They Just Have The Wrong Enemy

Back in 1918, the Great Powers, victors over Germany, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire did a bit of practical work, redrawing the maps of Europe and the Mideast.  Supposedly high on the list of priorities for this exercise in practical cartography was the uniquely American proposition called, "self-determination of peoples."  This noble bit of High Mindedness was honored more or less with respect to the splitting up of the old Hapsburg domains, but was it observed only in the breech when it came to dismembering the Ottoman lands.

When the hyper-idealistic Woodrow Wilson confronted the real world of secret deals and the fruits of wartime exigencies, he discovered that his notions of self-determination had been preempted by an assortment of understandings both formal and otherwise between Great Britain and France.  One of these rather under the table deals dealt with the area called Palestine.  This area along with the coterminous Trans-Jordan had been divided according to two contradictory undertakings.  One, the Balfour Declaration, promised Jews a "national homeland."  The other, an agreement between two bureaucrats, Sykes and Picot, created two protectorates, one under British rule and the other under French.

This exercise in international can kicking is still with us today in the form of the seemingly endless conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  (By the way a body of American experts on the region advised President Wilson to fight this one to the death as the result would be a century of bloodshed.  Rarely have experts been so right.)

Almost overlooked was the simultaneous division of Iraq and Syria into British (Iraq) and French (Syria along with its appendage, Lebanon) protectorates.  Embedded in both Iraq and Syria as well as in the rump state of Turkey and the country then called Persia was a people long separated from their neighbors by language, customs, and culture but not religion.  This nation now split among four states was the Kurds.

The Kurds were not at all happy with this division.  Nor should they have been.  According to the principle of self-determination, the Kurds merited their own state, the state of Kurdistan.  But, these unfortunate folk lacked any representative in Versailles.  Unlike the Arabs way down south, the Kurds had provided no service to the Allied cause.  Unlike the Arabs, the Kurds had no access to powerful British political figures.  Neither did they gain the attention of imperial minded bureaucrats.  As a result, they were casually and cruelly consigned to minority status within four states.

Almost immediately, the Kurds commenced a defensive insurgency in each and every of the four countries to which they had been so cavalierly assigned.  The insurgency has not ended to this day.  Like the conflict between Arab Palestinian and Israeli Jew, the conflict gives no hint of ending soon, or ever.

The Kurdish people are an ancient hill folk.  Like hill dwellers almost everywhere, they are excellent warriors.  It deserves mention that the great Muslim fighter who kicked Crusader butt with great effect, Saladin, was a Kurd.  While today's Kurdish fighters may not have either the military genius or bent to chivalry which marked the legendary Saladin, they are not slouches in the craft of guerrilla war as may be attested to by the marked lack of success enjoyed to date by Turks and Iranians alike.

Other than in Iraq where the Kurds have a semi-autonomous province under sole Kurdish control, it is accurate to say the Kurds live under occupation by a foreign force.  In Turkey, in Syria, and in Iran, the majority Kurdish areas are under direct military control.  Indeed, in at least two of these countries, the degree of military control equals or exceeds that exercised by Israel over the Palestinians of the West Bank and far outstrips that of Gaza.

The Kurds are denied equal treatment in all three states to a degree never reached in the West Bank or Gaza.  They are denied the use of their own language.  They are not allowed to conduct their own education.  They are not provided with the same level of governmental services including access to economic development as the majority populations in all three states.  In short, the Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iran have been pushed to the margins, had their culture and language robustly attacked as a matter of policy, and are subject to an array of legal disabilities as well as informal discrimination.

From any perspective, the Kurds have suffered far more deprivation of status, rights, and opportunities at the hands of the governments and majority populations of Turkey, Syria, and Iran than the Palestinians ever were during the years since June 1967.  At the same time, the Kurds have a claim on statehood which equals or exceeds that made by the Palestinians.

