Israel and Indigenous Palestinians

My latest article on Israel, Israel Is Not Quite What the Propaganda Machine Says It Is,was one of my first ventures into a territory about which I've read a lot but written little.

What has stopped me from writing about the subject of the controversial legitimacy of Israel is that I know that many of my friends and readers support Israel and would likely be offended.

But I decided that, since my purpose in writing is to tell the truth as I see it and hopefully help others in seeing it too, and, in addition, since I believe that everything is interconnected and there are no important parts of the whole picture we can ignore without distorting our vision of other parts, I had to take this step, although not very easy or pleasant.

The comments and reactions have been a mixed bag of favourable and unfavourable, but many more of the former than I expected.

I suspect that many people have begun to realise that Israel is not the saint and victim in the Middle East conflict - and that Jews are not the saints and victims in the history of Europe either -, but are afraid to say so explicitly, because the "anti-Semitic" slander is much more powerful these days than the "Islamophobic" one.

This post is the first part of my answers.

Giuseppe Gigliotti wrote a very long comment on my Facebook profile page in which he seems to fuse his opinions on this and a previous article of mine, Israel Not Such a Haven for Christians. I doun't doubt his good faith, only some of his claims, which I'll examine quoting them as they are, mistakes and all. He says:

"Maybe, if among conservatives (included people that you love quoting, like Oriana Fallaci), there is support for the Jewish State, it is not because of a supposed lobbist pressure, but because of other reason."

I love Oriana Fallaci and I like quoting her because she's among the first who opened my eyes on Islam. This doesn't mean that she can make no mistake.

In one of her books, though, Oriana Fallaci says that Lebanon was the most beautiful and European country in the Middle East until it was invaded by the Palestinians, who did to it what the Jews had done to their lands. She spent many years in the Middle East as correspondent for the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. So she had seen many things first hand, including the displacement of Palestinians by Israel.

Why she supported Israel can be explained by her focus on opposing Islam, the same reason that applies to most of the counterjihad movement. If we have a common enemy, the general way of thinking goes, we must be friends or at least allies.

This is not a safe judgement, especially considering that the West would not even have the problem of the enemy, Islam, inside the gates if Jewish organisations, Leftist and politically correct in the diaspora as much as they are ethnonationalist when it comes to Israel, hadn't promoted mass immigration, multiculturalism and "tolerance" to Islam in Europe and America, where, supported by a Jewish-dominated media industry, academia, education system and Hollywood, they had a great influence in pushing - along with Cultural Marxism, one of their creations -  policies that are greatly damaging the white, gentile, indigenous populations.

And they are still at it.

"Have you ever bothered to visit the country or to read about Zionism? It seems no."

I've read a lot about Zionism. I haven't visited Israel. I dispute the fact that you can understand a country's politics better if you've been there. In many cases it could even be counterproductive, for example if you go on one of those escorted tours to Israel for MPs and journalists organised by the Israel lobby during which you are presented only with the reality that they want you to see.

The following part, in which Giuseppe describes Israel as full of energy and mentions that he helps the local Christians there, is interesting but irrelevant to what I'm saying. Good for him to do that!

His next sentences puzzle me:

"So which is your point? You declare to be concerned about the fate of christians. Well, sorry but your concernes sound hollow to me. If you were moved by real angst, you wouldn't have quoted Younab. You know, a man on payroll of Abbas, that has nver condemned the muslim persecutions in Gaza or PA areas is not a source i will quote. But, it iz your own problem."

There is no quotation from "Younab" (or Younan, which is probably what Giuseppe meant) anywhere in those two articles under examination.

"Now let's pass to your scandalous theory about a supposed palestinian indigenousness. Even here, have you a vague idea of the jewish state law? It is meant to restate the obvious. Israel has always been the jewish people national home, without denying aocial or political rights to its minorities. That you, a woman who condemns multiculturalism , have objections only to the jewish selfdetermination sounds hilarious."

I am not objecting to Jewish self-determination, only to the method of stealing other peoples' lands used to achieve it. Palestinian indigenousness is not "scandalous", "a theory" or "supposed".

Even one of the heroes of Zionism (therefore yours), David Ben-Gurion, candidly admitted:

Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews. But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution! There is a gulf, and nothing can bridge it… We, as a nation, want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.

