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Why Golda Meir Was Right

(Hurriyet - Turkey) Burak Bekdil - It has been more than two and a half years since Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Israel's President Shimon Peres, "You (Jews) know well how to kill." In this holy month of Ramadan full of blood on Muslim territories, let's try to identify who are the ones who know well how to kill. As the Syrian death count clicks every day to come close to 2,000, the Turkish-Kurdish death count does not stop, already over 40,000 since 1984. Only during this Ramadan, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK's, death toll has reached 50 in this Muslim Kurds vs. Muslim Turks war. This excludes the PKK casualties in Turkey and in northern Iraq due to Turkish military retaliation since they are seldom accurately reported. But a simple, strictly Middle East research will reveal one million deaths in the all-Muslim Iran-Iraq war; 300,000 Muslim minorities killed by Saddam Hussein; 80,000 Iranians killed during the Islamic revolution; 25,000 deaths in 1970-71, the days of Black September, by the Jordanian government in its fight against the Palestinians; and 20,000 Islamists killed in 1982 by the elder al-Assad in Hama. Muslim Arab deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict are estimated at 46,000 including 11,000 during Israel's war of independence. That makes 0.05 percent of all deaths in all conflicts, or 0.4 percent of all Arab deaths in the Middle East conflicts. Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel, had a perfectly realistic point when she said that peace in the Middle East would only be possible "when Arabs love their children more than they hate us."
2011-08-25 00:00:00
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