Scott Spiegel

Frontrunner-of-the-month GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich caused a stir at Saturday night’s Iowa debate when he affirmed his previous characterization of “an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and were historically part of the Arab community.”

For once, Gingrich is correct.

The label “Palestine” was used historically to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (and beyond); the term had no political import.  During the first half of the 20^th century, “Palestinian” referred largely to Jews living in Palestine.  The Palestine Post, for example, was printed in Hebrew and English, and in 1950 was renamed The Jerusalem Post.

The British, who controlled Palestine after WWI, divided it in two in 1923, giving 75% of the land—the area that is now Jordan—to Palestinian Arabs, and the remaining 25% to Palestinian Jews.  But that wasn’t good enough to satisfy regional Arabic despots.

In 1947, the United Nations proposed a partition plan to create side-by-side Jewish and Arab states out of the 25% that was left of the original Palestine, west of the Jordan River.  The Arab regimes surrounding Palestine rejected the deal; this resulted in the 1947-1948 Civil War and the creation of the Jewish state.

During the subsequent 1948 Arab-Israeli War, started against Israel one day after it declared statehood, Arab governments encouraged hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs to flee their homes in order to facilitate the onslaught of the invading armies of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen against Israelis.  These regimes promised to return to Palestinian Arabs the property they had left once Israel was defeated; however, Israel won, and refugees were forced to relocate outside of Palestine.

As Gingrich noted, plenty of Muslim countries could have given Palestinian Arab refugees a state, but none did.  The countries to which refugees scattered—chiefly Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan—suppressed any burgeoning sense of Palestinian identity to a far greater degree than Israel ever did.

Strangely, Palestinian Arab refugees did not protest after the Arab-Israeli war when Egypt and Jordan grabbed the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Jerusalem—the same territories that the United Nations had set aside to serve as their home state.  To this day, Palestinian Arabs insist on being granted, not the territory set aside for them in 1923 in present-day Jordan, not the territory taken over in 1948 by Egypt and Jordan, but one tiny sliver of land in the Middle East that has served as a refuge for Jewish Holocaust survivors and a base for Jews to call their home state.

The “Palestinian people” was a fiction created post-WWII to facilitate the insertion of a fifth column inside Israel to demand endless, untenable land concessions and eventually encroach upon the entire Jewish state.

In an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 1977, former Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Zuheir Mohsen admitted, “The Palestinian people does not exist.  The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity.  In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese.  Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”

How much clearer can it get?  How much more nakedly could the founders of the Palestinian strategy reveal their modus operandi?

That the Palestinian people are invented is not in question.  The only question is whether they should be awarded their own state.  Anyone who cares about the security of Israel, the only free nation in the region, should answer with a resounding no.

Back to Saturday’s debate: Moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Gingrich if he thought his comments were dangerous.  Gingrich replied, “Is what I said factually correct?  Yes.  Is it historically true?  Yes…  [E]very day, rockets are fired into Israel…  Hamas does not admit the right of Israel to exist, and says publicly, ‘Not a single Jew will remain.’ The Palestinian Authority ambassador to India said last month… ‘Israel has no right to exist.’”

He continued: “The Palestinian claim to a right of return is based on a historically false story.  Somebody ought to have the courage to go all the way back to… the context in which Israel came into existence…  ‘Palestinian’ did not become a common term until after 1977.  This is a propaganda war in which our side refuses to engage.”

In response to Gingrich’s defense, hapless Mitt Romney floundered all over the place, claiming that, although he mostly agreed with Gingrich, it was a “mistake” to call the Palestinians an invented people (though they are), Gingrich had made it “more difficult for [Israelis] to sit down with the Palestinians” (though it’s already impossible), and Gingrich had decided to “throw incendiary words into a place which is a boiling pot” (though the situation is already hopeless).

Despite his ideological missteps, character flaws, and general unsuitability to be our nominee, I’m happy to give credit where credit is due, and in this case it goes squarely to Gingrich.  As he summed up, “It is helpful to have a president of the United States with the courage to tell the truth, [like] Ronald Reagan, who went around his entire national security apparatus to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and who overruled his entire State Department in order to say, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’  Reagan believed the power of truth restated the world and reframed the world…  I will tell the truth, even if it’s at the risk of causing some confusion… with the timid.”

If Gingrich doesn’t get the nomination—and he doesn’t especially deserve to—he may at least serve the same function that other unlikely nominees have served on various issues from Santorum (Iran) to Cain (taxes) to Bachmann (ObamaCare) to Perry (Social Security): namely, to push Mitt Romney to the right.  Based on his comments on the Palestinians, Gingrich may even serve as a model for pressuring our nominee to speak the truth.



