H/T Gramfan/from the Australian
Comedy Gold. And you always thought there was no fun in Islam:
Let’s share power, says moderate Arab
As long as Jews know their place and are willing to live under Islamic rule everything will be just swell:
“Don’t worry, we will be good to them. They will be treated as a protected minority. We are not interested in oppressing them. Historically, we don’t have a problem with Jews. Anti-semitism is not an Arab or Muslim thing, it’s primarily been a Christian thing.” Mr Aweidah says his views are typical today.
Sheik Yer’mami has a better idea:
AS the shock departure of Mahmoud Abbas sinks in for Palestinians, Ahmad Aweidah is rising fast in the new generation of leaders.
Palestinians, he said, should focus on a single state in which Palestinians were the majority.
It would be a federal system under which the Israel Defence Forces would retain responsibility for defence.
“Under one state, Jews and Arabs would share power at a local level for things like education and health, while things like water would be decided at a national level,” he said.
“The Jews would have their own canton and the Arabs would have their own canton. It would be a federal structure. The Palestinian canton would not be responsible for the defence of the country. I am happy for the Jewish canton to remain in charge of defence through the IDF. Not a single Palestinian would serve in the IDF. Jerusalem would be everybody’s. Jews would be able to live in Hebron not as settlers but as full citizens.
“The Irish and the English resolved their conflict. The English and the Scots. There have been many other conflicts that have seemed as intractable as this one. It’s better than continued conflict, is it not?”
In two recent interviews – one with foreign journalists and one with The Weekend Australian – Mr Aweidah argued that the possibility of a Palestinian state passed with the growth of Jewish settlements.
Palestinian politician Mustafa Bargouti said this week that international pressure had encouraged Palestinians to seek a two-state solution – an independent Palestine alongside Israel – but that this was no longer realistic. Mr Aweidah agreed: “The two-state solution is no longer viable,” he said.
“I think the only solution now is one state where the Palestinians are the majority and the Jews are a protected minority, just like the whites are now in South Africa.
“Time and demographics are on our side. In 15 years’ time, Palestinians will be the majority.”
Mr Aweidah claims the Palestinians have a birth rate of 4.3 per cent. As with everything in this conflict, this is disputed. Israeli analyst Yoram Ettinger described it as “a fairytale”.
“We have come up with documented data, mostly Palestinian material, which determines that the trend is exactly the opposite,” Mr Ettinger, head of research group Second Thought, told The Weekend Australian.
He found the number of Arabs in Judea and Samaria had been inflated by 66 per cent, and the number of Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza had been overestimated by 43 per cent. “The demographic tailwind is Jewish – the Arab birth rate is coming down in a free dive,” he said. However, prominent Israelis such as opposition leader Tzipi Livni continue to sound the demographic alarm for the Jewish population.
As Washington’s push to resume peace talks sinks, Palestinians more frequently are speaking about a unitary state. “What have we got from 15 years of negotiating since Oslo?” Mr Aweidah said. “Today we’re sitting behind a wall with 500,000 Jewish settlers. So what will we get from another 15 years of negotiations – one million settlers? The Jews say `never again’ about the Shoah. We say `never again’ about losing more years negotiating for nothing.”
Asked of Israelis who would resist his vision out of fear for the end of the Jewish state, he said: “But it would be the birth of the Jewish canton. Don’t worry, we will be good to them. They will be treated as a protected minority. We are not interested in oppressing them. Historically, we don’t have a problem with Jews. Anti-semitism is not an Arab or Muslim thing, it’s primarily been a Christian thing.” Mr Aweidah says his views are typical today.
The question is, if the moderates are speaking like this in public, how are the hardliners speaking in private?
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Let’s all go and live in a canton and have the IDF protect ALL!
Sounds fair/sarc off.
Whether to laugh or cry about the absurdity of it all?
Perhaps better to laugh.
But he can’t believe what he is saying.
Nah!!!! I don’t believe him.
Expell them here, expell them there, expell them everywhere.
My family research has discovered a ‘crusading’ streak in my forebears. Now I know why they did it, after originally thinking I belonged to a gruesome clan.
I am all for it!!!!
Charge!!!!!
My God, no wonder Arabs don’t win nobel prizes. They’re just so, what’s the word, intellectually challenged.
Hello Mary,
Good of you to join us.
For your safety, though, I suggest you use a pseudonym. We can exchange information and comments without putting our persons in jeopardy.
