The games we play

I admit I'm not much of sports fan. I never watch the Super Bowl or the Major League playoffs. So I haven't really been following the recent Association football games (aka soccer) like the rest of the world. I've only had a moderate interest in who wins only because a friend of mine cares about it.

But I do think we can learn something from the games we play. I don't profess to know much about the rules of Association football, but take the last two games for example. The United States tied Portugal 2-2. Neither sides loses and they both advance forward. In the next match the United States losses to Germany 1-0. Yet the United States still doesn't technically lose and advances to the next round. Apparently even when you lose, you still win.

Compare this with the games American's play. In Baseball, there is no draw, the game will go on indefinitely until one side wins. In American football the game will go into sudden death to break a tie. And above all a loss is one of the worse things ever. American's play to win.

I know I'm probably not the first to make this observation, I just find it interesting that Americans play games that foster true competitiveness, while the "international community" play games that make you feel good about yourself, even if your a loser. Maybe this is the reason why soccer has never really caught on in the Unites States.

Bush invaded Iraq for oil, lied about WMD's DEBUNKED

This was something I was intending to write about for awhile now, and since Iraq has been in the news again lately it seemed like the perfect time. The two biggest assertions by liberals about the Iraq war is that it was about oil, and the false pretense of weapons of mass destruction. You know the mantra: Bush lied, people died. This myth has been perpetuated long enough, and it's time to set the record straight.

The policy for regime change in Iraq actually began under president Bill Clinton when he signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which states that it was the policy of the United States to support democratic movements within Iraq. The Act was cited in October 2002 to argue for the authorization of military force against the Iraqi government. WMD's were only one of a litany of accusations against Saddam including: 

• Iraq's noncompliance with the conditions of the 1991 ceasefire agreement, including interference with U.N. weapons inspectors.
• Iraq "continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability" and "actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability" posed a "threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region."
• Iraq's "brutal repression of its civilian population."
• Iraq's "capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people".
• Iraq's hostility towards the United States as demonstrated by the 1993 assassination attempt on former President George H. W. Bush and firing on coalition aircraft enforcing the no-fly zones following the 1991 Gulf War.
• Members of al-Qaeda, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq.
• Iraq's "continu[ing] to aid and harbor other international terrorist organizations," including anti-United States terrorist organizations.
• Iraq paid bounty to families of suicide bombers.
• The efforts by the Congress and the President to fight terrorists, and those who aided or harbored them.
• The authorization by the Constitution and the Congress for the President to fight anti-United States terrorism.
• The governments in Turkey, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia feared Saddam and wanted him removed from power.
• Citing the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, the resolution reiterated that it should be the policy of the United States to remove the Saddam Hussein regime and promote a democratic replacement.

 If you recall, Saddam had previously invaded Kuwait 1990 and tried to annex it. It was only though military intervention that he was forced out. In 1991 he signed the Gulf War truce, which he continually violated over the next 10 years. Eventually George Bush Jr. gave Saddam an ultimatum, obey the Gulf War truce or else. Two months before the deadline, Bush went to congress to request the use of military force in the event that Saddam didn't comply with UN Resolution 1447. Both Houses of Congress including a majority of the Democrats in the Senate voted to allow military force in Iraq. Saddam ultimately refused to cooperate and the 2003 Iraq War began. Had Saddam agreed to cooperate the war would have never happened.

As previously mentioned, WND's were only one factor yet it is the one most singled out. The notion that Bush lied about WMD's is absolutely false. At the time the whole international intelligence community believed Saddam had WMD's, and rightfully so. It was well known that Saddam used chemical weapons on his enemies and his own people in the 1980's. And in 1981 Israel had bombed a nuclear reactor just south of Baghdad. The fact that he used chemical weapons before proved that he did have WMD's. In tape recordings discovered from the 1990's, Saddam admits to having chemical and germ warheads. The tapes also reveal Iraq's persistent efforts to hide information about their WMD programs form U.N. inspectors.  Later it came out that Iraq had concealed it's biological weapons program. So where did these weapons go? Former Iraqi general Georges Sada, who was the second highest ranked general in the Iraq Air Force, claims these weapons were transported to Syria shorty before the Iraq War. This is plausible considering Syria has one of the largest stockpiles of chemical weapons in the world.

