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Senator Barack Obama’s recent comments at the convention for the United Church of Christ are, in keeping with the religious theme, revelatory. According to the story at Breitbart.com, Senator Obama said:
Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked.
and
Part of it’s because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, who’ve been all too eager to exploit what divides us. At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design.
What these comments reveal is a candidate who does not respect religion in general or Christianity in particular and, more disturbingly for the topic under discussion, a candidate who chooses destruction over construction. Once again, as he did with fatherhood at Father’s Day, the Illinois Senator takes an important concept and twists it to fashion a platform from which to expound his own agenda. He hopes linking his agenda with respectable icons will transfer stature and acceptance to him. Fortunately, it doesn’t work.
In the first place, he misunderstands the nature of faith. While faith can be used as a tool to either unite or divide, such use is, in fact a misuse of faith. A man does not possess faith like he has money in his pocket and which he doles out to accomplish his purposes. Rather, faith exists in the heart, and a man places his faith in someone or something else. In the case of Christians it is placed in the God of the Bible. When Christians say they believe in God, they are not seeking to drive a wedge between themselves and those who do not. That such belief places them in a group different from those who deny God’s existence is not a division, it is a definition. Nothing in Christianity requires or even encourages shunning those who disagree with Christian faith. In fact, Christianity’s message is the exact opposite of that. Obama clearly doesn’t respect faith and religion enough to deal with them honestly.
Obama is right, however, about faith being hijacked. Unfortunately, he’s misidentified the hijacker. Obama wants to make Christians the culprits. Basic understanding of Christianity will not permit that conclusion. For something to be hijacked, it must first be going somewhere. Then the hijacker reveals himself and forces a change in direction to suit his purpose with no concern for the original destination. For milennia, Judaism and Christianity have taught that God is the Creator; that He created man both male and female and that that was good; that prayer to Him is a pursuit of the wise and that taking up the cause of those unable to defend themselves is among the most noble and most important things a man can do. That Obama, the Left and religious organizations like the United Church of Christ disagree with some or all of those propositions reveals them as the hijackers. Their break is with Christ and with Christianity itself, not the Christian Right. Of course, they cannot bluntly say so. The political and societal costs would be too great, even in 2007. But their goal is to so alter the understanding of Christian faith and Christian history that one day they can. Obama and the ‘Christian’ Left clearly have little to do with the teachings of Christ.
Finally, this entire conversation by Obama promotes destruction. I find it fascinating, but not surprising, that his four examples are creationism, marriage, abortion and prayer. Put another way these things represent the origin of all life, the human institution divinely ordained to perpetuate and nurture individual life, the beginning of the life of an individual and that individual’s reconnection with the source of all aspects of his life. Obama rightly credits Christians with supporting those things, with supporting Life. I will not say Obama’s lack of support for these things makes him in favor of Death. But working against Life is destructive at best and I have no problem acknowledging Obama is that at a minimum.
Having said that, I wonder if Deuteronomy 30:19 might have some application here after all …
Sorry for the recent absence here at BCM. Seems a person with some computer skills and mayhem on his mind decided to pay us a little visit. It took some time to clear up but hopefully it is over. I look forward to communicating with you all as per usual starting tomorrow.
Blessings,
Blue Collar Muse
PS - Thanks to EO for awesome computer skills in doing away with the problem.
My friend, James Whittington, posted this over at his blog. I’ve copied a few things from his post. Visit James and read the entire thing.
My friend Adam A. is Kurdish from northern Iraq.
Adam watched as Saddam Hussein’s “police” gunned down his brother in the street. Adam was arrested and tortured on several occasions, and he’s got the scars to prove it. He was forcefully conscripted into the Iraqi army, but escaped from Iraq prior to the Gulf War. …
Adam was a well-educated man of means in Iraq. He left several homes and quite a bit of money in the bank there, and he’ll never be able to get any of it back. …
He’s not terribly angry or bitter about his life, but there are two things Adam is incredibly passionate about, Freedom and America. …
Adam is now a very proud American citizen who LOVES being free in America. Whenever I start to complain about politics, the government, high taxes, etc…, Adam just smiles and says: “But James, you are free!” As far as Adam is concerned being free in America is all that matters. Freedom trumps all other concerns.
