It’s even deliciously ironic. The phrase, “Hoist with his own petard” comes to mind – a phrase that began with Shakespeare and essentially means ‘blown up by your own bomb’. (A Petard is a bomb used to breach gates, etc.)

Well, it seems that America might be soon be hoist by her own petard, because the UN may soon be asking the US to return land to Native Americans.

Maybe we should call it land for peace?

Should we maybe contact the Indians who lived in the area that is now Washington D.C. and see if they want their land back?

After all, the US really is occupied territory.

Isn’t that ironic?

US should return stolen land to Indian tribes, says United Nations

UN’s correspondent on indigenous peoples urges government to act to combat ‘racial discrimination’ felt by Native Americans

Chris McGreal, guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 May 2012 23.46 BST

A United Nations investigator probing discrimination against Native Americans has called on the US government to return some of the land stolen from Indian tribes as a step toward combatting continuing and systemic racial discrimination.

James Anaya, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, said no member of the US Congress would meet him as he investigated the part played by the government in the considerable difficulties faced by Indian tribes.

Anaya said that in nearly two weeks of visiting Indian reservations, indigenous communities in Alaska and Hawaii, and Native Americans now living in cities, he encountered people who suffered a history of dispossession of their lands and resources, the breakdown of their societies and “numerous instances of outright brutality, all grounded on racial discrimination”.

“It’s a racial discrimination that they feel is both systemic and also specific instances of ongoing discrimination that is felt at the individual level,” he said.
Anaya said racism extended from the broad relationship between federal or state governments and tribes down to local issues such as education.

“For example, with the treatment of children in schools both by their peers and by teachers as well as the educational system itself; the way native Americans and indigenous peoples are reflected in the school curriculum and teaching,” he said.

“And discrimination in the sense of the invisibility of Native Americans in the country overall that often is reflected in the popular media. The idea that is often projected through the mainstream media and among public figures that indigenous peoples are either gone or as a group are insignificant or that they’re out to get benefits in terms of handouts, or their communities and cultures are reduced to casinos, which are just flatly wrong.”

Close to a million people live on the US’s 310 Native American reservations. Some tribes have done well from a boom in casinos on reservations but most have not.

Anaya visited an Oglala Sioux reservation where the per capita income is around $7,000 a year, less than one-sixth of the national average, and life expectancy is about 50 years.

The two Sioux reservations in South Dakota – Rosebud and Pine Ridge – have some of the country’s poorest living conditions, including mass unemployment and the highest suicide rate in the western hemisphere with an epidemic of teenagers killing themselves.

“You can see they’re in a somewhat precarious situation in terms of their basic existence and the stability of their communities given that precarious land tenure situation. It’s not like they have large fisheries as a resource base to sustain them. In basic economic terms it’s a very difficult situation. You have upwards of 70% unemployment on the reservation and all kinds of social ills accompanying that. Very tough conditions,” he said.

Anaya said Rosebud is an example where returning land taken by the US government could improve a tribe’s fortunes as well as contribute to a “process of reconciliation”.

Read the rest of the article here.

You see, millions of Arabs owe their lives to Israel. And, I don’t mean the State of Israel – although many Arabs owe much to the Jewish State. No, I’m talking about a different Israel.

Israel Kligler.

I wrote about him on Friday, but over the weekend I realized that one specific group was directly impacted by his work – Palestinians.

Due to the scourge of malaria, the Land of Israel – known as Palestine before 1948 – could support no more than three or four hundred thousand people. Those that did not die of the disease, suffered periodic bouts of illness that kept them bedridden and deathly ill. Malaria kept productivity extremely low and life extremely short,  and what life that you had was completely miserable.

For everyone.

So, in addition to all the incredible work that the State of Israel has done to better the lives of the Arabs in the Middle East, you now know that there is another Israel that went far beyond all that.