In sharp contrast with the Palestinians, the Kurds have waged their multi-generation insurgency with remarkable humanity.  Unlike the Palestinians down to the present day, the Kurdish fighters sharply limit their attacks to military and constabulary targets.  The intentional attack of civilians is almost unheard of.  Compared to the Palestinian way of war, the Kurds take care to reduce collateral damage to a minimum.  In the usually dirty business of insurgent warfare, the Kurds are relative good guys.  The Palestinians are very much of the opposite hue.

These ground truths demand a question or two.  Where are the liberal groups in the West?  Where are the groups espousing boycotts, divestiture, or deligitimatization of Iran, Syria, and Turkey?  Where are the UN resolutions condemning the suppression of the legitimate rights of the Kurds by Ankara, Damascus, Tehran?  Where is the UN Human Rights Council with resolutions, special rapporteurs, and other displays of condemnation or concern?

In the last few years, advocates of Palestinian statehood have proliferated with a speed which boggles the imagination.  Campaigns of boycotts, divestiture, and sanctions have spilled forth in mighty torrents.  The UN and its lesser creatures have shown a tender concern for the Palestinians without precedent.  The High Minded and Lofty Thinking of the West have taken the Palestinians--rockets, suicide vests, and AK-47s  included--into a warm embrace.

All blame for whatever happens in the Mideast between Israel and the Palestinians is quickly, automatically, ascribed to the evil doing, racist, Zionist occupiers.  Even when a Jewish infant dies, throat slit as it slept near the dead parents and elder siblings, it is seen as the direct result of the Zionist occupier.

Meanwhile, the Turkish air force bombs civilians in Iraqi Kurdistan while Iranian artillery does the same without even the mildest whimper coming from the assorted advocates of self-determination around the world who are so quick to condemn the Zionist occupiers.  Even Syria is exempt from criticism as it denies the most basic rights to Kurds resident in its borders.

Why?

Why two "victims" (one, the Kurds, arguably more deserving of the term) with two such wildly disparate responses from the "international community," the human rights congeries, and politicians around the world?

The answer is as simple as it is ugly.  The Kurds are predominantly Muslim.  So also are the oppressive majority populations in each and every of the four states.  The Palestinians are mainly Muslim.  Their putative oppressors are Jewish.

And, now the really nasty part, antisemitism is as rife in the West as it is endemic to the Muslim states.  In the West, this ancient, evil mindset hides behind the currently respectable facade of being "anti-Zionist" or, even better, as a euphemism, "opposition to aspects of Israeli policy."

It is OK in the West to look at Muslim oppression of Muslims with total indifference.  In the Muslim majority states, the same is true to an even greater extent because to condemn the Muslim majority for oppressing a Muslim minority is to commit that great Islamic sin of fitna, of introducing fission in the great Islamic ummah.  The single towering fiction in Islam is that of holding the community of believers to be one huge, happy family.  So, no hand is raised, no voice either, to stop the oppression of Kurds by Muslim Turks, Muslim Iranians, or Muslim Arabs.

The fiction of Islamic unity is nothing compared to the larger concoction in the West.  The concealing of antisemitism behind the thin and torn scrim of "anti-Zionism" or "opposition to aspects of Israeli policy" is not simply hypocritical, it is a moral delict of the highest order.

Any way you cut it, the groups and individuals in the West who brandish the cudgels on behalf of the Palestinians while maintaining a discrete silence with respect to the Kurds are examples of moral decay without equal.  It is a very severe indictment of the High Minded in the West who by their careful selection of who deserves support show themselves to be both dishonest and antisemitic to the core.

The people and groups so staunchly supporting the Palestinians (including the UN, the UN Human Rights Council, the assorted NGOs, and the individuals who espouse sanctions, boycotts, and divestiture) will deserve respectful attention when and only when they exhibit the same level of concern for the Kurds as they do the Palestinians.  Unless and until these worthies are as willing to condemn and seek to delegitimatize the Turks, the Iranians, and the Syrians, they merit no hearing.

Rather, these groups and individuals should themselves be blackguarded as the antisemites they are.  Any less is to endorse their wicked position.