Who are the 'typical' Arabs?

[King Mongo]

Who are the 'typical' Arabs?
By Thomas O'Dwyer
Wed., January 26, 2005 Shvat 16, 5765
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=203094&sw=amuta


The glee was scarcely disguised in a message from one of the supremacist morons who litter my e-mail box these days along with the sexy Suzies from Moldova, and the "earn a million a month from home" scams. "I hope you're satisfied now that your anti-Israeli rantings have been exposed for what they are by the arrest of your traitor terrorist Arab friends, blah blah, yap yap, etc. etc." It was the same sort of glee that oozed from the cracks in the tabloid headlines about the seven Israeli Arabs charged with aiding and abetting the Meron bus bombing.

It is gratifying to see that the Israeli right-wing establishment now has an excuse for its perennial racist policies against the minority citizens of this country. The loutish Uzi Landau was of course as quick as ever in leaping onto the runaway racist bandwagon, bellowing from his vacation haunt about demolishing more family homes as the answer to everything. For a surprising moment - caused by a juxtaposition of news items - it seemed he was talking about demolishing the homes of the even more loutish settlers who terrorize, loot and destroy Arab people and property.

Let us make one fact clear at the outset: Despite the appalling discrimination against their community since the establishment of the state, more than 99 percent of the Israeli Arabs have been, are, and always will be loyal law-abiding citizens. The rhetoric of racism is the same everywhere - it is the thieves, drug dealers, criminals and terrorists that represent the minority community in a racist state, not the 99 percent law-abiding, hard-working, family-loving majority.

The logic extends at times to such ludicrous levels as to become laughable. Once in the 1970s, after the IRA bombed a bar in England, I was thrown out of a butcher's shop in Lincoln for being Irish. Not only did the idiot know me as a regular customer, he even knew I was an air force officer at the nearby nuclear base, with the same security clearance as the prime minister. But, as we all know, all Irish are terrorists - or as the late Princess Margaret said around the same time: "When I accidentally said `Irish pigs' at the dinner in Chicago, I really meant to say `Irish jigs' - which I like."

When I first visited Israel back in antiquity, an Israeli girlfriend of the time enthusiastically gushed: "You will be visiting the first country you have ever seen where there is no racism whatsoever. There can't be - we're all Jews." A touching naivete, my dear, but not so. (Tellingly, she had left her radical leftist kibbutz to go abroad after her army service and university - and never returned to visit Israel for 19 years.)

Screaming headlines

So now "the seven" terrorist collaborators will join car thieves as the representative face of the Arab community in the eyes and mouths of the vast number of truly racist Israelis. The newspapers quickly declared them guilty killers - and there hasn't even been a trial.


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