A few days after the horrors of September 11, 2001 Adam and I met for dinner. We discussed the terrorist attack, Middle Eastern politics, immigration and of course freedom in America.
After listening to Adam expound on freedom over dinner, I told him that I wished more native born Americans understood the concept of “freedom” and appreciated America as much as he did. He then told me something in his broken English that I will never forget. “Freedom is a Crown. America wears it, but only other nations can see it.”
Amazing isn’t it? So many here in the USA, blind to the freedom we enjoy, resist the idea that we should export it while so many elsewhere will risk all to get here to possess it!
Thanks James - and thanks Adam - for reminding me of what it means to be an American and live here.
Thinking it’s true what they say about a “fresh” pair of eyes seeing things “old” eyes miss …
On Friday, Townhall.com posted a brief article on B. Hussein Obama’s activities. He delivered a stump speech at Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Spartanburg, SC. The theme was fatherhood and family values in advance of the national celebration of Father’s Day. Usually, when people desire to praise a person or thing, they talk about that person or thing directly, telling listeners the good and positive things about their subject. Curiously, Obama takes the opposite approach and lauds family values and fatherhood by talking about all the bad fathers and poor examples of family values. Just more evidence that the Left approaches most issues in a fearful, negative and backwards fashion. That the article further describes the topic as Obama’s “life message” as well doesn’t speak well for the Illinois Democrat.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Friday that fathers have to share the responsibility for raising children and caring for families because their role doesn’t end at conception.
Days before Father’s Day, the first-term Illinois senator and father of two daughters delivered his life message as well as an assessment of what government needs to do in remarks at a Baptist church.
“It’s about to be Father’s Day,” he said. “Let’s admit to ourselves that there are a lot of men out there that need to stop acting like boys; who need to realize that responsibility does not end at conception; who need to know that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise a child.”
He recalled his own upbringing as the son of a Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas. Obama said he grew up with a father he know only through letters and stories told by his mothers and the relatives who raised him.
While he acknowledges the problem is confined, there are only “a lot of men out there” shirking their responsibilities, it is his solutions to the problem that are the most disturbing. He fails to be the voice of reason and truth in his party. Instead of standing up and saying that 50 years of deeply flawed Democrat policies and approaches to the issue have almost destroyed the family in many parts of American society, including black America, he skips past the true problem to promote the same worthless, tepid programs at the root of the very problem he says he wants to fix. In addition, he spouts the ever present, reason numbing, Democrat mantra that the entire problem is Bush’s fault. Evidently, prosperity in black America is just around the corner in January of 2009 when George “Just call me Sauron, all my enemies do!” Bush is no longer President.
He bemoaned the nation’s economic divide.
Changes in the way we “work and live have trapped too many American families between an economy that’s gone global and government that’s gone AWOL. Too many rungs have been removed from the ladder to middle-class security and the safety net that’s supposed to break any fall from that ladder has grown badly frayed,” Obama said.
The Illinois senator said he would invest $50 million in programs to help people find transitional jobs and get training for permanent employment. That is needed, he said, to help men _ especially black men _ find work to replace hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs they’ve lost in the last six years.
“Without a job or an education, many black men simply cannot afford to raise a family _ and too many have made the sad choice not to,” he said.
He said he would push to expand the federal earned income tax credit and the minimum hourly wages should be linked to the rate of inflation.
He’s right, there are problems that keep people from achieving success in this country in a time of unparalleled economic success. He’s right that there is a huge gap in the ladder of success. He’s right there are many men, black and white, without jobs or educations and thus without prospects of achieving the American dream. He’s also right that these things are mostly a matter of choices - bad choices. Choices made by the men themselves and choices made by an out of touch, irrational and irresponsible Democrat Party.
