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     The timing was just too much.
 
     I had just read of Western journalists crying uncontrollably at the news of Arafat's death, watched as the murderous ghoul's carefully-nurtured masses cried out slogans for Israel's destruction at his burial in Ramallah, and read repeated editorials virtually canonizing the Egyptian master butcher of Jews.
 
     Next, I heard someone interviewed about the situation in Iraq referring to the Pesh Merga--the fighting force of the Iraqi Kurds--as being the most effective army of its kind in Iraq. Then, to top it off, I came across an article about the Kurds in the November 14th Boston Globe by Thanassis Cambanis. While the article was informative and fairly balanced, please note its title: "Kurds Separatist Ambitions Pose Challenge To Iraq."
 
     It just all came together.
 
     Once again, the stench of hypocrisy and double standards was unbelievable...nauseating.
 
     For decades, the very same journalists, academics, politicians, Hollywood-types, and other would-be sources of ethical enlightenment who have been in the forefront of the fight for the creation of the Arabs' 22nd or 23rd state (second, not first, one within the original 1920 borders of the Palestinian Mandate) have either totally ignored or denigrated the aspirations of some thirty million truly stateless and much oppressed people, the Middle East's Kurds. While slanting his courses on the Middle East in favor of the Arabs and "Palestinians" in particular (and woe unto you if you disagreed with him), the only time I ever heard the tenured Carter Findley ever mention Kurds during my extensive doctoral studies at Ohio State in the '70s was when he mocked them telling of his travels in "so-called Turkish Kurdistan."
 
     Unlike Arabs, who could have had that additional state decades ago if they just didn't keep on insisting on denying Israel's Jews (half of whom who were refugees themselves from "Arab" lands) their microscopic one, Kurds were never offered such a deal or partition over lands in which they have lived for thousands of years. Kassites, Hurrians, Guti, Medes, and other Kurds predated the Arabs by millennia in Mesopotamia. Yet, when the Middle East was partitioned after World War I, while the Arabs wound up with the lion's share of Palestine after Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill convened the Cairo Conference in 1921 and orchestrated the award of Transjordan--some 80% of the total--to his Arabian Hashemite allies the following year, there would be no such division in the much larger Mandate of Mesopotamia...despite earlier promises made to the Kurds. The Arabs were awarded the whole shebang...the oil-rich Kurdish areas and all.
 
     While spread out over a half dozen modern states, the Kurds sought only one Kurdistan for their scattered peoples. Arabs, on the other hand, insisted that all lands that they formerly conquered in their own age of Caliphal imperialism were destined to be part of the "purely Arab patrimony" of the region...despite the presence of scores of millions of native, non-Arab peoples. For a Kurd, Copt, Berber, Jew, black African, and so forth to gain some semblance of acceptance in such a polity, they had to play along with the rules of the Arabizing game. The ongoing genocide against blacks in the southern Sudan, and the plight of North African Berbers, Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, kilab yahud--native "Jew dogs"--Egyptian Copts, and others as well are the result of this domineering and oppressive mindset.
 
     So, why is it that, while the "moralists" of the world shed tears and sing praises to Arafat's name, they remain largely deaf, dumb, and blind to all of this? Where are the Michael Moores and their pathetic Jew stooge choirs on such matters? Where is the New Left regarding these things? How about President Jimmy Carter, Jesse Jackson, & Co.?  They all certainly have plenty to say about those "oppressive Israelis."
 
     How can the liberal press and media, United Nations, European Union, and others as well (including the Foggy Folks) insist that Israel cave in to virtually all that Arabs demand (while even the Arabs' "moderates" label all such "peace"-making with the Jews as merely a "Trojan Horse"), while ignoring the plight of Kurds who have been repeatedly slaughtered en masse by the very same Arabs whom the world still insists that Kurds not separate from? How many more Halabjas must there be? Did those same folks insist that Serbs, Croats, Albanians, and others stay together for the sake of the unity of Yugoslavia after the death of Tito? If the latter was said to be an artificial state, then so too--most certainly--is Arab "Iraq"...put together to further the goals of British petroleum politics in cahoots with Arab nationalism after a British Mesopotamia was awarded the oil-rich areas around predominantly Kurdish Mosul in 1925.
 
     With the Arab portions of Iraq once again in turmoil (did you ever wonder why the Arabs can't come up with anyone except dictatorial, ruthless autocrats for practically all of their leaders?), is it fair or reasonable for the world to insist that the Kurds--whose areas already have much of the democracy and calm missing to the south (which is now devoid of its latest bloodthirsty autocrat)--stay united with Arabs who have repeatedly massacred them, periodically outlawed their culture and language, and such in years past. And who have already promised yet more revenge against them for being America's staunchest allies in Iraq?
 
     While "Palestinian"--regardless of how you define the term (most were Arabs who migrated into the Mandate from elsewhere)--Arabs form the overwhelming majority of Jordan's population, and Jordan itself comprises the bulk of the original Mandate of Palestine, the world insists that yet another state for Arabs be created in "Palestine."
These folks share the same culture, language, religion, and history (but also with local loyalties and stories to tell), yet the world accepts their "need" for some two dozen separate states. Think about that Boston Globe article's title again...
     And at the same time that the world's moralists still debate whether or not Arabs, who deliberately blow up civilian busloads of Jewish innocents, are militants or terrorists, folks like David Ignatius of The Washington Post have no problem using the "T" word for Kurds. While these same voices insist that there be that 22nd or 23rd state for Arabs, somehow 30 million Kurds remain, forever, undeserving of one. Furthermore, their quest is more often than not negatively labeled as that of mere "rebels" or "separatists."

     Ignatius, while writing on September 16, 2003 of the danger in playing America's Turkish card in Iraq, when referring to Kurds, labeled them only as terrorists or rebels.

     Too many other examples of this hypocritical, double standard treatment abound.

     More often than not, the Kurds and other victims of Arabs are simply ignored by the very same academics and others who readily demonize and seek to divest from Israel. And besides Ignatius' comments, we have seen more recent ones similar to them in the Boston Globe and elsewhere. Even more pathetic was an op-ed in the  March 26, 2003  New York Times in which that self-anointed expert, Thomas Friedman, advised that Kurds should be told point blank, "what part of 'no' don't you understand? ...You Kurds are not breaking away." This is the same guy who has written volumes demanding that Israel cave in to virtually all Arab territorial demands despite the fact that, in the wake of the '67 War, U.N. Resolution #242 itself recognized the need and called for a compromise here.

     During these days when we wonder what will happen next in an Arab Iraq that is once again showing its true colors after the traditional iron fist becomes missing (especially typical in societies that Arabs tend to breed), or among the "Palestinian" Arabs in the wake of Arafat's departure, or in a dozen other places involved in turmoil in the "Arab" world, is it not time for the Kurdish question to at long last get the attention that it deserves?