The next time someone comes and tells you about the injustice of Israeli occupation and how ‘innocent’ Palestinians are ‘dying every day’ at the hands of ‘blood thirsty’ Israeli soldiers… tell them about a different Israel.

Tell them about Israel Kligler and the millions of Arabs that owe their lives and well being to this man. And, after you’ve talked about this little-known giant of Israel’s history, go see the land that he made possible.

God bless Israel now means much more than it ever did before.

The man who battled Israel’s most formidable enemy — the mosquito

Israel Kligler is one of the reasons Israel exists. So why have you never heard of him?

By Matti Friedman, April 25, 2012, Times of Israel

Ninety-two years ago, a diminutive and determined young scientist stepped from a boat onto a “notoriously malarious” patch of Levantine land and into the middle of a losing war against a tiny, deadly enemy ravaging the population.

Israel Kligler – university professor, Zionist and public health pioneer – played an outsize role in defeating malaria in Palestine beginning in the 1920s. Countering the mosquito-borne disease was not a minor medical success but a crucial victory that paved the way for the growth of Jewish settlement and the eventual establishment of the State of Israel.

Today, Kligler and his role in Israel’s history have been forgotten. April 25 is a fitting date to remember him: This year, it happens to be both the eve of Israel’s Independence Day and World Malaria Day, marked every year by the UN’s World Health Organization. Thanks in large part to Kligler’s efforts, malaria was eradicated in Israel, but the global battle against the disease has been remarkably unsuccessful: Every year, according to the WHO, malaria infects 216 million people and kills 655,000.

Kligler has a small number of vocal boosters, and they believe his success should both earn him a place in the Zionist pantheon and be studied anew as the world continues to grapple with the disease he confronted nearly a century ago.

Born in what is now Ukraine in 1888, Kligler moved with his parents to New York City when he was 9. In 1920, having completed a doctorate in microbiology in New York and research on yellow fever in South America, he gave up a promising academic career in the US and arrived instead in British-ruled Palestine, committed to putting his scientific knowledge at the service of the Zionist project.

He found a land devastated by malaria. The illness was, a British report said in 1921, “by far the most important disease in Palestine.” Much of the territory Jews had purchased for settlement was in lowlands infested with malaria — that was one of the main reasons it was available — and the disease was decimating the ranks of the Zionist pioneers and the country’s other inhabitants. Some settlements had been abandoned altogether as a result.

One visitor in 1902 remarked that the Turkish soldiers at one border garrison had to be replaced monthly because all would contract malaria in little over a week. A report from 1917, the year the British arrived, noted that Palestine was “notoriously malarious,” and an estimated 90 percent of British soldiers at the town of Beisan — today’s Beit She’an, in the Jordan Valley — were ill within 10 days.

“There is little doubt that the static condition of Palestine during the last several centuries is due almost entirely to malaria,” Kligler himself wrote a decade after his arrival.

“The once famous city of Beth Shan, standing in the midst of an intensively irrigated plan, was in the course of time completely surrounded by water-logged marshes, became one of the most malarious points in a highly malarious area, and dwindled to a small village,” he wrote.

Describing the coastal plain, he wrote: “One sees large stretches of richly watered, potentially cultivable land inhabited only by a few Bedouin tribes, all infected with malaria, and eking out a precarious existence from the proceeds of baskets made of marsh reeds, and from the milk of buffaloes which wallow in the marshes.”

If the Zionist project was to succeed, this had to change.

Read the rest of the article here.

It’s complete and utter crap.

The video that you are about to watch describes how the Taliban create young suicide bombers in Pakistan. But, this could have been a documentary describing Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or many of the other fanatic Islamist groups preying upon young Palestinians.

And yes, that is exactly what they do. They prey upon the young minds of Palestinian youth.

It is the vilest form of child abuse, and it is practiced throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – as well as the many places where you can find fundamentalist Islam.

If you care about the Palestinians, then you need to free them – and their children – from this terrible cult of death.

