Especially since I already pointed out the Grand Mufti’s efforts on behalf of nationalism. That Brazil has no idea about that period in the I/P history is telling.
I personally have very little time for debating with a poster who hasn’t taken the time to become informed on the issue but uses wilfully ignorant questioning in an attempt to fetch-quest an opponent into submission.
You do realize, don’t you, that this supports my basic claim?
Looks to me like if anyone’s posts are wilfully ignorant, its yours. Besides which, I asked you some very simple, basic questions which would be easy to answer if you had even the slightest idea what you were talking about. If you want to call that a “fetch-quest,” then so be it. Looks to me like you simply prefer not to back up your claims.
It’s a Hamas spokesman on Al Jazeera TV ranting against Arab countries not helping Palestinians, claiming that “half the Palestinians are Egyptians and half are Saudis”, saying that every Palestinian can show that he came from Egypt, or Syria, or Yemen or Saudi Arabia, and thus those countries should send help to Palestinians, in his words, not so they can live well, but because they wage the Jihad.
By the same token, a large percentage of Americans are German, British, Irish, etc… That doesn’t mean, however, that “American” isn’t a valid grouping in which to place people.
Apples and oranges. That there were people there since ancient times is not disputed. That they were just one contiguous line of people is (they moved around, immigrated, emigrated, died off, etc…). That doesn’t mean that there weren’t people there for 1500 years.
Put it another way: there have been people in Central/South America for thousands of years. They haven’t been the same exact ethnic groups, and Mexicans are not Aztecs (or Mayans, or what have you), but there were still people there for the last several thousand years.
There were. For more than 1500 years. Probably for 15000 years and more. But the Palestinians living there cannot claim descent from those people when they came from Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria etc.
Again, not completely true. Did some of the people who lived there 1500 years ago have descendants who stayed there that time? Probably. Did others move in from other areas and intermix with the natives? Yes. Did some of the natives and the intermixed offspring leave? Yes. And so on.
The Palestinians, as a population, are not the direct lineal descendants of the Canaanites, for example. But so what?
I agree, but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that their eclectic descent per se does not somehow invalidate their claims to be a distinct group. Rather it is evidence of their underlying motivations.
The problem with “Palestinians” is that they were invented and continue to be identified as a group primarily to undermine Zionism. To use Finnagain’s words, they are a “weapon” which is being “cynically used.”
There aren’t “Americans” who are being discriminated against and kept stateless generation after generation in order to undermine Canada or Mexico or any other country for that matter.
Neither Canada and the US or Mexico and the US have serious disputes about the location of the border. But things like that have happened in other countries…the “optants” of Alsace-Lorraine after Germany took it over, who lost their French citizenship but refused to take German citizenship; The Polish Jews living in Germany in the 1930s who were stripped of their Polish citizenship and were put into refugee camps by Poland after Germany deported them; in fact, stateless Jews all over Europe in the 1930s and 40s; Western Saharans in Algeria; Sudanese refugees in Chad; Chinese in Brunei, Bedouin in Kuwait. It’s not like the Palestinians refugees are the only stateless people in the world, or the only group whose lives countries are playing games with for political reasons.
Yes Captain, but since we see that during the nascence of Palestinian Nationalism, one of its main figures also uses it for his political gains, there’s no such thing as a Palestinian. And Brazil’s deliberate unwillingness to learn anything about the history of the region unless he gets to ask increasingly bad faith fetch-quest questions just shows how unreal the Palestinians are. After all, if they were real, he would’ve been motivated to learn the history. But since he’s not, they aren’t.