We too have our terrorists. The Contras in Nicaragua carried out, with funding from Washington, some of the most egregious human rights violations in Central America, yet were lauded as "freedom fighters." Jonas Savimbi, the rebel leader the United States backed in Angola's civil war, murdered and tortured with a barbarity that far outstripped the Taliban. The rebellion Savimbi began in 1975 resulted in more than 5oo,ooo dead. President Ronald Reagan called Savimbi the Abraham Lincoln of Angola, although he littered the country with land mines, once bombed a Red Cross-run factory making artificial legs for victims of those mines, and pummeled a rival's wife and children to death. The mayhem and blood-letting we backed in Angola were copied in many parts of Africa, including Zaire and Liberia.

I have heard Israeli settlers on the West Bank, for example, argue that Palestinian towns, towns that have been Muslim since the seventh century, belong to them because it says so in the Bible.

By the way, I thought back then land was regarded as God's property, and people were simply borrowing it for their own use. I'm not sure if Jews practiced that, though.

Dark Flame99966 wrote:

By the way, I thought back then land was regarded as God's property, and people were simply borrowing it for their own use. I'm not sure if Jews practiced that, though.

The West never practiced that. In fact it could be argued that only black Africans and Native Americans ever did believe tat.

To speak of the Israeli war of independence with many Israelis, in which stateless European Jews established a country in a land that had been primarily Muslim since the seventh century, is to shout into a vast black hole. There is an emotional barrier, a desire not to tarnish the creation myth, which makes it difficult for many Israeli Jews, including some of the most liberal and progressive, to acknowledge the profound injustice the creation of the state of Israel meant for Palestinians. As Americans we struggle with these myths as well, only grudgingly conceding that many of our founding fathers were slave owners and much of our nation acquired after a genocidal campaign against Native Americans.

In peacetime this collective amnesia is challenged by a few intrepid scholars. Indeed, some of the best scholarly work on the 1948 war and what it meant for the Palestinians has come from Israeli historians-but their voices are muted or silenced in times of crisis. Our own nation is no different. We embrace gross and overtly racist notions of Islam that paint all Muslims as having a tendency to violence, anger, antimodernism, and close-mindedness. Questioning of the nationalist line, or an attempt to address historical injustices committed by us against our foes, is branded unpatriotic, intellectual treason, just as it was in Argentina in 1982.

The fervent drive for "authenticity" leads nationalist leaders to use a variety of disciplines to promote and legitimize the cause. In Israel the
mania for archeology, for excavating ancient Jewish ruins, is a way of legitimizing the presence of Jews in what was once Palestine. These sites
are given a prominence out of proportion to the multitude of other ruins that are not Jewish in character.

The city of Mostar in Bosnia was the scene of some of the most savage fighting of the war. The eastern Muslim section was surrounded and
heavily shelled by the Bosnian Croats. The town owed its name, "Bridge-keeper," to an elegant, arched Ottoman bridge built in 1566 to join the
banks of the Neretva River. The city, a quaint example of Ottoman architecture, was dotted with cobblestone alleys, stone houses, spindly minarets,
the Catholic campanile, and Orthodox steeples.


But Croatian commanders, intent on wiping out what was the heart of the city, blasted the bridge for two days in November 1993 until it tumbled
into the river. It, like the Moorishrevival library in Sarajevo, which was bombarded for three days by Serbian incendiary bombs in the summer of
1992, was a cultural symbol that did not fit with the narrative of Serbian or Croatian nationalists. It was part of the assault against all cultural icons
that spoke of the plurality of peoples in Mostar and Sarajevo.

In Bosnia the Serbs, desperately trying to deny the Muslim character of Bosnia, dynamited or plowed over libraries, museums, universities,
historic monuments, and cemeteries, but most of all mosques.

The town of Zvornik in Serb-held Bosnia once had a dozen mosques. The 1991 census listed 6o percent of its residents as Muslim Slavs. By the
end of the war the town was ioo percent Serb. Branko Grujic, the Serb-appointed mayor, informed us: "There never were any mosques in Zvornik."

Israel, despite efforts in secular state schools
to present a more balanced view of Arab history, allows state-funded religious schools to preach that Jewish rule should extend from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq and that the kingdom of Jordan is occupied Jewish land.'