Arab, Muslim and Pro-Israel - Abdel Bioud [pictured above]
I was born and raised in Algeria during a brutal civil war where Islamists were trying to take over the country to impose their worldview on everyone else. Friends and family members were killed. Individual liberty and freedom are values that I cherish very dearly.
By applying that freedom filter to the Israeli-Arab conflict, you get the following:
All Arab countries are dictatorships, with ruling gangster families on top, who use their monopoly of violence to kill/imprison anyone who questions them. On one hand, you have the families in power who are trying to steal as much money as possible, while using violence against their own people. On the other hand, you have the by-product of this insanity - the Islamists - confused people who had their vision of reality completely distorted by the system they were born in.
If you're a citizen of Israel, your basic freedoms are respected. You can live peacefully, raise a family, and send your kids to competitive and globally recognized universities. This puts them light-years ahead of any Arab state. Israel is a force of good for that region and for the world. And this is coming from someone with a Muslim name and an Arab face.
Even if you drop any rational judgment and go tribal on this issue, the Jewish people are the Arabs' cousins! If your cousins were being slaughtered and discriminated against all over the world, wouldn't you welcome them with your arms wide open?
The writer is a graduate student and vice president of communication for McGill Students for Israel.
(Times of Israel)
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2 comments:
He's brave. And, he's right.
Indeed. His last line captures something profound. If the Arab world had welcomed their Jewish cousins to the Mideast, things would have turned out much differently.
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