Moroccan Poet: Arab World is Imperialist, ‘Palestine’ is JewishOutspoken poet angers Arab countrymen by provocatively quipping that Arabs ‘are more Zionist than the Jews.
An outspoken Moroccan poet has angered many of her countrymen by accusing the Arab world of imperialism and defending the Jewish people’s right to a homeland in Israel.
In an interview with Med Radio last week Malika Mezzane, who is an ethnic Amazigh (or Berber), challenged the official line in the Arab world, where tiny Israel is accused of being “expansionist” and where Zionism – the movement for Jewish self-determination – is bizarrely equated with imperialism.
Asserting that it was in fact the Arab world which had pursued expansionist policies, Mezzane quipped that according to their own definition of the term, “Arabs are more Zionists than the Jews.”
The Arab world, she said, believed that it was “God’s chosen people, and they have the right to extend their territory, at the expense of other nations.”
Mezzane’s own people, the Amazigh, are one of the indigenous non-Arab nations of northern Africa which who were conquered and subjugated by the invading Arab armies during the Muslim conquest in the seventh century.
Since then they have been subjected to persecution and periodic campaigns of cultural and physical ethnic-cleansing at the hands of Arab rulers in the region. In some cases, Amazigh calls for self-determination have been rejected by Arab states as somehow representative of “western imperialism” – a perverse inversion of the reality similarly employed by anti-Zionists against the Jewish state.
Further infuriating her listeners, Mezzane insisted that the Jews were justified in establishing “their state in Palestine, since it’s their homeland.”
“We have never heard that Alaska or Australia was the homeland of the Jewish people. It’s the Arab people who exceeded their borders in order to establish the so-called Islamic Arab World, at the expense of the Jewish nation,” said Malika Mezzane.
The poet’s comments were decried as “provocative“, with many Arab Moroccans taking to Facebook to denounce her views. She has previously caused controversy by voicing staunch support for the Kurds, another indigenous non-Arab nation fighting for its rights in the Middle East in the face of hostility and concerted attacks by its Arab neighbors.
http://www.jewsnews.co.il/2014/09/21/mo ... is-jewish/And for the record:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/ ... LH20141106Israel tried to limit civilian casualties in Gaza: U.S. military chiefBY DAVID ALEXANDER
WASHINGTON Thu Nov 6, 2014 5:20pm EST
(Reuters) - The highest-ranking U.S. military officer said on Thursday that Israel went to "extraordinary lengths" to limit civilian casualties in the recent war in Gaza and that the Pentagon had sent a team to see what lessons could be learned from the operation.
Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged recent reports criticizing civilian deaths during the 50-day Gaza war this year but told an audience in New York he thought the Israel Defense Forces "did what they could" to avoid civilian casualties.
Israel was criticized for civilian deaths during the conflict, including by the White House. More than 2,100 Palestinians were killed during the fighting, most of them civilians and many of them children, according to U.N. and Palestinian figures.
A Human Rights Watch report in September accused Israel of committing war crimes by attacking three U.N.-run schools in the enclave, while Amnesty International said in a report released on Wednesday that Israel showed "callous indifference" to the carnage caused by attacks on civilian targets.
Dempsey was asked about the ethical implications of Israel's handling of the Gaza war, during an appearance in New York at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
"I actually do think that Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties," Dempsey told the group.
"In this kind of conflict, where you are held to a standard that your enemy is not held to, you're going to be criticized for civilian casualties," he added.
Dempsey said Hamas had turned Gaza into "very nearly a subterranean society" with tunneling throughout the coastal enclave.
"That caused the IDF some significant challenges. But they did some extraordinary things to try and limit civilian casualties, to include ... making it known that they were going to destroy a particular structure," Dempsey said.
He said the IDF, in addition to dropping warning leaflets, developed a technique called "roof-knocking" to advise residents to leave sites they planned to strike.
Rights groups have criticized the technique, which involves dropping a low-yield explosive or non-explosive device on a rooftop, saying it did not constitute an effective warning and could kill residents too.
Dempsey said the Pentagon three months ago sent a "lessons-learned team" of senior officers and non-commissioned officers to work with the IDF to see what could be learned from the Gaza operation, "to include the measures they took to prevent civilian casualties and what they did with tunneling."
The general said civilian casualties during the conflict were "tragic, but I think the IDF did what they could" to avoid them.
He said he thought his Israeli counterpart would look at lessons learned from the conflict to see what more could be done to avoid civilian deaths in future operations.
"The IDF is not interested in creating civilian casualties. They're interested in stopping the shooting of rockets and missiles out of the Gaza Strip and into Israel," Dempsey said.