Now, Fathi didn’t mean for us to take his statements in just quite that way. He was speaking in Arabic and was not expecting to be understood by a Western audience – especially, the Western audience that he’s been crying to about the ‘ancient’ Palestinian people with their ancient rights to Palestine (whatever THAT is).

Again, we aren’t saying that the Palestinians are any less deserving of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I certainly believe that they DO deserve all those things, which is why I am so upset with the Palestinian leadership. But, Palestinian claims to being a PEOPLE…

Well, they aren’t. They are not a people. They aren’t even an ethnic group. They’re not a minority of any kind. They’re Egyptians and Saudis and Syrians.

They are just average people with leaders who think that killing Jews and taking their land is perfectly acceptable. No, it’s more than that. To the Palestinian leadership, killing Jews and taking their land is a goal.

It is not Israel’s fault that the Palestinians chose badly. Choices have consequences, and the Palestinians have no one to blame but themselves.

But, if they’re prepared to put away their hatred, Israelis are prepared to be friends.

Hamas leader admits ‘Palestinian’ identity is invented

Tuesday, April 03, 2012 | Ryan Jones, Israel Today

US Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has come under a lot of fire for saying that the “Palestinians” are an invented people. Most have ridiculed Gingrich by pointing out there are clearly millions of Arabs living in so-called “Palestine.”

But Gingrich wasn’t talking about the physical presence of those people today, but rather the national identity they have adopted and the fact that most immigrated to the land not so long ago.

In a televised address on Al-Hekma TV last week, Hamas Minister of the Interior and of National Security Fathi Hammad basically backed up Gingrich’s assessment, acknowledging that the roots of most “Palestinians” are elsewhere in the Middle East, and that the Palestinian label is only a thin veneer.

Read the rest of the article here.

The latest bit irony comes from the denial of the right of an NGO to do a workshop in Ramallah. The NGO in question is called Zochrot, and it advocates the right of Palestinians to return to their towns and villages within Israel.

Now, you might remember that ‘The Right of Return’ is a key demand of the Palestinians, and a strategy that they hope will result in Israel ceasing to be a country with a Jewish majority.

So, why would the Palestinian Authority deny an NGO that advocates for a key Palestinian demand?

Because it is an Israeli NGO.

How utterly ironic.

NGO that wants Palestinian refugees let into Israel is barred from Ramallah for being Israeli

Anti-normalization protests force cancellation of workshop on the practicalities of the ‘right of return’

By Elhanan Miller March 28, 2012 | Times of Israel

Zochrot, a radical Israeli NGO that advocates the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees to the State of Israel, has been forced to cancel a workshop in Ramallah due to Palestinian anti-normalization pressure placed on the organizers.

Eitan Bronstein, Zochrot’s spokesman, told The Times of Israel on Wednesday that his organization was invited by a Quaker-run social club in Ramallah to present a counter-mapping project, dealing with the practical aspects of Palestinian return to abandoned villages within Israel.

The event, advertised on Facebook, garnered more than 100 RSVPs within hours, Bronstein says. But some Palestinians protested that an invitation had been extended to an Israeli organization, however sympathetic to Palestinian goals, considering it an unacceptable instance of “normalization” with Israel.

“Most Palestinian reactions continued to support the event,” Bronstein said. “Dialogue with an organization that supports the right of return and Israeli recognition of the Nakba is not only not ‘normalization,’ but it is moreover vital to create a common Israeli-Palestinian discourse among those who object to the current regime of separation.”

He said the event was nevertheless canceled due to the organizers’ sense that “the atmosphere that was created was not conducive to such an important discussion.”

Israeli governments of all shades have rejected the Palestinian demand for a “right of return,” which would give millions of descendants of Palestinians who lived in what is today Israel the right to “return” — undermining or reversing Israel’s majority Jewish demographic. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has remained formally committed to the demand, while also sometimes stating that Israel cannot be expected to accept an influx of millions of Palestinians.

Read the rest of the article here.