The Origin and Identity of the arabs - Part 2

Definition of the term Arab in historic sources

The word Arab is of uncertain meaning; when and by whom this people (or these peoples) began to be called Arabs is unknown.
The earliest sources where the term Arab appeared the first time are the Hebrew Scriptures of the post-exilic period, namely, during the rebuilding of the Temple under the Persian Empire (Nehemyah 2:19 -- 5th century b.c.e.), and is applied in a vague manner probably to some Nabatean tribes.
In the same period, also the Greek historian Herodotus mentions the Arabs, apparently in reference to the Yemenite tribes.
There are some earlier records, Akkadian and Assyrian sources that mention the "Aribi", a tribe of the desert that may be connected with the Ishmaelites, but there is not any certainty that such term has even any relationship with the word Arab.

Indeed, the term Arabia is Greek, as well as Egypt, Syria, Libya, etc. and its probable etymology may be of Semitic origin: 1) 'arabah = steppe, wilderness; 2) 'ereb = mixture of peoples.
Both terms are appropriate to them. Wherever Arabs have conquered, the lands became deserted; the Arabian peninsula itself was not so dry, and Yemen had an irrigation network that allowed the land to be fruitful before Northern Arabs invaded and subdued the Sabean kingdom.
Spain and Sicily were fertile lands in Roman times; they became dry during the Arab occupation.
Only Eretz Yisrael recovered fertility after hard work done by Jews -- the pieces of land still occupied by Arabs remain arid. The second term is also suitable to define Arabs, as they are indeed a mixture of different peoples. Arabs themselves recognize to come from two unrelated patriarchs: Qahtan (Southern Arabs) and Adnan (Northern Arabs), to be respectively identified with a Sabean and an Ishmaelite ancestor.

It seems that the name "Arabia" was applied to the whole peninsula only around the first century b.c.e., as defined by Diodorus of Sicily in his Bibliotheca Historica and by Strabo in his Geography, yet it is rather a geographic definition, not closely related with the actual ethnicity of the inhabitants, whom they declare to be of several kinds and call them by their own tribal names.

by Avraham Sándor

The Origin and Identity of the arabs - Part 1

In general, the term Arab in modern times is applied to a large group of different peoples that share in common the Arabic language, which for the overwhelming majority of them is not their original one but the tongue imposed to their forefathers by the Arabian conquerors.

Such a definition is ethnically unsuitable, in the same way as it would be inappropriate to call "Spaniards" to all Spanish-speaking peoples or "English" to all those non-British folks whose primary language is English.

It is true that the Arab countries have not only language in common but also most cultural features as well, yet, this is the result of the colonization and subsequent annihilation of the original pre-Arabic culture. Therefore, it is more correct to speak of them as "Arabized" peoples rather than Arabs.


From the ethnic viewpoint, the term Arab is roughly equivalent to "Arabian", namely, in reference to the only people considered to be Arab since the beginning and identified as such by themselves and by their neighbours.

It happens frequently that the word Arab is misused on purpose for political strategy:
1. by applying this term as an ethnic definition to the Arabized peoples (mainly North-Africans), in order to increase the number of the Arab population.
2. in a quite improper way, by calling "Arab" to ancient peoples that existed in the Middle East in order to claim historic rights and legitimate the Arab occupation.


So, it is necessary to reach a clear definition in two directions: which peoples are Arabs and which are not. Concerning the origin, the most widespread myth is that Arabs are Ishmaelites, what in the case of all the Arabized peoples is not true at all, and regarding Arabians is only partially true.

The original Arab culture has been lost and the most reliable information we have about it comes from external sources, because Islamic revisionism has produced a legendary account in replacement of the scientific truth, and so one of the most fascinating cultures of the past is now missing.

The Arabian myths have been created in order to legitimate the "pre-existence" of Islam by ascribing fanciful tales allegedly happened in Arabia to Hebrew Patriarchs and Prophets. Through these legends turned into "history", Arabs claim an Avrahamic origin through Yishmael, who was only the forefather of some tribes that intermarried with many other peoples that were already settled in Arabia much earlier than him and within which the Ishmaelite lineage was largely assimilated.

