TAPS hym

Day is done, gone the sun,
From the lake, from the hills, from the sky;
All is well, safely rest, God is nigh.

Fading light, dims the sight,
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright.
From afar, drawing nigh, falls the night.

Thanks and praise, for our days,
'Neath the sun, 'neath the stars, neath the sky;
As we go, this we know, God is nigh.

Sun has set, shadows come,
Time has fled, Scouts must go to their beds
Always true to the promise that they made.

While the light fades from sight,
And the stars gleaming rays softly send,
To thy hands we our souls, Lord, commend.
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Day is done, gone the sun From the lakes, from the hills, from the sky All is well, safely rest God is nigh. Thanks and praise for our days Neath the sun, neath the stars, neath the sky As we go, this we know God is nigh. Then goodnight, peaceful night; Till the light of the dawn shineth bright. God is near, do not fear, Friend, goodnight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKhhg2CqcCQ
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Other lyrics include: Love, good night,      Must thou go,           When the day,               And the night,                      Need thee so?                             All is well.                                    Speedeth all,                                          To their rest. Go to sleep,      Peaceful sleep,           May God keep                 The soldier                      Or sailor,                            On the land                                    Or the deep,                                           Safe in sleep. Thanks and praise         For our days,              Neath the sun,                   Neath the stars,                        Neath the sky,                              As we go,                                    This we know,                                          God is nigh. Love, good night,      Must thou go,           When the day,               And the night,                      Need thee so?                             All is well.                                    Speedeth all,                                          To their rest. Fading light        Dims the sight             And a star                 Gems the sky,                        Gleaning bright,                            Fare thee well,                                    Day has gone,                                           Night is on. Here we stand,       Hand in hand,             Wishing peace,                  Freedom, joy                       To each man.                            When there’s love                                  In our hearts,                                         God is nigh.

imagine that all is well, the sentries are posted and it's safe for me to go to sleep because God is here with me.
.....................
A girl singing at her GrandBob's funeral
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkm4imcJs7E

Jigsaw:- Peace. Justice, Truth, freedom of speech, Offends, Protection

The question to be asked is whether it is possible to have peace without justice? Is it possible to have justice without truth? Can we have truth without freedom of speech? And finally does freedom of speech mean anything if it is not the speech that offends? The answer to all these questions is no. Therefore to have peace we must promote freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is to protect the speech that offends. The speech that does not offend does not need protection. You are free to say anything even in Saudi Arabia, Iran and North Korea, as long as you don’t offend those in power.

Chamberlain's devotion to England

Churchill buries Chamberlain June 14, 2011

Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback

http://www.strangehistory.net/2011/06/14/churchill-buries-chamberlain/

In winning the Nobel Prize for literature Winston Churchill was placed among writers of the calibre of Thomas Mann, W.B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling. This is probably – as Churchill was the first to admit – to overstate his talents as an author: there is something to Evelyn Waugh’s bitchy description of Churchill’s ‘pseudo-Augustan prose’. But Churchill had the journalist’s gift of the soundbite and, in some of his war time orations, he created sustained masterpieces that kept up the spirits of an anxious nation and the various captive populations of continental Europe. A minor Churchillian classic that is often overlooked is his obituary on Neville Chamberlain, interesting both as a piece of writing, as parliamentary theatre and as a reflection on the nature of history.For Beachcombing, anyway, it rivals Churchill’s Dream.

In the second half of the 1930s Churchill, as Tory rebel, and Chamberlain, as prime minister, had bitterly fought each other in the Commons over Britain’s attitude towards Germany. Chamberlain followed a policy of detenté and containment: called, perhaps, unfairly ‘appeasement'; while Churchill saw, he believed, deeper into Hitler’s soul and wanted defiance and rollback. When war finally came Churchill served under Chamberlain as First Lord of the Admiralty and here there was some reconciliation between the two: the Chamberlains and the Churchills even shared dinner together at number Ten. Then, when Chamberlain resigned and Churchill became Prime Minister Chamberlain remained in the war cabinet and accommodation between the two men continued despite their very different instincts. However, this phase too ended as 9 November 1940, Neville Chamberlain passed away after a brief battle with cancer.

