WASHINGTON — The Palestine Liberation Organization's ambassador to the United States said Tuesday that any future Palestinian state it seeks with help from the United Nations and the United States should be free of Jews. (“PLO ambassador says Palestinian state should be free of Jews”).
With all we’ve got on our national mind these days, we Americans can get confused. Maybe it’s all those cell phone microwaves burrowing into our brains and all that tweeting. Could a clear-headed people who hadn’t been reduced to conversation via misspelled sentence fragments ever go to sleep undisturbed that we have all these vampire-based TV shows, the Bravo network, and Eric Holder as attorney general?
These distractions may just explain how Americans can still be so confused about what’s going on between Israel and her mortal enemies: the stateless Palestinians, and the 1.5 billion Muslim ummah. some with nukes, who side with them in their lust for Israel’s destruction.
According to the latest poll by The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center asking if the UN should recognize an independent Palestinian nation:
Fully a quarter of Americans express no opinion when asked for their “sympathies” between the two parties, a near high in polls back to 1982. In all, 40 percent say they side with the Israelis, 10 percent with the Palestinians, and 21 percent volunteer “neither.” Among those paying “a lot” of attention to the statehood issue, a majority — 55 percent — sympathize with Israel; 19 percent with the Palestinians.
Twenty-one percent don’t know their sympathies? (Frankly, it feels even higher.)
American public opinion swings back and forth from decade to decade on all sorts of issues. But in spite of that we’ve always shared in common the national trait of rooting for the underdog. Show us which one is being pushed around, and we know where our sympathies lie.
But, for some reason, that doesn’t apply when the underdog is Israel.
This 21% “neither” number is as if the whole country watched “Rocky,” and 65 million of your countrymen said afterwards they’re not sure if Creed should have won that fight. And the Palestinians, sensing this confusion, intend to exploit it at the UN.
Adding to this signal of confusion is President Obama. In his speech about the Palestinian request for statehood to the UN the other day, he said, “One year ago, I stood at this podium and I called for an independent Palestine. I believed then, and I believe now, that the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own.”
When Palestinians have been allowed to vote, they have gleefully elected a terrorist group like Fatah, except when they could do even worse by electing a terrorist group like Hamas. When America was attacked on 9/11, Palestinians handed out candy to their children and danced in the streets.
So whatever else may be said about all this, what can’t seriously be suggested is that the Palestinians deserve a state of their own. That’s why the President, in spite of what he says the Palestinians “deserve,” is opposing statehood.
Now Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the guy whom we we confused Americans erroneously believe is a peace-loving moderate (but only compared with Hamas), declared last December, “I will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land.” And now the PLO’s envoy to the US, Maen Areikat, says there won’t be any Jews in a Palestinian state – even as his government is applying to the UN for Palestinian statehood. Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post reported the story or Areikat’s comments.
USA Today did report:
Such a state would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was judenrein, or cleansed of Jews, said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council official.
Israel has 1.3 million Muslims who are Israeli citizens. Jews have lived in "Judea and Samaria," the biblical name for the West Bank, for thousands of years.
But now 21% of underdog-loving Americans don’t want to pick sides? Isn’t it interesting how the large majority (55%) in the Pew poll of those who sympathize with Israel tracks with people who pay attention to the issue?
Too bad that not paying attention to this issue is a very big American national pastime right now, along with downloading ringtones and getting tattoos.
But even if you’re one of those whose opinion is that the Palestinians “deserve their own state” --maybe because you heard sound bites somewhere about how Israel is an “apartheid state” and an is engaged in “illegal occupation” of Palestinian national territory, and you think they might be the underdogs – does it bother you at all to know that the Palestinians intend to establish a racist state next door to a people whose right to exist they have never once acknowledged?
Don’t you owe it to yourself to get the facts?
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