Lastly, if the war was about oil we wouldn't have wasted our time on liberating towns like Fulujia, and we certainly wouldn't have left. A truly malevolent country would have just taken the resources like the British Empire used to do, but we didn't. We pay for those resources like everyone else, and usually more than there worth. In truth the U.S. has plenty of oil on it's own.  The US is set to overtake Saudi Arabia in oil production and become the world's biggest oil producer by 2016. And that's not even counting the oil that is largely untapped on federal lands. China has actually been the biggest beneficiary of Iraqi oil. They buy nearly half the oil that Iraq produces, and are angling for more. So there you have it. As Paul Harvey would say, now you know the rest of the story.
 
Sources used:
The Threat We Face
Here’s what Saddam Hussein said
 Saddam's Secret Tapes
Bush lied, people died?
China Is Reaping Biggest Benefits of Iraq Oil Boom
U.S. surges past Saudis to become world's top oil supplier

Why gun control just doesn't work

I get it, I do. Gun control activists don't want to see people die from senseless gun violence, well neither do gun enthusiasts. Neither side wants to see some guy walk into a crowded movie theater or school and open fire on innocent civilians. We both see the problem, but we see two very different solutions. The pro-gun control crowd believes banning guns will solve the problem, the anti-gun control crowd knows this won't work.

For one the bad guys don't care about laws. This might surprise some, but some people just don't care if something is illegal or not. Laws have never prevented murders or robberies, if it did the prisons would be virtually empty. The truth is gun control has never worked. Strict gun control laws in Chicago, for instance, have never made it safer to walk down the street at night.

Second if a person want's to do harm they don't need a gun to do it. In March of 2014 eight terrorists wielding knives at a Chinese train station killed 29 civilians and wounded 140 others. China is no stranger to knife attacks where guns are illegal. There's also been a series of knife attacks on innocent Chinese school children. In Cologne Germany in 1964 Walter Seifert killed 10 and injured 22 others with a homemade flamethrower and a lance. In 1927 Andrew Philip Kehoe set off a bomb in a school that killed 43 people. In Bavaria, Germany in 2009 a man with Molotov cocktails and an axe injured 15 people at a school.  On 9/11 a couple of terrorists with box-cutters killed 3000 people at the World Trade Center. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people with a fertilizer bomb.  The Boston bombers killed 3 and wounded dozens more with a pressure cooker. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. In many of these incidents a person with a concealed weapon could have ended the attacks before they began. Incidentally it was this same reason that dissuaded the Japanese from attacking the West Coast of the United States during World War 2. The Japanese military was afraid of an armed civilian force with a gun behind every blade of grass.

Let's pose a hypothetical scenario. Let's pretend the Second Amendment is struck down and owning any kind of gun is illegal. This still would not prevent gun violence. Currently in the United States there are enough firearms for every man, woman, and child. These guns would remain in circulation for decades to come. The demand for guns would fuel a black market and some enterprising criminal would figure out a way to run guns into the U.S. Then there is the other side of the coin. Frankly I would be uncomfortable with a government that spies on it's own people and target's political dissidents to be the only ones with the guns. In fact this is one of the reasons for the Second Amendment, to ensure the government behaves themselves. The Founding Fathers knew power corrupts and the only way to ensure freedom is a government that fears the people.