By the time of Chamberlain’s death Churchill had reconciled himself to his old foe. He personally asked the King that Chamberlain be given access to Cabinet papers in his last days and in Churchill’s bumptious Boy’s Own universe Chamberlain himself was able to see that Britain was going to make it through: ‘I think he died with the comfort of knowing that his country had, at least, turned the corner’. It goes without saying that nobody could have guessed that Britain had ‘turned the corner’ in late 1940, that moment would not come until Japanese bombs fell at Pearl Harbour a year later. But Churchill had the habit of deforming reality so everything fit around his personal mythology of romance and redemption. It is one of the reasons that his Second World War reads so very well and is so often a poor historical source. Still these qualities were always going to make the great man’s speech on Chamberlain’s demise a cracker. Imagine the wartime House quiet with curiosity to hear whether Churchill could bury his old rival without damning him for the sins (as Churchill saw it) of attempting peace with Germany.

At the lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.

What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.

It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart – the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour. Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned… Herr Hitler protests with frantic words and gestures that he has only desired peace. What do these ravings and outpourings count before the silence of Neville Chamberlain’s tomb?

Beachcombing is always on the look out for Second World War curiosities: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

***

15 June 2011: Umbriel writes in ‘I’m not sure I agree that ‘nobody could have guessed that Britain had ‘turned the corner’ in late 1940’ – By the fall, the climax of the Battle of Britain was past, and with it imminent threat of invasion.  The ‘Destroyers for Bases Agreement’ had taken some of the pressure off in the Battle of the Atlantic. Most importantly, Churchill had by that time forged a strong working relationship with FDR (whose reelection occurred only a few days before Chamberlain’s demise, but was never in serious doubt), guaranteeing that the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ would provide increasing support. While all that might have been of limited comfort to the folks in London enduring the Blitz, the merchant and naval sailors in the Atlantic, and the troops in North Africa, I think the top-level planners realized that the long-term odds were as much in their favor as they’d been in World War I. For additional perspective on this, I highly recommend the recent book, The Wages of Destruction – an economic history of Nazi Germany, it puts in perspective a lot of the industrial and economic factors that drove the war.’ Thanks Umbriel!!

Does not matter;- as understanding the BASIC situation is never done ! !

tom hunter (4,225 comments) says: 
June 14th, 2014 at 9:28 am

Since Cha decided to be a smart-ass and put the following quote into yesterday’s GD, I thought I’d repeat it, together with my own addition:

Who said it?

If you’re going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you’ve got Baghdad, it’s not clear what you do with it. It’s not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it’s set up by the United States military when it’s there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?

Here’s fun. Take part of that answer:
It’s not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or ….. one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists?

Then wonder as to whether this question ever crossed the minds of the trio of Obama, Clinton, and Power when they decided to destroy Gaddafi in Libya, throw Mubarak to the wolves in Egypt, and wander around for a couple of years saying that Assad had to go. And that’s before we get to the whole “Redline” farce.

What did they call it again? R2P? No, that’s the UN, but we’ve not heard much about that since Libya.

Oh I know – SMART POWER – with added Leftism for increased smarts.

The failures are now coming so rapidly that even the godforsaken WaPo is starting to notice:

FOR YEARS, President Obama has been claiming credit for “ending wars,” when, in fact, he was pulling the United States out of wars that were far from over. Now the pretense is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

And before we start with the diversionary whine about how this is just about opposition to Obama at home and abroad., let’s note the almost unhinged attacks on Bush that occurred here on KB a few years ago about what he was doing wrong in the ME. Most of those commentators have vanished of course – probably out of embarrassment as The Smartest President Ever checks out.

SPC (5,219 comments) says: 
June 14th, 2014 at 10:12 am

tom hunter, the premise of the Bush regime change policy was that in principle it was not unique to Iraq but was part of US foreign policy to support democracy emerging from dictatorship.

The USA has always paid lip service to supporting democracy (though tolerated anti-communist tyrants), but rarely via troops on the ground to impose a regime change. A substantial difference that was put down to replacing the Taleban for hosting al Qaeda and replacing the Baath regime in Iraq “for having WMD” and breaching UN cease-fire terms to allow inspections.

The problem the US had after Iraq, was that if they could not pre judge what democracy would emerge when supporting the overthrow of tyranny – was that the same applied in any other ME nation, where Islamists would become active in the aftermath.

The alternative is a policy to support the overthrow of tyranny and support democracy except in Moslem nations, because working with tyrants that ruled over Moslems was more convenient. That would be discriminatory. The alternative was/is to then work with any and all tyrants and give up support for democracy.

