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Who Truly Deserves a State? The Kurds or
the Palestinians?
19.2.2012
By Victor Sharpe
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American Thinker |
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Victor Sharpe is a freelance
writer and author of the trilogy Politicide: The
attempted murder of the Jewish state.
February 19, 2012
There are over twenty Arab states throughout the
Middle East and North Africa, but the world demands,
in a chorus of barely disguised animosity towards
Israel, that yet another Arab state be created
within the mere forty miles separating the
Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan.
Israel, a territory no larger than the tiny
principality of Wales or the state of New Jersey,
would be forced to share this sliver of land with a
new and hostile Arab entity to be called Palestine,
while seeing its present narrow waist reduced to a
mere and suicidal nine miles in width -- what an
earlier Israeli statesman, Abba Eban, described as
the Auschwitz borders.
Remember, there has never existed in all of recorded
history an independent sovereign nation called
Palestine -- and certainly not an Arab one. The term
"Palestine" has always been the name of a
geographical territory, such as Siberia or
Patagonia. It has never been a state.
But there is a people who, like the Jews, deserves a
homeland and truly can trace their ancestry back
thousands of years. They are the Kurds, and it is
highly instructive to review their remarkable
history in conjunction with that of the Jews. It is
also necessary to review the historical injustice
imposed upon them over the centuries by hostile
neighbors and empires.
Let us go back to the captivity of the Ten Tribes of
Israel, who were taken from their land by the
Assyrians in 721-715 BC. Biblical Israel was
depopulated, its Jewish inhabitants deported to an
area in the region of ancient Media and Assyria -- a
territory roughly corresponding to that of
modern-day Kurdistan.
Assyria was, in turn, conquered by Babylonia, which
led to the eventual destruction of the southern
Jewish kingdom of Judah in 586 BC. The remaining two
Jewish tribes were sent to the same area as that of
their brethren from the northern kingdom.
When the Persian conqueror of Babylonia, Cyrus the
Great, allowed the Jews to return to their ancestral
lands, many Jews remained (and continued to live)
with their neighbors in Babylon -- an area which,
again, included modern-day Kurdistan.
The Babylonian Talmud refers in one section to the
Jewish deportees from Judah receiving rabbinical
permission to offer Judaism to the local population.
The Kurdish royal house and a large segment of the
general population in later years accepted the
Jewish faith. Indeed, when the Jews rose up against
Roman occupation in the 1st century AD, the Kurdish
queen sent troops and provisions to support the
embattled Jews.
By the beginning of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was
firmly established in Kurdistan, and Kurdish Jews in
Israel today speak an ancient form of Aramaic in
their homes and synagogues. Kurdish and Jewish life
became interwoven to such a remarkable degree that
many Kurdish folk tales are connected with Jews'.
It is interesting to note that several tombs of
biblical Jewish prophets are to be found in or near
Kurdistan. For example, the prophet Nachum is in
Alikush, while Jonah's tomb can be found in Nabi
Yunis, which is ancient Nineveh. Daniel's tomb is in
the oil-rich Kurdistan province of Kirkuk; Habbabuk
is in Tuisirkan; and Queen Hadassah, or Esther,
along with her uncle Mordechai, is in Hamadan.
After the failed revolt against Rome, many rabbis
found refuge in what is now Kurdistan. The rabbis
joined with their fellow scholars, and by the 3rd
century AD, Jewish academies were flourishing. But
the later Sassanid and Persian occupations of the
region ushered in a time of persecution for the Jews
and Kurds,www.ekurd.net
which lasted until the Muslim Arab invasion in the
7th century. Indeed, the Jews and Kurds joined with
the invading Arabs in the hope that their action
would bring relief from the Sassanid depredations
they had suffered.
Shortly after the Arab conquest, Jews from the
autonomous Jewish state of Himyar in what is today's
Saudi Arabia joined the Jews in the Kurdish regions.
However, under the now-Muslim Arab occupation,
matters worsened, and the Jews suffered as dhimmis
in the Muslim-controlled territory. The Jews found
themselves driven from their agricultural lands
because of onerous taxation by their Muslim
overlords. They thus left the land to become traders
and craftsmen in the cities. Many of the Jewish
peasants were converted to Islam by force or by dire
circumstances and intermarried with their neighbors.
From out of this population arose a great historical
figure. In 1138, a boy was born into a family of
Kurdish warriors and adventurers. His name was Salah-al-Din
Yusuf ibn Ayyub -- better known in the West as
Saladin. He drove the Christian crusaders out of
Jerusalem even though he was distrusted by the
Muslim Arabs because he was a Kurd. Even then, the
Arabs were aware of the close relationship that
existed between the Kurdish people and the Jews.
Saladin employed justice and humane measures in both
war and peace. This was in contrast to the methods
employed by the Arabs. Indeed, it is believed that
Saladin not only was just to the Christians, but he
allowed the Jews to flourish in Jerusalem and is
credited with finding the Western Wall of the Jewish
Temple, which had been buried under tons of rubbish
during the Christian Byzantine occupation. The great
Jewish rabbi, philosopher, and doctor Maimonides was
for a time Saladin's personal physician.
According to a team of international scientists, a
remarkable discovery was made in 2001. Doing DNA
research, a team of Israeli, German, and Indian
scientists found that many modern Jews have a closer
genetic relationship to populations in the northern
Mediterranean area (Kurds and Armenians) than to the
Arabs and Bedouins of the southern Mediterranean
region.
