By Gerald A. Honigman
Kurdish Flag (Photo By Sarchia Khursheed – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)
President Trump, it’s time to stop using and abusing America’s most loyal and effective allies in the region of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the Kurds.
Regardless of your friendship with Turkey’s autocratic Islamist, Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas connected, would be new Sultan with visions of recreating the Ottoman Empire at everyone elses’s expense, President Erdogan is no real friend of America.
His country has outlawed its own 23 million (of 40 million total) Kurds’s own very language and culture, renaming them “Mountain Turks” to extinguish their identity. Imagine if Israel had done such a thing to Arabs in Israel?
Need I question what the world’s response would have been? Yet Turks and Arabs have routinely done this to their own minorities. Ismet Cherif Vanly’s “ The Syrian (Arab) ‘Mein Kampf’ Against the Kurds (Amsterdam 1968) needs no further explanation, does it?
Before viewing the Middle East Forum’s important newer article about the Kurds, please check out the following earlier analyses for more extensive background, and ask why you don’t see anyone protesting, rioting, demonstrating, intimidating, and so forth others on behalf of these people on campuses and elsewhere, and why most courses dealing with this region to this day never even mention the word “Kurd” to their students.
Begin by carefully reviewing “Berber Autumn” in the Middle East Forum to understand why this travesty being committed in academia, the United Nations, and elsewhere is so:
https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/berber-autumn
Here’s the current MEF’s article…
The MEForum was founded by Professor Daniel Pipes, whose endorsement sits atop my own forever timely book dealing with the struggles of many of the different—and oft neglected—non-Arab, non-Turkic—peoples in MENA (and to a lesser extent, sub Saharan AFRICA) for the own fair share of the justice pie.
Soon after http://q4j-middle-east.com was published, Daniel pleasantly informed me that one of his children was “caught” in his study reading one particular book, of countless others…mine. He sent me a picture of her deeply involved in the book, and asking him, “Who really are the Kurds?”
Very few people even knew anything about them, including most academics involved in Middle Eastern studies. Or more accurately, they deliberately and consciously chose not to know.
I refer readers again to “Berber Autumn” in the link above to understand what has been going on for decades at the expense of hundreds of millions of non-Arab, non-Turkic peoples in MENA, adjacent areas, the Indian subcontinent, sub Saharan Africa, and other places where Arab and other Arabized/Islamized jihadi settling, colonizing, and murderous conquerors have overtaken at the native inhabitants’s expense.
The slaughtered on the Indian subcontinent and in black sub Saharan Africa alone (not counting over 200,000 Kurds gassed and otherwise massacred by Arabs in Iraq and Syria) are mind boggling, committed by the same folks who laughingly accuse Israel of “genocide.” The Christian Assyrians, Yazidis, Druze, and Armenians were also victimized this way.
Regarding sub Saharan Africa:
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/338495
Back in the ‘70’s, during my own doctoral work, I did extensive research on the plight of this 40 million TRULY stateless people who, unlike Arabs, with almost two dozen states to call their own— including one given to them in 1922 on almost 80% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine—were constantly used and abused by many internal and external players in the region with tragic consequences.
“British Petroleum Politics, Arab Nationalism, and the Kurdish Struggle for Independence” soon found its way (in an much shortened version) into the heavily Nobel Laureate sponsored academic journal, the Fall/Winter 1982 edition of the Middle East Review.
From there it made its way onto the recommended reference lists of various institutions of higher learning such as Paris’s acclaimed Institut d’etudes Politiques (Sciences Po).
Here are some of my much earlier analyses in the Kurdish media which deal with the same issue the MEForum’s article updates nicely, giving our beleaguered, loyal friends and allies, who’ve born the brunt of most of fighting against ISIS and other assorted jihadis in Syria and Iraq, their just dues…
And…
The Real Message of the Turks’ Invasion of Syria: The Birth of Kurdistan is Long Overdue…
And just one more of dozens I’ve penned over the decades on behalf of the plight of over one hundred million non-Arab, non-Turkic peoples in a region which most Arabs today still view as nothing more than “purely Arab patrimony,” and to hell with anyone else’s hopes and aspirations:
Ankara’s Mountain Turk Headache & the Crocodile Tears of Academia
Actually, Israel is the most loyal and effective US ally in the region. But yes, Trump is right that we should not be mistreating the Kurds. We have betrayed them in the past.
Some thoughts:
The US shouldn’t treat the Kurds like the SLA.
It is time for a free Kurdistan in the applicable parts of Iraq, Syria, Iran (and Turkey, too, if they could swing it).
US bases / outposts in Kurdistan would benefit the US, and would stabilize the area by holding a potential hammer over the rogue countries or groups in the area.
It is a moral imperative for the Kurds to have their own homeland, unlike the PLO.
Religiously, the Kurds are diverse and apparently tolerant.