I recently received two e-mails from a person who wanted to discuss the situation in Gaza and compared it to the Nazi Holocaust. I replied to his first missive but ignored the second.

The word “genocide” is tossed around a lot these days. It once meant the extermination of an entire nation or race. It now seemingly means the killing of several hundred people.

The Israeli actions in Gaza come no where near to approaching genocide. If the Israelis intended such a solution to terrorism, they have the ability to level both Gaza and the West Bank with purely conventional weapons. The actions they have taken since 1949 clearly show that they are restraining themselves from committing such horrific acts.

My position on the Israeli issue has been stated here in the past. 1949 is long past. There exists at this time an Israeli nation and a Palestinian nation. These two nations must learn to exist together for there to be peace. Both sides must recognize that the other is not going away, can not disappear.

The “plight” of the Palestinians may be laid at the feet of their leadership and that of the Arab nations that the original refugees found themselves in.

The Palestinian leadership, once in the camps, and now in the West Bank and Gaza is corrupt and incapable of governing. The billions of dollars of assistance that the West has provided this leadership has been stolen or squandered with little effect.

The Arab nations that took in the refugees after every Israeli victory bear a huge amount of the responsibility for Palestinian poverty. There was never any need to keep the refugees interned in camps for generations. They could have been allowed to move freely within their host countries, engage in business and participate in society. Instead, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan took every possible measure to prevent the Palestinians from being anything but refugees confined to camps. Both Lebanon and Jordan defeated militarily attempts by Palestinians to change that circumstance.

Gaza is a near desert parcel of land, barren of natural resources. It serves only as a place of confinement, and that confinement was orchestrated by Egypt and the leadership of the Palestinians. The ability to move with their lives was and is denied to the people living in Gaza. The Arab world intends for it to be a festering sore and its people to suffer.

The same is true for the camps in Lebanon. No Arab government wants the camps dissolved. If they did, they would have opened their arms to a people that, in 1949, were highly educated, well-to-do, and many of which were Christian. Israel did not create the camps, the Arabs did.

I have a site that illustrates what genocide is. I built it some years ago as a mirror site for one that another blogger had built. His site seems to have vanished. My site is still up, and I have added to it a bit.

Genocide is what the Germans did in World War II. The Ohrdruf Photos

The Germans are quick to denounce Holocaust denial. Yet, they have removed every trace of camp after camp until only the main camps remain. All the satellite camps are being erased.

When a Holocaust denier says that the existing camps could not possibly have killed six million people, he is correct. The Germans have made every trace of dozens of camps disappear. It took a vast network of camps to kill that many people. If the camps are gone, so, soon, will be the truth about the murders committed there.

In Turkey, the military is the protector of the secular state. Since the Islamists have taken control of the government, there have been rumors of a coup by the military to restore secularism. From AP via the Houston Chronicle, here is a story about recent arrests of alleged plotters.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted party has been locked in a power struggle with secular groups supported by the military and other state institutions, including the judiciary.

Secularists see themselves as the defenders of the modern secular ideology espoused by Turkish national founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and oppose groups they say want to impose Islam on society.

Earlier in the week, the Constitutional Court heard allegations against the ruling party of anti-secular activity. The prosecutor wants the party disbanded, and Erdogan and 70 other party members banned from joining a political party for five years.

The prosecutor cited the government’s attempt to permit Islamic-style head scarves at universities — which the Constitutional Court last month ruled unconstitutional.

Hugh Hewitt hits it out of the park with this comment:

The only possible resolution of the competition between faiths is that each understand and accept (1) the evangelical imperative that resides within any system that claims the revelation of God’s plan, (2)no genuine conversion can be other than voluntary (3)religious freedom is the ultimate trust in that revelation, and (4)the only system under which genuine faith should seek to prosper.

MNF-I

Iraqi Army forces entered the Zayn Al-Abidin mosque in Tarmiyah and detained its leader overseeing the illegal religious court Sept. 8, while U.S. forces provided support.

Sources and local civilians reported that the mosque’s leader had acted as a judge for the Sharia Court in Tarmiyah.

Al Qaeda operatives often establish a Sharia court to “try” individuals for violations of the Wahabist law, an extreme interpretation of the Qur’an.

