Fitzgerald: "Crippling economic sanctions"
We heard again on the BBC yesterday from that fountain of Islamic apologetics, Rosemary Hollis of the Royal Blah of International Affairs. Remember that line in Lolita about the girl who "wore a halter with little to halt"? That's Rosemary Hollis -- self-assured with little be self-assured about. She was going on and on about the "crippling economic sanctions" imposed on the "Palestinians" by the Americans and Europeans.

Let's stop right there, because the BBC interviewer did not himself stop to ask her a question or two. Let's ask ourselves: are the "Palestinian" Arabs really economically crippled? The ones whose picture you can see in The New Duranty Times with an advertisement in the background for a satellite television dish? And we all know that satellite television dishes are the very emblem of poverty, the symbol of utter despair brought on by "crippling economic sanctions," don't we?

So what are these "crippling economic sanctions"? They consist in this, and only this: the refusal of the United States, and of governments in the Infidel lands of Western Europe, to continue pouring a billion or two each year into the "Palestinian" coffers, which billions are spent, we know, by the leaders, on themselves, and then on a dozen separate "security" services and on buying weapons to be used against Israel -- explosives, rockets, guns of all kinds, even little projects as yet unpublicized by Israel. Arafat died having squirreled away a billion or so for himself, and with another few billion completely unaccounted for, but no doubt the bank accounts and European real estate of such people as Mahmoud Abbas and the rest of the Fatah or PLO leadership accounts for a good deal. Remember when Zuheir Mohsen was assassinated at his luxury apartment in Cannes? He's not the only one to have lived high; they all do. And of course one reason they love, like other Arab despots, to visit Paris or London or Washington is to enjoy those all-expenses paid vacations in the best suites at the Hotel Raphael (a former President of Lebanon used to love the best suite there, right on Avenue Kleber) or the Crillon (that's the one with the suite Mubarak likes), and it's no different anywhere else. Send in the girls, or in Arafat's case the boys, and send in the caviar for the general or even the colonel or captain or king, and let's party.

Well, what "crippling economic sanctions" -- as Rosemary Hollis of the Royal Blah put it to the BBC did not explain -- means is that we, the Infidels, are, perhaps only temporarily, just for a little bit, now refusing to keep sending the billions to people who spend most of their waking hours dreaming about, and working to advance the dream, of killing our fellow Infidels and putting the Holy Land under Muslim domination and control. The Israelis built their state out of nothing. They did make the desert bloom. Former physicists and art historians did drain the Huleh marshes, did plant trees, did build up an agricultural base. Then they built a technological base that, by dint of fantastic amounts of work and entrepreneurial flair in high technology, in pharmaceuticals, and in many other areas rival the achievements of the largest and richest Western countries -- whose citizens do not simultaneously have to worry constantly about fighting for their lives, and often have to stop production to go to war, a war imposed on them by the most implacable and malevolent of enemies.

The greenhouses of the Israelis were handed over to the "Palestinians" intact, bought for them by various Jewish well-wishers who hoped, and believed, that those "Palestinians" would set to work. It was nonsense from start to finish. Those "Palestinians" wrecked the greenhouses, as they have wrecked everything. They prefer, you see, to be paid for by Infidels. They prefer to go and demand -- for demand they do -- hundreds of millions, and then billions, which no one accounts for, which is largely diverted for sinister efforts, and which come on top of the longest-running fake "refugee" saga in world history: that UNRWA mission by which ever since 1948 every local Arab and his brother has signed up for free everything, and no one ever dies but many are born and added to the rolls, and the U.N.'s funds for real refugees all over the world are reduced by all that money that goes, and goes, and goes, to those "Palestinians." And on top of it comes the billions that have come from America and Western Europe as that "aid" that has now been denied just for a bit. And now the smooth Rosemary Hollises and editorial pages of The Guardian, Le Monde, The Bandar Beacon, and The New Duranty Times, and the assorted BBC and NPR speakers and speakerines, dare to describe this to us as “crippling economic sanctions.” They dare to use such language with us, the long-suffering Infidel taxpayers who have been shelling out huge sums for people who hate not only the Israelis, with whom we should all sympathize and identify with, but all Infidels everywhere.

Meanwhile, the Arabs and Muslims have taken in over ten trillion dollars from OPEC revenues since the fall of 1973. Ten trillion dollars as the result not of work, but of an accident of geology. They have built assorted Las Vegases, with private palaces for the ruling class, and then some. They have bought hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons, and in so doing have corrupted and involved in corruption a large number of people in the capitals of the West. Why, just the other day the British government closed down an investigation into the clear violation of British law because of the demands of the Al-Saud family. The British will allow Saudi corruption and theft of national assets to go uninvestigated, and to take precedence over such a thing as the mere rule of law.

And with this ten trillion dollars, beyond the arms and the palaces and the dozens upon dozens of private jumbo jets for these daggers-and-dishdashas primitives, there has been money for the "shahids" -- the assorted suicide bombers and their families, but not for the "Palestinians" generally. The Infidels, you see, are expected to give that aid -- aid which is has become expected by the recipients, and which the donors too have come to believe that they, those donors, simply must keep providing lest those Muslim recipients get angry with those Infidels for not continuing to provide such aid. For when Muslims are denied their Jizyah, then all kinds of things can happen.

This is a completely absurd situation. It is as if someone down the street despises you, and would like nothing better than to see you submit to his dominance and to be permanently reduced to a condition of humiliation and degradation, as Muslims believe Infidels must by right be made to do in lands where Islam dominates (and Islam must come to dominate everywhere), and you begin to support him entirely, hoping to buy his good-will while he does nothing except prepare and plot to destroy not just you, but others who like you are Infidels (and because they are Infidels). And if you then temporarily suspend that support, only until a meaningless verbal formula is uttered by that malevolent and evil man or one of his associates, and then you promise, tugging at your forelock, to renew those payments with alacrity, and then that man starts screaming about the "crippling economic sanctions" you have imposed on him by ceasing to support him as you have, what would you say? Would you agree with the BBC and much of the Western press, and certainly with smooth-talking Rosemary Hollis of the Royal Blah, that in sooth they are right, that indeed you have imposed "crippling economic sanctions"?

Or would you react in a different way, with different words?