My close friend, Hyman, told me a story about a Jewish boy and a Catholic boy who were the best of friends. One day while the Jewish boy was hard at play, he felt a small hand slap him across the back of the head. Rubbing his head, he quickly turned around. It was his friend – huffing, puffing and ready to throw another blow.
“What’d-ja do that for?” he asked.
“Because the Jews killed Christ.”
“But that was over two thousand years ago!”
“Yeah, but my Mommy only told me yesterday.”
The point? Hatreds never die when we keep passing them on to the next generation.
That’s what the Palestinians are doing by constantly slapping Israel across the head over its “occupation of Palestinian lands.” That’s what race hustlers are doing by constantly slapping America across the head over the horrors of slavery, as if whites dying by the hundreds of thousands to end slavery never happened.
Spouting warped interpretations of history, disenchanted “people of color” and advocates for Palestinian “liberation” are now teaming up to make America hate again. Cocooned in the heroic language of equal justice, their twisted versions of history are anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist and wildly out of context.
In a July 12 speech, senior Hamas official Fathi Hammad urged Palestinians abroad to kill Jews everywhere and said that Palestinians will “cleanse Palestine of the filth of the Jews,” by 2022. He believes that Islam is on the threshold of a “global Islamic civilizational era,” and that a third Intifada would transform Israel into an Islamic Caliphate.
“Our patience has run out,” Hammad said. “We are on the verge of exploding. … But our brothers [in the diaspora] are still preparing.They are warming up. They have been warming up for a year and a half. A long time has passed with them warming up.Oh, you 7 million Palestinians abroad, enough of the warming up. We must attack every Jew on Planet Earth. We must slaughter and kill them, with Allah’s help.”
The next day, Hammad threatened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on TV. “We are coming to chop your heads off your necks.”
I don’t know what Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar thinks of Hammad, but they’re no doubt busy warming Americans up to the idea that it’s OK to bash Israel over its “occupation” of Palestine.For some reason, it’s a really big deal for them.
Omar introduced a resolution, July 17, to push back on laws that ban boycotting Israel.
Wrapping the anti-Israel BDS Movement into the Civil Rights Movement, Tlaib took to the floor of the House, July 23, to tell us that boycotting Israel is the same as boycotting Nazi Germany.
“The right to boycott is deeply rooted in the fabric of our country,” she said. “Where would we be now without the boycott led by civil rights activists in the 1950s and ‘60s like the Montgomery bus boycott …”
As a “daughter of Palestinian immigrants,” Tlaib said she won’t stand for restricting rights to “boycott the racist policies of the government and state of Israel.”
She’s not alone.
Wearing a red T-Shirt with the words “Free Palestine,” Temple University professor Marc Lamont-Hill told 13-year-old Palestinian journalist/activist Janna Jihad at a “Existence is Resistance” gathering in New York, July 18, that he was “hurt” and “indignant” after being let go from CNN over remarks he made during the UN’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People in November. CNN should have fired him in September after he told his audience to stop romanticizing the civil rights tradition of nonviolence at the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights conference.
“(W)e have allowed this non-violent thing to become so normative that we’re undermining our own ability to resist in real robust ways,” he said during the conference, which was titled, “Together We Rise – Resilience Across Movements.”
“That’s the challenge,” he said. “It romanticizes nonviolence, but how can you romanticize nonviolence when you have a state (Israel) that is at all moments waging war against you, against your bodies, poisoning your water, limiting your access to water, locking up your children, killing you.”
Lamont-Hill, known for his twisted version of Israeli-Palestinian history, said on July 19 that he may have gotten into trouble with CNN over the way he ended his UN speech. Expressing solidarity with Palestinians, not only “in words,” but in actions, he said, “that will give us what justice requires, and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea.”
The “river” is the Jordan River and the “sea” is the Mediterranean Sea. For Hamas, “from the river to the sea” is an open call for Israel’s destruction – a “final solution” to the Zionist occupation problem.
“From the river to the sea,” a mantra that’s also finding a home on U.S. college campuses, is really the crux of the matter.
By their actions, Palestinians scream to the world that they aren’t serious about negotiating with Israel.Read the history. If they really wanted an independent state, they’ve had many opportunities since the 1930s: The Peel Commission partition plan in 1937; the U.N. Resolution 181 partition plan in 1947; the Camp David Summit plan in 2000; and Israel’s 2008 peace offer.
After many of these negotiations, Palestinians resorted to violence, which demanded a swift Israeli response. As late as May, militants in Gaza fired 250 rockets into Israel, forcing Israeli civilians into bomb shelters for much of the day. Israel retaliated, four people were killed, and this is where Hamas gets the fresh fodder for its Israeli “occupation” horror stories: Israel defending itself.
“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children,” Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1969.“We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
Today, they still hate Israel more, and they teach their children to hate them.And if we aren’t careful, tolerating race-baiters who use warped interpretations of slavery to whip up “people of color” could grow into something we’ve never seen in America: A bottomless pit of irreconcilable animosities that never end – just like in the Middle East.
In a 2005 “60 Minutes” interview, Mike Wallace asked actor Morgan Freeman how America can get rid of racism. His answer was simple.
“Stop talking about it.”
That’s great advice.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member