And in his 7 June 1938 Address at the Mapai Political Committee, quoted in Simha Flapan's Zionism and the Palestinians (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , he said:

In our political argument abroad, we minimize Arab opposition to us. But let us not ignore the truth among ourselves... But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. Militarily, it is we who are on the defensive who have the upper hand but in the political sphere they are superior. The land, the villages, the mountains, the roads are in their hands. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside.

The United Nations recognised Israel on December 11 1948 with Resolution 194, but Article 11 of the latter declares:

(The General Assembly) Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible. [Emphases added]

So, Israel's recognition by the UN included that Israel let dispossessed Palestinians return (the “Right of Return”), which Israel hasn't done and for which the UN has issued various resolutions against Israel. I suppose the UN suffers from the universal disease of anti-Semitism.

"But, let's move to the next step. Where is the proof of the indigenousness of palestinians? You haven't quoted a single source, except that idiotic map. And, for your perusal, that images disprove your thesis. If you knew israeli history, something that you don't know, you would know that the borders of Palestinian Mandate were designated by britons. An indigenous people doesn't use a colonial map for defining its own homeland. And infact the Lehi was against this demarcation, since it was arbitrary. Yet, this indigenous people that you love so much uses an invented map... The truth is that until 30s there was no palestiniannation."

Giuseppe is contradicting himself, as by his own admission there was a Palestinian nation from the '30s, therefore before the birth of Israel.

Elsewhere, Giuseppe is confusing "nation" with "state".

To be a nation, a people doesn't have to be represented by a state. A good example is the Jewish people: before Israel, they didn't have a state, but Jewish nationalism existed, and that's what led to the establishment of the Jewish state.

From this initial confusion stem his misunderstandings about the maps: they don't portray country borders, they depict where Palestinians lived before dispossession and where they live now.

I doubt that Giuseppe has read my article under discussion, or that he has read it carefully, otherwise he wouldn't write that I don't "know that the borders of Palestinian Mandate were designated by britons", because I describe that situation there.

Proof of the indigenousness of Palestinians? There's plenty. I did cite a respected source, historian J.M. Roberts. I also quoted a Zionist source, Moshe Dayan, who said:

We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here... Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages... There is no one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.

Where's Giuseppe's proof that Palestinians were not indigenous to those lands?

Here's some more that they were, in the World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples about the current Gaza Strip and West Bank, in co-operation with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), saying:

Main indigenous and minority groups: indigenous Palestinians...

Giuseppe' reference to the Lehi's opposition to my map's demarcation as arbitrary is a bit self-defeating.

The Lehi (aka Stern Gang) was a violent and terrorist Zionist group whose objective was to evict the British authorities from Palestine by force, to allow unrestricted immigration of Jews and the constitution of a Jewish state, a "new totalitarian Hebrew republic". Hardly a reputable source.

As is well known, they were not the only Jewish terrorist group:

In the aftermath of World War II, Britain still played host to a number of groups sympathetic to Fascism and racial nationalism. These groups, together with the growing prominence of vocal politicians like Enoch Powell, alarmed the Jewish population. Of course, this was the same Jewish population which had repaid British war-time assistance by supporting, in every conceivable way, the Irgun terrorist campaign against the British in Palestine. One Jewish historian has remarked that Jews in Britain lavishly funded “the purchase of arms for Jewish underground armies fighting against British troops.”[1] Jewish terrorism against the British had culminated in 1947 with the kidnapping of two British army Intelligence Corps NCOs, Sergeant Clifford Martin and Sergeant Mervyn Paice. Martin and Paice were beaten and bloodied by their Jewish captors, before being hanged in a eucalyptus grove near Netanya. Their bodies were booby-trapped with mines, causing them to be torn to pieces when efforts were made to retrieve them. The brutal and sadistic slayings comprising the ‘Sergeant’s Affair’ had followed the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel (British headquarters in Palestine) a year earlier. The new atrocity sparked a wave of revulsion throughout Britain. More specifically, the actions caused the British people to re-think Jewish loyalty.

My answers to comments continue in another article.

PM: Slovakia is Christian, No to Muslims and Mosques

"Since Slovakia is a Christian country, we cannot tolerate an influx of 300,000-400,000 Muslim immigrants who would like to start building mosques all over our land and trying to change the nature, culture and values ​​of the state," said Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico.

