These leaders are cowards who refuse to tell their people the truth and to accept the responsibility of making difficult compromises.  They have a record of leading their people into one disaster after another.  Their people live with the terrible consequences while they fly to capitals of the world, stay in luxury hotels, and are pampered and pandered to by anti-Israel and anti-Jew idealogues who don't mind Palestinians suffering in the service of their fantasies. 

The people orchestrating the invasions into the north of Israel are once again playing their people for fools, and the people seem to be assuming their roles as usual.  Repression, hatred of Jews, and the desire to destroy the Jewish people seem to be powerful motivators that defeat reason, realism, and compromise.

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