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I knew that Ford was a strongly anti-Semitic. I didn't know that he was a sort of patron of Arabs in the US. Another scary thing about anti-Jewish sentiment in the Middle East is that a great deal of it in the past has been built up by the governments themselves, many of them governments that received aid from the US.
 

Leo Caesius

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Paul Spring said:
I knew that Ford was a strongly anti-Semitic. I didn't know that he was a sort of patron of Arabs in the US.
Yes, the history of Arab immigration to the US is tied to the automobile industry and particularly the Ford Motor Company. Of course, at that time, nearly all of the immigrants were Christians (this is still true to a certain extent today) but many of them received their jobs and education from Ford. This explains why so many Arabs are concentrated in the Metro Detroit area, and particularly Dearborn.

One of the reasons for which Ford hired immigrants, and particularly Arabs, was that he refused to hire blacks, and the jobs at Ford were almost always dangerous and low-paying (even if he paid better than his competitors).

Ironically, the Ford Foundation funded the UN World Conference on Racism in Durban (and we all remember how that turned out) but I think that was just a coincidence. Ford still funds Palestinian NGOs to the tune of about $350,000 a year.
 
NOTE that for a thousand or more years MOSLEMS were more tolerant of Jews than Christians were

The basic cause of Arab anti Jewish feelings is this.

The West spent a thousand years oppressing Jews. Britain felt a bit guitly about it in 1917 and did not actually want Jews in Britain. So the British Foriegn Secretary (Who had earlier passed laws to make it harder for Jewish refugees from Russia go come here) made the Balfour Declaration saying that Palestine could be a National Home for the Jews without effecting the rights of the people already there


Israel was created as a result of guilt about allowing the Holocaust to happen.




Essentially the West oppressed Jewish people for a thousand or more years. We then compensated them by taking someone else's land giving it to the Zionist faction.


It is certainly true that following Arab regimes and various Nationalist and Religious groups used anti Jewish and anti Israeli feelings.


The behaviour of Israeli occupiers since the 1970s has aided anti Jewish movements in the Moslem and Arab communities
 

Leo Caesius

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Incidentally, the record for American casualties in Iraq has just been broken - previously held by April (which, as you remember, was before "sovereignty" was "restored" to the people of Iraq). More have been killed in this month than any other month since the beginning of the occupation - and that's not even including the total number of American casualties from Falluja, which the military refuses to release.

It's no wonder that the Bush Administration is getting ready to cut and run. I don't know whether to be happy or sad about that. Ultimately, I think it can lead to no good.
 
Leo, where do you get the idea the US is going to cut and run? Once the Iraqis have an elected government with an army of its own I would expect US involvment to be reduced substantially, but I doubt the US is leaving any time soon.

Derek, the idea that Muslims were not biased towards, or otherwise mistreating, the Jews, is pure nonsense. While conditions may have been better than in Europe centuries ago, it is about as relevant as noting that African-Americans were better treated under Jim Crow than under slavery.

That argument is simply absurd. Any Arabs believing it are also absurd.

"The British decided to establish Israel because they felt guilty about something that would not happen for another 20-25 years and which they weren't going to do anyway."
 

Leo Caesius

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Grimm Reaper said:
Once the Iraqis have an elected government with an army of its own I would expect US involvment to be reduced substantially, but I doubt the US is leaving any time soon.
When will that happen? As Dick Cheney pointed out, the Iraqis have the highest casualty rates of anyone in the Coalition (ignoring the fact that Iraq was never part of the Coalition...). I don't know what the recruitment numbers for the Iraqi military are, but I can't imagine that they're meeting their goals.

Also, the insurgents control the roads. The British embassy has ordered its staff to avoid the road linking Baghdad to the airport, and that's the safest way out of the country. The senior advisor that I met told me that no one travels by land in Iraq - everything is done with helicopters. Those who take the roads frequently end up being ambushed. Given that Allawi has declared the country to be in a "state of emergency," how can we expect Iraqis to campaign in a time of martial law? If Allawi is reelected because no other candidates was able to campaign, can we say that he was democratically elected? That's only a slight improvement over the Saddam state.

My guess is that the US presence in Iraq will be significantly reduced before there are democratic elections or a real Iraqi Army. Don't get me wrong, though - I hope that I'm mistaken.
 
Leo Caesius said:
When you talk about "the Arab Press" you have to be careful. Some of the most widely distributed and most influential newspapers in the Middle East are published in London. The fact of the matter is that the Israel-9/11 rumor, while common enough, rarely surfaces in the press. I'd be willing to be that when it has, it only appeared in wingnut columns ala Ann Coulter.

In any society where the official avenues of information are considered to be compromised, conspiracy theories take root. The fact of the matter is that, in information just like finance, the bad drives out the good. When people don't have confidence in the "legitimate" sources of information, they inevitably turn to the "underground" media, which are often factually inaccurate. Look at the internet. 90% of the stuff you find on the internet is bunk (compared to, say, only 50-60% in the American news media).

The same is true for Italy. Italians love conspiracy theories. And why not? Berlusconi owns 90% of the media. That figure hardly inspires one to put confidence in the Italian media. I think it may happen here, as well. Americans have always had a penchant for conspiracy theories, and they're fast losing confidence in their own media. We have gotten to the point where FOX is the #1 news channel and yet nobody takes it seriously. Who knows? Perhaps one day we'll start hearing theories about how the Michigan Militia orchestrated 9/11.

Interesting idea, Leo. Thanks.
 
The Balfour declaration happened in 1917. It was before the Holocaust

It was NOT before a thousand and more years of Western anti semitism including numerous incidents of mass murder.

The state of Israel was something that went further the a national homeland. That was a result of guilt over later events
 
Derek, as I said, the argument is foolish.

The British enacted the Balfour Declaration because of guilt over what Germany would not even start doing for another 18 years?

'National homeland' as defined in the League of Nations mandate was actually pretty clear, and that, not the Balfour Declaration, is what led to the State of Israel.

A minor historical detail. Between 1949 and 1954 over 800,000 Jews were driven by violent racism from the Arab and Muslim world. Seems to me that Islamic hatred for Jews goes back a little further than the territories occupied in 1967. I would say it goes back to, oh, let me see, the existance of Islam.

And surely the ultimate comment of Islamic tolerance is that a higher percentage of Jews who survived the Holocaust chose to stay in Europe(even not including the Soviet Bloc) than did the percentage of Jews who chose to NOT run for Israel after 1948 from whatever Muslim nation they lived in.
 
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