Palestinian refugees

From my earlier stance it must be obvious that in my mind the Middle East crisis, as a crisis, has been created (yes, I stand by my opinion) and fueled by the Arab countries of the area. Don't get me wrong, I do not say that those Arabs from British Palestine, who for one reason or another were forced to leave their properties behind and became refugees, were not wronged during the creation of Israel. What I cannot digest is the fact that they are still there in the refugee camps. Sixty years have past! Around the world there were horrendous hot spots, with horribly traumatised refugees who barely escaped with their lives, in numbers vastly greater than those of the Palestinians. Yet, they managed to move on, immigrated to different countries and rebuilt their lives.

To present you with my own personal perspective: I am a formal refugee from Eastern Europe, my family has lost everything one horrible night, down to the smallest personal items and, although we did not lose our lives like the Jews did, we accepted history's quirks and moved on. It would not have even occurred to us to stay in those Viennese refugee camps and orchestrate suicide bombings into our old countries. But then again nobody encouraged us to do so, nobody fed us fairy tales, nobody promised us that soon the lands behind the Iron Courtain will be reconquered and everybody will get back their lands and lost property. Because that is what the Palestinian refugees (if we can still call that the children and grandchildren of those who originally fled) are being promised, to this day, as they are kept isolated from the rest of the host countries, kept in poverty, while the rest of the Arab world enjoys the benefits of the wealth generated by the rising oil prices.

Recent political events, the fact that the majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas, an organization openly talking about the eventual distruction of Israel, have proven what I personally was aware of for a long time now, that Russian Communist propaganda egged on the majority of the Palestinians (as well as the rest of the Arab world) to keep on fighting towards Israel's total elimination (see my August 24 entry). This generation of refugees grew up using school books written in some cases as long ago as Nasser's regime in the fifties. What can you expect when children as young as 3-4 years old parrot words like: "Jews are apes and pigs". The girl in this clip is in Egypt, the interview was shown in Saudi Arabia, on Iqra TV on May 7, 2002.