Monday, October 15, 2007

The Horowitz-Dershowitz Catch-22


In a follow up to the last entry I will continue to point out just how biased Mr. David Horowitz is and just what type of agenda he has. I will do this by simply looking at documents he supports or places on his website or statements he himself makes. Let the unraveling begin…

Mr. Horowitz’s website is filled with all sorts of propaganda. Typical of such propaganda is historical “narratives”, if they can even be called such, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One example which appears on his site is a pamphlet by David Meir-Levi for which Mr. Horowitz wrote the introduction. In the pamphlet called “Big Lies: Demolishing the Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel” Horowitz claims that this information “restores the memory of the facts that lie at the heart of the conflict in the Middle East.”

One claim, central to so-called historical narratives such as Big Lies, is the assertion that Palestinians did not exist prior to the creation of the Israeli state and that the inhabitants of what was Israel (if any, they were not much) were Arabs NOT PALESTIANS. This is a claim that Horowitz and others like Alan Dershowitz make. Consistent with this is the claim that Palestinian nationalism does not come into being until much after 1948 in an Arab attempt reclaim Israel as legitimate Palestinian land.

We can see examples of this in “Big Lies”

“There were no “Palestinian” lands at the time because there were no people claiming to be Palestinians. There were Arabs who lived in the region of Palestine who considered themselves Syrians.”

And also in other nonsensical presentations produced by the “David Horowitz Freedom Center” like the flash presentation “Jimmy Carters War Against the Jews” which claims:

“When Israel was created in 1948, the words “Palestine” and Palestinian did not refer to an Arab people or an Arab nation.”

There is a central utility to making these claims. If your goal is to prove that there is no legitimate Palestinian claim to land which is now controlled by Israel then you want to assert that there is no such thing as Palestinians (only Arabs) and if there is, it is a post-Israel creation and therefore Arabs should be content as they already have other Arab states to call their own. Any claim for Israel by Arabs then becomes a greed filled demand for more land they could not possibly deserve.

I hope my readers understand that I am not endorsing or even challenging the accuracy of these statements. I am simply presenting them and explaining how such statements are needed to arrive to the conclusions presented by Horowtiz and others.

Recently, the new claims of Horowitz and the like is that there is an intricate connection between Islam and Fascism. We must be aware of the so-called “Islamo-Fascist” threat. In an attempt to avoid looking completely foolish Horowitz and the promulgators of the term “Islamo-Fascism” attempt to connect Palestinians, who they would like to cast as modern day enemies of the Jews, as co-conspirators with Hitler.

Research” has been conducted by a German historian on the connection between Haj Amin Al Hussieni and Adolf Hitler. I place the word research in quotes only because after reading the most contentions parts of this article and looking at the citations I cannot comment on the quality of the sources because they are all in German, a language I am not proficient in. Let us assume that the sources are reliable, as Mr. Horowitz and others like Alan Dershowitz do.

Horowitz and Dershowitz have both recently called on the connection between Hajj Amin Al Hussieni and Hitler to suggest a connection between Islam and Fascism exists. Horowitz uses this to claim that Palestinians are “the quintessential Islamo-Fascists”. Dershowitz claims that “The truth is that the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses, played a significant role in Hitler's Holocaust. The Palestinian leader at the time was Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufit of Jerusalem.”

Suddenly there is ample talk of Palestinians in the pre-war period! The alleged connections between Hussieni and Hitler go back to the 1930s. Horowitz and Dershowitz, who before loved to claim that there were no Palestinians and that Palestinian nationalism is a post-1948 invention, are supporting the idea that there was a distinct Palestinian leadership and distinct Palestinian masses and using nationalist terms to do so.

They cannot claim an Arab-Nazi connection because Jordanians, for example, fought alongside British in World War Two. In fact, it was Jordanian loyalty during WWII that earned them independence from the British Mandate. So to make the claim in any way they have to focus on one individual, Husseini, and they cannot claim that his actions represent Arabs. They still however need to claim he is not an isolated individual but rather a representative of masses which want to obliterate the Jews. So instead they are forced blame it on Palestinians and in doing so they completely contradict themselves.

People like Desrshowtiz and Horowitz should not be welcomed into academia. In the halls of higher learning one sets out to find a conclusion by doing research. Dershowitz and Horowitz routinely start out with a conclusion (based on their political agenda) and then look for “research” to support it. This inevitably leads to self-contradiction.

So what is the answer? Is there a Palestinian nationalism before the creation of the state of Israel or not? Mr. Dershowitz and Horowitz cannot have their cake and eat it too. They have to chose one answer and by doing so they will expose their politically driven agenda. If they refuse to choose they will acknowledge that agenda by default.



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