SPC (5,219 comments) says: 
June 14th, 2014 at 10:30 am

And the US did not decide the fate of the Mubarak regime, its unpopularity did. The military chose to pose as facilitating the peoples will in removing him enabling an election the MB would win – all to use any subsequent unpopularity with the people to return to power. Sisi was Suleiman’s (intelligence chief under Mubarak) former boss in the military.

As for Syria, that began when unarmed protestors were shot in Damascus. And the West was a minor player in supporting challenge to that regimes continuance – it was more the example of Libya that inspired the Free Syria Army than actual western support for the FSA. Most of the support came from Islamist volunteers and Gulf funding (part of a Sunni vs Shia sectarian divide).

flash2846 (145 comments) says: 
June 14th, 2014 at 10:44 am

To quote my father “Its Wog on Wog so why do you care? And if you do care ask yourself why the other Wogs don’t”

Dad (former military) has a point. In every global conflict people of European decent risk and lay down their lives to help the week and innocent. Occasionally they are assisted by African’s, Asians, Pakistani etc. but never the Arab. He’ll take money for use of his airspace though. “Scum of the Earth” Again quoting Dad.

SPC (5,219 comments) says: 
June 14th, 2014 at 11:02 am

I.S.I.S. is not a long term threat.

Syria will reclaim the north off them. Iran will work to ensure Baghdad is held. The Kurds could take Mosul now if given back Kirkuk if they did.

But the problems in Iraq will not go away unless Sunni (and Kurds – Kirkuk as a capital) have autonomy, Sunni once before dismissed an al Qaeda presence from amongst them and would do so again if given autonomy.

The Sunni in Iraq are validly concerned about a Hezbollah type force being built up in Iraq – this speaks to the regime becoming a tyranny or itself being destabilised from within its own Shia ranks.

Denmark's Freedom Sacrifice Memorial

Hedegaard Reflects on Danish Resistance to Nazi Totalitarianism & Acquiescence to Totalitarian Islam

May 5th, 2014 (40 seconds ago) · No Comments · Essays

Lars Hedegaard, the intrepid Danish historian and journalist, who was nearly assassinated last year by a jihadist (who was just recently apprehended), gave an impassioned speech yesterday (5/4/14), commemorating Denmark’s Day of Liberation from the World War II-era Nazi occupation.

**

[W] e are told that this ideology of conquest is an enrichment and if something is an enrichment, you cannot get enough of it. Consequently our political and spiritual masters see to it that Islam’s influence grows by the day and fall over each other to comply with every demand raised by the prophet’s strongmen. While doing this, our masters accuse everyone who refuses to toe the line of being racists and Fascists. Why don’t we – all of us common people – turn our backs on political parties, politicians, intellectual icons, journalists and priests who endeavor to destroy our country? So far we are not in a situation similar to the one faced by our comrades in the anti-Nazi Resistance. We can still speak our minds. We don’t have to vote for parties that open a door to evil and thus hand over their compatriots to foreign oppressors. We can stop buying newspapers that fill us with lies and propaganda. And if our priest agitates for an ideology he has promised to oppose, we can attend another church. We can refuse to give money to the erection of our enemies’ barracks and command and control centers.

The prophet’s followers certainly do not lack for passion or singleness of purpose. How about the rest of us?

**

Remember our glorious forebears – and reflect

On Denmark’s Day of Liberation, May 4, Dispatch International’s Editor-in-Chief Lars Hedegaard spoke at Copenhagen’s Grove of Commemoration for the patriots who gave their lives as members of the Danish Resistance against the Nazi occupation 1940-1945.

Lars Hedegaard

At Stadsgraven between Christianshavn and Amager there is a monument for 76 men and women from the Copenhagen district of Amager who gave their lives fighting the German occupation during the World War II. The monument carries an inscription by the poet Otto Gelsted:

“You wanderer who stops at this spot

remember those

who gave their lives for freedom and right

and our common home

and when again you hurry to your day’s work

then remember

that you are still standing in a freedom front”

Otto Gelsted was a Communist and it may sound strange that he would talk about our common home.

But there was a time when Danes almost regardless of their political persuasion were certain that we had something in common – something worth protecting and keeping.

It was so important that thousands were willing to risk their lives to defend the inalienable gift that is Denmark and the freedom without which nothing matters. Today hardly anybody talks about Denmark as our common home and even fewer can imagine being part of a freedom front. That is very strange for the enemies of freedom who have entered our country and gained powerful allies among our ruling elites certainly do not lack for determination. They know what they want – which is to replace our man-made laws and democratic order that are the results of a thousand-year history with a law they claim has been handed down by a god and therefore cannot be changed.

