By សតិវអតុ
Now that conservatives have attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar,
D-Minn. relentlessly for her dislike of Israel , they are attacking Rep.
Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., for the same reason. She is Palestinian and she dares
to defend her heritage.
Philip Klein
wrote an article for the Washington
Examiner in which he tries to claim she is ignorant and unfamiliar with
issues of the Middle East . He writes:
“Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.,
has made yet another shocking and historically ignorant claim: That thinking
about the Holocaust gives her a "calming feeling" because her
Palestinian ancestors provided a "safe haven" for Jewish victims of
the tragedy.
Tlaib, a close ally of Rep.
Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is no stranger to anti-Semitic controversies herself,
made the latest statement on a podcast called "Skullduggery"
in an episode titled "From Rashida with Love."
"There’s always kind of a
calming feeling I tell folks when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of
the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost
their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity,
their existence in many ways, have been wiped out, and some people's
passports," Tlaib said just after the 28 minute mark. "And just all
of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the
Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the
world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided
that, right, in many ways. But they did it in a way that took their human
dignity away and it was forced on them.”
He goes on to drag out a lot of facts about the Middle East
and the role that Israel
has supposedly played. But while some of Tlaid’s facts may not be right,
neither are his. For example:
“The Jewish presence in the area
currently known as Israel
dates back thousands of years, and the modern migration of Jews back there
pre-dated the Holocaust by many decades, starting with the migration of Jews
from Yemen in 1881.”
What he fails to say here is that the Jews left that part of
the world many thousands of years ago and the country was a colony of Britain called Palestine for many
of the last 40 years. He continues:
“After World War II, when the
Jewish people declared the state of Israel, their official proclamation said, "We
appeal - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months
- to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and
participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal
citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent
institutions." Instead of choosing to live peacefully, however, Arab
leaders encouraged Arabs to flee Israel ,
and the next day, the young nation was invaded by Egypt ,
Syria , Jordan , Lebanon ,
and Iraq
The terrorist group the Palestine
Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, three years before Israel occupied the West
Bank in the Six Day War, territories that we're now led to believe
is at the heart of the conflict.”
What he doesn’t say is that the Palestinians, who occupied
what is now Israel ,
were run out by force. They did not “choose” to leave their homeland. The
Europeans who set up Israel
ignored the Palestinian people and all the Arabs who lived in the neighboring
countries.
There is no excuse for the treatment of the Palestinian
people, who have been denied their own state, which the Palestine Liberation
Organization has agreed to, in a two state
solution. Today unarmed Palestinian protesters are shot to death and there
is no excuse for doing that.
We can only expect more attempts to ridicule Tlaib, just as
with Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Until these three were elected, there
has been no challenge to US Foreign policy. There has been no difference
between Republicans and Democrats on US foreign policy until now. And we
can expect more attacks as this one, in the near future.
No comments:
Post a Comment