Here in America guns have been a part of the culture since it's inception. The Second Amendment has given everyone the right to bear arms. It used to be buying a Thompson Sub-machine gun was as easy as ordering it through the mail. And some schools had shooting ranges and actually let their students bring their guns to school. Such a thing would be unfathomable today. Senseless mass killings were almost non existent a generation ago. Sure they happened but they were much more rare, not like today. What happened to society between then and now? What changed to the point that we now need metal detectors in schools now? Society has changed and not for the better. There are probably many factors, including a less virtuous society. But it's clear gun violence is merely a symptom, not the problem. The only thing gun control does it put a ban-aide on a gushing wound. Gun owners know in an ever increasing violent world the best protection is a firearm.

American Exceptionalism

What is American exceptionalism? Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh first defines it by what it's not. It's not that we are better people or more superior. It is not that we are smarter people. It is not that God loves us more or prefers us more than anyone else. American exceptionalism has nothing to do with anything but freedom and liberty. The history of the world has been dominated by tyranny and slavery. The vast majority of human beings that have ever lived, have lived under the tyranny of despots. America was the first to break that cycle. For the first time in human history a government and nation was founded on the belief that leaders serve the population. Ronald Reagen said it best, "In this country of ours, took place the greatest revolution that has ever taken place in world’s history. The only true revolution. Every other revolution simply exchanged one set of rulers for another. But here for the first time in all the thousands of years of man’s relation to man, a little group of the men, the founding fathers for the first time – established the idea that you and I had within ourselves the God given right and ability to determine our own destiny."America became the exception to the rule, and that is what makes us exceptional.

Political commentator Bill Whittle demonstrates four ways in which America has been exceptional, militarily, economically, scientifically, and culturally. The superiority of any nation can be gauged by the strength of it's military and the America military remains the most powerful military in the world, bar none. Economically America produces 24% of the world's Gross Domestic Product. Individually America produces 14$ billion in GDP, compared with China that produces $4.9 billion with triple the population. The American dollar remains the world's premier reserve currency. America gives more aide than any other country. In 2011 America gave 4.6$ Billion in humanitarian aid, more than EU institutions, The UK, Japan and Sweden combined. China gave a dismal $38 Million in 2010. Scientifically America has produced 75 million research papers from 1996-2008, four times as many as the runner up. The United States has more Nobel Prize winners than any other country. Some of the most important inventions of the modern age were invented in America including the light bulb, the telephone, personal computers, the atomic bomb, the internet, the airplane, the assembly line, and the Polio vaccine among many others. Last but not least American pop culture has been exported to every corner of the globe. The top 50 movies of all time are American. And the top seven best selling music albums are American.

America is unique in that the first time in history people fought for independence in the name of certain universal principles such as human rights and civil liberties. Believing that inalienable rights did not come from men, who could take away such rights, but from the creator. They believed the government exists to serve the people and not the other way around. Unlike many modern revolutions it wasn't fought because of economic deprivation or because of an oppressed class against the elite.  our Founders gave birth to the greatest constitutional Republic the world has ever known. It's in Democracies like those in Europe where citizens receive their rights from government.
Britain, Germany, Spain, etc. don't have a Declaration of Independence or a Bill of Rights that defines the God given rights received at birth as in the United States. This is the fundamental difference between America and democratic governments worldwide. In these nations, birth doesn't entitle the citizen any right outside of what the government has granted. And what's given can always be taken away.


It's American exceptionalism that helped the Allies win World War 2, that put a man on the moon, that brought down the Berlin Wall, and that created the most powerful nation in less than 200 years from it's inception. If we cease to think of ourselves as exceptional then what is left but mediocrity.

