Cynthia McKinney, the AIPACed congresswoman from Georgia, spoke at the UN about the Palestinian tragedy, the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

The full title of this article,
the The Honorable Sis. Cynthia McKinney Speaks at NYC Nakba Rally, which occurred on May 16, 2008

Cynthia McKinney remarks were at the Al Nakba Rally sponsored by Not in My Name at the United Nations, New York on May 16, 2008

On my birthday last year, I declared my independence from a national leadership that, through its votes in support of the war machine, is now complicit in war crimes, torture, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace.

I declared my independence from every bomb dropped, every veteran maimed, and every child killed.

I noted that the Democratic leadership in Congress had failed to restore this country to Constitutional rule by repealing the Patriot Acts, the Secret Evidence Act, and the Military Commissions Act.

That it had aided and abetted illegal spying against the American people. And that it took impeachment off the table.

In addition, the Democratic Congressional leadership failed to promote the economic integrity of this country by not repealing the Bush tax cuts. They failed to institute a livable wage, Medicare-for-all health care, and gave even more money to the Pentagon as it misuses our hard-earned dollars.

We can add to that list, too, an abject failure to stand up for human rights and dignity.

If the Democratic and Republican leadership won't respect the right of return for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita survivors, how can we expect them to champion the right of return for Palestinians?

If this country's leadership tolerates the wanton murder of unarmed black and Latino men by law enforcement officials--extra-judicial killings--how can we expect them to stop or even speak out against targeted assassinations in the Middle East?

If the Democratic and Republican leadership accept ethnic cleansing in this country by way of gentrification and predatory lending, why should we expect them to put an end to it in Palestine?

If the leadership of this country impedes self-determination for native peoples in this country, why should we expect them to support indigenous rights for anyone abroad?

And sadly, the sensationalist corporate media would rather trick us into thinking that reporting on a pastor, a former Vice Presidential nominee, and a former cable TV magnate constitutes this country's much-needed discussion of its own apartheid past and present, so why should we expect an honest discussion of apartheid and Zionism?

I hope by now it is clear. Our values will never be reflected in public policy as long as our political parties and our country remain hijacked.

Hijacked by false patriots who usurp the applause of the people and all the while betray our values.

I've decided that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will operate any longer as business as usual--not in my name.

That Democrats and Republicans will use my tax dollars and betray my values, not one day longer--not in my name.

That neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have earned my most precious political asset--my vote.

And that now is the time to do some things I've never done before in order to have some things I've never had before.

And so here today, I declare my independence from weapons transfers: including Apache Helicopters; F'16s; sidewinder, hellfire, and Stinger missiles.

I declare my independence from occupation, demolished homes, political prisoners, and babies dying at checkpoints.

I declare my independence from UN vetoes, expropriated land, stolen resources, and the installation of puppet regimes.

I declare my independence from all forms of dehumanization and am not afraid to speak truth to power.

And I am happy to join with peace-loving people around the world who know that there can be no peace without justice.

Let us never tire in our work for justice.

Thank you.

Wow, that's great news.  Hopefully soon, more and more people will hear the TRUTH.

Thanks

Shergald. I see your posts. Can you explain who you are and why you are so vested in this.

   Palestinians' "Peoplehood" Based on a Big Lie

   By Eli E. Hertz

   The Palistinians claim that they are an ancient and indigenous people fails to stand up to historic scrutiny. Most Palestinian Arabs were newcomers to British Mandate Palestine. Until the 1967 Six-Day War made it expedient for Arabs to create a Palestinian peoplehood, local Arabs simply considered themselves part of the `great Arab nation' or `southern Syrians.'

   "Repeat a lie often enough and people will begin to believe it."Nazi propaganda master Joseph Goebbels

   "All [that Palestinians] can agree on as a community is what they want to destroy, not what they want to build."New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

   There is no age-old Palestinian people. Most so-called Palestinians are relative newcomers to the Land of Israel

   Like a mantra, Arabs repeatedly claim that the Palestinians are a native people. The concept of a `Stateless Palestinian people' is not based on fact. It is a fabrication.

   Palestinian Arabs cast themselves as a native people in "Palestine" - like the Aborigines in Australia or Native Americans in America. They portray the Jews as European imperialists and colonizers. This is simply untrue.

   Until the Jews began returning to the Land of Israel in increasing numbers from the late 19th century to the turn of the 20th, the area called Palestine was a God-forsaken backwash that belonged to the Ottoman Empire, based in Turkey.

   The land's fragile ecology had been laid waste in the wake of the Arabs' 7th-century conquest. In 1799, the population was at it lowest and estimated to be no more than 250,000 to 300,000 inhabitants in all the land.

   At the turn of the 20th century, the Arab population west of the Jordan River (today, Israel and the West Bank) was about half a million inhabitants and east of the Jordan River perhaps 200,000.