The “way we work and live” has changed in the last 50 years. It used to be that families endured tough times and hung together knowing that better days were ahead if they would perservere. Things like no fault divorce, the minimum wage, welfare, Aid to Dependent Children and hosts of other Democrat social programs, while sounding compassionate and helpful, not only did not fix the problems they were designed to address, they actually compounded those problems. Left in place over decades, the compounded problems have themselves been compounded and compounded yet again.
Refusing to be bound by sound economic principle and common sense, the Left ignores the truth that you get more of what you pay for. Thus, when they pay mothers for having children and remove financial incentives for men and women to marry, all in the name of compassion, they feign surprise when out of wedlock pregnancies skyrocket and two parent familes evaporate. This is taken as evidence the American dream doesn’t work for black America, justifying even more social engineering. When it is pointed out other minority groups with strong family bonds do better than blacks despite living in the same economic and social environment, that argument is dismissed as the ravings of ancient, white European males who have no way to understand the crises in black America. And so the farce is perpetuated.
According to Obama, the adverse employment situation for black men is due to 6 years of bad Bush labor policies whereby “hundreds of thousands” of manufacturing jobs have been lost. Nice to know the problem is only 6 years old. That shouldn’t be too hard to fix. But what if the problem is decades old? What if giving just enough money to men every month that they can barely survive without lifting a finger is the reason that men have opted to stay home? Kept by their government mistress, these gigolos provide the services their mistress demands every 2 years by voting in the crowd that will continue the largesse as opposed to dealing with the deteriorating condition this immoral arrangement has produced.
Why should they acquire basic work and life skills on rungs 1 through 10 on Obama’s “ladder to middle-class security” when the government puts a net out to keep them safe? Unfortunately, that net isn’t the “safety net that’s supposed to break any fall from that ladder”. It’s a fowler’s net spread near the ladder, preventing anyone it traps from climbing at all! Without basic job skills, it is difficult to obtain a job requiring intermediate skills and impossible to get one requiring advanced skills. The rungs on the ladder that are missing are not the middle ones. They weren’t removed by Bush, evil GOPers and Conservatives. In fact, there aren’t any rungs missing at all. The only thing missing is a huge sign with an arrow pointing at the “safety net” with the written warning, “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here!” Those with different values stand on every rung of the ladder, all of which are still strong and functional and able to bear whatever weight is placed on them. They call out warnings to those below that the music from those encouraging them to trust the net is a siren song of personal and societal destruction.
There is no guarantee on the ladder like there is in the net. But there are no limits either. Instead of pointing to black success stories like Sowell, Williams, Watts, Rice, Thomas and thousands more - frankly, instead of pointing to himself and his family, instead of touting hard work, education, discipline and the perserverance that positions you to take advantage of the mythical “lucky break” that so often appears for those who practice such things and tragically eludes those who do not, Obama comes SO close to being something akin to a Savior for black America and lets the opportunity pass in favor of the party line. Instead of honoring fathers by lauding those successful in the endeavor, he denigrates the concept by relegating it to a mere pad from which to launch his own agenda.
His solutions to these important and profound issues are stale and proven worthless at best and counter productive at worst. Pay more for having kids, raise the minimum wage even more, discourage personal initiative and responsibility and encourage others to make your decisions for you, permit others to establish limits on your plans and allow someone else to distract you from the process of dreaming of a better tomorrow. Tragically, after 50 years there are still people that think this is the best way to govern and for us to live. Even more tragic is there are still people willing to accept those limits as being the best life has to offer.
Thinking it’s been going on too long to be anything other than deliberate …
With 5 kids to look after (soon to be only 4 when #1 son moves out), a small business to manage, lots of church stuff to do and all important blogging time, The Much Younger Trophy Wife and I don’t get out a lot. Often, in order to enjoy an hour or so of adult conversation (talk that doesn’t include the phrases bedtime, inside voices, homework, curfew, NO!! and a number of other parental perennials) we must schedule it in advance. Being Blackberryless makes this even more difficult in this age of technology!
