Kristof's Scattered Thinking

In his "Is This Apartheid in Bahrain?", Nicholas Kristof not only publishes "A few scattered thoughts about Bahrain" but quite clearly more than enough scattered thinking.

He writes

...Bahrain is modern, moderate and well-educated, and by Gulf standards it has more of the forms of democracy than some others. But here’s my question to King Hamad: Why is it any more appropriate for a minority Sunni population to rule over majority Shia than it was in South Africa for a minority white population to rule over a majority black population? What exactly is the difference?

Indeed, the language of the ruling party sounds a lot to me like the language of white South Africans — or even like the language of white southerners in Jim Crow America, or the language of militant Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

In the first place, in limiting his aspersion to "militant Israeli settlers", he may think (I can still use that term with Kristoff although in a tenable fashion) that his intention is that not all "settlers" are "militant" - which is palpably true. But is that his intention?

Secondly, Bahrain is located in Arabia. Sunnis and Shiites are an internal Islamic theological andf now political problem. The Land of Israel lies outside Arabia although because of Islamic militancy, Arabs expanded their territory and invaded our homeland, conquered it, occupied it and subjugated the Jewsih minority (by then) population. And continued to do so for some 1300 years and then, when the League of Nations recognized our right to reconstitute our national home in its historic borders, Muslim and even Christian Arabs waged a campaign of terror to halt that legal right.

In other words, the language of the oppressed minority in Bahrain may be closer to the language of myself and my fellow revenants residing in Judera and Samaria.

He then writes

The other day I saw a sign reading “Imagine Bahrain without the al-Khalifas.” That kind of thing is utterly inappropriate. The opposition has to do what Nelson Mandela did so brilliantly in South Africa – make clear that majority rule will not lead to persecution of the minority. Every time the democracy movement scrawls “Death to Al-Khalifa” on a sign, it erodes its own legitimacy before the world.

which comes close to explaining why there are "militant settlers" in Judea and Samaria who see and hear and experience what are the true intentions of the Arabs and not only in Judea and Samaria but in Israel as well.

Kristof should learn more about history before he becomes too scattered.

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