   The collapse of the agricultural system with the influx of nomadic tribes after the Arab conquest that created malarial swamps and denuded the ancient terrace system eroding the soil, was coupled by a tyrannous regime, a crippling tax system and absentee landowners that further decimated the population. Much of the indigenous population had long since migrated or disappeared. Very few Jews or Arabs lived in the region before the arrival of the first Zionists in the 1880s and most of those that did lived in abject poverty.

   Most Arabs living west of the Jordan River in Israel, the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza are newcomers who came from surrounding Arab lands after the turn of the 20th century because they were attracted to the relative economic prosperity brought about by the Zionist Movement and the British in the 1920s and 1930s.

   This is substantiated by eyewitness reports of a deserted country - including 18th-century reports from the British archaeologist Thomas Shaw, French author and historian Count Constantine Volney (Travels through Syria and Egypt, 1798); the mid-19th-century writings of Alphonse de Lamartine (Recollections of the East, 1835); Mark Twain (Innocents Abroad, 1867); and reports from the British Consul in Jerusalem (1857) that were sent back to London.

   The Ottoman Turks' census (1882) recorded only 141,000 Muslims in the Land of Israel. The real number is probably closer to 350,000 to 425,000, since many hid to avoid taxes. The British census in 1922 reported 650,000 Muslims.

   Aerial photographs taken by German aviators during World War I show an underdeveloped country composed mainly of primitive hamlets. Ashdod, for instance, was a cluster of mud dwellings, Haifa a fishing village. In 1934 alone, 30,000 Syrian Arabs from the Hauran moved across the northern frontier into Mandate Palestine, attracted by work in and around the newly built British port and the construction of other infrastructure projects. They even dubbed Haifa Um el-Amal (`the city of work').

   The fallacy of Arab claims that most Palestinians were indigenous to Palestine - not newcomers - is also bolstered by a 1909 vintage photograph of Nablus, today an Arab city on the West BankMount Gerizim, the population in 1909 - Muslim Arabs and Jewish Samaritans - could not have been greater than 2,000 residents. with over 121,000 residents. Based on the number of buildings in the photo taken from the base of

   Family names of many Palestinians attest to their non-Palestinian origins. Just as Jews bear names like Berliner, Warsaw and Toledano, modern phone books in the Territories are filled with families named Elmisri (Egyptian), Chalabi (Syrian), Mugrabi (North Africa). Even George Habash - the arch-terrorist and head of Black September - bears a name with origins in Abyssinia or Ethiopia, Habash in both Arabic and Hebrew.

   Palestinian nationality is an entity defined by its opposition to Zionism, and not its national aspirations.

   What unites Palestinians has been their opposition to Jewish nationalism and the desire to stamp it out, not aspirations for their own state. Local patriotic feelings are generated only when a non-Islamic entity takes charge - such as Israel did after the 1967 Six-Day War. It dissipates under Arab rule, no matter how distant or despotic.

   A Palestinian identity did not exist until an opposing force created it - primarily anti-Zionism. Opposition to a non-Muslim nationalism on what local Arabs, and the entire Arab world, view as their own turf, was the only expression of `Palestinian peoplehood.'

   The Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, a charismatic religious leader and radical anti-Zionist was the moving force behind opposition to Jewish immigration in the 1920s and 1930s. The two-pronged approach of the "Diplomacy of Rejection" (of Zionism) and the violence the Mufti incited occurred at the same time Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq became countries in the post-Ottoman reshuffling of territories established by the British and the French under the League of Nation's mandate system.

   The tiny educated class among the Arabs of Palestine was more politically aware than the rest of Arab society, with the inklings of a separate national identity. However, for decades, the primary frame of reference for most local Arabs was the clan or tribe, religion and sect, and village of origin. If Arabs in Palestine defined themselves politically, it was as "southern Syrians." Under Ottoman rule, Syria referred to a region much larger than the Syrian Arab Republic of today, with borders established by France and England in 1920.

   In his book Greater Syria: The History of an Ambition, Daniel Pipes explains:

   "Syria was a region that stretched from the borders of Anatolia to those of Egypt, from the edge of Iraq to the Mediterranean Sea. In terms of today's states, the Syria of old comprised Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan, plus the Gaza Strip and Alexandria."

   Syrian maps in the 21st century still co-opt most of Greater Syria, including Israel.

   The Grand Mufti Al-Husseini's aspirations slowly shifted from pan-Arabism - the dream of uniting all Arabs into one polity, whereby Arabs in Palestine would unite with their brethren in Syria - to winning a separate Palestinian entity, with himself at the helm. Al-Husseini was the moving force behind the 1929 riots against the Jews and the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt against two non-Muslim entities in Palestine - the British and the Jews. He gathered a large following by playing on fears that the Jews had come to dispossess, or at least dominate the Arabs.

   Much like Yasser Arafat, the Grand Mufti's ingrained all-or-nothing extremism, fanaticism and even an inability to cooperate with his own compatriots made him totally ineffective. He led the Palestinian Arabs nowhere.

