Brotherly Love

As we’ve seen over the last few weeks there have been demonstrations on campus dealing with the Arab-Jewish conflict. While these demonstrations are indeed entertaining, I want everyone to do their own research. We are inundated with information, from the television, to the radio, to the internet. We have sources at our fingertips, and we don’t take the effort to learn and find things out for ourselves. We believe what we are told.

We don’t ask why things happen the way they happen. We don’t look into the history of a problem to deal with the ramifications of today. We are lazy.

There are many topics that pro-Arab demonstrators never deal with. One of these topics is the how Arabs that are interested in peace with the Jews are treated by their Arab brothers.

As of mid-July 2002, the casualty rate is given as 1,500 Arabs killed, while only 550 Jews have been killed. While these numbers seem one sided, we need to break down them down. The number of Arabs killed does not make a distinction between civilian and armed combatants, or even who they were killed by.

A new study compiled by the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (http://www.ict.org.il/researchreport/researchreport.htm) broke down these numbers into smaller categories such as age, gender, and whether or not they were combatants. The study showed that a majority of Palestinian Arab deaths were combatants, Jewish deaths were 80% civilian.

An interesting fact to notice is that between September 30, 2000 and May 30, 2002, thirty-four Palestinian females have been killed out of 1,293 Arab deaths - 2.63% In contrast, 146 Israeli females have been killed out of 501 Israeli deaths - 29% (www.bridgesforpeace.com). This is due to the targeting of Israeli civilians by Arab terrorists versus the accidental killing of Arab civilians by the Israeli Army. If the Israeli Army were focused on killing civilians, the female casualty rate would be much higher.

The most important part of the study that needs to be focused on are the 185 Arabs killed by their own brothers. This is one out of eight Arabs killed in this current conflict. During the first Intifada in the late 1980s, about 800 Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians as “suspected collaborators”, one-third of the total death toll.

These Arab “suspected collaborators” are executed in several different ways. Sometimes they are executed after a Palestinian Authority “trial” in which they went without access to lawyers and without the right to appeal, after being horribly tortured (Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org) Sometimes these “collaborators” were murdered in a prison raid, or sometimes murdered in the street and hung by their heels in the city square (www.HonestReporting.com).

While Israel keeps getting accused of killing Arabs indiscriminately, we can see that numbers do no justice to the people involved in the Arab-Jewish conflict. There is no love lost between Arabs. Palestinians are tortured and killed by their own brothers.

We live in a country where we have an overwhelming amount of information available to us. We don’t need to be swayed by who yells the loudest or who puts more blood on the pavement to attract our attention. We need honesty, not just slogans. It may be easier to root for the underdog, but it may not be the right thing. Check it out for yourself. Do the research.