A History Lesson for Piers Morgan

Last week Piers Morgan, who has replaced Larry King on CNN, interviewed Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. While it is good for Truth to speak to Power it is always discouraging to listen to someone who is supposed to be informed display by his line of questioning that he has, at a minimum, been completely hoodwinked by the Palestinian Myth Machine which couches its narrative as a peaceful people wrongfully dispossessed of their historic birthright and shamefully treated by hostile occupiers. This is the narrative that has gained currency in our State Department, in the chancelleries of Europe, and certainly throughout the Arab world. Nothing could be farther from the truth yet it is passed around more frequently than the bong at Oliver Stone's house. This is in spite of the identical Al Qaeda, Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Authority rhetoric of hatred and incitement to violence that is beamed towards Israel and the West on a weekly basis culminating in the sort of brutal murders of a peaceful and slumbering Jewish family as witnessed in Itamar last week. It is this kind of wanton butchery that over decades has come to define Palestinian society. Instead of demanding an end to it the international community, a rhetorical beguiler of one's intelligence if ever there was one, gets excited about the future construction of 1600 homes to be built on vacant land 1.2 miles from the Knesset.

Piers Morgan began with the confident assumption that the Palestinians have a case. That was his first mistake. Netanyahu should have immediately given him a history lesson starting with the historical fact that Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital of Israel for 3,000 years and 2,000 of those (count them) before the unfortunate advent of Islam. It has NEVER been the capital of any other people. It is mentioned in the Bible almost 600 times. It is not mentioned in the Koran even once. Regardless of how often or how loudly they claim title to it the claims of Islam are entirely spurious and are devoid of historical evidence and contrary to international law particularly as detailed in the San Remo Agreement of 1920.

Morgan made the point that Israel must make some significant "concession" in order to make peace. However, there are a couple of things wrong with that assertion: 1)by making any concessions in the first place Israel has sent the wrong message, namely that the Palestinians actually have a case and that Israel took something from them which was rightfully theirs to begin with & 2) the Palestinian have never responded to concessions. They simply pocketed them, increased the ante, never kept their word but always made good on their threats and did so with America and the so-called international community looking on with approval much of the time.

Morgan went on to say that Israel is one of the more "calm" places in the Middle East today but failed to relate this to the fact that it is a democracy with liberal democratic values extended to its Arab and Jewish citizens alike and not an oppressive theocratic state that subjugates women, hangs homosexuals and persecutes non-Muslim minorities. Yet, a 23rd. Islamic state where Jews would be forbidden is what Morgan seems to think would be able to live side by side in peace and harmony with Israel, the world's only Jewish nation.

He managed to bring up the "awful conditions" of the Palestinian refugees in Gaza and asked Netanyahu if he would like to live there. Old Piers must have been very loosely educated. Everyone knows that 10 years after the worst war in history, with over 40 million deaths and millions of refugees, all of the refugee camps in Europe had been closed and everyone had been resettled. Why is this not the case 63 years after 5 Arab armies attacked Israel in 1948 and what happened to almost 900,000 Jewish refugees who were kicked out of their homes in Arab countries in the years after the Arab armies were defeated? To answer the first question, it is obvious that the Palestinian refugees are kept in place by their cynical leaders to pull at the heart strings of the West and its "useful idiots" in order to generate money and sympathy for their fake cause. To answer the second question, the Jewish refugees were all absorbed by Israel and went on to lead active and productive lives. Persecuted, murdered, banished and robbed of their property there wasn't a suicide bomber amongst them!

Some of the questions Morgan should have asked, or at least wondered about out loud, was what exactly has happened to the billions of dollars in aid that has been sent to the Palestinians and why hasn't that been used to help their own people? Why doesn't the place look like Beverly Hills and why don't most of their people have graduate degrees? Where has the money gone? What have they been doing with it? Why is it when their Arab brothers have access to billions and billions of petro-dollars they treat the so-called Palestinians as red-headed step children? Why do they need money from the West? Why do we get the sinking feeling that the Arab Palestinians are just used as tactical pawns in the strategic goal of annihilating Israel? Why is it that Israel, with no natural resources and surrounded for 63 years by genocidal enemies whose undiminished goal is her extinction, is now an economic and entrepreneurial power house with arable land converted from pure desert? Sixty five percent of the PA's income is derived from international aid and when Yasser Arafat was around a good deal of that ended up in his own bank account. What does Mahmoud Abbas's bank account look like these days?

Morgan made the point that there was a huge disparity between the conditions in Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Israel and characterized this disparity as a case of "them" and "us". However, the "them" is not the PA and the "us" is not the Israelis. The real "them" is the Arab Palestinians and the real "us" is their leaders whose hatred of Israel and Jews is inspired by the kind religious fanaticism which cannot be assuaged by negotiations, concessions, sanctions, threats or gifts of land. Gaza proves that "land for peace" does not work.

As for Morgan's question to Prime Minister Netanyahu about whether he would like to live in Gaza, why would he want to live in an area where Jews are prohibited and where the population voted to have Hamas, an internationally recognized group of terrorist killers, govern their affairs? Before the interview Piers should have read the Hamas Charter. He would have discovered that it is one of the most unambiguous documents of hatred ever produced. In it he would have read their boast that the destruction of Israel would be Hamas' contribution to the eventual establishment of an Islamic caliphate. Why exactly would Netanyhu want to live there? Netanyahu should have asked if Piers would like to live in Sderot or Ashkelon where, until recently, he would have been treated to the daily arrival of rockets raining down on him from Gaza.

Behind each of Piers Morgan's questions was the inference that there is a moral equivalency between those who wish to destroy the state of Israel and those who are determined to defend her. Thus he reveals that he has missed the point of this interminable conflict. The world's industrialized nations pander to the Arabs in order to ensure an uninterrupted flow of oil upon which their economic lives depend and thereby Israel's security and even her existence become subordinated to this consideration. Furthermore, Israel is an embattled outpost of western values. She is on the front line of the relentless march of Islamic totalitarianism. She stands in the breach in the defense of western democracies as the largest and most important target of the vicious and unending religious hatred which Islam can muster and which, by the way, is not solely reserved for Israel. There is nothing Israel has done, can do or alter to mollify Islam. Stranded in a state of developmental immaturity Islam steals from history believing that the creation of a new past will justify its right to change the future in its favor.

One hopes that Piers Morgan's illusions are due to misinformation rather than the corrupt and pervasive bias against Israel with which the mainstream media is stained and infected, in which case Prime Minister Netanyahu should have taught him a much needed history lesson. Israel's prime minister need not have answered each question as if its basic premise was valid; instead he should have dispelled the illusions of Piers Morgan while educating the audience who needed to hear the truth. Truth, of course, is a rare commodity in the Middle East and is only exceeded in its rarity by the absence of journalistic due diligence on the part of Piers Morgan when he prepared his questions for the prime minister.

Watch the video here.