Slovakia is the country that had its commemorative Euro coin depicting two Christian saints, Cyril and Methodius, at first rejected by the European Commission, which told Bratislava it would need to re-design the coins and remove Christian symbols, including halos and a cross-adorned stole. Eventually the Slovakia Euro was issued with halos and crosses.

This is the umpteenth demonstration of an obvious historical and contemporary fact: the stronger a country's attachment to its Christian heritage, the more robust, intelligent and informed its fight against Islam, as Mr Fico's strategy well exemplifies.

The PM noted that some countries are passing special laws to combat Islamic terrorism that give more leeway to the police. But, he said, "the best way to deal with that threat would be to have different rules for 'certain groups' when it comes to privacy, phones or bank accounts."

"When it comes to fighting Islamic terrorism, countries should pass laws that allow the police to do surveillance on people who are considered a potential threat to the country."

It's unnecessary to restrict the freedom of citizens by taking potshots at everyone, we should restrict only that of a small group at risk that threatens us: Muslims. Difficult to deny that the Slovak Prime Minister's is a logical and more effective strategy.

"Most of the people in these groups are foreign-born" he continued, "but there may also be people who are citizens of our country acting in such a way as to raise suspicions that in the future they could do something harmful to the country, as we have seen in Western Europe, and we must be prepared."

Fico agree swith Miroslav Lajčák, the Slovak Foreign Minister, that "the project of multiculturalism has failed."

Muslims Attack Christian School over Charlie Hebdo

Where has all the Christian-Muslim interfaith dialogue gone? Or maybe it has just been a monologue, with only the Christians doing the talking and no-one on the other side listening?

That this is the case has been dramatically brought home by yesterday's events in Pakistan, where, amid countrywide protests and demonstrations, hundreds of Muslim students protesting against Charlie Hebdo's cartoons stormed a Christian high school for boys in the city of Bannu, in the country's northwest, and demanded its closure.

Four students were injured. According to witnesses, the protesters opened its gates, entered the school and vandalised it, destroying objects and windows. Some of them were carrying guns.

Last month 150 people, mostly students, were killed when Taliban gunmen attacked an army-run school in the provincial capital Peshawar. Charlie Hebdo caricatures have triggered massive protests in Pakistan. On January 16, at least three people were injured when protesters and police clashed at an anti-Charlie Hebdo stir outside the French consulate in Karachi.

No More Mosques in Lombardy Region, Italy, from Today

Victory! Something is changing.

Some positive effects of the Charlie Hebdo atrocities are felt in Italy, with crackdown on the cult of Islam.

First Massimo Bitonci, the mayor of the city of Padua, in the region of Venice (Veneto), Northern Italy, simply and clearly said: "No more mosques in Padua. The city council will not grant any more public space for the building of mosques and Islamic places of worship."

Padua's councillor Marina Buffoni sent the city's police to Muslim meeting places, to confiscate posters and images of women in burqa. She said: "These posters showed women completely covered by a burqa, you could only see their eyes. It's unacceptable for an organisation to display such images, in defiance of principles of true integration, especially regarding the status of women. True integration doesn't just mean respect of Italian law, but also of the customs of our tradition. The burqa is a symbol of slavery and subjugation of women and will never be welcome in the city of Padua."

And now, the Lombardy Region, Italy's richest and most populated, whose main city is Milan, has today approved an "anti-mosque law".

The restrictive amendments to the Law N. 12, Urban Planning for Places of Religious Worship, received 43 votes in favour (among which those of the Northern League) and 26 against (from the Left and Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement).

The new buildings must blend in with the local landscape architecturally and in size: therefore, no minarets.

Other requirements include the installation of CCTVs directly linked with the police, the presence of appropriate link roads and primary urban infrastructure, parking areas at least twice the size of the floor area of the worship building and, above all, "appropriate distances from other, existing places of worship". Given the vast presence of churches in Italy, the proliferation of mosques will be difficult.

Two Years in Jail for Comparing Muhammad to a Pig

A Danish man living in Vienna was sentenced to two years in prison for having compared Islam's prophet Muhammad to a pig on Facebook posts. The 32 year-old, according to a report by the Austrian Press Agency (APA), was sentenced by Judge George Olschak, who called it "a deeply offensive insult to Islam" and "illegal incitement to religious hatred."

The even stricter state prosecutor, Stefanie Schön, said that the sentence "is too lenient" and she would appeal "for a longer period of detention."