But let us return to the present day and to why the
world clamors for a Palestinian Arab state but
strangely turns its back upon Kurdish national
independence and statehood. The universally accepted
principle of self-determination seems not to apply
to the Kurds.
In an article in the New York Sun on 6 July 2004
titled "The Kurdish Statehood Exception," Hillel
Halkin exposed the discrimination and double
standards employed against Kurdish aspirations of
statehood. He wrote, "[T]he historic injustices done
to them and their suffering over the years can be
adequately redressed within the framework of a
federal Iraq, in which they will have to make do --
subject to the consent of a central, Arab-dominated
government in Baghdad -- with mere autonomy. Full
Kurdish statehood is unthinkable. This, too, is
considered to be self-evident."
The brutal fact in realpolitik, therefore, is that
the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians have many
friends in the oil-rich Arab world -- oil the world
desperately needs for its economies. The Kurds, like
the Jews, have few friends, and the Kurds have
little or no influence in the international
corridors of power.
Mr. Halkin pointed out that "the Kurds have a far
better case for statehood than do the Palestinians.
They have their own unique language and culture,
which the Palestinian Arabs do not have. They have
had a sense of themselves as a distinct people for
many centuries, which the Palestinian Arabs have not
had. They have been betrayed repeatedly in the past
100 years by the international community and its
promises, while the Palestinian Arabs have been
betrayed only by their fellow Arabs."
The old nostrum, therefore, that only when the
Palestinian Arabs finally have a state will there be
peace in the world is a mirage in the desert. Fellow
writer Gerald Honigman also writes on the world's
preoccupation with the Arabs who call themselves
Palestinians while ignoring the plight of the Kurds,
Berbers, and millions of other non-Arab peoples of
the Middle East and North Africa. Honigman's book
was part of the LSS exhibit at the prestigious ASMEA
Conference of scholars last November (and is now in
at least a dozen major universities so far) and has
several chapters focusing on the Kurdish issue. It's
no accident that its foreword was written mostly by
the President of the Kurdistan National Assembly of
Syria.
During the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the Kurds were
gassed and slaughtered in large numbers. They
suffered ethnic cleansing by the Turks and continue
to be oppressed by the present Turkish government,
whose foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, had the
gall to suggest, at a meeting of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, that Turkey
supports the oppressed of the world. He ignored his
own government's oppression of the Kurds and
predictably named the anti-Semitic thugdom in Gaza
"oppressed." On the basis of pure realpolitik, the
legality and morality of the Kurds' cause is
infinitely stronger than that of the Arabs who call
themselves Palestinians.
On the other hand, after the overthrow of Saddam
Hussein, the Kurds displayed great political and
economic wisdom. How different from the example of
the Gazan Arabs who, when foolishly given full
control over the Gaza Strip by Israel, chose not to
build hospitals and schools, but instead bunkers and
missile launchers. To this they have added the
imposition of sharia law, with its attendant
denigration of women and non-Muslims.
The Kurdish experiment, in at least the territory's
current quasi-independence, has shown the world a
decent society where all its inhabitants, men and
women, enjoy far greater freedoms than can be found
anywhere else in the Arab and Muslim world -- and
certainly anywhere else in Iraq, which is fast
descending into ethnic chaos now that the U.S.
military has left.
Barack Obama, David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Nicolas
Sarkozy, and all the leaders of the free world
should look to Kurdistan, with its huge oil
reserves, as the new state that needs to be created
in the Middle East. It is simple and natural
justice, which is far too long overdue. A
Palestinian Arab state, on the other hand, will
immediately become a haven for anti-Western
terrorism, a base for al-Qaeda and Hamas (the junior
partner of the Muslim Brotherhood), and a
non-democratic land carved out of the Jewish
ancestral and biblical lands of Judea and Samaria
upon which the stultifying shroud of sharia law will
inevitably descend. In short, it will be established
with one purpose: to destroy what is left of
embattled Israel.
Finally, it is also natural justice for the Jewish
State -- with its millennial association of shared
history alongside the Kurdish people, who number
over 30,000,000, scattered throughout northwestern
Iran, northern Iraq, Syria and Turkey -- to fight in
the world's forums for the speedy establishment of
an independent and proud Kurdistan. An enduring
alliance between Israel and Kurdistan would be a
vindication of history, a recognition of the shared
sufferings of both peoples, and bring closer the
advent of a brighter future for both non-Arab
nations.
Mahmoud Abbas, Holocaust denier and present
president of the Palestinian Authority, has never,
and will never, abrogate publicly in English or in
Arabic the articles in Fatah's constitution, which
call for the "obliteration of Zionist economic,
political, military and cultural existence" -- or,
in other words, the destruction of the Jewish State
and the genocide of its citizens. So much for the
man President Obama and the Europeans shower with
money and praise.
It is the Kurds who unreservedly deserve a state.
The invented Palestinian Arabs have forfeited that
right by their relentless aggression, crimes, and
genocidal intentions towards Israel and the Jews.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of
the trilogy Politicide: The attempted murder of the
Jewish state.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer with many
published articles and essays in leading national
and international conservative websites and
magazines. Born and educated in England, he is now a
U.S. citizen and lives in the Pacific Northwest. He
has been a broadcaster and has authored several
books including a collection of short stories under
the title The Blue Hour. His highly acclaimed
two-volume set of in-depth studies on the threats
from resurgent Islam to Israel and Judeo-Christian
civilization is titled Politicide. When not writing,
he is also an accomplished Jazz musician and
performer.
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