| Submit your comments on this article |
| Iraq-Jordan |
| Kurds Exercise Right to Return to Lands Stolen By Arabs |
| 2004-08-06 |
| From Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty The Kurdish weekly Hawlati reported on 4 August that 14,000 Kurdish families have returned to the city of Kirkuk and the surrounding areas since the fall of the Hussein regime in April 2003. The weekly also reported that some 3,400 Arab families have left the city and returned to southern Iraq. The governor's deputy for settlement and compensation matters, Hasib Rozhbayani, told Hawlati that 3,332 Arab families left Kirkuk, many of them selling their houses. He claimed that many Kurds displaced from the city under the Hussein regime's Arabization program have been able to reclaim their land in the city. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #4 Paleos' right of return "argument", such as it is, bears no relation whatsoever to the Kurds' situation. For one thing Kurds are not Arabs, and are hated by Arabs and they were quite literally ripped out of their homes by Arabs under Saddam's orders. Furthermore, Kurds actually existed as a legitimate separate group historically dating back to ancient times. According to historian William Westermann, "The Kurds can present a better claim to race purity...than any people which now inhabits Europe." However Paleos as a distinctive group in Arab culture is a fairly recent separate entity as compared to the history of Kurds. Read the following for the historical background of the cultural entity known as Palestinians: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003690 "Where Hatred Trumps Bread: What does the Palestinian nation offer the world?"by Cynthia Ozick, June 30, 2003 Wall Street Journal When, some years ago, Golda Meir contentiously remarked, "There are no Palestinians," she was historically correct and evolutionally mistaken. She was right because the people who had only recently begun to take on the name "Palestinian" were ethnically and civilizationally Arab, part of what the Arabs themselves were pleased to call, with the poetic resonance of indivisibility, "the Arab Nation." Palestine, moreover, had its origin as a term of malice, the Roman invaders' way of erasing Judea by naming it after the Philistines who warred against the Jews. And like the Palestinians today, who deny the ancient reality of the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, the emperor Hadrian also had the distinction of reassigning the history of Jerusalem; he dubbed it Aelia Capitolina, in honor of Jupiter. Yet at the same time Golda Meir was mistaken: She declined to recognize a growing sectarianism rooted not merely in the bitterness of contemporary politics--the Arab war against the Jews--but far more comprehensively in a particularized and developing cultism. Whether the Palestinians nowadays constitute a cult or a sect or a nation within the greater Arab world is scarcely to the point. They have become a nation in their own eyes--and, with the blessings of the road map, internationally as well. Nevertheless it is not the determination of political borders that makes a nation; a nation is defined by its traits and usages, by its heroes and aspirations--in short, by its culture. History, in Benedetto Croce's formulation, "is about the positive and not the negative." No one can refute the truth that the Palestinians have fashioned a culture peculiarly their own--but one so steeped in the negative as to have been turned into a kind of anti-history. In order to deprive Jews of their patrimony, Palestinians have fabricated a sectarian narrative alien to commonplace knowledge. Although the Arab invasion of Palestine did not occur until the 17th century, Palestinian Arabs are declared to be, according to activist Salah Jabr, "the descendants of civilizations that have lived in this land since the Stone Age." With equal absurdity, other such deniers of Jewish patrimony claim a Canaanite bloodline. By replacing history with fantasy, the Palestinians have invented a society unlike any other, where hatred trumps bread. They have reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors. And they have been assisted in these deviations by Arab rulers who for half a century have purposefully and pitilessly caged and stigmatized them as refugees, down to the fourth generation. Refugeeism, abetted also by the United Nations, has itself been joined to the Palestinian cult of anti-history. A people respectful of history, including its own above all, will work to fructify and invigorate life; it will not debase and vitiate it. The salient attribute of any culture is originality and its legacies. Genius, no matter how rare, is a human universal. It sends into the world new perception and new experience, inspiring duplication: Out of Israel came monotheism, out of Greece philosophy, out of Arab civilization science and poetry, out of England the Magna Carta, out of France the Enlightenment. What has been the genius of Palestinian originality, what has been the contribution of the evolving culture of Palestinian sectarianism? On the international scene: airplane hijackings and the murder of American diplomats in the 1970s, Olympic slaughterings and shipboard murders in the 1980s. And toward the Jews of the Holy Land, beginning in the 1920s and continuing until this morning, terror, terror, terror, terror... |
| Posted by: rex 2004-08-06 4:29:52 PM |
| #3 No, the Iraqi Arabs don't have nukes... |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-08-06 4:05:17 PM |
| #2 Am I the omly one who sees this as being used by the Paleos to excercise the "Right of Return" and reclaim lands abandonned, note I said abandonned in the 1948 and 1967 wars |
| Posted by: cheaderhead 2004-08-06 4:02:07 PM |
| #1 Thanks for posting this, Mike! |
| Posted by: .com 2004-08-06 12:04:16 PM |