Professor William Polk, an Academic & Diplomatic Authority Promotes Big Lies for 60 years Now

Prof William Polk has had a double career, academic and diplomatic, head of Middle East policy planning at the State Dept. For many many years he has been promoting the big lie of Arab innocence. And he still is. Hence he has done great damage, especially since he has had his academic authority to lend credence to his pro-Arab propaganda lies. If anybody does not think that the State Department has been hostile to Israel since the beginning, one of the  pieces of evidence for the affirmative is the career and words and deeds of Polk. Here he is in a fresh blast of baloney, repeating the same lie of Arab innocence. But he is careful to denounce the Holocaust and Western Judeophobia, which he feels he  needs to do in order to establish credibility and moral legitimacy for his insidious claims of Arab innocence.

 

I highlight below his repetition of old lies:

For their own interests, the British and then the Americans just closed their eyes to the developing tragedy; both were content to have a poor, defenseless Asian people pay the price for Western anti-Semitism. The Jewish community grew, appropriated most of the best land (largely by purchase from absentee owners) and benefitted from massive infusions of foreign money (now totaling well over $100 billion or more than all the aid programs for the rest of the world). Meanwhile, the Jewish fate in Europe moved toward the Holocaust.

 

What did that actually mean? If I were a Jew in Germany in the 1930s, I would have gone to America and if I could not get in -- some could not -- to Palestine; if I were an Arab at almost any time from 1920 onward, I would have tried to stop the flood. The real culprit is neither the Jew nor the Palestinian. It is us. Anti-Semitism is a Western, not an Asian, disease. [my emph.]

 

List of lies:

1) before WW One the Muslims in this country saw themselves as part of the mighty Ottoman empire and were loyal to it. They did not see themselves as a "poor, defenseless Asian people," nor as a separate "Palestinian" people.  Scions of leading Muslim families served in the Ottoman imperial service . Husseinis, Khalidis and Abdul-Hadis held high positions. Rashid Khalidi, one of the family, is now a professor at Columbia University in New York and is a friend of President Obama.

 

2) Arabs/Muslims/Palestinian Arabs/ were not guilty of antisemitism which was purely a Western disease, so he claims. This is false since Judeophobia is inherent in Islam generally [although it can be interpreted away if one wants]. Here is a documented article about Judeophobia in Islam and especially on the part of Palestinian Arab Muslims. It also shows how Jews were ill treated specifically in Jerusalem. 

Polk plays a rather elegant trick with this statement by so liberally and generously and open-mindedly taking the guilt upon "Us." But the purpose is to depict the Jews as guilty for taking a land away from the helpless, innocent Palestinian Arabs who had never done them any harm. Supposedly. Moreover, Polk mentions the Holocaust but does not admit that Arabs or Palestinian Arabs particularly took part in it, especially the chief Palestinian Arab leader, Haj Amin el-Husseini who spent most of the WW2 years in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, their satellite states in eastern Europe and the Nazi-occupied countries. Husseini visited Nazi murder camps in Poland.

 

3) About real estate in the country. First he claims that the Zionist Jews "appropriated most of the best land." That word appropriated means took by force or usurped unfairly with some amount of coercion and/or legal swindling. However, he then corrects himself by writing that Jews/Zionists obtained the land "by purchase." So which is it? This is deliberate double talk.

 

Polk goes on:

In the "one state," the Arabs will be the subjugated minority with few rights and little or any security -- they will be the "Jews" of an Israeli Germany or an Israeli Imperial Russia, cooped up in ghettos, imprisoned, driven into exile or subjected to a final partition. [my emph.]

 

In fact, the experience of Israeli Arabs shows that that outcome is unlikely to say the least. Maybe it is a projection of what Polk knows about the Jewish experience as dhimmis in Arab/Muslim states. Moreover, it is an old story that Judeophobes like to reverse the picture of Jewish oppression in Christian and Muslim lands and charge the Jews with being oppressors, persecutors, etc.

 

So Polk has been dangerous for some 60 years and is still going strong. Here is my critique of Polk and of his anti-Israel propaganda book from the 1950s. Polk's book, Backdrop to Tragedy (1957) is truly disgraceful.