President Barack Obama's Complete List of Historic Firsts

Law and Justice
• First President to Violate the War Powers Act (Unilaterally Executing American Military Operations in Libya Without Informing Congress In the Required Time Period - Source: Huffington Post)
• First President to Triple the Number of Warrantless Wiretaps of U.S. Citizens (Source: ACLU)
• First President to Sign into Law a Bill That Permits the Government to "Hold Anyone Suspected of Being Associated With Terrorism Indefinitely, Without Any Form of Due Process. No Indictment. No Judge or Jury. No Evidence. No Trial. Just an Indefinite Jail Sentence" (NDAA Bill - Source: Business Insider)
• First President to Refuse to Tell the Public What He Did For Eight (8) Hours After Being Informed That a U.S. Ambassador Was Facing Imminent Death During a Terror Attack (Source: Mediate)
• First President to Lie About the Reason For an Ambassador's Death, Blaming it on an Internet Video Rather Than What He Knew to be the Case: the Al Qaeda-linked Terror Group Ansar al-Sharia (Source: House Oversight Committee, et. al.)
• First President to Have an Innocent Filmmaker Thrown in Jail After Lying About the Cause for a Deadly Attack on U.S. Diplomats and Blaming the Filmmaker (Source: CNN)
• First President to Use the IRS to "Unfairly Target Political Enemies" as Well as Jewish Groups (Source: Sen. Ted Cruz)
• First President to Unlawfully Seize Telephone Records of More than 100 Reporters to Intimidate and/or Bully Them (Source: Associated Press)
• First President to Witness a Single Cabinet Secretary Commit Multiple Hatch Act Violations Without Acting, Speaking Out, Disciplining or Firing That Person (Source: New York Times)
• First President to Have His Attorney General Held in Criminal Contempt of Congress For His Efforts to Cover Up Operation Fast and Furious, That Killed Over 300 Individuals (Source: Politico)
• First President to
claim Executive Privilege to shield a sitting Attorney General from a Contempt of Congress finding for perjury and withholding evidence from lawful subpoenas (Source: Business Insider)
• First President to Issue Unlawful "Recess-Appointments" Over a Long Weekend -- While the U.S. Senate Remained in Session (against the advice of his own Justice Department - Source: United States Court of Appeals)
• First President to Fire an Inspector General of Americorps for Catching One of His Friends in a Corruption Case (Source: Gawker)
• First President to "Order a Secret Amnesty Program that Stopped the Deportations of Illegal Immigrants Across the U.S., Including Those With Criminal Convictions" (Source: DHS documents uncovered by Judicial Watch)
• First President to Sue States for Enforcing Voter ID Requirements, Which Were Previously Ruled Legal by the U.S. Supreme Court (Source: CNN)
• First President to Encourage Racial Discrimination and Intimidation at Polling Places (the New Black Panthers voter intimidation case, Source: Investors Business Daily)
• First President to Refuse to Comply With a House Oversight Committee Subpoena (Source: Heritage Foundation)
• First President to Arbitrarily Declare an Existing Law Unconstitutional and Refuse to Enforce It (Defense of Marriage Act - Source: ABC News)
• First President to Demand a Company Hand Over $20 Billion to One of His Political Appointees (BP Oil Spill Relief Fund - Source: Fox News)
• First President to Have a Law Signed By an 'Auto-pen' Without Being "Present" (Source: The New York Times)
• First President to Have His Administration Fund an Organization Tied to the Cop-Killing Terrorist Group, the Weather Underground (Source: National Review)

Scandals
• First President to publicly announce an enemies list (consisting of his opponents campaign contributors; and to use the instrumentalities of government to punish those on the list - Source: Heritage Foundation)
• First President to Attempt to Block Legally-Required 60-Day Layoff Notices by Government Contractors Due to His Own Cuts to Defense Spending -- Because The Notices Would Occur Before the Election. (Source: National Journal)
• First President to Intentionally Disable Credit Card Security Measures (in order to allow over-the-limit donations, foreign contributions and other illegal fundraising measures - Source: Power Line)
• First President to send 80 percent of a $16 billion program (green energy) to his campaign bundlers and contributors, leaving only 20% to those who did not contribute. (Source: Washington Examiner)
• First President to Propose an Executive Order Demanding Companies Disclose Their Political Contributions to Bid on Government Contracts (Source: Wall Street Journal)
• First President to issue an Executive Order implementing a "Racial Justice System", a system that tries to achieve "racially equivalent outcomes" for crimes (Source: Daily Caller)
• First President to Leak Confidential IRS Tax Records to Groups Aligned Politically With Him for Partisan Advantage (Source: The Hill Newspaper)
• First President to Use the EPA to Punish Political Enemies and Reward Political Allies (Source: Competitive Enterprise Institute)
• First President to Send Millions in Taxpayer Dollars to His Wife's Former Employer (Source: White House Dossier)

