"...when the Arabs will love their children..."

Golda Meir stands out as one of the more blatantly racist of Israel's leaders over the years (a contest in which she has stiff competition to this day). One of her more famous quotes was that "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us". Because you see, clearly anyone who fights for their very survival after and while being ethnically cleansed simply has misplaced blind rage towards some innocent other and doesn't truly love their children. No really, it's true, why don't you believe me? I mean look at all those Bosnians, making all their lame excuses about being upset over being ethnically cleansed, starved, raped, gunned down in mass graves. Everyone knows the *real* problem was that they just hated Serbs and didn't love their children. And the blacks in South Africa, they could have brought peace so much easier if they would have just given in to their benevolent, loving Apartheid overlords. But noooooooo, they just clearly hated Afrikaners more than they loved their own children.

Which is why the following is so perplexing...a letter...from a Palestinian father to his children in 1938...expressing what appears to genuine, heartfelt love for his children. Almost 20 years *before* Golda Meir showed the world that Arabs had not yet learned to love their children like the rest of us! How can this be?! An Arab, loving his children??? "Impossible!" the Israeli government informs us, "they FORCE us to shoot their unarmed children and destroy their houses over their heads and torture their fathers and rip up the olive groves that feed their families and steal the water that is supposed to nourish their babies. Clearly THEY don't love their children when they force US to do these things to them." (Really, it's true, Israeli soldiers never shoot innocent civilians of their own free will and choice, there is always an invisible Palestinian who sneaks up behind Israeli soldiers, pulls his finger down to the trigger and as the Israeli soldier screams "no, no, don't make me shoot that terrorist baby" the invisible Palestinian forces the Israeli soldier to pull the trigger against his will. It's true, ask any Israeli soldier, they will all tell you between their tears how pained and anguished they are by it and how they need billions of dollars in annual American aid to pay for psychological treatment and ammunition resupply.)

I don't understand, it is so perplexing, can someone please explain this apparently loving letter from an Arab (gasp!) father to his children me? It must be a forgery right? It can't possibly be the Golda Meir was promoting racist ideas that Arabs are sub-humans who don't love their children like everyone else...can it?


[Click image to see in detail: May 1938 letter by Fuad Saba, member of the Arab Higher Committee in Palestine, to his children from British-imposed exile in the Seychelles.]

[Fuad Saba pictured with other members of the Arab Higher Committee, he is standing top right. Background: by the late 1930s the Arab population of Palestine had seen the writing on the wall that the Zionist movement was determined to colonize and steal their country and had not come to live in peace as neighbors as the native Jewish population of the Holy Land had done for millenia before the overwhelmingly-European Zionists arrived. The British occupiers were ineptly maneuvering back and forth trying to please one side then the other and in the process bungling everything but ultimately allowing Zionist plans to march forward and disposses the native inhabitants of their homeland. An Arab uprising broke out which the British brutally crushed, flattening entire neighborhoods, arresting anyone even suspected of any political activity whatsoever, and exiling many Palestinian leaders. Fuad Saba, as a member of the Arab Higher Committee whose goal was independence and putting a stop to foreign plans to colonize his country, was exiled to the Seychelles from where he wrote the letter above to his children.]