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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Elie Elhadj
Published Letters: 6 Editor's Choice: 1
In December 1863, Hugh McCulloch, then Comptroller of the Currency of the United States and later Secretary of the Treasury, addressed a letter to all national banks. Here are some of the paragraphs.
“Let no loans be made that are not secured beyond a reasonable contingency. Do nothing to foster and encourage speculation. Give facilities only to legitimate and prudent transactions. Never renew a note or bill merely because you may not know where to place the money with equal advantage if the paper is paid.
“Distribute your loans rather than concentrate them in a few hands. Large loans to a single individual or firm, although sometimes proper and necessary, are generally injudicious, and frequently unsafe. Large borrowers are apt to control the bank; and when this is the relation between a bank and its customers, it is not difficult to decide which in the end will suffer.
“If you doubt the propriety of discounting an offering, give the bank the benefit of the doubt and decline it; never make a discount if you doubt the propriety of doing so. If you have reasons to distrust the integrity of a customer, close his account. Never deal with a rascal under the impression that you can prevent him from cheating you. The risk in such cases is greater than the profit.
“Pay your officers such salaries as will enable them to live comfortably and respectably without stealing; and require of them their entire services. If an officer lives beyond his income, dismiss him; even if his excess of expenditures can be explained consistently with his integrity, still dismiss him. Extravagance, if not a crime, very naturally leads to crime.
“The capital of a bank should be reality, not a fiction; and it should be owned by those who have money to lend, and not by borrowers.
“Pursue a straightforward, upright, legitimate banking business. ‘Splendid financing’ is not legitimate banking, and ‘splendid financiers’ in banking are generally either humbugs or rascals.”
A single state for Arabs and Jews in Palestine is the durable long-term solution.
Politicizing Genesis 15:18 politicized the Quran; instigating a religious war that could last for a thousand years.
The Zionist dream of an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine is unsustainable, unless the Palestinians vanish.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews lived in Arab countries peaceably for centuries. In Coningsby, Benjamin Disraeli, first and so far the only Jewish British Prime Minister (1868 and 1874-1880), described in glowing terms the “halcyon centuries” in Muslim Spain where the “children of Ishmael rewarded the children of Israel with equal rights and privileges with themselves.” Sultan Bayezid-II (1481-1512) encouraged thousands of Jews to settle in the Muslim Ottoman Empire following their expulsion from Spain. That the migration of 850,000 Jews from Arab lands around 1948 was due to Arab maltreatment of Jews is an unfair charge. The migration happened during Israel’s creation, when more than 500 Palestinian villages were de-populated and about 800,000 became refugees.
Islam venerates Judaism. The Quran made Abraham as the first Muslim. Islam is the Religion of Abraham. The Quranic Chapter 14 is named after Abraham and, to Joseph the Quran names Chapter 12. Today, Jewish derived Arabic proper names are common.
Feeling powerless, the Arab masses invoked hostile Quranic Verses, recounted stories of the Prophet’s troubled relationship with the Jewish tribes in Medina, drew lessons from substituting Friday for the Sabbath and the direction during prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca. For thirteen centuries, however, these events were non-issues.
Politicizing the Bible pushed frustrated moderate Arabs into orthodoxy and the orthodox into Jihadism. Witness the growth of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, among other Islamist groupings.
Had Zionism adhered to the stipulation in the 1917 Balfour declaration: “Nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” this conflict would not have developed.
The Bible and the Quran must be de-politicized.
The two-state solution is capricious:
First, demographically, a purely Jewish state is unachievable.
Secondly, issues like Jerusalem, borders, security for Israel and for Palestine, water rights, settlements, and the refugees’ right-of-return are intractable. When Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasser Arafat attempted in July 2000 to tackle these issues at Camp David, the negotiations collapsed, leading to the second intifada.
Thirdly, even if a miracle patches up a two-state agreement, the extremists on both sides would undermine it.
Fourthly, the Arab masses will shun a Zionist state. Judging from Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994), relations among the Egyptian and Jordanian masses and Israelis have failed to develop beyond small diplomatic missions.
Western democratic and secular ideals and Jewish sense of justice should inspire a single, democratic, and secular state:
First, the intractable obstacles would disappear.
Secondly, a single state will commingle Palestinians and Jews into an inseparable mix. Arabs would no longer have an excuse to boycott their Jewish “cousins.” Economic, cultural, educational, and social interaction would follow.
Thirdly, a single state solution would allow Arabs and Jews access to the entirety of Palestine.
Durable peace requires the genuine welcome of the Arab masses of the Jewish people. The Jews who had lived among Arabs could be a positive factor. Both peoples share customs, habits, values, food, music, dance, and, for the older generation, the Arabic language.
In provoking the enmity of their age-old Muslim friends, Zionism has disserved the long-term strategic interests of the Jewish people. In Christian Europe, by contrast, centuries of maltreatment of Jews culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
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