It is a god who says that the entire world belongs to him and that it is the duty of every believer to engage in holy war until there is not a single human being who has not accepted his tyranny. This god’s prophet has created an ideology that has left a trail of blood through 1400 years of history and compared to which Nazism and Communism were like ripples on history’s surface. A few decades ago this ideology – and the project of conquest for which it stands – gained a foothold in our country. And here it will have the same consequences as in any other place to which it has spread. There is no reason to enumerate these consequences. Anyone with eyes to see will notice them or can read about them.

Nonetheless we are told that this ideology of conquest is an enrichment and if something is an enrichment, you cannot get enough of it. Consequently our political and spiritual masters see to it that Islam’s influence grows by the day and fall over each other to comply with every demand raised by the prophet’s strongmen. While doing this, our masters accuse everyone who refuses to toe the line of being racists and Fascists.

Symbol? or just huff and puff?

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/11/02/in-midst-syrian-war-giant-jesus-statue-arises/
Will it last?  Will things change?  The surprising connection over time of its backers.   Does it give hope or will hope just be dashed in swirling conflicts, strife, politics and religion? 

BEIRUT –  In the midst of a conflict rife with sectarianism, a giant bronze statue of Jesus has gone up on a Syrian mountain, apparently under cover of a truce among three factions in the country's civil war.

Jesus stands, arms outstretched, on the Cherubim mountain, overlooking a route pilgrims took from Constantinople to Jerusalem in ancient times. The statue is 40 feet tall and stands on a base that brings its height to 105 feet, organizers of the project estimate.

That the statue made it to Syria and went up without incident on Oct. 14 is remarkable. The project took eight years and was set back by the civil war that followed the March 2011 uprising against President Bashar Assad.

Christians and other minorities are all targets in the conflict, and the statue's safety is by no means guaranteed. It stands among villages where some fighters, linked to Al Qaeda, have little sympathy for Christians.

So why put up a giant statue of Christ in the midst of such setbacks and so much danger?

Because "Jesus would have done it," organizer Samir al-Ghadban quoted a Christian church leader as telling him.

The backers' success in overcoming the obstacles shows the complexity of civil war, where sometimes despite the atrocities the warring parties can reach short-term truces.

Al-Ghadban said that the main armed groups in the area -- Syrian government forces, rebels and the local militias of Sednaya, the Christian town near the statue site -- halted fire while organizers set up the statue, without providing further details.

Rebels and government forces occasionally agree to cease-fires to allow the movement of goods. They typically do not admit to having truces because that would tacitly acknowledge their enemies.

It took three days to raise the statue. Photos provided by organizers show it being hauled in two pieces by farm tractors, then lifted into place by a crane. Smaller statues of Adam and Eve stand nearby.

The project, called "I Have Come to Save the World," is run by the London-based St. Paul and St. George Foundation, which Al-Ghadban directs. It was previously named the Gavrilov Foundation, after a Russian businessman, Yuri Gavrilov.

Documents filed with Britain's Charity Commission describe it as supporting "deserving projects in the field of science and animal welfare" in England and Russia, but the commission's accounts show it spent less than $400 in the last four years.

Al-Ghadban said most of the financing came from private donors, but did not supply further details.

Russians have been a driving force behind the project -- not surprising given that the Kremlin is embattled Assad's chief ally, and the Orthodox churches in Russia and Syria have close ties. Al-Ghadban, who spoke to The Associated Press from Moscow, is Syrian-Russian and lives in both countries.

Al-Ghadban said he began the project in 2005, hoping the statue would be an inspiration for Syria's Christians. He said he was inspired by Rio de Janeiro's towering Christ the Redeemer statue.

He commissioned an Armenian sculptor, but progress was slow.  A series of his backers died, including Valentin Varennikov, a general who participated in the 1991 coup attempt against then President Mikhail Gorbachev. He later sought President Vladimir Putin's backing for the statue project.

Varennikov died in 2009.

Another backer, Patriarch Ignatius IV, the Lebanon-based head of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch and All the East, died in 2012. He had donated the land for the statue, according to church official Bishop Ghattas Hazim.

By 2012, the statue was ready, but Syria was aflame, causing the project's biggest delay, al-Ghadban said.

