Roundup on Newt Gingrich and the 'Palestinians'

In the odd case that you missed it, the video's here: "Newt Gingrich on Palestinians at GOP Debate in Iowa: 'These People Are Terrorists'."

Now, see Caroline Glick, "Gingrich's Fresh Hope." It's a long post, but interestingly the biggest challenge to Gingrich is not the Arab liars backing the Hamas-dominated Palestinians, but the U.S. conservatives attacking Newt for "turning his back on a 30- year bipartisan consensus" on the (failed) two-state solution for Middle East peace.

And check Daniel Greenfield, "A Badly Invented People." This is excellent:

Palestinian identity is just so much gibberish. The official definition of that identity encompasses only those parts of the Palestine Mandate which Israel holds today.

The people who live on the parts of the Palestine Mandate that were turned into the Kingdom of Jordan in 1921 are not Palestinians. There is no call to incorporate them into a Palestinian state. The people who lived in the parts of Israel that were captured by Jordan and Egypt in 1948 weren't Palestinians, and there was no call to turn the land that today comprises the so-called "Occupied Territories" into a state. But in 1967 when Israel liberated those areas-- only then did they magically turn into Palestinians.

How is anyone supposed to take this nonsense seriously?

But RTWT.

And from Melanie Phillips, "Hey, stop this dangerous candidate! He's told the truth!":

US presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich ... has recently demonstrated yet again Melanie’s First Rule of Modern Political Discourse – the more obvious the truth that you utter, the more explosive and abusive the reaction.

For Gingrich said the Palestinian Arabs were ‘an invented people’ – and the world promptly started hurling execrations at him, as if such a statement proved beyond doubt that Gingrich was indeed a dangerously extreme individual who, when it came to political positioning, was just off the graph altogether.

More at the link (with additional sources at the discussion).

And there's lots of stuff at FrontPage Magazine, for example, from David Horowitz, "Gingrich Gets It Right":

In an interview on Saturday, Newt Gingrich put some reality into the surreal discussion of the Middle East conflict and (as he put it) the delusional nature of the current “peace process.” The Palestinians are indeed an “invented people” — invented by the Nasser dictatorship and KGB by the way — and the Hitlerian lie that Israel occupies one square inch of “Arab” let alone “Palestinian” land needs to be buried for any clarity on what the conflict is about, let alone progress towards peace.

Of course there is no peace in the Middle East and there can be no peace so long as the Muslim Arabs want to kill the Jews and destroy the Jewish state. That is the explicit goal of the enemies of Israel in the terrorist entities of Gaza and the West Bank, and also of Israel’s principal enemy the Islamic Republic of Iran.

And another essay from Horowitz, "An Invented People Despite Some Doubters":

Some conservatives, most notably Elliot Abrams, have criticized Newt Gingrich’s observation that the Palestinians are an invented people by saying that even if they are — (and there is no real question but that they are) — they’ve been around long enough (50 years, or since the creation of the PLO in 1964) so that we need to deal with that fact — not. What makes anyone think this is a people even today? Last spring I spoke at Brooklyn College. My speech was attended and then obstructed by a sizeable contingent from the Brooklyn College “Palestinian Club” — at least fifty people, all ethnic Arabs claiming to be Palestinians. During my talk I referred to the Palestinian death cult, its admiration for Hitler, its determination to wipe the Jewish state from the face of the earth, its eagerness to kill any Jew and to blow up its own children in the process. I said it was a “sick, sick culture.” But when the members of the so-called Palestinian Club erupted at me, what they said was “Why do you want to lynch all Muslims?” (This is on video available on YouTube or on our site — under “Videos” — for anyone who wants to check. It comes in the Q&A period.) This does not sound like a nationalist movement.

But the evidence is that Palestinians are a political fiction for a movement whose organizing desire is the destruction of the Jewish state and expulsion of the Jews is far stronger than this small incident. In 1948, 80% of the so-called “Palestine Mandate” had been given to the Hashemite minority in control of Jordan. The Jews were given half of the remaining 20% and the Arabs the other half. A nationalist movement would surely have accepted the partition and then laid claim to the 80% controlled by the Hashemites in Jordan. No such thing happened. Instead the Arab states including Jordan attacked the Jewish state with the intention of destroying it.

The upshot of that war was a Jewish victory in 1949. Whereupon Egypt annexed Gaza and Jordan annexed the West Bank — all the territory that had been offered to the so-called Palestinians and rejected by them. There was not a peep out of the Arab world — or out of the so-called Palestinians — over this rejection. Why? Because a Palestinian state was never their agenda. Their agenda was and is the destruction of the Jewish state and the expulsion of the Jews from the Middle East — or failing that, their absolute subjection as a hated minority without access to state power.

See also Bruce Thornton, "Newt Challenges the Myth of Palestinian Nationalism," and Ryan Mauro, "History of ‘Palestine’ Becomes Center of GOP Debate."

BONUS: See the letters to the editor at New York Times, "A Spotlight on Gingrich and Romney."