The trial is the result of investigations by a fanatic self-described "anti-fascist", Uwe Seiler, who is busy reporting what he considers far-Right propaganda and neo-Nazi rhetoric on the Internet to the police.

The Danish man, who in spite of everything hasn't lost his sense of humor, pointed out that he wrote most of the online messages in his own language, saying: "If I wanted to talk to an Austrian public, I would write in Turkish. Of course, in the past I would have used German."

BBC Is Mad To Refuse Calling Terrorists the Paris Killers

The BBC was called "mad" after one of its top executives, the head of BBC Arabic Tarik Kafala, said that the Charlie Hebdo killers should not be described as "terrorists".

Mr Kafala, whose BBC Arabic television, radio and online news services - the largest of the BBC’s non-English language news services - reach a weekly audience of 36 million people, explained: “We try to avoid describing anyone as a terrorist or an act as being terrorist. What we try to do is to say that ‘two men killed 12 people in an attack on the office of a satirical magazine’. That’s enough, we know what that means and what it is.”

The BBC, whose own guidance also states that the word "terrorist" is considered "a barrier", backed his comments but faced a storm of criticism from peers and MPs over its "outrageous" decision to not use the term.

In line with its editorial guidelines, the BBC coverage of the Paris attacks in which 17 people were murdered, as well as that of last month's Taliban school massacre in Peshawar, Pakistan, carefully avoided using the expression "terrorist", except when quoting other people's words.

BBC TV, radio and online reports described the murderers as "militants" or "gunmen" instead.

Mr Kafala added: “Terrorism is such a loaded word. The UN has been struggling for more than a decade to define the word and they can’t. It is very difficult to. We know what political violence is, we know what murder, bombings and shootings are and we describe them. That’s much more revealing, we believe, than using a word like 'terrorist' which people will see as value-laden.”

And for Mr Kafala, I suppose, if "terrorist" should be avoided for being too little revealing, "Muslim" must be avoided for being too revealing.

Have We Carefully Thought of the Consequences of Absolute Free Speech?

This article was published on The Occidental Observer

By Enza Ferreri


One “thought experiment” in the recent – but not yet concluded - debate on freedom of speech surrounding the Charlie Hebdo massacre particularly impressed me:

Here is a thought experiment: Suppose that while the demonstrators stood solemnly at Place de la Republique the other night,… a man stepped out in front… carrying a placard with a cartoon depicting the editor of the magazine lying in a pool of blood, saying, “Well I’ll be a son of a gun!” or “You’ve really blown me away!” or some such witticism. How would the crowd have reacted? Would they have laughed?... He would have been lucky to get away with his life.

Masses of people have turned the victims of a horrific assassination… into heroes of France and free speech. The point of the thought experiment is not to show that such people are hypocrites. Rather, it is to suggest that they don’t know their own minds. They see themselves as committed to the proposition that there are no limits to freedom of expression... But they too have their limits. They just don’t know it.

Perhaps because he’s a philosopher and by profession he's obliged to analyse the logical consistency and theoretical validity of statements, Brian Klug here encapsulates the problem with the default mainstream "Je Suis Charlie" position.

There is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech.

Even those who sincerely believe that they uphold this principle often don't realise they wouldn’t be prepared to accept any word expressed in any circumstance.

Similarly, philosophers like Karl Popper maintain that in any debate you cannot question everything. The debaters must share some common assumptions, including the use of the same language and basic definitions of at least some of the main concepts relevant to the discussion.

This corresponds to relativity in the physical world. To establish if and at what speed a train is moving, you need something still to compare it with.

Questioning everything results in chaos, which ultimately means questioning nothing.

This is one of the fallacies often propounded by the so-called "New Atheists" like Richard Dawkins: question everything.

The prevailing ideology of relativism, wedded to the policy of multiculturalism, does something similar to questioning everything, by denying the idea that some doctrines are better than others and rejecting a shared set of belief as a sine qua non for a society.

By believing in everything we believe in nothing. Hence the current confusion about freedom of speech and in particular the failure to recognise exactly when this good is paid for too dearly at the expense of society.

Therefore the discussion shouldn’t be around yes or no to free speech but about what should limit free speech and why.

The best way to do that is to establish the principles and goals to guide our decision about what expressions shouldn’t be permitted by law as their effects are so deleterious that they outweigh the benefits of free speech.

