"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."
---British Historian Arnold Toynbee, Foreword to The Transformation 1971
"Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and in-human to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.---Mahatma Gandhi
The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French. If the Jews have no home but Palestine, will they relish the idea of being forced to leave the other parts of the world in which they are settled? Or do they want a double home where they can remain at will? This cry for the national home affords a colourable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews.
Indeed there is free speech in America except if the Eleventh Commandment is violated which states: Thou shall not speak ill of Jews and Israel lest you be cursed.
Your comments that Jews came from Europe to settle a foreign nation, Palestine, is absolutely true and undeniable. Many courageous Israeli politicians, diplomats, academicians and journalists such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris, Tom Segev, and Simha Flapan who used declassified Israeli documents to prove the creation of Israel by European Jews through ethnic cleansing (called then by Israeli politicians"transfer")
Here are two quotes from David Ben Gurion, Israel's founder and First Prime Minister:
"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] .... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." (Righteous Victims, p. 144)
David Ben Gurion: "If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country … We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"
Your mistake was not historical but addressed a taboo subject--Jews and Israel--that immediately garners the ire, demands, and intimidation of organized Jewry who have easy access to a large portion of the American media to spread such attacks like wildfire until the person who made such remarks is smeared, humiliated, fired, or never to be hired again.
How inexplicably ironic that the Neocon Pro Iraq War White House press secretary Ari Fleicher should demand your firing because you spoke a truthful statement, yet he and his mainly Jewish Neocons took this country to an illegal immoral war based on total LIES that led to the invasion of a nation innocent of 9/11 or Al Qaeda times, Iraq, thus devastating the country and murdering over one million Iraqis. Iraqis are dying till this day due to that invasion. Fleischer's staunch Pro Israel support is not just due to him being a Jew but according to SourceWatch he holds a dual citizenship, American and Israeli.
According to Ari Fleischer Helen Thomas advocated for a "religious cleansing". The fact is she never mentioned religion but simply stated historical facts.
Here's Ari Fleischer, the White House Spin Doctor on WMD's on Iraq, March 21, 2003
"Well, there is NO question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of Mass Destruction, Biological and Chemical particularly"Fleischer still defends Bush and the mass destruction of Iraq today. Not one single person in the Bush Administration has been held accountable for the war crimes committed against Iraq.
Is this a man who has a shred of credibility to attack you, Helen, the most honored, longest serving journalist in the White House? You've been the only courageous journalist in the White House to doggedly seek truthful answers to questions the American people, in fact the world, want answered. It's been only since the Bush Administration with Ari Fleischer as press secretary that you've been slowly marginalized due to your insistence on the truth of why we invaded an innocent nation that has cost this country close to 5,000 deaths, tens of thousands of injured soldiers, and at a cost of $1 Trillion...
Hearst must remain true to its principle that free speech is a bulwark of our democracy. You did not speak as a reporter for Hearst or in any official capacity but gave your honest (and truthful) opinion that Israel was founded and inhabited by European Jews. Although most Americans and world citizens would agree with your historical statement, they don't have your honorable courage to state such truth.
The fear of a large scale media driven backlash with the powerful label of the modern Scarlett Letter, "A" for Anti-Semite, is enough to bring our government, institutions, and private citizens to withhold their tongue, or else.
It would be an unjust and total capitulation to a minority group (most Jewish Americans are not members of organized Jewry and in fact most oppose Israel's policies) if Hearst would accede to a politically motivated attack against you because you're a thorn, a gadfly, in the side of those who thrive on propaganda for their livelihood or on idealogical grounds.
Neither Fleischer, nor the Jewish establishment, nor conservatives, nor the media demanded that Dick Armey be removed from his leadership post in Congress or that Mike Huckabee be fired by MSNBC for their public remarks that Israel ethnically cleanse the Palestinians for a third time, this time pushing the entire population out of their occupied homeland.
Rep. DICK ARMEY: "Most of the people who now populate Israel were transported from all over the world to that land and they made it their home. The Palestinians can do the same, and we're perfectly content to work with the Palestinians in doing that. We are not willing to sacrifice Israel for the notion of a Palestinian homeland."
Mike Huckabee "There is only one place on earth where the Jewish people could have a homeland that is consistent with their roots, whereas the Palestinians can create their homeland in many other places in the Middle East, outside Israel,"
Many known and unknown personalities around the world who dared to criticize Israel's founding, its policies, or the powerful stronghold the Israel Lobby has on our government have been summarily attacked and smeared to ensure their silence and deter others from practicing their Constitutional right enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the Right to Free Speech and Free Press.
Helen, you join such laudable company as President Jimmy Carter, Former Archbishop Desmund Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Nobel Prize Winners Mary Robinson and Mairead Corrigan Maguire, among many European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin American politicians, diplomats, academicians, and journalists.
Many persons have paid the price for daring to raise Israel's founding based on the theft of a nation, Palestine or its brutal occupation of the West Bank, inhumane siege of Gaza or its multiple wars and invasions of Arab nations. I personally lived through and survived Israel's three month siege and bombardment of Beirut from air, land, and sea that killed close to 20,000 civilians.
I urge Hearst not to acquiesce to the politically motivated attacks on Helen Thomas, a journalist in the mold of Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite. There will never be another Helen Thomas and Hearst must honor her long service to this nation, her pursuit for truth and holding our politicians accountable to the Constitution and the American people, and preserve her reputation so that she may retire with dignity and nobility that she richly deserves.
America will be worse off when Helen ever decides to retire.
God bless you, Helen, and may He keep you in good health, good spirits, and continue to give you the strength to fight for truth for all our sake.
With utmost respect and gratitude,
Mohamed Khodr M.D., M.P.H.
Virginia
Relevant Quotes:
10 April, 2001
Rabbi calls for annihilation of Arabs
"It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable,"....."The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world,
"Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Foreign Minister, supports a form of ethnic cleansing, advocating the transfer of Israeli Arab citizens out of Israel. (Population transfer is known under international law as a form of “ethnic cleansing.”) He’s argued, “The idea of land for peace is false… the guiding principle has to be exchange of populations and territories…. We will never agree to a definition of ‘two states for two peoples’.” J-Street
December 12, 2008
“The Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, has said that Israeli Arabs must leave Israel as soon as a Palestinian state is established.
"Once a Palestinian state is established, I can come to the Palestinian citizens, whom we call Israeli Arabs, and say to them 'you are citizens with equal rights, but the national solution for you is elsewhere,'" Livni said during a meeting with high school students in Tel Aviv.
"Polls show that more than half of the Jewish population does not wish Arabs to live in their neighborhoods and that many Israelis would like to see the government encourage Arab citizens to leave the country."
MUST READ: Albert Einstein and Other Prominent U.S. Jews Letter to the New York Times December 4, 1984 on Menachem Begin and Founding of Israel
Excerpt:
TO THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:
“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.”
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