When I first saw Katherine’s post about the NiT meetup at The Flying Saucer, I thought to myself, “I’d like to go to that and tell Brittney ‘Thanks!’” When I mentioned it to The Much Younger Trophy Wife she thought it sounded like fun and a date was born. After all, I figured if it turned out to be a bust after delivering my message to her Brittney-ness, I could just leave.
Boy, was I wrong!
There was no way I was going to leave after I got there! To say it was fun and enjoyable would be an understatement! All I can say is NiT bloggers, commentors and lurkers ROCK!
Not only did I get to tell Brittney ‘Thanks’, I got to meet a host of you that I only knew from words on a post. Who knew that Brittney is MUCH cuter in person than she is in the pics at her blog? Who knew that I had already spent some time getting to know Katherine by reading her blog before I even knew she was THE Katherine Coble? Who knew that I would already know Kerry from almost 15 years ago at Belmont Church and then he’d pop back up like this? Who knew that Aunt B would be so much FUN and not the stodgy liberal I may or may not have stereotypically mentally pictured her as? Who knew that you could get an indepth education on most of the countries of Europe from a 40 something curly headed misfit in a downtown Nashville eatery? Who knew that Chip and I would not, in fact, be the only males there? Who knew that Chip’s description of Jag as “a happily married and beautiful woman” would be almost perfect - he forgot to mention delightful conversationalist! Who knew that ACK would be so quiet? Who knew that Megan would be as gracious and lovely in person as she is witty in print? And who knew that Ivy, far from being ‘Bad, Bad and Bitchy’, would be delightful fun and bloggerette extraordinaire - I’m pretty sure I left before the alchohol kicked in and the cuddliness began! Who knew there’d be so many others there I didn’t get to meet even though I wanted to? And who knew I’d be sorry to see the little hand was past ‘9′ and speeding towards ‘10′ meaning it was time to head home (as an old guy with a Much Younger Trophy Wife I turn into Fred Thompson at 9:30)?
The Much Younger Trophy Wife and I flew home from the Saucer on the memories of a great time and are looking forward to the next installment …
Many thanks and a hat tip to the BadIdeaGuy over at Target Rich Environment for posting this over at his place. Just so you all know, TRE is a daily read for me. Steve usually has something funny, interesting and/or timely posted there. Stop over and give him a read.
Ever wonder where the term ‘Old Glory’ comes from as it refers to the Stars and Stripes? Here’s the scoop - and it has a Nashville angle!
This famous name was coined by Captain William Driver, a shipmaster of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1831. As he was leaving on one of his many voyages aboard the brig CHARLES DOGGETT - and this one would climax with the rescue of the mutineers of the BOUNTY - some friends presented him with a beautiful flag of twenty four stars. As the banner opened to the ocean breeze for the first time, he exclaimed “Old Glory!”
He retired to Nashville in 1837, taking his treasured flag from his sea days with him. By the time the Civil War erupted, most everyone in and around Nashville recognized Captain Driver’s “Old Glory.” When Tennesee seceded from the Union, Rebels were determined to destroy his flag, but repeated searches revealed no trace of the hated banner.
Then on February 25th, 1862, Union forces captured Nashville and raised the American flag over the capital. It was a rather small ensign and immediately folks began asking Captain Driver if “Old Glory” still existed. Happy to have soldiers with him this time, Captain Driver went home and began ripping at the seams of his bedcover. As the stitches holding the quilt-top to the batting unraveled, the onlookers peered inside and saw the 24-starred original “Old Glory”!
Captain Driver gently gathered up the flag and returned with the soldiers to the capitol. Though he was sixty years old, the Captain climbed up to the tower to replace the smaller banner with his beloved flag. The Sixth Ohio Regiment cheered and saluted - and later adopted the nickname “Old Glory” as their own, telling and re-telling the story of Captain Driver’s devotion to the flag we honor yet today.
