Palestinians Angry! Dog Bites Man! Sun Rises in East! Monday Follows Sunday! Obama Plays Golf!

Slow day, so I read the BBC. Even more so than the NY Times, the once-reputable BBC, the BBC of coded messages to the anti-Nazi resistance, now can be trusted only to provide a glimpse into the oh-so conventional, predictable, and uninteresting leftist mindset which dominates the news media in the West. The Palestinians are angry a headline on the BBC website tells us. They are angry because Israelis are building homes in Jerusalem and the West Bank. If they weren't building them, would the Palestinians be less angry? I wonder.

It's Sunday. I am waiting for my son to come help me move patio furniture into the garage so we can rip up our backyard tomorrow and then pave it over. My wife, the hater of all things nature, the woman who loves her two SUVs, the one who has declared "I will go to the beach when it is paved and all the sharks are dead," has decreed no more grass, bushes, trees, etc., in the Diployard. Paving stones as far as the eye can see! So when dealing with demands to pave an area, I, of course, think of the Middle East.

Let's start with basics. The whole Palestinian homeland bit is a massive scam. Palestinians are Arabs just like the folks in Jordan and Egypt--Arafat was born in Cairo. When the Arab states invaded the nascent state of Israel in 1948, they did not do so for a Palestinian homeland. They just wanted to kill Jews, drive them into the ocean, and eliminate Western influence from the region. Egypt, Jordan, and Syria intended to take the tiny parcel of land allocated to the Jews by the UN and keep it. No Palestinian homeland, no "two state solution," just another "final solution" which would have seen tens-of-thousands of Jews killed, including those born in "Palestine," yes, Jews were also "Palestinians." That's all. Period.

After the Arab states got their clocks cleaned, we began to hear the baying about a Palestine homeland which just so happened to coincide exactly with the boundaries of Israel. Amazing how that happens! Wherever Jews lived, THAT formed part of the Palestinian homeland. Jordan, of course, had the West Bank from 1948 to 1967; at no time was that then considered part of this definition of the "Palestinian" homeland. It was part of Jordan. There were no international cries to free that portion of Palestine from Jordanian occupation. The West Bank became part of the "homeland" only when Israel took it from Jordan in the Six Day War.

We also saw the amazing phenomenon of Palestinian refugees. Arabs displaced by fighting started by Arabs were dumped by Arabs on the tender mercies of the UN. The Arab countries wanted nothing to do with them. The UN being all about programs, of course, created the monstrosities known as Palestinian refugee camps, and established a massive money-sucking bureaucracy to administer them and beg for ever greater amounts of money--most of it from Western countries, including the USA. These camps, really mini versions of Detroit, held tens-of-thousands of people with nothing to do except get free stuff, and, of course, listen to political hacks lecture them about the perfidious Jews and Westerners, and recruit them into violent gangs. Please note that between 1948 and 1967, some one million Jews were expelled from their homes in Arab countries, such as Iraq. There were no UN refuge camps for them; no international bureaucracies set up to protect and "guide" them. No. They moved, and as refugees have done since time immemorial, got on with their lives. I also would note there were no perennial UN programs for the refugees from East Germany. No. West Germany absorbed them into its society and that was that. The same with the Poles and the many other Eastern Europeans displaced by Soviet Communism. No UN programs for them.

That murderous hypocrisy has continued to this day: What is held by the Arabs belongs to the Arabs; what is held by Israel belongs to . . . surprise! . . . the Arabs! When Arab pathologies create a humanitarian mess, the West gets to clean it up. We could expect this nonsense from the corrupt Arab regimes, but it has become a staple of Western leftist thought, as well. We see this in the hysteria over Jewish settlements. It seems that the UN and much of the West have bought the idea that Jews cannot live near Muslims. Areas seen as once Muslim must remain that way forever. That is certainly how Islamists think when, for example, they turn their attention to Spain.

Most interesting, we hear nothing about the million or so Arabs with Israeli citizenship, the freest and most prosperous Arabs in the Middle East. If Jews cannot live among Muslims, should the reverse be true, as well? Should the Israelis kick out the million Arabs in Israel in retaliation for the million Jews kicked out of Arab lands? Maybe the BBC can tell us.

Nothing to see here, move along. Take that Adirondack chair with you.

WLA