   The `Palestinian' cause became a key rallying point for Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East, according to Oxford historian Avi Shlaim. The countries the British and French created in 1918-1922 were based largely on meridians on the map, as is evident in the borders that delineate the Arab states today. Because these states lack ethnic logic or a sense of community, their opposition to the national aspirations of the Jews has come to fuel that fires Arab nationalism as the `glue' of national identity. (see details on the ramifications of British and French policy, which plague the Middle East to this day in the chapter "The European Union.")

   From the 1920s, rejection of Jewish nationalism, attempts to prevent the establishment of a Jewish homeland by violence, and rejection of any form of Jewish political power, including any plans to share stewardship with Arabs, crystallized into the expression of Palestinianism. No other positive definition of an Arab-Palestinian people has surfaced. This point is admirably illustrated in the following historic incident:

   "In 1926, Lord Plumer was appointed as the second High Commissioner of Palestine. The Arabs within the Mandate were infuriated when Plumer stood up for the Zionists' national anthem Hatikva during ceremonies held in his honor when Plumer first visited Tel Aviv. When a delegation of Palestinian Arabs protested Plumer's `Zionist bias,' the High Commissioner asked the Arabs if he remained seated when their national anthem was played, `wouldn't you regard my behavior as most unmannerly?' Met by silence, Plumer asked: `By the way, have you got a national anthem?' When the delegation replied with chagrin that they did not, he snapped back, "I think you had better get one as soon as possible."

   But it took the Palestinians more than 60 years to heed Plumer's advice, adopting Anthem of the Intifada two decades after Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 - at the beginning of the 1987 Intifada.

   Under the Mandate, local Arabs also refused to establish an `Arab Agency' to develop the Arab sector, parallel to the Jewish Agency that directed development of the Jewish sector (see the Chapter "Rejectionism").

   In fact, the so-called patriotism of indigenous Muslims has flourished only when non-Muslim entities (the Crusaders, the British, the Jews) have taken charge of the Holy Land. When political control returns to Muslim hands, the ardent patriotism of the Arabs of Palestine magically wanes, no matter how distant or how despotic the government. One Turkish pasha who ruled Acco (Acre) between 1775 and 1804 was labeled Al Jazzar, The Butcher, by locals.

   Why hasn't Arab representative government ever been established in Palestine, either in 1948 or during the next 19 years of Arab rule? Because other Arabs co-opted the Palestinian cause as a rallying point that would advance the concept that the territory was up for grabs. "The Arab invasion of Palestine was not a means for achieving an independent Palestine, but rather the result of a lack of consensus on the part of the Arab states regarding such independence," summed up one historian. Adherents to a separate Palestinian identity were a mute minority on the West Bank and Gaza during the 19 years of Jordanian and Egyptian rule - until Israel took control from the Jordanians and the Egyptians in 1967. Suddenly a separate Palestinian peoplehood appeared and claimed it deserved nationhood - and 21 other Arab states went along with it.

   Palestinianism in and of itself lacks any substance of its own. Arab society on the West Bank and Gaza suffers from deep social cleavages created by a host of rivalries based on divergent geographic, historical, geographical, sociological and familial allegiances. What glues Palestinians together is a carefully nurtured hatred of Israel and the rejection of Jewish nationhood.

Also, found through the blogosphere:

The authoritative source on the origin of "nakba" is none other than George Antonius, supposedly the first "official historian of Palestinian nationalism." Like so many "Palestinians," he actually wasn't - Palestinian, that is. He was a Christian Lebanese-Egyptian who lived for a while in Jerusalem, where he composed his official advocacy/history of Arab nationalism. The Arab Awakening, a highly biased book, was published in 1938 and for years afterward was the official text used at British universities.

...

On page 312 of The Arab Awakening, Antonius writes, "The year 1920 has an evil name in Arab annals: it is referred to as the Year of the Catastrophe (Am al-Nakba). It saw the first armed risings that occurred in protest against the post-War settlement imposed by the Allies on the Arab countries. In that year, serious outbreaks took place in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq."

Yes, the answer to our little quiz is 1920, not 1948. That's 1920 - when there was no Zionist state, no Jewish sovereignty, no "settlements" in "occupied territories," no Israel Defense Forces, no Israeli missiles and choppers targeting terror leaders, and no Jewish control over Jerusalem (which had a Jewish demographic majority going back at least to 1850).

The original "nakba" had nothing to do with Jews, and nothing to do with demands by Palestinian Arabs for self-determination, independence and statehood. To the contrary, it had everything to do with the fact that the Palestinian Arabs saw themselves as Syrians. They rioted at this nakba - at this catastrophe- because they found deeply offensive the very idea that they should be independent from Syria and Syrians.

You're right, shergald...the truth WILL be heard.  Unfortunately, though, the truth doesn't say what you think it does.