Detainees are often bound and tortured for several days while awaiting this “trial”, ultimately found guilty and then murdered.

Sharia courts are a practice in rural areas where Al Qaeda operates unchallenged and is used under the guise of their own rule of law.

During a search of the mosque, Coalition forces discovered a box of letters that appeared to be addressed to the Islamic State of Iraq, an Al Qaeda pseudonym, describing what individuals could do for money.

Coalition forces determined the illegal judge posed an imminent threat to the population of Tarmiyah, and he was detained for further questioning.

Yep, that’s what the headline in the Democrat & Chronicle reads.

Yusef Sharif’s dream is on display in the architectural renderings hanging on a wall of his restaurant — the masonry building, the gold-colored dome: a total of more than 31,000 square feet in which his congregation’s mosque would be a central piece.

Rochester’s Muslim population has held steady over the past six years — at an estimated 18,000 to 20,000 people, according to local Muslim clerics. But the number of area mosques has increased, from five in 2001 to seven, according to Sharif, imam of Masjid Sabiqun (formerly Islamic Da’Wah Community Center).

The largest, the Islamic Center of Rochester on Westfall Road in Brighton, is undergoing an expansion that will triple its size. But Sharif’s would be larger still and would be a gathering place for the neighborhood, with a career academy, day care center and restaurant.

Area mosques cater to Islam’s many different followers, among them people of Turkish, Middle Eastern and African-American descent. The mosque Sharif hopes to build would consist primarily of African-Americans, as his congregation of about four dozen does now, and would be located in a mostly African-American neighborhood. But it would be open to all, and Sharif said he’d like a more diverse membership.

Sharif wants to buy or be given city-owned land on Portland Avenue in northeast Rochester, across from Freddie Thomas High School. The congregation currently meets in a four-story building at 303 Central Ave., which Sharif retrofitted with a restaurant, prayer room and yet-unopened, 20-bed emergency shelter for men referred by outside agencies.

Who is Yusif Sharif: WXXI [PBS] from 2001

THANK YOU ONCE AGAIN. AS AN EMPLOYEE FOR THE ROCHESTER CITY SCHOOL DISTRICT FOR ELEVEN YEARS, THERE’S AN INTERNATIONAL PROGRAM THEY HAVE AT THIS HIGH SCHOOL, I’D RATHER NOT SAY DUE TO CIRCUMSTANCES THAT EVERYBODY UNDERSTANDS, THAT THERE ARE STUDENTS IN THIS SCHOOL THAT ARE NOT FROM THIS COUNTRY. THEY HAVE COME TO ME PERSONALLY. THEY ARE MUSLIM, AND I WAS HAPPY THAT I WAS THERE TO BE AN INTERMEDIARY BETWEEN THE ADMINISTRATION AND STUDENT THAT WAS BEING HARASSED. THEY WERE MUSLIM AND THEY WERE BEING HARASSED BY OTHER STUDENTS AND STEREOTYPED.

I WANT TO ADD, TOO, AGAIN AS AFRICAN-AMERICAN BORN IN THIS COUNTRY, WE KNOW THAT RACISM DID EXIST, SLAVERY DID EXIST. I UNDERSTAND WHAT THE SISTER SAID AS FAR AS STEREOTYPES. AS SOMEONE WHO ACCEPTED ISLAM 13 YEARS AGO, I HAVE YET — AND I SPEAK FOR AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSLIMS IN THIS COUNTRY, THAT TRULY HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED BY — AS TRUE MUSLIMS.

I DON’T IDENTIFY WITH THE TEACHINGS OF FARRAKHAN. HIS TEACHINGS ARE NOT NEEDED OR ACCEPTED, BUT I UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN AND SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO IGNORE AND THAT’S WHAT WE HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DO. SO WHAT I HAVE SEEN IS SINCE THIS ATROCITY IS THAT WITH THE CHILDREN, THE YOUNGER ONES IN SCHOOLS, I HAVE BEEN THERE AS A MUSLIM AND AS A CONCERNED PERSON AND AS A STAFF MEMBER TO BE AN INTERMEDIARY.