Newt and the "Palestinians"

Go, Mr. Former Speaker!

The time is long past due for the world to tell its Arabic-speaking portion that it needs to naturalize the Falastin Arab refugees and their descendants.

It ought to be a mandatory talking point for everyone in the US foreign policy community that there are roughly around 30,000 victims of an-Nakhbar and their descendants in the USA, and that these people carry US passports whenthey travel, may freely buy and sell real estate, vote in US elections, and even run for office. Yet in the whole of the Arab world from Iraq and the Gulf to Mauretania, only Jordan, the PA, and Israel itself give the Falastin Arabs real citizenship--and even the PA is thinking of denying it to those from pre-1967 Israel.

Yet the Arab states, which insit on keeping the Falastin Arabs stateless, dare to use them as an excuse to trash US embassies and demonize the USA in their government-controlled media (Egypt, the recipient of so much US aid, was notorious in this regard).

The enormity of this travesty is that Lahore-born Manmohan Singh and Delhi-born Pervez Musharaf sat down to talk about defusing Indo-Pakistani tensions, when both men were young refugees in 1948, and ended up as leaders of their countries. Further, Jews descended from the Arab countries--and there were Jews in Egypt, Iraq, and the Maghreb before there were Arabs--are now no-questions-asked Israelis. This is perhaps one of the most obscene imbalances in the Middle East.

Good for you, Mr. Speaker--and I was raised Democrat!