Therefore, the equation Arab = Ishmaelite is a myth, because Ishmael was not an Arab, nor the forefather of all Arabs; actually, his descent contributed to the formation of the peoples that came to be known as Arabs some centuries later.

Connected with the alleged Ishmaelite identification, the Semitic identity is taken for granted, yet, this is also a half-truth because the Arabian ethnicity and culture arose from an original Kushite stock that was subsequently assimilated by the Semitic tribes that came after them, and even the Ishmaelites were a mixed group with a strong Hamitic component, as we will see in this essay.

by Avraham Sándor

This Tuesday is Jerusalem Day.

The day we celebrate the miraculous military victory in the Six-Day War, 40 years ago.

The IDF reclaimed Jerusalem, and more specifically the Old City and the Western Wall, as well as what we know today as Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

Israeli leaders always promise they will maintain a “united Jerusalem.”

read more...

Palestinian leader: 'Kill every American and Jew'

Every American and Jew in the world must be killed, demanded Ahmad Bahar, the speaker of the Palestinian Authority parliament in a televised speech, explaining the U.S. is on its way to collapse.

"Allah, take hold of the Jews and their allies, Allah, take hold of the Americans and their allies. ... Allah, count them and kill them to the last one and don't leave even one," said Bahar last week in a speech broadcast on official PA television, which is controlled by PA President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party.

Bahar, a Hamas member, is a senior figure in the Hamas-Fatah unity government headed by Abbas.

His speech was translated this week by Palestinian Media Watch, which provided a video excerpt that can be seen here.

Bahar declared the U.S. has been defeated.

"Be certain that America is on its way to disappear. America is wallowing [in blood] today in Iraq and Afghanistan, America is defeated and Israel is defeated, and was defeated in Lebanon and Palestine. ... Make us victorious over the infidel people.

"This is Islam, that was ahead of its time with regards to human rights in the treatment of prisoners, but our people was afflicted by the cancerous lump, that is the Jews, in the heart of the Arab nation."

Fatah and Hamas in February forged a unity government that grants Hamas veto rights over any agreement with Israel. The U.S. backs talks with the Palestinian government and last month brokered bi-weekly meetings between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert meant to eventually lead to the creation of a Palestinian state.

Earlier this week, a Hamas leader stated in an Arabic language interview Abbas does not have full authority to engage in negotiations with Israel, and Hamas will block any deal reached during talks with Olmert.

"These meetings are pointless and do nothing to further the Palestinian cause," said Muhammad Saleh Taha during an interview last week with Al-Alam, an Iranian TV channel.

"We will not accept any negotiations with the occupier on the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people and their legitimate rights. [Hamas leaders] stressed that they had reservations about giving [Abbas] full authority in the negotiations," Taha said in the interview.

"In the strongest of terms, we oppose such negotiations and everything that will come out of it. We, the Hamas movement, will not agree to it. ... The government platform is not the platform of Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement. ... Hamas will not relinquish its platform of resistance," said Taha.

When asked to clarify whether the Hamas movement would oppose any agreement reached between Abbas and Olmert, Taha replied: "Definitely."

Honeybee die-off threatens food supply

Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.

Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Even cattle, which feed on alfalfa, depend on bees. So if the collapse worsens, we could end up being "stuck with grains and water," said Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for USDA's bee and pollination program.

"This is the biggest general threat to our food supply," Hackett said.

While not all scientists foresee a food crisis, noting that large-scale bee die-offs have happened before, this one seems particularly baffling and alarming.

U.S. beekeepers in the past few months have lost one-quarter of their colonies — or about five times the normal winter losses — because of what scientists have dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder. The problem started in November and seems to have spread to 27 states, with similar collapses reported in Brazil, Canada and parts of Europe.

