ITS ALL ISRAEL´S FAULT!

I knew it would come but I did not reckon quite so quickly. This is amazing and depressing. Read this by Lee Kaplan. (Read www.israpundit.com)

A UC Berkeley professor joins with the LA Times to blame Israel for Hamas victory
By Lee Kaplan

The late Palestinian-American professor Edward Said, the father of Palestinian academic nonsense on US college campus, once said, “Facts don’t matter, only emotions matter. Write your own history.”

An apt pupil of this school of thought, Beshara Doumani, the professor of Middle East studies at UC Berkeley, writes in the LA Times today that the Hamas victory in the Palestinian Authority was engineered by Israel.

There must be some logic or validity to such a premise for the LA Times to run such an opinion, right? After all, a college professor, a PhD in middle east history no less, wrote it.

Such a premise, of course, should come as no surprise from a UC Berkeley middle east studies professor who comes from a campus known for its embracing anti-Israel causes, no matter how ridiculous. Doumani’s associate, Professor Hatem Bazian, once called for an Intifada in America, Hamas-style.According to Doumani, “The mantra ‘there is no partner for peace’ has been an ironclad law of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians since the days of the British Mandate ” and “It wasn't really Hamas that eviscerated Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah in the elections. It was the Israeli governments that engineered the failure of the "peace process" to produce fruit, and the Fatah leadership's gluttony that blinded them to the consequences of their own failures. Still, the Hamas victory will make it much easier for Israel to sell the "no partner for peace" line.”

Doumani of course relies on his readers being just as ignorant of history as the editors at the LA Times. He ignores the “three No’s” of the Arab world since 1967: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with it as he blames Israel for a Hamas win.

The LA Times considers Doumani’s article a valid opinion article because of the author’s background as an “academic.” (I will await similar on the Irish media scene)The fact that Israel did not want to allow Hamas to run somehow escaped the history professor’s fact book. The fact that Israel gave up half the territory under its control, brought Arafat out of exile in Tunis, and provided 70% of the funding to help the PLO create a new state to bring about a peace settlement, only to become the victim of over 25,000 relentless terrorist attacks for thirteen years, is of no importance to a historian like Doumani who also teaches at a university where one course taught in the past that Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America, Muslims did it.

Such an article by Doumani illustrates how the educational standards of the Muslim world have crept into American society. One could not create a more Orwellian manner of discussing current events in the Middle East than the LA Times does by even just giving space to Doumani’s nonsense.

Israel was opposed to Hamas running in the election because it is a terrorist group-period. The US State Department insisted Hamas be allowed to do it. Hamas won. Like Abraham Lincoln said, you can’t fool all the people all the time. That is, unless they read the LA Times where an Arab professor might have a shot at trying to do so.

And history professor Doumani does a good job as he continues with the Edward Said rant of appealing to emotions over facts: “After Oslo, the daily life of Palestinians in the occupied territories has deteriorated to almost subhuman levels, largely because of Israeli policies. The best that people hope for is to keep their heads above water and pray that their society will not suffer a complete collapse. At times like these, people turn to God and to each other. Hamas has helped them to do both, and it has something to show for it.”

Now, that’s a mouthful of words where in one fell swoop he faults Israel for Hamas’ win then praises the same terrorist group that refuses to make peace with Israel for saving the Palestinian people and reinforcing their mutual self-concern and love of God.

I just came back from the West Bank last June and if Americans only saw the villas and luxury homes going up in Ramallah and the West Bank, funded in part by their USAID tax dollars, they’d be frothing at the mouth. I certainly was. (This is amazing. This is so much against all we have heard about the disposssessed Palestinians. I have asked Israpundit to try to get photographs)

With foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority running one billion dollars a year from the EU and USA, the 3.2 million Palestinians just can’t seem to get down to building a civil society. Maybe they should sell a few guns or bombs, because that’s where their money goes. The votes for Hamas are because of a culture that has been nurtured in the Arab world that always blames “the other” for mistakes made. In this case, that “other” is Israel and the United States.

It’s about time people in America wake up to what is passing as the new intelligentsia exported from the totalitarian Arab world to the classrooms and colleges in the United States. Doumani should not even have been given the time of day by the LA Times, a newspaper that chose instead to give exposure by a terrorism apologist to an audience of millions so he could try to and pass off the same tired line of the PLO: Israel’s existence is the fault for everything.