Economy
• First President to Preside Over a Cut to the Credit Rating of the United States Government (Source: Reuters)
• First President to Bypass Congress and Implement the DREAM Act Through Executive Fiat (Source: Christian Science Monitor)
• First President to Move America Past the Dependency Tipping Point, In Which 51% of Households Now Pay No Income Taxes (Source: Center for Individual Freedom)
• First President to Increase Food Stamp Spending By More Than 100% in Less Than Four Years (Source: Sen. Jeff Sessions)
• First President to Spend a Trillion Dollars on 'Shovel-Ready' Jobs -- and Later Admit There Was No Such Thing as Shovel-Ready Jobs (Source: President Obama during an early meeting of his 'Jobs Council')
• First President to Threaten Insurance Companies After They Publicly Spoke out on How Obamacare Helped Cause their Rate Increases (Source: The Hill)
• First President to Abrogate Bankruptcy Law to Turn Over Control of Companies to His Union Supporters (Source: Wall Street Journal)
• First President to Propose Budgets So Unreasonable That Not a Single Representative From Either Party Would Cast a Vote in Favor (Sources: The Hill, Open Market)
• First President Whose Economic Policies Have the Number of Americans on Disability Exceed the Population of New York (Source: CNS News)
• First President to Sign a Law Requiring All Americans to Purchase a Product From a Third Party (Source: Wall Street Journal)
• First President to Sue States For Enforcing Immigration Laws Passed by Congress (Source: The Arizona Republic newspaper)
• First President to See America Lose Its Status as the World's Largest Economy (Source: Peterson Institute)
• First President to redistribute $26.5 billion of the taxpayers' funds to his union supporters in the UAW (Source: Heritage Foundation)
• First President to Threaten an Auto Company (Ford) After It Publicly Mocked Bailouts of GM and Chrysler (Source: Detroit News)
• First President to Attempt to Bully a Major Manufacturing Company Into Not Opening a Factory in a Right-to-Work State (Boeing's facility in South Carolina - Source: Wall Street Journal)

Energy Policy
• First President to Endanger the Stability of the Electric Grid by Shutting Down Hundreds of Coal-Fired Plants Without Adequate Replacement Technologies (Source: National Electric Reliability Corporation - PDF)
• First President to Have His EPA Repudiated by a Federal Judge for "Overstepping Its Powers" When They Attempted to Shut Down Coal Operations in Appalachia (Source: Huffington Post)
• First President to be Held in Contempt of Court for Illegally Obstructing Oil Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico (Source: Politico)

National Security and World Affairs
• First President to Lie Repeatedly to the American People About the Murder of a U.S. Ambassador and Three Other Diplomatic Personnel for Purely Political Reasons, Rewriting a "Talking Points" Memo No Fewer Than a Dozen Times to Avoid Referencing a Pre-Planned Terror Attack (Source: ABC News)
• First President to Openly Defy a Congressional Order Not To Share Sensitive Nuclear Defense Secrets With the Russian Government (Sources: ABC News, Rep. Michael Turner)
• First President to Leak Highly Classified Military and Intelligence Secrets to Hollywood In Order to Promote a Movie That Could Help His Reelection Campaign (Source: Judicial Watch)
• First President to Terminate America's Ability to Put a Man into Space (Sources: USA Today, ABC News)
• First President to press for a "treaty giving a U.N. body veto power over the use of our territorial waters and rights to half of all offshore oil revenue" (The Law Of The Sea Treaty, Source: Investors Business Daily)
• First President to send $200 million to a terrorist organization (Hamas) after Congress had explicitly frozen the money for fear it would fund attacks against civilians (Sources: American Thinker, The Independent [UK])