The most cited examples of such expressions are falsely shouting "Fire!" in a crowded place and incitements to commit crime.

But, beyond obvious cases like these, we can immediately see that we cannot reach a consensus, since people in our fractured society have widely-different goals and principles.

Much of this diversity in the West is produced by the influx of large masses of people from countries with worldviews, religious doctrines, ways of life profoundly diverging from ours.

The Hebdo attack tragically revealed one such irreducible conflict of ideas that makes it impossible for Westerners and devout Muslims to agree on when free expression should be limited.

Not even Charlie Hebdo (henceforth CH), the much-trumpeted supreme paragon and defender to the death of free speech, believed in absolute freedom of speech, as demonstrated by its sacking of the cartoonist Siné for a column considered anti-Jewish but, compared to the rag's ordinary fare, too mild for words. Later Siné won a 40,000-euro court judgment against CH for wrongful termination.

CH wasn’t the paper of free speech, but of double standards.

Recently the rag’s long-standing lawyer Richard Malka made evident his opinion that people can be too free in their speech when he chastised Nouvel Obs magazine for publishing a criticism of CH’s slain editor “Charb” by its co-founder Henri Roussel.

I don’t consider Charb et al martyrs. You can be a martyr to a cause, but when your cause is nothing (that’s what nihilism, in the end, is), you can’t be one.

Neither is their paper “satirical”: satire must express something more than the mere immature desire to attack and destroy.

According to encyclopaedias and dictionaries, satire has the intention to shame into improvement; its purpose is constructive social criticism, ridiculing stupidity or vices, showing the weaknesses or bad qualities of a person, government, society, etc.

There is no attempt at improving anything in CH’s crude depiction of sodomy among the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, no constructive social criticism in its celebration of Christmas with a cartoon of Baby Jesus thrown in a public squat toilet between a loo-paper roll (Mary) and a toilet brush (Joseph). No stupidity or vices are exposed – as opposed to demonstrated - by the drawing of the Virgin Mary making the vulgar “umbrella gesture” to fleeing Iraqi Christians while shouting the same words uttered during the massacre in which its drawer, Riss, was wounded, in an eerie coincidence: "Allahu Akbar". No weaknesses or bad qualities are shown by the sketch of a dishevelled, desperate Madonna who, dripping liquid, says she was raped by the three Wise Men.

“Are we all supposed to march in solidarity with that?” asks Patrick Buchanan.

CH’s crass, adolescent humour revolving around sex (preferably of the homosexual variety) and excrements is unfunny and sad. It reminds me of a song by 1960s-70s Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio De Andre’, about Charles Martel returning from the Battle of Poitiers after having defeated the Moors. The supposed humour concerns his long abstinence from sex imposed by the war, ending in his encounter with a prostitute.

De Andre’, like CH, was a product of the ’68 culture with its visceral hatred for anything Christian. Neither is satire: no intelligent message is put across, it’s turpitude and vile defamation just for the sake of it. In a word: destructive. Which is what the counterculture is all about.

Here we get to answer the question regarding the core principles and goals that must be protected from attacks, the line that freedom of speech must not cross. Charles Martel is a symbol of a Europe united by the same belief in Christianity and prepared to defend that belief on which its civilisation was founded and without which, as it is under everyone’s eyes now, is sinking.

Christianity must be protected from its enemies, then as now. It’s not a question of preferential taste or personal desire: it’s the collective cohesion that is at stake, without which there is no Western society. Critically, given the decline of Christianity as a unifying force among Europeans, statements about the legitimacy of the interests of White Europeans in retaining their territories and their culture must be protected rather than marginalised or made illegal as “hate speech.”

It’s, at this point, a question of survival. Freedom of speech is not a suicide pact, as Alexander Boot put it.

That our heroes and the symbol of our fight for freedom must be the demented pornographers of CH shows what sorry state our civilisation has reached.

That revolting excuse of a rag has been a procession of covers offending Christianity, at a moment when like never before we need something to believe in and to rally around.

It's because of people like CH and De Andre’ and their successful propagation of desecrations of what had kept us together and strong for centuries, that we have been left with absolutely nothing to fight Islam with.

By disarming us, the CH journalists victims of the recent attacks have indeed invited their own death - in a deeper sense than is commonly thought.