We are a stiff-necked people

Last Thursday the United Nations completed the journey it began in November 1974 when it invited a mass-murderer born and raised in Egypt to speak to its General Assembly. At the time, Yasser Arafat said he brought with him an olive branch of peace, and a gun. To the day he died, Arafat turned down every opportunity to use the olive branch, but never skipped a chance to use the gun.

It didn’t matter, because by the time his hate-ravaged body gave out, the terrorist organization he led-- the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had already taught the world Arafat’s lesson--which was, “terrorism works, it is a legitimate form of political expression.”

Suckled at the teat of Western world appeasement and Arab petrodollars, the PLO begot many children including the radical Muslims who attacked us on 9/11, who today are still trying to destroy our way of life.

With its vote to recognize Palestine as a non-member state, the UN created something out of nothing just as the Roman’s did two thousand years ago when they changed the name of the Jewish State from Judea to Palaestina. The Romans did it as a slap in the face to those stiff-necked “Jews” who revolted against their rule too many times. They renamed the Jewish homeland giving it the name of an ancient Israelite Aegean enemy, the Philistines, who disappeared from the region over five centuries before. The Romans renamed the land to ensure that this sacred place lost its Jewish identity.

It never did lose its identity, because we Jews are a stiff-necked people who have clung to our faith, our Torah, and our G-d ever since a man named Abram left his father’s house in Ur, traveled to the land he was shown and changed his name to Abraham.

We left the land because of famine and stayed away to work construction in Egypt, but the Children of Israel lived in that particular piece of G-d-given land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea continuously since a disciple of Moses named Joshua led us back home three and a half millennia ago.

For most of the two thousand years since Rome, no one had tried to deny its connection to the Jews. Things might not have been peaceful, and we were forced to submit to the rule of foreign kings, but Jews lived in the land.