If you are interested in the Mearsheimer/Walt article and/or book (I didn’t know there was a book), here is a very interesting documentary about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N294FMDok98

For the reflexive defenders of all things Israeli: Please note that 90% of those interviewed are Jewish. One is Israeli and started a competing PAC to AIPAC in the hopes of counteracting AIPAC and all the damage they are doing to America. He’s rightly concerned with blowback as Americans are awakening. At least be open, be curious. This has nothing to do with “race,” religion, so cut it out. No more red herrings please. Those who have awakened do not fall for those tactics and we are awakening others.

“I never said it would be easy, I only said it would be the truth” Morpheus

Go ahead, take the red pill….:-)

Now THAT’s a literate Literary Review worthy of the name!

M. R. Khan

Words of the “review” and, especailly, the previous words of the reviewer, are hints to the reader whether the “information” presented is reliable. (NOT)

How does help determine the veracity of the W&M book? Maybe at the CLR you expected a rock-solid factual analysis and instead stepped in a flaming bag?

James Abu, you are clear, although won’t admit here, your sympathies lie with the wrong Freedom Fighters. Does Sihan Sirhan qualify as one of your heros too, or will pretend not to recognize RFK’s killer? Right, we should have trusted Arafat more…

This “review” is better known as a “screed” and belongs in amazon.com, not the California Literary Review! Any adults around?

What we really need from CLR is specifics on where W&M are factually correct or flat out wrong, drawing on multiple, reliable sources, and a reasoned analysis of their conclusions. That would be a review.

The implication that Mr. Abourezk is making, of course, is that anyone who is pro-Israel on any level is assumed to be a liar.

While I gave specific reasons why the books written by Ilan Pappe and Clayton Swisher can be considered unreliable, from their own words and/or omissions as well as my own original research, the best that Mr. Abourezk can do to cast aspersions of Ross’ book is to mention that he now works for that evil “Lobby.” Using that logic, of course, would allow us to assume that Abourezk is equally suspect for being an uncompromising supporter of Arab causes. I prefer to stick with facts, not guilt by association, and any problems I have with Mr. Abourezk come from his own words, most specifically his praise for Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists that was mentioned earlier in this thread and that he has studiously ignored so far.

In the end, the biggest flaw with Abourezk’s positions is that he consistently ascribes the best of intentions to Arab and Muslim countries and the worst of intentions to Israel and, often, the US. In one particularly hilarious paragraph in his review above he says that “both Iran and Syria have proposed a nuclear weapons free Middle East.” The reported events of recent weeks by British journalists who can hardly be considered pro-Israel indicate that not only did Syria have a clandestine nuclear weapons program, but also that there was a major chemical weapons accident this past summer killing dozens of Syrians and Iranian engineers with WMD that were meant to be placed on missiles. But Abourezk, quite willing to publicly assume that anybody who supports Israel is not trustworthy, has no such skepticism about the public pronouncements of dictators and the world’s worst human rights abusers.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem with Mr. Abourezk’s positions on the Middle East and of the “Israel Lobby.”

It also strikes me that if someone working for “a component” of The Lobby is automatically disqualified from talking on this issue, then the same must apply to you on the other side for you have made your biases very plain.

And yes, I think Bill Clinton lied a lot about a lot of issues when he was president.

Mr. Abourezk’s mention of Camp David piqued my interest as this was the issue that led me to takes sides on the Israeli/Arab confab. Given that we had the Israelis and the Palestinians in failed negotiations, why would one simply believe either side? It seems reasonable to at least turn to the mediators for some understanding. In this case, the two chief functionaries were Clinton and Ross, both of whom categorically blamed Arafat.

Given the enormous cachet that would have attached to solving this issue, it seems highly likely that the mediators did in fact seek a real solution and the balance of probability strongly suggests their accounts should be reliable.

Even if not, even if the stories about how it was a bad deal are true, it was the best offer ever. (I know this because the media in general was quite adamant and even at that time when I paid less attention to world affairs, I knew the general media was hardly pro-Israel.) Given that Israel was bending so far, what on earth was the point of not only not negotiating further, but starting an Intifada? It speaks volumes.

