VICTOR SHARPE: YES TO KURDISTAN. NO TO AN ARAB PALESTINIAN STATE

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/yes-to-kurdistan-no-to-palestinian-state

According to Roy Gutman, in an article published recently by the McClatchy Newspapers, the Kurds have delayed plans for a referendum on independence. The reasoning seems to be that it is better for the Kurds to first concentrate on defeating the existential threat to the Kurdish region from the brutish ravages of Islamic State (IS).

Massoud Barzani is the Kurdish leader of the largely autonomous Kurdish region but his chief of staff, Fuad Hussein, has said: “We now have a priority to clean the area of IS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). IS must not remain our neighbor. When you have this priority, some other priorities will be delayed.”

Once the Islamic State savages are finally defeated and Barack Obama no longer suspiciously delays and obstructs what any normal U.S. president would have undertaken long ago – namely the total eradication of the barbaric Muslim Islamic State thugs who have been allowed to befoul the world – it is hoped that at long last an independent, sovereign Kurdistan will arrive on the world stage.

The Kurds, like the Jews, unreservedly deserve their existing homelands, for both trace their ancestry in them back thousands of years. It is highly instructive to review the Kurds remarkable history in conjunction with that of the Jews. It is also necessary to review the historical injustice imposed upon both indigenous peoples 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 or near that of modern-day Kurdistan.

Assyria was, in turn, conquered by Babylonia, which led to the eventual destruction of the southern biblical Jewish kingdom of Judah in 586 BC. The remaining two Jewish tribes were sent to the same areas as their brethren from the northern kingdom.

When the Persian conqueror of Babylonia, Cyrus the Great, allowed the Jews to return to their ancestral lands, some Jews remained (and continued to live) with their neighbors in Babylon – an area which, again, included modern-day Kurdistan.

It was only in 1948, upon the birth of the reconstituted Jewish State of Israel, that the 2,500 year old Jewish life in the region ended when the Arab regimes drove the Jews out of their ancient homes; most fleeing to safety in Israel.

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 Jewish warriors.

By the beginning of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was firmly established in Kurdistan, and today, 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 Nahum is in Alikush, while Jonah’s tomb was in Nabi Yunis, which is ancient Nineveh.

Horrifyingly, Jonah’s tomb was desecrated and destroyed by the ravening Muslim hordes of Islamic State within the last three months. 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. Their safety is an open question just as the few surviving Christian religious sites are.

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, which lasted until the Muslim Arab invasion in the 7th century. Indeed, the Jews and Kurds at first 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 -occupied territory.

The Jews found themselves driven from their agricultural lands because of onerous taxation by their Muslim overlords against all non-Muslims – the deplorable jizya tax. 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 turned 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 as far back as 6 July 2004 titled “The Kurdish Statehood Exception,” Hillel Halkin exposed the discrimination and double standards employed against Kurdish aspirations of statehood. He wrote:

“…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 certainly 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 brutal fact in realpolitik, therefore, is that the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians have many friends in the world; thanks in part to Arab oil the world desperately needs for its economies but more likely hidden anti-Semitism masquerading as overarching support for the Palestinians. The Kurds, like the Jews, have few friends, and the Kurds have little or no influence in the international corridors of power.

The old nostrum that only when the Palestinian Arabs finally have a state will there be peace in the world is a grotesque mirage in the desert sands.

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.

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 Islamist Turkish government of Tayip Recip Erdogan. 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.

After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Kurds displayed great political and economic wisdom. How different from the example of the Palestinian Arabs who, when foolishly given full control over the Gaza Strip by Israel, chose not to build hospitals and schools, but instead built bunkers and placed missile launchers close to civilians whom they use as human shields – a crime against humanity. They also have a racist charter calling for the destruction of the State of Israel and the extermination of all Jews worldwide.

The unspeakable manifestation of the Hamas charter was evident in the recent murder and mutilation of three Israeli hikers by Hamas terrorists, followed by the deliberate onslaught from Hamas occupied Gaza of thousands of missiles upon Israeli civilians, which led to Israel’s response to Palestinian aggression.

In Gaza, Hamas added the imposition of Islamic sharia law, with its attendant denigration of women and non-Muslims and a veritable reign of terror against all who criticize Hamas.

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 in the Arab and Muslim world – and certainly anywhere else in Iraq, which is now a failed state and has descended into ethnic chaos since the U.S. military left under Barack Hussein Obama’s order.

Obama, Cameron, Merkel, 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 Hamas and IS haven for anti-Western terrorism, and a non-democratic land carved out of the Jewish ancestral and biblical lands of Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank) upon which the stultifying shroud of sharia law will inevitably descend as it has in Hamas occupied Gaza.

In short, it will be established with one purpose: to destroy what is left of embattled Israel and become yet another Islamic launching pad for violent jihad against first Europe and then the United States.

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 Kurds 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 and perhaps for the entire Middle East.

Mahmoud Abbas, Holocaust denier and present president of the Palestinian Authority and Chairman of the PLO, 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 against humanity, and genocidal intentions towards Israel and the Jews.

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