Miscellaneous
• First President to Insert Himself into White House Biographies of Past Presidents (Source: The New York Times).
• First President to Golf 122 or More Times in His First Four-and-a-half Years in Office (Source: White House Dossier)

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2011/06/president-barack-obamas-complete-list.html

Top Ten Myths about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (REFUTED)

On June 17, 2010, political analyst and author Jeremy R. Hammond posted an article entitled "Top Ten Myths about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" in which he attempts to dispel the myths surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a decisively Anti-Israel perspective. Since his article encompasses so many of the arguments and criticisms that are levied against Israel, it's the perfect piece in which to refute those allegations which are routinely used to demonize and delegtimize Israel. Feel free to share without my permission, just give proper credit.


#1 – Jews and Arabs have always been in conflict in the region.

Claim: Jews and Arabs have not always been in conflict until Zionism.

Arab and Jew relations
Jews and Arabs have always had a contemptuous relationship.While Jews and Arabs lived in relative peace at various times with Jews, peaceful coexistence meant subordination and degradation. Under Islamic law Jews held dhimmi status, meaning that they were a protected group but were required to pay a yearly poll tax, and accept limitations and distinctive markings that emphasize the dhimmi's inferiority to Muslims. Basically they were forced to pay protection money. Jews were generally looked upon with contempt by their Muslim neighbors which the Koran refers to as “apes and pigs” (Surah 5:60).

Even when there was peace it was a tenuous peace that could change in an instant. For example, the Damascus affair in 1840, occurred when a French monk and his servant disappeared in Damascus. Immediately following, a charge of ritual murder was brought against a large number of Jews in the city including children who were tortured. The consuls of England, France and Germany as well as Ottoman authorities, Christians, Muslims and Jews all played a great role in this affair. Following the Damascus affair, Pogroms spread through the Middle East and North Africa. A pogrom is a violent riot aimed at massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews. Pogroms occurred in: Aleppo (1850, 1875), Damascus (1840, 1848, 1890), Beirut (1862, 1874), Dayr al-Qamar (1847), Jerusalem (1847), Cairo (1844, 1890, 1901–02), Mansura (1877), Alexandria (1870, 1882, 1901–07), Port Said (1903, 1908), Damanhur (1871, 1873, 1877, 1891), Istanbul (1870, 1874), Buyukdere (1864), Kuzguncuk (1866), Eyub (1868), Edirne (1872), Izmir (1872, 1874). There was a massacre of Jews in Baghdad in 1828. There was another massacre in Barfurush in 1867. In 1839, in the eastern Persian city of Meshed, a mob burst into the Jewish Quarter, burned the synagogue, and destroyed the Torah scrolls. This is known as the Allahdad incident. It was only by forcible conversion that a massacre was averted. -(Persecution of Jews)

In 1929 Mobs attacked Jews in Jerusalem, Safed, Jaffa and Kfar Darom, a kibbutz in the Gaza Strip. The centuries-old Jewish community of Hebron was destroyed, and 67 Jews were slaughtered. British authorities reported incidents of rape, torture, beheadings of babies and mutilation. British High Commissioner John Chancellor wrote, “I do not think that history records many worse horrors in the last few hundred years.” In total, 135 Jews were killed, and 350 were maimed or wounded. Arab fears of a Zionist takeover of the land would not account for the savagery of these attacks.

The sudden uptick in conflict between the Jews and Arabs had less to do with Zionism and more to do with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire following World War 1. Jews had been a fairly well protected, if subservient, minority in the Ottoman Empire. Dhimmis means "the protected people", and while they were second class citizens they had the right to protection of life and property. Also, keep in mind there were no nation states during this time and thus no national aspirations or rivalries. These conditions rapidly changed following the defeat of the Ottoman Turks. And once the British Mandate expired on 1948 the Jews essentially had to fend for themselves.

