It has become axiomatic since Oslo that there is a Palestinian people, and that they are oppressed and disenfranchised and deserve to express their national identity through a state of their own. This state is to be housed on the lands captured by Israel in the Six Day War, and run by the Palestinian Authority headed by Yasir Arafat.
Let’s think about this. In the light of recent events, what kind of state can we expect the Palestinian people to establish?
A state which has no respect for human life, where small children are inculcated with hate for other peoples and religions and cultures. Where they attend summer camps in which they are taught that to be a suicide bomber is the highest form of religious expression. Where they are taken to the front to get themselves shot for the sake of photo ops, and where their parents get paid blood money for child sacrifice.
A state in which people regularly murder women for infractions of male honor codes. A place where a brother will stab a sister he suspects of sexual misconduct, while his mother and father look on in approval. A state where domestic abuse isn’t a problem, it’s a way of life, and where battered women are the norm. This, if they are lucky, because the Taliban, another extremist Muslim state in which the participants are exercising their national identity, have made women virtual slaves, denying them education, medical care, employment, and freedom of movement and expression.
- A state in which summary executions are carried out without due process.
- A state which defends shattering the skulls of infants in their mothers arms.
- A state in which hands dipped in the blood of lynch mob victims are raised to cheering crowds.
- A state in which education consists of hate-mongering textbooks.
- A state run by corrupt officials who literally get away with murder, while pocketing all monies collected to alleviate the suffering of the hungry, unemployed and unskilled.
And to those who say that the Palestinian people are not to blame, but their leadership, I would like to point out that the Palestinian people has chosen, and continues to choose, its leadership every day by passively accepting the dictates of the Palestinian Authority with Yasir Arafat at its head. There are enough guns and ammunition in the hands of enough people to cause Arafat quite a bit of trouble should the Palestinian people choose to change its leadership.
I would like to say to all those progressive, liberal people whose hearts yearn to see a Palestinian State set up in the West Bank and Gaza, what is the matter with you? Does the world really need yet one more corrupt state of Muslim extremists to misconstrue their own religion, and dishonor the religion and cultural artifacts of others? Do we really need to empower yet another murderous, corrupt, inhumane regime and give it legitimacy? To what end? And to whose benefit?
The Palestinian people may have earned themselves the curse of living in such a state, but can the world, in good conscience, really agree to let them have it?
The truth is, that anyone who really cares about the Palestinians, anyone with an ounce of real humanism, liberalism, or humanity at all, should oppose the establishment of a Palestinian State under current conditions with every fiber of their being.
Because nobody deserves the kind of state that Yasir Arafat and his henchman have created. Not even the Palestinian people.
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