It is difficult to respond to the accusations that Israel-bashers are fond of hammering away at that the Zionists who built Israel were racist bigots hell-bent on ethnically cleansing Palestine of Arabs. How can someone prove that the mindset of the vast majority of Zionists were the exact opposite, that they truly wanted to live in peace with the Arabs despite the daily terror that the Jews of Palestine were subjected to?

I posted something last week that does in fact go a long way towards proving exactly that – http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2007/09/zionism-and-intense-desire-for-peace.html . I took a single issue of the Zionist Palestine Post from March 10, 1946 and analyzed exactly how the Zionists quoted there, as well as the editors of the paper, wrote about Arabs. The desire to live in peace with the Palestinian Arabs was not just empty words – it was pervasive. I invite anyone to look at the archives of the old Palestine Post and try to find articles that disprove what I am saying. You have two decades of issues available online. The tendency of historians to take individual quotes out of context is reprehensible when it is done for partisan purposes – but here is real source material that cannot be faked that shows, pretty clearly, that Abourezk and Pappe are not being honest in their slander against Zionism.

I also noticed that the Dershowitz column was also published in the Huffington Post, and Abourezk didn’t have a reply printed there either. Is the HuffPo part of the Israel Lobby as well? (I emailed the Jerusalem Post to ask them whether they censored Abourezk’s reply to Dershowitz.)

Cheers!

Of course, Mr. Abourezk is silent on whether Bill Clinton is also a liar for saying that Barak accepted Clinton’s plan and Arafat rejected it. But if he accepts the words of graduate student Clayton Swisher over what Clinton and Ross have said, that is indeed what he is saying.

(Swisher seems to base much of account on interviews with Saeb Erekat, who is an accomplished liar in his own right – see http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2007/08/laughing-it-up-with-liar.html for some examples. But Swisher’s agenda is clear when he completely fails to mention the official PLO response to Clinton’s offer, where they reject virtually all of it – and it is still on their web site: http://www.nad-plo.org/inner.php?view=nego_nego_clinton_nclinton2p )

So I just documented proof of what Dennis Ross said from the PLO’s own words that Abourezk’s recommended source inexplicably ignores.

Another innovation brought to us courtesy of Mr. Abourezk is saying that Wolf Blitzer’s “hostility” towards him is evidence that Blitzer is himself a member of that amazingly powerful Lobby. It appears that the definition of this “lobby” has been watered down to pretty much anyone who is not lockstep with the Abourezks of the world in supporting Syrian and Palestinian terror.

Apparently, there is another liar in the room: Mr. Abourezk himself. Dershowitz did not call Abourezk anti-semitic in his article in the Jerusalem Post, although he does broadly imply it – in much the same way Abourezk broadly implies that Jews (i.e., “Zionists”) were behind 9/11. I don’t know whether Abourezk’s comments to JPost were indeed censored, but I for one would love to see him actually address what he said on Al-Manar rather than change the subject repeatedly as he has done on this thread (notice that he chooses to attack the weaker Zionist posters on minor topics and ignores my substantive responses and challenges.)

Also, my regards to the person who claims to be Wolf Blitzer’s mother. Not realizing that my description of him could be interpreted as anti-Semitic, I had said he was short and asked hostile questions. I probably should have said he was just “not tall,” and that his questions were as “sweet as honey.”

But you can see how easy it is to be thrown off the subject. We are now discussing Wolf Blitzer’s height rather than his work for the Israeli Lobby back then.

As well, Alan Dershowitz attacked my in his column which he wrote for the Jerusalem Post. I tried to respond with a comment, but apparently Arabs are not allowed onto that website.

Mr. Dershowitz came up with something original–he said my remarks on a television interview I did with Almanar television, which is actually Hisbollah’s station, were anti-Semitic.

I had always thought that Mr. Dershowitz and I could have been friends, except for his support of torture, his efforts to have Norman Finkelstein thrown off the faculty of De Paul University, his plagiarism, which Norman caught him doing, and his defense of O.J. Simpson during the famous murder trial. Mr. Dershowitz will most likely be busy now with O.J.’s latest venture into the world of crime.

He did a magnificent job, however, of trying to change the subject of what Israel is doing to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, which is to brutally occupy an unwilling population.

I hope that all presidential candidates and politicians will read every word…

You can criticize Nigeria without being a racist, but criticize Israel and all heck breaks loose.

I came here because I wanted to read a review from a different perspective. I can get the Israeli perspective anywhere.

This man does not speak for me or for my people. He is a total disgrace to the community of Arab Americans to which he pretends to represent. We in Lebanon do NOT see Hizbollah as heros Mr Abourezk! Get your facts straight.

And instead of demonizing Israel how about talking about the real issures facing Lebanon? Infant mortality, the lack of security brought about by fanatics from Iran who you clearly adore and the ravaged economy you who live in the US have no interest in. Shame on you. You are a disgrace to the people of Lebanon and a puppet of facists.

Answer the question asked you by those who post here including the tape of you on Hizbollah TV then show your evil face in Lebanon again.

My apologies for not answering a flawed question. It is flawed because it makes an amazing number of erroneous assumptions for such a short question:

* That the West Bank is legally “Palestinian” Arab territory;
* That Israel’s defensive fence is somehow connected to “apartheid”;
* That Jews are simply not allowed to live in historically Jewish areas, a very racist argument.

Space and time here do not permit me to prove each of these wrong, and I prefer to have an audience that is receptive to learning facts rather than those parroting hateful talking points (like “apartheid wall.”) My blog does address many of these issues much more comprehensively and if you are interested I can point to articles that do an even better job.

Cheers!

Sure, the best defense is always a good offense. And when you’re at fault, trying to shift blame to others is a tried and true tactic. The terrorists and their supporters, like you, Elder and Callie, always try to distract others from their own evildoing, like a pickpocket who yells “thief, thief!” and points at someone else when caught redhanded. We’re wise to your tricks, and we despise what you’re doing to the Palestinians and, if you’re Americans, to your own country.

No one posting here has said a blessed thing about the facts brought up about the authors clear and present bias against Israel and by extention Jews.

It would appear the ones who support this review have little to say of any substance and that makes the point of those who refer to this as simple bigoty sound quite credible.

Have you anything to say of substance? As for the poster from Berkeley I believe you have the most inane comment. Can you refute a single thing that Elder has said if you are a mid east ’scholar’ one would hope you had more to say that was a true debate. Simply calling oneself a ’scholar’ is quite silly.

Yes, Elder, you’re guilty of smear tactics and hypocrisy as well. If you insist on using the “supporter of terrorists” smear, you should apply it to yourself, since you support ethnic cleansers and terrorists who are trying to drive Arabs from the West Bank. To figure out who the real terrorists are, all you have to do is ask who has troops, settlers, and an apartheid wall on whose territory? Hint: not the Palestinians.

Yes, the Stern Gang engaged in terror. This is not news. What is manifestly a lie is the idea that the Zionists engaged in “ethnic cleansing,” a reprehensible slander that is shown to be false by the simple fact that there are 1.2 million Arabs living in Israel today. If anyone should be accused of “ethnic cleansing” it would be the Arab world that expelled nearly every Jew in the years following 1948. The Old City of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria became literally Judenrein under “moderate” Jordanian rule – not a single Jew was left in those areas, and every single synagogue in the Old City was demolished within days of Jordanian control in 1948.

Other Arab atrocities that Mr. Abourezk wants to sweep under the rug started in 1886 with the first Arab attacks on a Jewish settlement, and they escalated in 1921, 1929 with the horrendous massacres in Hebron and elsewhere (ancient Jewish communities that had lived in Palestine for centuries), the 1936-39 reign of terror where thousands were killed including from Arab infighting, and no shortage of Arab massacres of Jewish civilians in 1947-48 including Hadassah Hospital.