Captain Driver’s grave is located in the old Nashville City Cemetery, and is one of three (3) places authorized by act of Congress where the Flag of the United States may be flown 24 hours a day.
A caption above a faded black and white picture in the book, ‘The Stars and the Stripes’, states that, “‘Old Glory’ may no longer be opened to be photographed, and no color photograph is available.” Visible in the photo in the lower right corner of the canton is an appliqued anchor, Captain Driver’s very personal note. “Old Glory” is the most illustrious of a number of flags - both Northern and Confederate - reputed to have been similarly hidden, then later revealed as times changed. The flag was given to his granddaughter or neice and she later donated it to the Smithsonian.
After 25 years here, I still get a kick out of finding out cool stuff like this …
Back in February I posted a response to comments by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the real nature of the Holocaust. At that time I mentioned the thinking I had done on the matter would result in several posts. This is the second installment.
We hear a great deal about the trials faced by longsuffering Palestinians. Locked away in camps dotting the Middle Eastern landscape they suffer in silence, ignored by the media. Driven to despair by the evil residents of the Zionist entity, when they hit bottom they snap. With no hope left, they decide to check out, to head home, to get a little face time with Allah and enjoy the sexual pot pourri that is their own personal harem of 72.
To accomplish this trip, they don’t OD on pills, eat one of the ubiquitous weapons in the Middle East or sit in a garage with a vehicle running. That would be too much like the infidels in the West. No, everyone knows the proper Muslim way to shuffle off to eternity is to strap on a belt filled with explosives, poison soaked shrapnel and a trigger and then find a crowd of Jews and Americans (pick a crowd without an armed IDF member in it - they might ruin your send off) and then pull the trigger. In the blink of an eye, Allah and sexual fantasies undreamed of in this world are yours.
There is a problem with the process, however. The homicidal rage driving these people to kill Jews and themselves is based in the premise that the Jews are responsible for displacing the Palestinians and keeping them locked in camps. Unfortunately, that is not true. Further, that it has been pounded into the minds of Palestinians and the world over the last 60 years as a rationale for all manner of bad Palestinian behavior means that it is an untruth that will likely take some drastic measures to expose and correct.
If you want to know the truth; if you want to know who is really to blame for the plight of the Palestinians, you need look no further than to the Arab nations that surround Israel. This is what happened.
Desperate for the prosperity and future being created by the Zionist’s dreams and industry, Arabs from all over the Middle East made a bee line for the region known as Palestine in the first part of the 1900s. They settled there to make a better life for themselves and their families. Hat tip to Maggie for this post at Maggie’s Notebook, Who and What Are Palestinians. Be sure to read her post and the review she points to there.
Once there, the Arabs and the Jews worked out a relationship that was of benefit to all parties concerned. They were neighbors, friends and business associates.
In the run up to the Declaration of Statehood by Israel in May of 1948, that changed. Tensions ran high as the surrounding Arab nations began their talk of driving the Jews into the sea and turning it red with Jewish blood. Lost in the Arab bluster and threats against the Jews are the words the Arabs had for their Arab bretheren then residing in Palestine.
Palestinian Arabs were advised to vacate the region ahead of the Arab assault on the Zionists. This was, of course, for their own safety as the Arab invasion armies could not be held responsible if, while shooting at Jews, they killed Arabs without the good sense to beat feet ahead of the bombs and bullets. For those Arabs thinking twice about leaving years or decades of work and life behind in response to Arab aggression, the word went out that Arabs found in Palestine after the victory would be considered traitors and collaborators and would be dealt with accordingly. Besides, what’s to worry about, the Palestinians leave for a couple of weeks while Arab armies kick Jewish backside for grins and giggles and then everyone can come back. As an added bonus, just think of all that stuff the dead Jews won’t need anymore - SOMEone is going to have to do something with all that stuff! **wink, wink**
The Jews, on the other hand, asked their Arab neighbors, friends and business associates to stay, to be a part of the Jewish State and to keep on doing what they had been doing for almost half a century. History records that Palestinian Arabs chose the offer extended by the Arab nations and not the Jewish nation. So effective was the carrot and stick of plunder or execution that 90% of Haifa’s 60,000 Arabs left!