They have intellectual challenges [funny], due to consanguinity, long memories and a harsh way with un-believers and islamophobes [I know, I know, I am just imagining what they will say to this comment]
They have their ways.
Merry Christmas and a Very Happy New Year.
Staggering Statistics on Muslims Killing Muslims
From wasteofmyoxygen
FrontPageMagazine
ACT has posted a set of statistics that demonstrates the real violence against Muslims, it is not Jews, Christians or even America that is leading the pack in Muslim Genocide, but rather other Muslims. These numbers (almost 10 million killed by other Muslims) defy rationality and surely anyone with half a brain can see where the real problem lies. Islam may or may not be a peaceful religion, but the people who dominate the religion and are the face that the world sees as representation of the religion, surely are far from peaceful.
“some 11,000,000 Muslims have been violently killed since 1948, of which 35,000, or 0.3 percent, died during the sixty years of fighting Israel, or just 1 out of every 315 Muslim fatalities. In contrast, over 90 percent of the 11 million who perished were killed by fellow Muslims.”
By Gunnar Heinsohn and Daniel Pipes, FrontPageMagazine, October 8, 2007
The Arab-Israeli conflict is often said, not just by extremists, to be the world’s most dangerous conflict – and, accordingly, Israel is judged the world’s most belligerent country.
For example, British prime minister Tony Blair told the U.S. Congress in July 2003 that “Terrorism will not be defeated without peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Here it is that the poison is incubated. Here it is that the extremist is able to confuse in the mind of a frighteningly large number of people the case for a Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel.”
This viewpoint leads many Europeans, among others, to see Israel as the most menacing country on earth.
But is this true? It flies in the face of the well-known pattern that liberal democracies do not aggress; plus, it assumes, wrongly, that the Arab-Israeli conflict is among the most costly in terms of lives lost.
To place the Arab-Israeli fatalities in their proper context, one of the two co-authors, Gunnar Heinsohn, has compiled statistics to rank conflicts since 1950 by the number of human deaths incurred. Note how far down the list is the entry in bold type.
Conflicts since 1950 with over 10,000 Fatalities*
1 40,000,000 Red China, 1949-76 (outright killing, manmade famine, Gulag)
2 10,000,000 Soviet Bloc: late Stalinism, 1950-53; post-Stalinism, to 1987 (mostly Gulag)
3 4,000,000 Ethiopia, 1962-92: Communists, artificial hunger, genocides
4 3,800,000 Zaire (Congo-Kinshasa): 1967-68; 1977-78; 1992-95; 1998-present
5 2,800,000 Korean war, 1950-53
6 1,900,000 Sudan, 1955-72; 1983-2006 (civil wars, genocides)
7 1,870,000 Cambodia: Khmer Rouge 1975-79; civil war 1978-91
8 1,800,000 Vietnam War, 1954-75
9 1,800,000 Afghanistan: Soviet and internecine killings, Taliban 1980-2001
10 1,250,000 West Pakistan massacres in East Pakistan (Bangladesh 1971)
11 1,100,000 Nigeria, 1966-79 (Biafra); 1993-present
12 1,100,000 Mozambique, 1964-70 (30,000) + after retreat of Portugal 1976-92
13 1,000,000 Iran-Iraq-War, 1980-88
14 900,000 Rwanda genocide, 1994
15 875,000 Algeria: against France 1954-62 (675,000); between Islamists and the government 1991-2006 (200,000)
16 850,000 Uganda, 1971-79; 1981-85; 1994-present
17 650,000 Indonesia: Marxists 1965-66 (450,000); East Timor, Papua, Aceh etc, 1969-present (200,000)
18 580,000 Angola: war against Portugal 1961-72 (80,000); after Portugal’s retreat (1972-2002)
19 500,000 Brazil against its Indians, up to 1999
20 430,000 Vietnam, after the war ended in 1975 (own people; boat refugees)
21 400,000 Indochina: against France, 1945-54
22 400,000 Burundi, 1959-present (Tutsi/Hutu)
23 400,000 Somalia, 1991-present
24 400,000 North Korea up to 2006 (own people)
25 300,000 Kurds in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, 1980s-1990s
26 300,000 Iraq, 1970-2003 (Saddam against minorities)
