A very short open letter to George Galloway, MP

Dear Sir:
Last week, following the attacks in London, you wrote:
“No one can condone acts of violence aimed at working people going about their daily lives. They have not been a party to, nor are they responsible for, the decisions of their government. They are entirely innocent and we condemn those who have killed or injured them.”
Today a suicide bomber killed two women and injured 24 others in an attack on a shopping mall in Netanya, Israel.
Do you condemn the attack in Netanya today?
I look forward to receiving your reply, which I will publish on the web.
Eric Lee

17 Comments on "A very short open letter to George Galloway, MP"

  1. austerlitz | 12/07/2005 at 20:31 |

    Are you relying on the fact that he reads your website or have you found other means to send it to him?

  2. Judean | 12/07/2005 at 20:38 |

    I must express my amazement at the level of utter igorance displayed by many of your posters regarding the State of Israel. Despite what they may think there never has been a State of Palestine and until 1964 there was no “Palestinian Nation”. If they would care to look at UN resolutions 194 and 224 they will not see the word “Palestinian”. The myth of the Palestinian people is worthy of Goebbels and represents little more than an Arab attempt to deny statehood to the Jewish people who have been around unlike the mythological “Palestinians” for thousands of years.
    For example if you go to Rome you will be able to see the Arch of Titus and on it read the words “Judea Capte” (not Palestine)and see depicted the destruction of the Jewish Temple (no Al aqsa mosque – no Islam) and the enslavery and dispersion of the Jewish People not Arabs – so comments like Israel was created from nothing are nothing short of ignorant hogwash – which is where I began. Further enlightenment to follow.

  3. Not difficult to e mail him is it?

  4. Juan Golblado | 12/07/2005 at 20:53 |

    I saw reference to the letter, and the link to this page, on Harry’s Place blog, which is read by some SWP types (some of the more masochistic come around with their silly arguments), and they’ll surely tell daddy.
    Great letter Eric! As a Londoner, I have this to say: THANKS!

  5. Judean | 12/07/2005 at 21:02 |

    I have often marvelled at the restraint of Israel in the face of the horrible things the Palestinian Arabs (today two women brutally killed tens seriously injured by a suicide terrorist) are doing in the present Oslo War (as I think of it).
    I think if they had tried this stuff on an Arab government starting at the end of September 2000, by the end of that October half the PA territory would be a smoking ruin and tens of thousands of Palestinians dead, just like in Jordan in 1973 and at Hama in Syria in 1982.
    The Palestinians are lucky they are fighting Israel, infused as its people are with Jewish ethical and moral beliefs, and not some brutal Arab dictatorship. Just think if it would have been Saddam Hussein – Jenin would be a ghost town right now.
    I never forget the reason there is an Israel occupation in the first place: the concerted Arab effort in 1967 to destroy the Jewish State. I was a teenager at the time, but I well remember the period of tension leading up to the fighting, when it seemed the whole world had abandoned Israel to its fate and the Arabs were ready to pounce.
    Then Israel struck and produced what seemed to be a miracle of deliverance. “He blew and they were scattered” sums up the amazed relief Israel’s friends felt at the close of the sixth day.
    However from June 1967 until Israel passed control to the kleptocracy known as the PA in the mid-1990s, life expectancy among the so-called Palestinians had risen from 48 to 72 years (compared to 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa). Mortality rates fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990, while Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (in Iraq the rate is 64, in Egypt 40, in Jordan 23, in Syria 22).
    Per-capita GNP in the “West Bank” and Gaza expanded tenfold between 1968 and 1991, from $165 to $1,715 (compared with Jordan’s $1,050, Egypt’s $600, Turkey’s $1,630, and Tunisia’s $1,440). By 1999, Palestinian per-capita income was nearly double Syria’s, more than four times Yemen’s, and 10 percent higher than Jordan’s.
    So what is the oppression your posters writing about?

  6. austerlitz | 12/07/2005 at 21:24 |

    Call me a psychic, but my guess is that Judean is going to be lecturing us about the Sykes-Picot agreement in a minute.

  7. Judean | 12/07/2005 at 21:38 |

    Why go back to 1916 – there weren’t any Palestinians then either? It would seem that faced with the enormity of the truth resort to plan B – simply abandon the untenable and resort to feeble sarcasm? I suppose the least one can say is that you appear to know that there was a Sykes-Picot Agreement.