I have spent much time reading contemporaneous accounts of the events in newspapers from the 1930s and 1940s and the Zionists (at least the ones that wrote for the Palestine Post) consistently wanted to live in peace with their Arab neighbors. The archives are online so if you want to find counterexamples, feel free. Yes, not every single Jew acted in an exemplary manner – real life doesn’t allow such neat categorizations – but the vast majority of Zionists considered the terror attacks from Irgun and Stern to be outrageous and did not celebrate them, as too many Arabs have been wont to do whenever Jews or Westerners are murdered.

In other words, Abourezk is cherry-picking the facts that fit his agenda and is not only ignoring the rich history of Arab terror that continues on to this day, he appears to embrace it when the perpetrators are Hamas and Hezbollah (we unfortunately do not have a record of his opinion of Islamic Jihad, PFLP, Al Aqsa Brigades, or any of dozens of other groups.) Israel has time and time again offered real concessions for real peace and it has been rejected by the Arabs, and very often the people who suffer most are the very Palestinians that the Arabs pretend to care so much about.

For more details about the history of the entire Palestinian Arab people – and I am far more sympathetic to them than you might think, although their leaders have been atrocious for decades – I have been writing a series of postings about them. Check out http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2007/05/psychological-history-of-palestinian.html

And if you find any mistakes, please let me know. Unlike some people, I really do care about the truth.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe (an Israeli historian,who also enumertes the relative size of the opposing military).

Taking Sides, by Steven Green. (An American writer)

Any of Israeli historian Tom Segev’s books.

I believe these books, plus the Donald Neff Trilogy, can be ordered from the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, http://www.middleeastbooks.com. That organization has an extensive book list, all of such books are at a discounted price. Donald Neff used to be Time Magazine’s Jerusalem correspondent until he quit time and began writing Middle East history.

One other point–The UN General Assembly passed a partition plan in 1947, but General Assembly votes are non-binding, unlike Security Council votes which are binding. Thus, the myth that the UN created Israel is just that–a myth. If such votes were binding, then Israel would be forced to obey the dozens of General Assembly votes passed since then that have favored Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders, all of them ignored by Israel. There have also been dozens of Security Council votes criticizing Israel for committing war crimes, etc., all of which have been vetoed by the United States.

Ilan Pappe’s book on ethnic cleansing is particularly shocking to read. Pappe recounts the horrendous slaughter, accompanied by a campaign of fear by the Zionist armies and terror groups designed to drive the Palestinians out of Palestine in order to create a majority Jewish state.

Another book that may now be out of print is: Terror Out of Zion, by J. Bowyer Bell (St. Martin’s Press), which carefully details the terrorism wrought by Zionist terror groups, such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun, was elected Israel’s Prime Minister in the 1970s, and Yitzak Shamir, one of the troika who led the Stern Gang, also was elected as Prime Minister of Israel.

I became friends with Nathan Yalin Mor, who was also one of the Troika running the Stern Gang, however, since he later had become a “peacenik,” opting for peace between
Jews and Arabs, he was sort of persona non grata in Washington, D.C. It was up to me to make appointments for him when he wanted to see someone in our government, as none of the Jewish groups would even speak to him. The tribulations of someone who wants peace are somewhat remarkable. I once asked him if the Stern Gang had sent letter bombs to British politicians in the 1940s, as Sir Christopher Mayhew told me that his secretary opened one and was injured by doing so. Nathan said, “yes, we sent lots of letter bombs.”

If quoting Mr. Abourezk and inviting people to watch the video that he made for Hezbollah TV is considered a “smear tactic,” then I must be guilty.

Atheo, you are correct in that the Arab armies in 1948 were poorly organized with the exception of the Transjordanian Arab Legion. That has no bearing whatsoever on the Arab desire to utterly destroy Israel, which is incontrovertible.