Palestinian self-determination
To say that Zionists have rejected Palestinian self-determination is disingenuous and ignores the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1937 Peel Commission plan, the 1947 UN Partition, the Lausanne Conference of 1949, 1978 Camp David Accords, 1991 Madrid Conference, 1993 Oslo Accords, 1997 Hebron Agreement, 1998 Wye River Memorandum, 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum, 2000 Camp David Summit, the December 23 Clinton Parameter plans, 2001 Taba Summit, 2003 Road map for peace, 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA), 2007 Annapolis Conference. All of which have been rejected or not fulfilled by the Palestinian leadership. Regardless, today Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are under self-rule.

Land allotted to the Jews
While Arabs were always the majority, the area the UN allotted for the Jewish state had a significant Jewish population. Over 70 percent of the land for the proposed Jewish portion was not privately owned, but was state land that belonged to the British Mandate. More importantly it was land that nobody wanted, such as arid wastelands or swamplands. By 1947 60% of the remaining land partitioned for the Jews was the Negev Desert. It was the Jews who were largely responsible for restoring the land and creating communities and villages where none existed before. In 1901 the Jewish National Fund was formed to help restore the land of Israel. Swamps were drained, deserts were irrigated, and trees were planted.

    “They (Jews) paid high prices for the land, and in addition, they paid to certain occupants of those lands a considerable amount of money which they were not legally bound to pay.” —Hope Simpson Report, 1930"

    “Of the total of 418,000 dunums (quarter-acres) acquired by Jews in Palestine [between 1878 and 1914], 58 percent was sold by non-Palestinian [Arab] absentee landlords and 36 percent by Palestinian absentee landlords, for a total of 94 percent.” —Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi

    “Arab claims that the Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land cannot be maintained. Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamps and uncultivated when it was bought.” —Peel Commission Report, 1937

Israeli- Palestinian Conflict Part 2

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Part 2

#2 - The United Nations created Israel

Claim: The United Nations, under UNSCOP, did not create Israel because both parties did not accept Resolution 181.

The reason for the partition in the first place

The UNSCOP came to the conclusion that the conflicting national aspirations of the Arabs and Jews could not be reconciled. The only solution was to partition two states, one Jewish the other Arab. Despite that the Jews were not happy with the small allotment of territory and they would not have Jerusalem they accepted the compromise. This despite the land allotted to the Jews was only 13% of the original British Mandate for a purposed Jewish state. The Arabs rejected it, despite there being 22 Arab states and one Jewish state.

Why there were no Arab representatives

The reason UNSCOP contained no representatives from any Arab country was because the Arab Higher Committee boycotted the Commission. The Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha, speaking to Jewish Agency representatives David Horowitz, said, "The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It's likely, Mr. Horowitz, that your plan is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight. You won't get anything by peaceful means or compromise. You can, perhaps, get something, but only by the force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you. I am not sure we'll succeed, but we'll try. We were able to drive out the Crusaders, but on the other hand we lost Spain and Persia. It may be that we shall lose Palestine. But it's too late to talk of peaceful solutions." –(September 16, 1947)

Israel's legitimacy

Once the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War 1, the land ceased belonging to the Turks and went to the Allied powers. The British and French in turn carved up the middle-east into nation states and turned it back to the Arabs to self-rule. The legitimacy of these Arab countries are never questioned. In the case of Palestine, the land essential became up for grabs once the British Mandate expired on May 14th 1948, the day Israel declared independence. Israel’s international “birth certificate” is validated by uninterrupted Jewish settlement from the time of Joshua onward; the Balfour Declaration of 1917; the League of Nations Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration; the United Nations partition resolution of 1947; Israel’s admission to the UN in 1949; and the recognition of Israel by most other states.

Israeli- Palestinian Conflict Part 3