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Allen B. West, the former Florida Congressman and retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, prompted a walk-out at Chicago’s DePaul University from students who “couldn’t handle the truth” about Israel.
On his blog on Tuesday, West, currently a Fox News Contributor and Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, wrote, “As I stood waiting to speak and surveyed the crowd, it was easy to pick out the ones there to make some protest statement — especially on a college campus where the topic was the Middle East and the Israeli-Arab situation.”
West said he prefaced his lecture on today’s politics with a historical view:
“I began by explaining the history of the introduction of the term ‘Palestine.’ It came after the Bar Kokhba revolt during 132-136 AD by the Jewish people against the Romans. It would end up being the last revolt.”
He explained how Emperor Hadrian vowed to eliminate and eradicate Judaism, which he blamed for the insurrections. Hadrian moved to prohibit Torah law, ban the Hebrew calendar, and execute Judaic scholars.
“But the part of Hadrian’s decree which had the most lasting impact was his goal to wipe the name of Judea and ancient Israel from the map, as he renamed the region Syria Palaestina –seems Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had a similar idea,” wrote West. “He also renamed Jerusalem, Aeolia Capitolina. The name Palaestina was a derivative of the word Philistia and the ancient Philistines traced their lineage to the Greeks. So, these words, Palestine and Palestinian, had nothing to do with Arabs, but were meant as punishment and symbolic of a genocidal objective by a Roman emperor.”
From there, West spoke about how modern Israel emerged from post-World War I policies, including the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 and the McMahon Agreement and Balfour Declaration. He then addressed post-World War II British mandates and the partition of Israel and Jordan as the two-state solution, and analyzed the declaration of the modern day State of Israel, on May 14 1948, through the conflagrations of the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
West said the tone changed when the history lesson focused on the origins of the Palestinian Authority.
“I think what broke the backs of the ‘pro-Palestinian’ supporters in the crowd was when I talked about the history of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the emergence of the Fatah movement. I reminded the crowd of the civil war of 1970 when King Hussein sought to expel Yasser Arafat and the PLO from Jordan, where they were founded in 1964. And we all remember the attack by ‘Black September’ at the 1972 Munich Olympics.”
“And so the ‘tolerant’ members of the audience, at the command of some individual, stood and walked out — about 30 of them — leaving about 40 people remaining. To me they were cowards who refused to hear anything that countered their radical agenda.”
After the crowd left, West continued to speak: “And so I continued to address the issues of the Middle East and what we could look to as resolutions — stressing that Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood for seeking peace and a diplomatic solution to coexistence. I told those remaining, especially the DePaul students, to always stand upon truth and know their history, and I reminded them, ‘In a universe of deceit, truth becomes a revolutionary act.’”
“If we are to resolve the issue between Israel and the Arabs, it has to be based upon truth. It has to be a recognition of the right for the Jewish state to exist. There has to be a renouncing of Islamic terrorism,” West wrote.
He described the walk-out as “a one-way street” and said he “also saw clearly how our children are being sent to college and university campuses that are petri dishes for radical thought, not intellectual debate, which is supported by a complicit administration and teaching staff.”
“As to those individuals who walked out, I’m not exactly sure why they attended in the first place — perhaps they believed they were making a statement, but about what? Because obviously, to paraphrase COL Nathan Jessup in ‘A Few Good Men,’ they couldn’t handle the truth.”
3 COMMENTS
- rulierose
April 25, 2014 - 5:51 pm
well, I can tell you why they “attended in the first place” Col. West: so fewer pro-Israel students could attend.
I’ve seen it happen on my own campus in Michigan. the more seats taken up by the haters, the fewer seats left for the students who actually want to hear to speaker.
it’s SOP for the anti-Israel crowd.
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- Richard Rivette
April 25, 2014 - 3:20 pm
It should come as no surprise to intelligent people everywhere that this land of “Palestine” that is hyped, never existed. There are no such people as Palestinians, yet by acceding to that unreality we are now faced with being defensive about having Israel exist at all.
One of the world’s oldest countries, and the only democracy in the Middle East is under assault. Why? Because young people are basically ignorant of facts, and when presented with them will refuse to believe them.
Just as the horrors of the holocaust seem to unbelievable at first exposure, they happened. And we must ensure that they never happen again. That starts with stating the truth as the Honorable Allen West has done, repetitively, and in every venue possible. People will eventually listen.
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