All would have been well that ended well if those pesky Zionists had just rolled over and let themselves be exterminated. Instead, they had the chutzpah to defend themselves and even mount an offensive or three. The end result was that the backside which ended up on the receiving end of the whooping was distinctly Arab. And here we arrive at our goal of pinpointing the problem.
Tens of thousands of Arabs left what was now Israel in advance of the Arab armies’ invasion. They assumed they would return behind a victorious coalition. When that victory didn’t materialize as promised, these people had a problem. Where were they going to go?
Israel rightly viewed them as a security threat. They had openly and decisively sided with Israel’s enemies for whatever reason. Thus Israel would not let them return to the homes, businesses, lands and neighborhoods they had lived in previously.
The Arab governments that encouraged them to leave also refused to allow their Arab brothers from Palestine, the very ones that believed the promises of swift victory and choice spoils, to be welcomed into Arab society. They weren’t citizens of any of the Arab countries, they were merely Palestinians and while everyone was willing to use them, no one was willing to extend them a brotherly Arab hand in their time of need.
The solution was the creation of refugee camps which dot the Middle Eastern landscape even today. There they would suffer in silence, ignored by their bretheren unless some media attention was deemed necessary by those claiming to speak for Palestinians but who were really driving their own agenda. Driven to despair by the selfishness and cruelty of their fellow Arabs, when they hit bottom they snap. With no hope left, they decide to check out, to head home, to get a little face time with Allah and enjoy the sexual pot pourri that is their own personal harem of 72.
But instead of holding their Arab brothers responsible for their plight and demanding that Arab countries do the right thing by them, 60 years worth of propaganda and education have erased the Arab’s culpability in the matter of the Palestinian question and substituted the Jews. Thus Palestinian homicide bombers attack the Jews, international media fault and castigate the Jews, and finally, it seems even the Jews themselves are blaming the Jews.
But the truth is far different than the story you’ve been told. Now that you know, I wonder what you’ll do. In case you were thinking, where did Blue Collar Muse get all these strange notions about Arabs and Palestinians? The answer is, from the Arabs and Palestinians, of course.
The quotes and sources for this article follow. They were interesting enough I wanted to include them here but not in the body of the post. You can check them out for yourself if you’ve a mind to.
The quotes below are contained in Walid Shobeat’s book, ‘Why I Left Jihad’. In my copy, they appear on pages 147-151.
Abu Mazen wrote in an article titled, ‘What We Have Learned and What We Should Do’, published in Falastin eth-Thawra, Revolutionary Palestine, the official journal of the PLO, Beirut, March 1976
The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland … The Arab states succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people.
Khaled al-Azm, who served as Prime Minister of Syria in 1948 and 1949, wrote in his memoirs that among the reasons for the Arab failure in 1948 was
… the call by the Arab Governments to the inhabitants of Palestine to evacuate it and to leave for the bordering Arab countries, after having sown terror among them … Since 1948 we have been demanding the rerturn of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave … We have brought destruction upon a million Arab refugees, by calling upon them and pleading with them to leave their land, their homes, their work and business … (Source - Khaled al-Azm’s memoirs, Beirut, 1973, part 1, pp. 386-387)
Harry C. Stebbens, who was an official in the British Mandatory Government in Palestine in 1947-48, wrote:
Long before the end of the British mandate, between January and April, ‘48, practically all my Arab Palestinian staff of some 200 men and women and all of the 1800 labor force had left Haifa in spite of every possible effort to assure them of their safety if they stayed. They all left for one of more of the following reasons:
The Arab terrorism engendered by the November, 1947, U.N. partition resolution frightened them to death of their imaginative souls and they feared Jewish retaliation.
