A scene from an Egyptian Spring, Tahrir Square May 13 -->


May 15, Nakba Day

"Let’s keep in mind ... that Nakba Day isn’t about establishing some kind of peaceful Palestinian state outside of Israel’s 1967 borders. It’s a “holiday” that marks and celebrates full-blown Arab rejectionism of any Jewish State anywhere in the Middle East. In 1948 the hope was to eradicate Israel by crushing it with the military power of five Arab armies. In 2011 the hope is to eradicate Israel by overrunning it with 3 million fifth-generation “refugees,” a population drawn from UN camps and routinely identified as the most virulently anti-Israel in the Arab world. This latter scheme, of course, is the famous “right of return,” institutionalized among other places in the Saudi plan.

The meaning of Nakba Day isn’t really up for debate. Elsewhere in Israeli-Arab reality, there’s room for Middle East analysts to insist that the Palestinians don’t actually mean what they say they mean (“sure that Palestinian Authority official just advocated mass genocide of ‘Jewish swine’ and said that the peace process is a two-phase strategy of destroying Israel, but he meant it moderately!”) Nakba Day is impossible to spin. It stands for hysteria about Israel’s creation as such. The giant photojournalism-friendly keys carried around by rioters aren’t allusions to nice villas in Bethlehem. They are references to villages never seen by the refugees’ parents’ parents’ but to which Palestinians still insist they have a right."

Here is some agreement from the former Scholar-in-Residence at Middle East Institute in Washington DC, former free-lance Middle East consultant for NBC News and ABC News and now professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley,
aka Angry Arab:

"On this sad day, one should pledge to the people of Palestine that: We shall not forget; we shall not forgive, ever. That we shall count your dead and injured, one by one. That we know that all Israeli crimes are registered in notebooks--as Mahmud Darwish had said. We pledge that we are committed to: No peace with Israel. No Negotiation with Israel. No recognition of Israel. That all the deeds and treaties by Arab tyrants represent their oil and their polygamous ruling families and the external backers they have. That they don't ever speak for the Arab people. We pledge full return AND compensation. And when Palestine is liberated, we should ensure a safe and peaceful and democratic and secular transfer of power. All flags of Zionist occupation will be discarded but can be used as bathroom mats--we should commit to recycling in liberated Palestine. "

In this TVO, courtesy of Ibishblog, at 42 minutes into the vid, the conversation turns of justice and dignity for the Palestinians.

Take a look and listen carefully. The honourable panelists all agree that Palestinians long for that kind of acknowledgement from Israel. Really? Is this the impression you get from reading the message that emanates from the Arab nutcase quoted above? Is "peaceful and democratic and secular transfer of power" his suit, you think? And why should we care what he says? Because, as I indicated several times before, it is his positions, his incontinent bile, his implacable hatred, that most truly represent that mindset of the Arab Street. If you don't believe me, if you think I overstate the matter, all you need to do is have the guts to look up editorials written in the Arab media, visit Arab blogs, venture into Muslim-Arab message boards, in order to check for yourselves whether my reading is correct.