Osama bin Laden's Fallacy

by Nadene Goldfoot

This Al-Qaeda chief is quite angry about Bush celebrating Israel's birthday in Israel. He vowed that the Muslims would fight and not give up one inch of Palestine in a taped message today.

He tells a history that comes out of a fictitious novel. He and his people have told the same lies so often that they probably believe it themselves.

As Victor Sharpe recently wrote, a two state solution was offered the Arabs 86 years ago and they turned it down then and have been doing so ever since. They only began to get the idea of having their own state after the 1967 war, which they started and lost. Then, what they really wanted was the little state of Israel minus the Jews.

Jordan took advantage of the offer and gained 35,000 sqare miles that was handed over to Emir Abdullah in 1922. There went most of what was to be the Jewish state. The land called Palestine was never a state; it was a named area, named from the Romans to eradicate the Jewish heritage. It was overseen by the Ottoman Empire, and when they crumbled, Great Britain was given the mandate to oversee the area. Then, there were very very few Arabs living there and none of them had any reason to want their own state. They had wandered there from their other homelands surrounding the area when looking for work.

As for our occupying Arab territory, it isn't true, either. If the Arabs hadn't attacked us in 1967, we wouldn't have won the war which in turn gave us the land. Originally it had been ours, and it was a surprise blessing to get it back. It was a lesson: fight Israel and you will lose not only the war but more. The land was not the "Palestinians" anyway. It was under Egypt and Jordan's control.

They were given the opportunity at every step of the way to have their own state, and they always refused the offer. Unlike Israel, we took the sliver we were finally given when originally we were promised the whole territory of Palestine. We were grateful. The Palestinians are not of the same ilk. They're just greedy, intolerant and hateful.

Bin Laden is a real trouble-maker. He has encouraged Muslims to support the war in Iraq in order to help the Palestinians. He calls the present rocket attacks on Israel the "Gaza massacre", referring to the retaliation from Israel. He must be absolutely mad to think that Israel would quietly sit and not respond to constant shelling in its land. There is not a country in the world who is that insane. We are not going to retaliate with slings and arrows, for heavens sake. They're firing rockets at us, and eventually the peacemaker Olmert gets around to appeasing the people of Sderot and Ashkelon and surrounding area with a retaliation hoping to squelch further attacks. It must make the Hamas terrorists joyous when we do this, as then they have fodder for their mill of hateful propaganda about Israel. Their little soundbites of "not give up one inch of Palestine" causes most Americans to conclude that Israel is taking Palestinian land and that's what the fight is all about. Heaven help us!

Reference: Yahoo News by Lydia Georgi "Bin Laden slams West over Israel, vows to fight on.

Victor Sharpe: The Two-State Solution is 86 Years Old