Majority Sunni Muslims dominate the revolt, and jihadists make up some of the strongest fighting groups. Other Muslim groups along with the 10-percent Christian minority have stood largely with Assad's government, or remained neutral, sometimes arming themselves to keep hard-line rebels out of their communities.

Churches have been vandalized, priests abducted. Last month the extremists overran Maaloula, a Christian-majority town so old that some of its people still speak a language from Jesus' time.

On Tuesday a militant Muslim cleric, Sheik Omar al-Gharba, posted a YouTube video of himself smashing a blue-and-white statue of the Virgin Mary.

Al-Ghadban and the project's most important backer, Gavrilov, weighed canceling it.

They consulted Syria's Greek Orthodox Patriarch John Yaziji. It was he who told them "Jesus would have done it."

They began shipping the statue from Armenia to Lebanon. In August, while it was en route, Gavrilov, 49, suffered a fatal heart attack, al-Ghadban said.

Eventually the statue reached Syria.

"It was a miracle," al-Ghadban said. "Nobody who participated in this expected this to succeed."

The Measure and Power of NEED

This is the excerpt I want. The full context is below the jump break    and in solving one problem lost the jump break

My brother, a lifelong socialist, believes that the European Union concept will put an end to war, and that to achieve this is paramount. That there may be a cost is accepted. He does not, however, perceive the gamble inherent in his belief as in the political sense. He is a fundamentalist — he does not understand the need to monitor the costs of the project, either financial or social.

There comes a point where either of these issues will cause exactly the kind of strife he is trying to avoid.

The European Project is essentially a religious undertaking, a huge social experiment with mythology at its core. What we are seeing on these pages is fallout, and fallout is a dangerous side effect of meddling.

There is a stark difference between experimentation and meddling. Behind an experiment is a hypothesis; behind meddling is ignorance. The two are similar except that in trying to prove a hypothesis, one has set limits and paradigms. When one meddles, there are no limits and no paradigms. Experiments sometimes produce unexpected results, but because there are limits, then the results tend to be limited. Not so when meddling.

When Britain joined the EEC, it was because the EEC was prosperous. On the day before Britain signed up, the Common Fisheries Policy was signed at a secret meeting to which Britain was not invited, and Britain unexpectedly found that its protected (and well-managed) fisheries had been signed away to EEC ownership. Within ten years the British fishing fleet was decimated, and the fish stocks around the country raped.

Valuable catches were being thrown overboard, adding to the pollution problem. Fish do not survive the trawl process; they are asphyxiated before they get onto the deck of the trawler, but legislation was aimed at managing prices, not sustainability. It is even possible that those drafting the legislation, in their profound ignorance, thought that the unwanted fish were returned alive to the sea, just as little boys fishing off a wooden pier would do with their catch.

For many countries, the results of meddlings in the ranks of the unelected European Union bureaucracy have become dire. The people of Cyprus are now victims of the outright theft of a proportion of their housekeeping and savings. This is a criminal act on a grand scale, but because ‘the end justifies the means’ this immorality is whitewashed on the basis of ‘need’.

Need is usually a question of balance and context, but in a context where the end justifies the means, need can become paramount and is no longer subject to scrutiny. Thus, when need dictates that, for example, the EDL must be demonised, then means will be conjured up to fulfil the need.

Conjuring tricks tend to be obvious to those with a bit of knowledge, or even to those with the ability to reason. But if you can dumb down the audience to the point that they believe in magic, then the conjurer is king.

So too, in a dumbed-down society, ‘need’ becomes an overriding excuse for any excess. Weimar Germany ‘needed’ a scapegoat, and Zionist, Bolsheviks fitted the bill, National Socialism did the deed and thus fulfilled the need.

In the Europe of the fifties, the need was to end wars, the magic wand was waved and hey presto! the EU and ‘ever closer union’ fulfilled the need, the fallout of which has been national and cultural ‘patriacide’.