But if you doubt it, here’s a quote from May 15, 1948, when the Arab League Secretary General Abdul Razek Azzam Pasha announced the intention to wage “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”

If you need a few dozen other quotes from Arab leaders determined to not only destroy Israel but also to wipe out any vestiges of Jews from the area, just ask. I’ll be happy to educate you, as well as Mr. Abourezk, if he is still lurking about.

what America is doing right know is these lot are standing on top of our head and America is still giving them a hand..not a fair fight one might say.

thanks to Mr Walts and Mear atlast they have awaking the dead American souls…i knew there was a god somewhere on these planet.

ayyub

The baseless myth, of how the Arab armies wanted to destroy the ‘Jewish State’, has been propagated in all sectors of the Israeli society, especially in its school system, military boot camps, and media. As it will be proven below, this myth was deemed necessary by most Zionists to legitimize their continued USURPATION of the Palestinian people’s political, civil, and economic rights.

Often when Israelis and Zionists are confronted with facts contrary to their liking, they counter by accusing the sources of fabrication or being part of the “anti-Semitic” Arab propaganda. To avoid such a “confusion”, we’ll directly quote two of the most prominent pro-Israeli historians, Martin Van Creveld (the renowned Israeli military strategist and historian) and Martin Gilbert, who wrote:

“In the Event of invading [Arab] forces were limited to approximately 30,000 men. The strongest [consider this fact while reading the next quote] single contingent was the Jordanian one, already described. Next came Egyptians with 5,500 men, then the Iraqis with 4,500 who ….. were joined by perhaps 3,000 local irregulars. The total was thus around eight rather under strength brigades, some of them definitely of second-and even third-rate quality. To these must be added approximately 2,000 Lebanese (one brigade) and 6,000 Syrians (three brigades). Thus, even though the Arab countries [population] outnumbered the Yishuv by better then forty-to-one, in terms of military manpower available for combat in Palestine the two sides were fairly evenly matched. As time went on and both sides sent reinforcements the balance changed in the Jews’ favor; by October they had almost 90,000 men and women under arms, the Arabs only 68,000.” (The Sword And The Olive, p. 77-78)

“Senior Hagana commanders met with committee [UN Special Committee On Palestine-UNSCOP] members in Jerusalem’s Talpiot quarter in similarly surreptitious circumstances to express confidence that Jewish forces, which they numbered at 90,000, including 35,000 reservists, could overcome any Arab assault should it come to war.” (Jerusalem Post)

“Ben-Gurion made serious efforts, shortly before the United Nations vote on the Partition proposal, to seek the neutrality of King Abdullah of Transjordan, whose British trained and officered army, the Arab Legion, was the STRONGEST fighting force in the Middle East. The king had long been at loggerheads with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, for the moral leadership of the Arabs of the whole region. Abdullah’s secret interlocutor was to be Golda Meir:”‘ …… He [King Abudullah] soon made the heart of the matter clear: he would not join in any Arab attack on us. He would always remain our friend, he said, and like us, he wanted peace more than anything else. After all, we had a common foe, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.’”(Israel: A History, p.149-150)

“As for Abdullah’s Arab Legion, it had fought better than any other Arab force. Yet on scarcely any occasion had the Arab Legion attempted to conquer territories allotted to the Jews by the partition plan, preferring to stay on the defensive.” (The Sword And The Olive, p. 95)

“…. there was no common military headquarters, no attempts at coordinating the offenses of the Arab armies, and … not even a regular liaison service for sharing enemy intelligence.” (The Sword And The Olive, p. 83)

“Perhaps the most important [of the Arab armies problems] was a crippled shortage of ammunition, owing to the international arms embargo …, in the case of the Iraqis and Egyptians, long lines of communications. For example, after February 25, 1948, the Arab Legion received no new ammunition for its 20mm guns. Some of the ammunition used by the Iraqi artillery was more than thirty years old; the Syrians had no ammunition for their heavy 155mm guns. Whereas Jewish stockpiles were growing all the times [especially the big arms shipment from Czechoslovakia in May 1948], the enemies were so depleted they stole ammunition shipments for each other. In addition, they were ill-coordinated, technically incompetent, slow, ponderous, badly led, and unable to cope with night operations that willy-nilly, constituted the IDF’s expertise.” (The Sword And The Olive, p. 95-96)

full article:

http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story457.html