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Joseph Massad, The Electronic Intifada, 20 January 2009 Common Western political wisdom has it that when Western countries support Israeli military action against Arab countries or the Palestinian people, they do so because they support Israel's right to defend itself against its enemies.  Palestinians inspect a mosque in Gaza City destroyed by Israel during its 22 days of attacks on the Gaza Strip that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians, 18 January 2009 This has always been established wisdom in Israel itself, even before the colonial settlement was thestablished, wherein its predatory army is ironically named the Israel Defense Forces, not unlike the South African apartheid army, which was also known as the South African Defense Forces. This defensive nomenclature is hardly exclusive to Israel and South Africa, as many countries rushed after World War II to rename their Ministries of "War" as Ministries of "Defense." Still, Israel's allegedly defensive actions define every single war the colonial settlement has ever engaged in, even and especially when it starts these wars, which it has done in all cases except in 1973. Thus the war of 1948 which Zionist militias started against e Palestinian people on 30 November 1947, a day after a Western-controlled United Nations General Assembly issued the Partition Plan, is presented as "defensive," as was its expulsion of about 400,000 Palestinians before 15 May 1948, i.e. before the day on which three Arab armies (the Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi armies) invaded the area that became Israel (Lebanon hardly had an army to invade with and hardly managed to retrieve two Lebanese villages that Israel had occupied, and Jordanian forces only entered the areas designated by the UN plan for the Palestinian state, and East Jerusalem which was projected to fall under UN jurisdiction). |
Turkey, a great nation that had once led the Muslim ummah under the Caliphate system may yet hold the key to the major problems afflicting the Muslim world today. Islam is being revitalized in a country that is well prepared for acceptance in the modern world. If Islam becomes accepted in the West and the rest of the world, it is the adaptation of Islam to democratic values under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan that is mainly responsible.
At a time, when the international community has turned a blind eye to Israel’s crimes towards the Palestinians, Venezuela has been one of the few nations who has the courage to openly condemn Israel for its crimes and express support for the Palestinian people. Most members of the non-aligned movement professed support for the Palestinian cause during the cold war and severed relations with Israel as they saw the Palestinian struggle as part of the same anti colonial struggle that they were a part of. Other commentators have stated that the non-aligned support for the Palestinian cause was not formed out of any genuine concern for the Palestinian people but as a way to align their foreign policy to that of the former Soviet Union for strategic purposes or to gather favor from several oil producing Arab nations used for their development.