PrintJune 14, 2007
Palestine: The Prison
So you have the bad luck to be born into an Arab family in Gaza. As a toddler you get to watch the Mickey Martyr Club on Hamas TV, to begin a lifelong process of indoctrination into the nobility of suffering, suicide, and killing the enemy. But suppose your parents get tired of the constant war drumming, which is bad for children and other living things. Today they're caught in a vicious crossfire between Fatah and Hamas. Can you move out of the war zone?
Not according to the Mufti of the Palestinian Authority. In an official fatwah from on high, this gentleman declares:
"No Permission to Emigrate from Palestine.""There has been much talk in Palestine about emigration, especially among the young people, due to the difficult security and economic situation. This is being done in search of a better life abroad. Many are continuing to rush to the gates of the embassies and consulates of the Western nations with requests for visas in order to reside permanently in those countries."We hereby declare that emigration from the blessed lands is not permitted according to religious law. The people living in these areas must remain in their homes and must not leave them to conquerors. Those who abide by this ruling will perform an honorable deed and will support the Aksa Mosque." [emphasis added]
In other words, you're in a PA prison, cannon fodder for the jihad. Get used to it, kid.
For almost sixty years those who claim descent from Israeli Arab refugees who fled during the 1948 war have been fed, housed, and kept on multigenerational welfare dependency, for reasons that sound compassionate, but which are in fact cruel to the last degree.
Occasionally those who keep them there tell the truth in public, as the PA Mufti just did. Of all the refugee floods in the last fifty-nine years, no other group has been kept in prison for the sake of future revenge. Pakistan was founded by millions of refugees from British India in the same year of 1948. But their descendants are not called refugees: They are citizens of Pakistan. Germans fled Russia and Eastern Europe following World War II and were integrated into German, and nobody is a third generation refugee.
Occasionally those who keep them there tell the truth in public, as the PA Mufti just did. Of all the refugee floods in the last fifty-nine years, no other group has been kept in prison for the sake of future revenge. Pakistan was founded by millions of refugees from British India in the same year of 1948. But their descendants are not called refugees: They are citizens of Pakistan. Germans fled Russia and Eastern Europe following World War II and were integrated into German, and nobody is a third generation refugee.
Somehow the Left and the Muslim world turn a blind eye to those who keep the Palestinians in prison, fired up with hatred against Israel, day in and out. Both the Left and the Islamic fascists want to keep the Palestinians' misery alive, as a casus belli, a constantly renewed reason for war against Israel. The UN social welfare bureaucracy of lives off the perpetuation of that deliberate misery. The world has determined they belong in prison.
What a sad state of affairs. If Islam were compassionate, the Mufti would let the children and grand-children of Arab refugees make their own decision about staying or leaving, like other people can. Then much of the hatred around the Israel-Palestinian issue would slowly yield to calm. Today, Pakistan and India may not love each other, but they are living side by side. That's all that's needed.
But will the Mufti let them go? Not a chance. Allah will know his own.
James Lewis blogs at http://www.dangeroustimes.wordpress.com
