Diary: Neo-Christians

"No issue however has generated more anti-Arab racism than Israel's occupation of Palestine. Popular governmental support for Israel has amplified the importance of Arabs to American foreign policy.

"More important, Israel's well accepted rationalizations for occupying and settling the territories-security, terrorism, divine mandate, and so forth-necessarily subordinate Palestinians to an inferior position vis-�-vis Israeli Jews-and by extension, Americans.

"Because Israel is a staunch ally of the USA and is the subject of much media coverage, the Palestinians are represented overwhelmingly in America media. These representations, which often marginalize Palestinians by privileging Israeli narratives of suffering, produce a rhetorical framework in which anti-Arab racism flourishes. In fact, I would argue that Zionists [Christian and Jewish] in the USA are the biggest progenitors of Anti-Arab racism today." [*Steven Salita, "Anti-Arab Racism in the USA" page 35]

This is NOT saying Zionism is racist, but Zionists have been most successful in selling their story. Suicide/homicide bombers are invoked ad-nauseum, by the USA media, but the brutal 40 year occupation to which the suicide/homicide bombings are the direct result of, is never even mentioned by the MSM. It is always the Palestinians who are the perpetrators of violence and never a word in the media about how Zionists groups, such as AIPAC, Jewish Defense League, Americans for a Safe Israel, Friends of Israel, Christian Coalition, and Christians for Israel, in the USA openly work to rationalize Israeli violence.

Not a word is mentioned by the USA MSM and neo-Christians about the fact that USA sanctions against Iraq during the 1990's resulted in the deaths of one half million innocent Iraqi children.

Not a word is mentioned by the USA MSM and neo-Christians that the current death toll from USA actions in Iraq have resulted in the deaths of more innocent Iraqis than Saddam killed.

Not a word is mentioned by USA MSM and neo-Christians that Ben Gurion openly claimed, "We must expel Arabs and take their places" and "I favor compulsory transfer-I see nothing unethical about it."

Not a word is mentioned by USA MSM and neo-Christians that in 1973 Ariel Sharon told Winston Churchill III, "We'll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We'll insert a strip of Jewish settlement in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlement, right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart."

Only the august "Washington Report On Middle East Affairs" has reported that nine out of the top ten career recipients of pro-Israel PAC funds in the House were Democrats and eight out of ten in the Senate and that during the 2004 contribution cycle the top ten recipients were Democrats in both House and Senate.

USA blind support of Israel and silence regarding Israel's blatant defiance of International Law testifies to the pervasiveness of anti-Arab racism in America.

Israel is NOT a democracy, but an ethnocracy: full right to Jews but none for the indigenous 3.5 million Palestinians in the territories and the 1.2 million in Israel. Only the stupid do not comprehend that it is apartheid when Jewish only by-pass roads that cut through Palestinian farmlands are for illegal settlers; squatters only. Only those in deep denial refuse to believe that 90% of West Bank water is used by illegal colonists who make up 10% of the West Bank population. Only the blind fail to see the injustice when illegal settlers who murder a Palestinian will -if even tried-only receive community service as a punishment, while any Palestinian even suspected of murdering an Israeli will reap the destruction of their entire neighborhood by the Israeli Occupying Forces.

3.5 million Palestinians in the OPT have no right to purchase property, no freedom of movement, no reliable legal recourse when their homes are demolished, or if they are arrested, have their land confiscated. The facts on the ground are that Palestinians have no civil rights and no human rights.

These are but a few examples of the irrefutable evidence that apartheid and ethnic cleansing is Israeli governmental policy.

In WWII, six million Jews were exterminated by a people who regarded them as racially and ethnically inferior. After WWII, a Jewish only state centered on Jewish only history, values and traditions was established in the Arab world. The historical fact is that the Garden of Eden was in the area we now know as Iraq, so why were the Palestinians chosen to atone for the sins of the Holocaust in which they played absolutely no part?

On November 10, 1975, UN resolution 3379 compared Israel to apartheid South Africa and called Zionism "a form of racism and racial discrimination."

After much lobbying, the UN passed Resolution 46/86 in 1991 which rescinded 3379, as a precondition for Israel attending the Madrid Peace Conference organized by President Bush, Sr.

How is it, that an occupation founded by illegal colonization with laws based on racial discrimination with the continuing domination of military blockades, curfews, an illegal wall that grabs Palestinian resources and divides families and blatantly defies the principals of the Charter of the UN and International Law upon which it's very founding was contingent, is not apartheid?

How can it be that these crimes against humanity are never mentioned by the USA MSM and neo-Christians?

A media that belabors the ludicrous fringe minority of Palestinians who call for the destruction of Israel, but ignore the many members of the Knesset that openly call for the deportation of all Arabs from the Holy Land is a media that has failed miserably at its commission to seek and report the truth.

"We have seen the enemy and he is US."-Pogo

Unless USA foreign policy changes soon, it is far more likely that the indigenous people of Palestine will be destroyed than the hypocrisy of the democracy known as Israel.

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*Steven Salita is an Arab Christian, Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and the author of Anti-Arab Racism in the USA.

Salita held a workshop during the United for Peace and Justice lobby networking day following the historic March in DC where a half a million patriotic, thoughtful, committed American citizens rose up and surrounded The Capitol building on January 27, 2007 to demand an END to the WAR and Occupation of Iraq.