Note from Robert Spencer:
Yesterday I was told that a prominent network is not interested in inviting me on to its shows because one of its directors is "pro-Palestinian and pro-Arab, and he felt that you were too hostile to Arabs."

I was stunned, because the only thing I am really hostile to is the organized worldwide attempt to murder or subjugate my family and my countrymen. No one could be less hostile to Arabs than I am, and this showed me (again) how successful has been the campaign by American Muslim advocacy groups and their allies to blur the distinctions between Arabs and Muslims and between Muslims and Islam. The problem of global terror is one of jihad ideology, not of Arabs. Most Muslims today aren't Arabs at all. I am in daily contact with Arabic-speaking Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian Christians. My own grandparents were exiled from Turkey by radical Muslims in 1919. A dear friend of mine, a Palestinian woman, was so enthusiastic about my book Islam Unveiled that she spoke to me about translating it into Arabic.

In short, I am "pro-Palestinian." I just don't understand this term the way most do, and I think that the dominant understanding of it is harmful to the Palestinians and to other people. To point out the nature and goals of violent jihadists and radical Muslims, as I do in my books and here at Jihad Watch, is not injurious to the Palestinians in any way, shape, or form. Much more injurious to their cause is their jihadist leadership, which blackens their cause with suicide bombings in restaurants, buses, etc. And that jihadist leadership has already made Sharia a key component of the legal structure of the Palestinian Authority, which bodes ill for my friends the non-Muslim Palestinians, as well as for Muslim and non-Muslim women. The idea that, in order to secure Palestinian rights, Christians must unite with Muslims against Israel founders on the fact, explicitly stated in documents such as the Hamas Charter, that jihadists are not interested in making common cause with Christians or anyone else. They intend to subjugate Palestinian Christians along with Jews as second-class dhimmis in an Islamic state if they get the chance.

Therefore, anti-jihad activity, such as what I am trying to do, is "pro-Palestinian and pro-Arab" in the best and truest sense. And now Clifford May, in a magnificent piece, expands on why decent people grow uneasy when it comes to supporting the Palestinian cause as it is defined today. From the Manchester Union Leader, with thanks to David Zohar.

What keeps the peace now between Egypt and Israel is not something called the Camp David Accords, but the military power of Israel. In other words, Egypt does not attack Israel for the same reason that Syria does not attack it.

Amazing how resistent the foolish Israeli leadership is to comprehending this, and to making clear that it now understands what is going on. When Israelis were distracted with nation-building, and resettling huge numbers of Jewish refugees in the first two decades of the state's existence, such inattention was understandable. But when, after 1967, the Arabs began to methodically dress up their campaign in the camouflage of a "struggle for legitimate rights" and then invented, for the occasion, the "Palestinian people" (who are not mentioned once in the UN records between 1948 and 1967 -- not once, not by any Arab or non-Arab), the Israelis should have been vigilant. They were not. They have damaged themselves, terribly.

And what is more, they have damaged the West, which not understanding the Jihad against Israel, also failed to understand the elements of Jihad that are being used against the entire non-Muslim world, with Western Europe the first to suffer. Yet one sympathizes with Israel, for it simply did not have a policymaking elite that could permit itself the leisure to think and to comprehend; they were so busy countering that attack, putting out this diplomatic fire, and so on -- and who, after all, wants to allow himself to believe that his country will forever be a target, will forever -- no matter what its size -- be for the Muslim Believer an outrage, a "humiliation" (for Islam "must dominate and not be dominated") that, sooner or later, in a decade or a hundred years, or a thousand years, be undone.

Oh, on a lexical note, it may be difficult, but I would urge those who care about such things not to promote the adjective "Palestinian" to an ethnic noun; that would be to collaborate in the Arab propaganda effort. "Palestinian Arab" keeps the geographic epithet in its place -- just where it belongs.