27 240,000 Columbia, 1946-58; 1964-present
28 200,000 Yugoslavia, Tito regime, 1944-80
29 200,000 Guatemala, 1960-96
30 190,000 Laos, 1975-90
31 175,000 Serbia against Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, 1991-1999
32 150,000 Romania, 1949-99 (own people)
33 150,000 Liberia, 1989-97
34 140,000 Russia against Chechnya, 1994-present
35 150,000 Lebanon civil war, 1975-90
36 140,000 Kuwait War, 1990-91
37 130,000 Philippines: 1946-54 (10,000); 1972-present (120,000)
38 130,000 Burma/Myanmar, 1948-present
39 100,000 North Yemen, 1962-70
40 100,000 Sierra Leone, 1991-present
41 100,000 Albania, 1945-91 (own people)
42 80,000 Iran, 1978-79 (revolution)
43 75,000 Iraq, 2003-present (domestic)
44 75,000 El Salvador, 1975-92
45 70,000 Eritrea against Ethiopia, 1998-2000
46 68,000 Sri Lanka, 1997-present
47 60,000 Zimbabwe, 1966-79; 1980-present
48 60,000 Nicaragua, 1972-91 (Marxists/natives etc,)
49 51,000 Arab-Israeli conflict 1950-present
50 50,000 North Vietnam, 1954-75 (own people)
51 50,000 Tajikistan, 1992-96 (secularists against Islamists)
52 50,000 Equatorial Guinea, 1969-79
53 50,000 Peru, 1980-2000
54 50,000 Guinea, 1958-84
55 40,000 Chad, 1982-90
56 30,000 Bulgaria, 1948-89 (own people)
57 30,000 Rhodesia, 1972-79
58 30,000 Argentina, 1976-83 (own people)
59 27,000 Hungary, 1948-89 (own people)
60 26,000 Kashmir independence, 1989-present
61 25,000 Jordan government vs. Palestinians, 1970-71 (Black September)
62 22,000 Poland, 1948-89 (own people)
63 20,000 Syria, 1982 (against Islamists in Hama)
64 20,000 Chinese-Vietnamese war, 1979
65 19,000 Morocco: war against France, 1953-56 (3,000) and in Western Sahara, 1975-present (16,000)
66 18,000 Congo Republic, 1997-99
67 10,000 South Yemen, 1986 (civil war)
*All figures rounded. Sources: Brzezinski, Z., Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-first Century, 1993; Courtois, S., Le Livre Noir du Communism, 1997; Heinsohn, G., Lexikon der Völkermorde, 1999, 2nd ed.; Heinsohn, G., Söhne und Weltmacht, 2006, 8th ed.; Rummel. R., Death by Government, 1994; Small, M. and Singer, J.D., Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars 1816-1980, 1982; White, M., “Death Tolls for the Major Wars and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century,” 2003.
This grisly inventory finds the total number of deaths in conflicts since 1950 numbering about 85,000,000. Of that sum, the deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1950 include 32,000 deaths due to Arab state attacks and 19,000 due to Palestinian attacks, or 51,000 in all. Arabs make up roughly 35,000 of these dead and Jewish Israelis make up 16,000.
These figures mean that deaths Arab-Israeli fighting since 1950 amount to just 0.06 percent of the total number of deaths in all conflicts in that period. More graphically, only 1 out of about 1,700 persons killed in conflicts since 1950 has died due to Arab-Israeli fighting.
(Adding the 11,000 killed in the Israeli war of independence, 1947-49, made up of 5,000 Arabs and 6,000 Israeli Jews, does not significantly alter these figures.)
In a different perspective, some 11,000,000 Muslims have been violently killed since 1948, of which 35,000, or 0.3 percent, died during the sixty years of fighting Israel, or just 1 out of every 315 Muslim fatalities. In contrast, over 90 percent of the 11 million who perished were killed by fellow Muslims.
Comments: (1) Despite the relative non-lethality of the Arab-Israeli conflict, its renown, notoriety, complexity, and diplomatic centrality will probably give it continued out-sized importance in the global imagination. And Israel’s reputation will continue to pay the price. (2) Still, it helps to point out the 1-in-1,700 statistic as a corrective, in the hope that one day, this reality will register, permitting the Arab-Israeli conflict to subside to its rightful, lesser place in world politics.
Professor Heinsohn is director of the Raphael-Lemkin-Institut für Xenophobie- und Genozidforschung at the University of Bremen. Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum.