GO CARDINAL!

From today's edition of the Stanford Daily, comes this headline (the lead story, complete with picture of concerned students):

Students mark Nakbah, Palestinian catastrophe

Yes sir, right there at the top of the page. And what, you might ask, is "Nakbah?" To what Palestinian "catastrophe" does it refer? To the decades of kleptocratic dictatorship by Arafat? It is well for you to ask since, were you to rely upon your own knowledge, or even a graduate degree in history, you'd come up short.

“Nakbah is the most important date on the Palestinian calendar,” said sophomore Omar Shakir, co-president of the Coalition for Justice in the Middle East, or CJME, during the Nakbah Day event held yesterday in White Plaza, as part of Palestinian Awareness Month.

The student group said on its Web site that the event was to commemorate the destruction of Palestinian society and the dispossession of the Palestinian people by Zionist forces in 1947-1948. Nakbah means catastrophe in Arabic.

And there you have it. As you know, in 1947 the United Nations partitioned the British Middle East Mandate so as to create an Arab State (Jordan) (despite the fact that there existed at that time several Arab states) and a Jewish State (Israel), to provide a homeland for those Jews who had somehow managed to avoid being murdered by the the Nazis, the Soviets, the Turks, the French, and anyone else who happened to be around.

One must assume that the "catastrophe" lay in the fact that when all of the Arab countries in the region attacked Israel, this time the Jews refused to lay down and die quietly. How impolite of them. How dastardly. Israel fought back against the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon when they launched the attacks that were to be, in the words of Azzam Pasha, the Secretary-General of the Arab League .

. . a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.

At Stanford yesterday there was, at least, a small counter-rally, but I fear its members had themselves already bought too much nonesense.

One of the students, sophomore Lyuba Wolf, said, “We’re not here to protest the existence of a Palestinian state or Palestinian dignity. This is a distortion in that it portrays Israelis as oppressors and Palestinians as innocent victims, when in reality the situation is much more complicated. We just want to give people a chance to see some of the nuances of the situation.”

Sorry, Ms. Wolf, you were doing fine there for a while, but then the wheels came off: the situation is not really very complicated, and there are few nuances.

A Palestinian catastrophe, indeed. Read the whole thing HERE. There was free falafel.