OxBlog

Sunday, January 05, 2003

# Posted 10:13 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

PREACHING TO THE CONVERTED: Is it OK, if sometimes, instead of reading to learn, you read out of spite? I sort of felt that way while reading this Weekly Standard piece about the Palestinians. It didn't say much new, but it said it well. Here is a sampling of some of the goodies:
Even if Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, this would not affect in the slightest the tensions [within the Arab world]...It is helpful to remember that all of the dead in the Arab-Israeli wars of the past half century amount to only a tiny fraction of the million killed during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the 100,000 killed in Algeria's civil war since 1992, or the 100,000 killed in Lebanon's civil war from 1975 to 1990.
Or:
For the Europeans, championing the Palestinian cause allows them to assuage lingering colonial guilt by championing the aspirations of a Third World people who claim to be oppressed by Western imperialists--in this case, Israelis. It also allows Europeans to trumpet their moral superiority over pro-Israel Americans. And, last but not least, it allows them to curry favor with both oil-rich Arab states and their own growing Muslim minorities.
Or:
All the Arab states combined donate less than $7 million to UNRWA [the UN body responsible for the refugee camps], just 2.4 percent of its $290 million budget. (Kuwait, Egypt, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates collectively contribute a grand total of zero.) By contrast, the Great Satan forks over $110 million, or 38 percent of UNRWA's budget. The Arabs prefer to spend their money to support Palestinian suicide bombers. Saddam Hussein alone has paid an estimated $20 million over the past two years to "martyrs'" families.
And finally:
Arafat's wife Suha has generously said that there would be "no greater honor" than to sacrifice her son as a martyr. But she doesn't have a son. She has a daughter and they live in Paris.
These things are sort of like potato chips. You can't have just one.
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