Propagandists promised a blood bath as soon as the mandate ended in which the streets of all the cities would run with blood.
The promised invasion by the foreign Arab armies (which started on May 14, 1948, with the Arab Legion massacre of some 200 Jewish settlers at Kfar Etzion) was preceded by extensive broadcasts from Cairo, Damascus, Amman, and Beirut to the effect that any Arabs who stayed would be hanged as collaborators with the Jews.
It is true that the massacre of Deir Yassan (always quoted by the Arabs) caused some refugees. But the massacre of Kfar Etzion, the massacre of the hospital convoy which killed 48 Jewish doctors and nurses, and the continued shelling and blasting of Jewish settlements for more than 20 years, has not caused one single Israeli to move away. They sit tight, if necessary, in their shelters, while across the river where the shooting comes from, the towns and villages are deserted, last year’s crops still rot on the trees and the refugees move still further away from any trouble. (source - Harry C. Stebbens, London Evening Standard, January 10, 1969)
On September 6, 1949, the Beirut Telegraph carried an interview with Emile Ghoury, Secretary of the Palestinian Higher Committee, in which he said: “The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the act of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state.”
The Jordan daily, Falastin, stated in February, 1949: “The Arab states which had encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies, have failed to keep their promises to help these refugees.”
As late as October 12, 1963, the Cairo daily, Akhbar el-Yom, recalled: “15 May, 1948 arrived … on that very day the Mufti of Jerusalem appealed to the Arabs of Palestine to leave the country, because the Arab armies were about to enter and fight in their stead …”
A British police report to Jerusalem Headquarters in April 26, 1948 attested: “Every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab population to stay and carry on with their normal lives …”
In Haifa, on April 27, 1948, the Arab National Committee refused to sign a truce, reporting in a memorandum to the Arab League Governments: “…when the delegation entered the conference room it proudly refused to sign the truce and asked that the evacuation of the Arab population and their transfer to neighboring Arab countries be facilitated … The military and civil authorities and the Jewish representatives expressed their profound regret. The mayor of Haifa adjourned the meeting with a passionate appeal to the Arab population to reconsider its decision …”
“The refugees were confident that their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two. Their leaders had promised them that the Arab Armies would crush the ‘Zionist gangs’ very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile.” (source - Msgr. George Hakim, Greek Catholic Bishop, Sada al Janub, May 5, 1948, Beirut, as quoted in London times, August, 1948)
“Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors was the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit … It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.” (source - The Economist, October 2, 1948, London)
All of the above statements were written while the exodus of refugees-to-be was still taking place. Let’s look at statements made after the fact:
“The Arab states encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies.” (source - Falastin, editorial, February 19, 1949, Amman)
“The Arab exodus, initially at least, was encouraged by many Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin Al-Husseni, the exiled pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, and by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine. They viewed the first wave of Arab setbacks as merely transitory. Let the Palestine Arabs flee into neighboring countries. It would serve to arouse the other Arab peoples to greater effort, and when the Arab invasion struck, the Palestinians could return to their homes and be compensated with the property of Jews driven into the sea.” (source - Kenneth Bilby, New Star in the Near East, pp. 30-31, New York, 1950)
“The Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade … He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean … Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes, and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down.” (source - Habib Issa, in the daily US-published Lebanese newspaper, Al-Hoda, June 8, 1951, New York)
My apologies for some absence over the last few days. Work and Real Life have taken away from important blogosphere time. I’ve really been remiss in keeping you all aware of the goings on at the Coalition Against Illegal Immigration, CAII. To rectify that, here are the latest posts from CAII members. Enjoy …
This was a production of The Coalition Against Illegal Immigration (CAII). If you would like to participate, please go to the above link to learn more. Afterwards, email the coalition and let us know at what level you would like to participate.
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