Genuine Concern for Middle East People

Arab Spring and the Israeli enemy

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ABDULATEEF AL-MULHIM

Saturday 6 October 2012

Last Update 6 October 2012 2:53 am

http://www.arabnews.com/arab-spring-and-israeli-enemy

Thirty-nine years ago, on Oct. 6, 1973, the third major war between the Arabs and Israel broke out. The war lasted only 20 days. The two sides were engaged in two other major wars, in 1948 and 1967. 
The 1967 War lasted only six days. But, these three wars were not the only Arab-Israel confrontations. From the period of 1948 and to this day many confrontations have taken place. Some of them were small clashes and many of them were full-scale battles, but there were no major wars apart from the ones mentioned above. The Arab-Israeli conflict is the most complicated conflict the world ever experienced. On the anniversary of the 1973 War between the Arab and the Israelis, many people in the Arab world are beginning to ask many questions about the past, present and the future with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The questions now are: What was the real cost of these wars to the Arab world and its people. And the harder question that no Arab national wants to ask is: What was the real cost for not recognizing Israel in 1948 and why didn’t the Arab states spend their assets on education, health care and the infrastructures instead of wars? But, the hardest question that no Arab national wants to hear is whether Israel is the real enemy of the Arab world and the Arab people.
I decided to write this article after I saw photos and reports about a starving child in Yemen, a burned ancient Aleppo souk in Syria, the under developed Sinai in Egypt, car bombs in Iraq and the destroyed buildings in Libya. The photos and the reports were shown on the Al-Arabiya network, which is the most watched and respected news outlet in the Middle East. 
The common thing among all what I saw is that the destruction and the atrocities are not done by an outside enemy. The starvation, the killings and the destruction in these Arab countries are done by the same hands that are supposed to protect and build the unity of these countries and safeguard the people of these countries. So, the question now is that who is the real enemy of the Arab world?
The Arab world wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of innocent lives fighting Israel, which they considered is their sworn enemy, an enemy whose existence they never recognized. The Arab world has many enemies and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list. The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the human lives and finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people. 
These dictators’ atrocities against their own people are far worse than all the full-scale Arab-Israeli wars. 
In the past, we have talked about why some Israeli soldiers attack and mistreat Palestinians. Also, we saw Israeli planes and tanks attack various Arab countries. But, do these attacks match the current atrocities being committed by some Arab states against their own people. 
In Syria, the atrocities are beyond anybody’s imaginations? And, isn’t the Iraqis are the ones who are destroying their own country? Wasn’t it Tunisia’s dictator who was able to steal 13 billion dollars from the poor Tunisians? And how can a child starve in Yemen if their land is the most fertile land in the world? Why would Iraqi brains leave Iraq in a country that makes 110 billion dollars from oil export? Why do the Lebanese fail to govern one of the tiniest countries in the world? And what made the Arab states start sinking into chaos?
On May 14, 1948 the state of Israel was declared. And just one day after that, on May 15, 1948 the Arabs declared war on Israel to get back Palestine. The war ended on March 10, 1949. It lasted for nine months, three weeks and two days. The Arabs lost the war and called this war Nakbah (catastrophic war). The Arabs gained nothing and thousands of Palestinians became refugees.
And on 1967, the Arabs led by Egypt under the rule of Gamal Abdul Nasser, went in war with Israel and lost more Palestinian land and made more Palestinian refugees who are now on the mercy of the countries that host them. The Arabs called this war Naksah (upset). The Arabs never admitted defeat in both wars and the Palestinian cause got more complicated. And now, with the never ending Arab Spring, the Arab world has no time for the Palestinians refugees or Palestinian cause, because many Arabs are refugees themselves and under constant attacks from their own forces. Syrians are leaving their own country, not because of the Israeli planes dropping bombs on them. It is the Syrian Air Force which is dropping the bombs. And now, Iraqi Arab Muslims, most intelligent brains, are leaving Iraq for the est. In Yemen, the world’s saddest human tragedy play is being written by the Yemenis. In Egypt, the people in Sinai are forgotten. 
Finally, if many of the Arab states are in such disarray, then what happened to the Arabs’ sworn enemy (Israel)? Israel now has the most advanced research facilities, top universities and advanced infrastructure. Many Arabs don’t know that the life expectancy of the Palestinians living in Israel is far longer than many Arab states and they enjoy far better political and social freedom than many of their Arab brothers. Even the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip enjoy more political and social rights than some places in the Arab World. Wasn’t one of the judges who sent a former Israeli president to jail is an Israeli-Palestinian? 
The Arab Spring showed the world that the Palestinians are happier and in better situation than their Arab brothers who fought to liberate them from the Israelis. Now, it is time to stop the hatred and wars and start to create better living conditions for the future Arab generations.

— This article is exclusive to Arab News.
almulhimnavy@hotmail.com

Also interesting to peruse the comment section too, to gain the different perspectives