The American front of the war against Israel
What do you get when you put a deep and wide fund of knowledge, a logical mind, and a profound intellect into the service of a single article? You get Richard Baehr’s article at The American Thinker entitled “The War in American against Israel (part one).” Unsurprisingly, Mr. Baehr does a meticulous, but never boring, deconstruction of the situation in which Israel now finds herself vis a vis the Palestinians and the rest of the world, and goes on to predict coming events as we near the 40th Anniversary of the Six Day War and the trial of two AIPAC employees accused of espionage. The following paragraphs will give you a small taste of the intellectual pleasures that await you (and the knowledge you will gain) if you read Mr. Baehr’s article:
The New York Times has already revealed that it is preparing a series of articles commemorating the Six Day War, during which Israel took control of the West Bank from Jordan. (Jordan had seized and annexed the West Bank after Israel’s 1948 war of Independence). In that same Six Day War, Israel took the Golan Heights (from which Syria had shelled Israeli farmers in the Galilee for decades) from Syria, Gaza (which Egypt had seized in the 1948 war and then occupied, and which was given by Israel to the Palestinians in 2005) and the Sinai peninsula from Egypt. The Sinai was returned in its entirety to Egypt after the Camp David accord of 1979.
Given the laziness of many members of the journalistic class, a major story in the New York Times such as this one will be borrowed or excerpted by many other newspapers. We can predict the themes of this coming New York Times assault on Israel, from reading a recent article by Steve Erlanger, the Times’ bureau chief in Israel, and a recent column by Nicholas Kristof.
In short, we can expect that Israel will be accused of maintaining a brutal occupation of Palestinian lands for 40 years after the war. More than any other single factor, it will be argued that this is the primary cause of the worldwide Muslim hostility towards Israel, to its principal ally America, and to the instability and ferment in the broader Muslim world.
Exactly how the Israeli Palestinian conflict has been the cause or related in any way to the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir, or the violence in Muslim areas of Thailand and the Philippines, or the eight year, million casualty Iran-Iraq war, or the civil war in Lebanon, or the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, or Serbian violence against Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, or the sectarian violence in Iraq, will not be explained. It is enough to know that Muslims are unhappy with the plight of the Palestinians, so ergo, the turmoil all along the Muslim world’s intersection with the non-Muslim world, must be linked to Israeli wickedness.
I urge you to read the rest and I know that, as I do, you’ll be looking forward to coming installments. Incidentally, I figure in a small way in the article, since Mr. Baehr links to the first in a series of posts I did about how the American press viewed the Six Day War at the time it actually took place. I urge you to read that post, as well as part II and part III, since they are eye openers when compared with modern coverage of the Middle East.