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Related articles

• Hey, stop this dangerous candidate! He’s told the truth! – Daily Mail (dailymail.co.uk)
• Arab League condemns Gingrich’s remarks on Palestinians – BBC News (bbc.co.uk)
• Gingrich draws flak for remarks on Palestinians (thehindu.com)
• Newt Gingrich: “Invented Palestinian People” (roshpinaproject.com)
• Gingrich Stands By Controversial Comment About Palestinians (huffingtonpost.com)

Two ineluctable facts stand out when scrutinizing politicians’ actions on gay issues over the past 30 years: (1) Republicans are not anti-gay and (2) Democrats are not pro-gay. By 2009, there are few differences between Republican and Democratic politicians on gay issues, except that Democrats are more likely to jerk gay voters around and Republicans are more likely to quietly favor pro-liberty stances. There may have been a difference between the two parties once, but that hasn’t been the case for a long time.

In 1978, California governor Ronald Reagan opposed the Briggs Initiative, which would have barred gays from teaching in public schools. In an op-ed penned as he was beginning his presidential campaign, Reagan wrote, “Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.” This, in the late 70s, while Jimmy Carter was publicly refusing to meet with gay groups. The initiative was overwhelmingly defeated, mostly due to Reagan’s efforts, and this momentum was instrumental in forming the Log Cabin Republicans.

Reagan was the first president to invite two openly gay men—interior decorator Ted Graber and his partner—to spend the night at the White House. Washington Post reporter Robert Kaiser called Reagan a “closet tolerant.” If Reagan was closeted, it was because no one asked him his views, not because he was hiding anything.

The number of gays discharged from the military dropped every year under Reagan. In contrast, the number of gays discharged increased every full year under Bill Clinton except one, doubling from 617 in 1994 to 1,231 in 2000. The number of gays discharged decreased again every full year under George W. Bush except one, halved from 1,273 in 2001 to 612 in 2006. Gay rights groups report the number of gays discharged over decades, but they never break it down by administration, because the numbers make Democrats look bad and Republicans look good.

More recently, Obama claimed he would repeal the ban on gays in the military—and has spent precisely zero time working to fulfill this promise. He refused to issue an executive order staying the investigation of gays until the law is changed, and is content destroying through inaction the military careers of servicemen like Arabic translator Dan Choi.

Our Gay Marriage Opponent-in-Chief kicked off his inauguration with an invocation by Rick Warren, robust financial sponsor of the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8. Happy days are here again!

Independent Gay Forum reports that around the 100-day mark of Obama’s presidency, WhiteHouse.gov removed discussion of almost all gay issues from its Civil Rights page including mention of repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, cut its number of “promises” to gays from eight to three, and slashed discussion of gay issues from half a page to a few sentences. After bloggers objected, some material returned but not the promise to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act or a quote about gay civil rights. “Change we can believe in” apparently means “we can be confident that campaign promises to gays will get scrubbed from Obama’s website on a regular basis.”

In Washington D.C., former Democratic mayor Marion Barry recently woke up from a nap to realize he had accidentally voted with a unanimous City Council to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, and subsequently asked the council for a do-over so he could take back his vote.

Meanwhile, gay-friendly candidates and policies are making inroads even in the religious wing of the Republican Party. In the 2008 presidential primaries, televangelist Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Guiliani, the most pro-gay major Republican candidate, a man who shacked up with a gay male couple after his divorce and promised them if New York ever legalized gay marriage he would preside over their ceremony.

Focus on the Family, James Dobson’s group, recently expressed their openness to a gay Obama Supreme Court nominee: “The issue is not their sexual orientation. It’s whether they are a good judge or not.” Sexual orientation “should never come up. It’s not even pertinent to the equation.”

If, in 2009, gays want to support the Democratic Party because they happen to agree with every one of their non-gay-related positions, fine. It’s a bit suspicious that so many gays tout the full Democratic Party line, from global warming to Guantanamo Bay. But if they’re voting for Democrats because of their superior stance on gay issues, they’re not getting much out of the bargain.

How about these “pro-gay” positions? Republicans are more aggressive than Democrats in the war against Islamic extremists, who are extraordinarily harsh in their condemnation and punishment of gays.

Republicans are tougher on law enforcement than Democrats—a boon for gays, who are more likely to suffer bias crimes. Republicans are more likely to support gun rights, as in the recent D.C. gun law Supreme Court case, which included as plaintiff a gay man who wanted to protect himself against anti-gay violence.

Republicans favor lower taxes than Democrats, and gays have more disposable income than heterosexuals.

Why is the Republican Party the real pro-gay party? The fact that Republican politicians aren’t anti-gay and Democratic politicians aren’t pro-gay helps. The fact that Republican positions make more sense than Democratic positions on some gay issues (e.g., opposing “hate crimes” laws for preferred minority groups-of-the-moment) also helps. But the main reason is that the Republican Party is more inclined to protect individual liberties, inarguably in economic realms, and even in some social realms (e.g., smoking and nutrition-related). They’re more likely to support tough law enforcement that allows liberties to be protected. And they’re more likely to support national defense, which allows us to maintain a country that protects liberties in the first place.

If the Republican Party is better for this country, and the party that is better for this country is better for all of us, then the Republican Party is the real pro-gay party.