  8. Judean,
    All nationalisms are constructs, most of them modern constructs. So what that the Palestianians didn’t understand themselves as a nation state until the 20th century. Italy didn’t until the 19th century (only 2% of the country spoke what today is understood as Italian at the time). The Untied States didn’t until the 18th and probably the 19th century. Should the US revert to the various Indian tribes? Should Italy revert to a patchwork of separate principalities and states?
    Under your scenario, what should happen to the Palestinians? Are you advocating a one state solution? Should they be absorbed into Israel – indeed, this is what your point about the West Bank GDP applies? Or should they live in a permament state of limbo that looks increasinly like South African apartheid?
    Simply put, you can’t simply “erase” the Palestinians and their sense of nationhood now anymore than you can 21st century Italian or American nationhood, no matter how inconvenient a fact it is to you.

  9. Judean | 12/07/2005 at 23:52 |

    I am not advocating anything.
    I merely wished to point out to a number of posters on this site who have the mistaken notion that the Palestians are an ancient folk that Palestinian nationalism is a recently invented condition which as you say because of “relative narrative” we now have to live with.
    Your comment “so what that the Palestinians didn’t understand themselves as a nation state until the 20th century” reveals if I may say a lack of knowledge. If you trace the ancestery of the people who call themselves Palestinian you will find that they all have a single language and culture similar in all respects to those Arabs who live elsewhere in the Middle East. Unlike Africa they do not belong to any different tribe.
    Their “nationalism” was a product of Nasser’s determination to destroy the Jewish State and to use the wretchedness of the refugee camps which he had perpetuated in Gaza and which Arab countries throughout the Middle East have perpetuated for the same purpose for the past nearly sixty years thereby engendering the hatred which feeds and nutures the cult of the suicide bomber.
    However, all this should not negate the Jewish peoples’ right to self determination in their ancient homeland.
    It may interest you to learn that after the planned withdrawal later this summer:
    430,000 West Bank Palestinians will be able to move freely within and between Palestinian controlled areas.
    0 Jews, dead or alive, will remain in Gaza.
    1.2 million Arabs will remain full and legal citizens of Israel. All Israeli citizens — Christians, Muslims, and Jews — have freedom of speech, religion, press, and the right to vote.
    1.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, many of them in Palestinian Authority-controlled refugee camps, will be able to live under their own leaders.
    820,000 Jewish refugees, forced to flee without their belongings from Arab countries between 1947 and 1949 and in 1956, will still have no compensation for their losses from Arab governments.
    650,000 Arab refugees who left Israel between 1947 and 1949 will still need Palestinian leaders who will end terrorism and the culture of hate.
    Israel’s withdrawal from four northern West Bank Settlements will create an area more than twice the size of Gaza’s 140 square miles under Palestinian control and devoid of any Jewish presence. Arafat must be rubbing his hands in glee wherever he is.

  10. Judean,
    I’m not advocating against Israel’s existence.
    I’m just saying that Palestine’s existence is also a reality, too. Today. You can point out the history of how these claims came into existence, but these claims are real and deeply felt by folks in the West Bank and Gaza, not to mention the Palestinian diaspora accross the world.

  11. Judean,
    I appreciate what it is you’re attempting to do. I too have noticed the blatant rewrite of history as it pertains to the Palestine Arabs. I’m not sure what is worse. The people who accept it even though it conflicts with the known history of the region. Or the people who perpetuate it – Especially in the west. Where a professor who KNOWS that regions history down to its minutia will discard historical fact in order to indoctrinate or reinforce political dogma. The irony that western liberals who have benefited the most from the enlightenment now perpetuate the very mentality the enlightenment freed us from is not lost on me.
    A useless factoid.. Arafat and his band of cut-throats weren

  12. austerlitz | 13/07/2005 at 09:05 |

    They were expelled to Tusnisia after being expelled from Lebanon, there is some doubt about Arafat’s place of birth, possibly Egypt, but all the rest are Palestinians.

  13. Dave F | 13/07/2005 at 09:58 |

    In fact Iraq is a British creation made up of three culturally distinct areas, but a lot of people left and right now seem to believe it exists and must continue to exist. Tito (a Croat) invented Yugoslavia, of course, but eventually the West dismantled it.
    Africa’s national borders were created in a colonial carveup among the countries of the West (hence a lot of the internecine warfare).
    I have sympathy with Israel’s problems with the neighbours, but many of the current national boundaries on the world map are relatively modern constructs. Even Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc.

  14. Dave F,
    Spot on. European national identities tended to evolve organically on the basis of physical and cultural geography. The nations of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and the subcontinent are Western constructs.

  15. except, erm, italy of course. and germany.
    oh well, back to the library …

  16. Judean | 13/07/2005 at 21:46 |

    Well George Galloway won’t be responding anytime soon. Hardly surprising isn’t it?

  17. Anonymous | 18/02/2006 at 16:14 |

    you Bastard Muslim Haters

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