If you want your faith in the basic goodness, tolerance, and understanding of humankind shaken, check out the emails Rabbi Nesenoff received (linked below) after his interview with Helen Thomas went viral. And for an interesting take on the affair and some of its consequences, click on the "click here and read" link on that same page.
Thomas said what many, many people believe. The key here is "believe". Education is not the principal factor in attitude formation. (If it were, a lot of major corporations would be wasting their money on their glitzy ads aimed at appealing to emotions, not reason.) In fact, people seem to selectively seek and absorb facts which supplement their preconceptions. So Thomas apparently remained ignorant of much of the historical and religious impetus for the present imbroglio in the Middle East, even as she remains naive about "going back where they came from". There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who are refugees or recent descendants of refugees. Most of them can no longer go back even were they to be welcome. Some would be killed if they returned - like the Jews going back to Arab lands (which Thomas is obviously ignorant of, or perhaps just oblivious to.) Some are offspring of divergent other lands, with each parent or grandparent from a different country. Where should they go back to, and how would they function without the language skills and personal connections, unmotivated by any desire to emigrate, into an unknown or unwelcoming culture?
The Arabs have created a uniquely dangerous and effective weapon in retaining refugees in camps paid for by us for the past 6 decades: These are readily identifiable individuals who really can go back - just as soon as all the Jews are killed. While the other 100 million refugees of the 20'th century were resettled and then resumed their lives, only this small fraction of individuals (perhaps 3/4 million) has been kept prisoner by their own brethren as a weapon aimed for the intended hegemony of the Islamic religious movement seeking world domination. Not only has the West been foolishly paying for this sly aggression. We have in this and other ways been supportive of the deliberate Arab oppression of this Arab population for all this time, keeping them hostage to their own brethren neighbors' imperialist goals. Yet we assist in the resettlement and acculturation of all other displaced populations (except, of course, the 3/4 million Jews who fled Arab atrocities for safety in Israel). We even help Christians flee their Arab persecutors from the very territories the deceptive narratives claim are unfairly "under oppressive Israeli occupation." The UN, using our funds, further encourages the Jihad-by-pathos by sustaining a separate agency whose sole function is to support the Islamic population in the Territories. This completely removes them from the real UN refugee agency which assists all other populations, and further facilitates the war against Israel. We are subsidizing and supporting the Arab/Farsi war against Israel under the guise of humanitarian aid. These "refugees" exist in a craftily executed phony status, largely self-imposed and callously sustained by their own coreligionists. They perform a mass theatrical act designed to extract the world's ignorant sympathy. And an ignorant world has reacted as planned.
It's way past time to disband the notion of Arab refugees and get on with the acceptance of living. But the skewed politics of Arab Jihad, aided by oil and abetted by ignorance, make rational accommodation impossible, so there will be much further pain all around. There's still plenty of deliberate ignorance to support it. Helen Thomas is the archetypal case in point.
http://www.rabbilive.com/RabbiLIVE/Home.html
13 June 2010
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