Scientists are struggling to figure out what is killing the honeybees, and early results of a key study this week point to some kind of disease or parasite.

Even before this disorder struck, America's honeybees were in trouble. Their numbers were steadily shrinking, because their genes do not equip them to fight poisons and disease very well, and because their gregarious nature exposes them to ailments that afflict thousands of their close cousins.

"Quite frankly, the question is whether the bees can weather this perfect storm," Hackett said. "Do they have the resilience to bounce back? We'll know probably by the end of the summer."

Experts from Brazil and Europe have joined in the detective work at USDA's bee lab in suburban Washington. In recent weeks, Hackett briefed Vice President Cheney's office on the problem. Congress has held hearings on the matter.

"This crisis threatens to wipe out production of crops dependent on bees for pollination," Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said in a statement.

A congressional study said honeybees add about $15 billion a year in value to our food supply.

Of the 17,000 species of bees that scientists know about, "honeybees are, for many reasons, the pollinator of choice for most North American crops," a National Academy of Sciences study said last year. They pollinate many types of plants, repeatedly visit the same plant, and recruit other honeybees to visit, too.

Pulitzer Prize-winning insect biologist E.O. Wilson of Harvard said the honeybee is nature's "workhorse — and we took it for granted."

"We've hung our own future on a thread," Wilson, author of the book "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth," told The Associated Press on Monday.

Beginning this past fall, beekeepers would open up their hives and find no workers, just newborn bees and the queen. Unlike past bee die-offs, where dead bees would be found near the hive, this time they just disappeared. The die-off takes just one to three weeks.

USDA's top bee scientist, Jeff Pettis, who is coordinating the detective work on this die-off, has more suspected causes than time, people and money to look into them.

The top suspects are a parasite, an unknown virus, some kind of bacteria, pesticides, or a one-two combination of the top four, with one weakening the honeybee and the second killing it.

A quick experiment with some of the devastated hives makes pesticides seem less likely. In the recent experiment, Pettis and colleagues irradiated some hard-hit hives and reintroduced new bee colonies. More bees thrived in the irradiated hives than in the non-irradiated ones, pointing toward some kind of disease or parasite that was killed by radiation.

The parasite hypothesis has history and some new findings to give it a boost: A mite practically wiped out the wild honeybee in the U.S. in the 1990s. And another new one-celled parasitic fungus was found last week in a tiny sample of dead bees by University of California San Francisco molecular biologist Joe DeRisi, who isolated the human SARS virus.

However, Pettis and others said while the parasite nosema ceranae may be a factor, it cannot be the sole cause. The fungus has been seen before, sometimes in colonies that were healthy.

Recently, scientists have begun to wonder if mankind is too dependent on honeybees. The scientific warning signs came in two reports last October.

First, the National Academy of Sciences said pollinators, especially America's honeybee, were under threat of collapse because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in the United States shrank from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2005.

Then, scientists finished mapping the honeybee genome and found that the insect did not have the normal complement of genes that take poisons out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting genes. A fruitfly or a mosquito has twice the number of genes to fight toxins, University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum.

What the genome mapping revealed was "that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable to disease and toxins," Berenbaum said.

University of Montana bee expert Jerry Bromenshenk has surveyed more than 500 beekeepers and found that 38 percent of them had losses of 75 percent or more. A few weeks back, Bromenshenk was visiting California beekeepers and saw a hive that was thriving. Two days later, it had completely collapsed.

Yet Bromenshenk said, "I'm not ready to panic yet." He said he doesn't think a food crisis is looming.

Even though experts this year gave what's happening a new name and think this is a new type of die-off, it may have happened before.

Bromenshenk said cited die-offs in the 1960s and 1970s that sound somewhat the same. There were reports of something like this in the United States in spots in 2004, Pettis said. And Germany had something similar in 2004, said Peter Neumann, co-chairman of a 17-country European research group studying the problem.

"The problem is that everyone wants a simple answer," Pettis said. "And it may not be a simple answer."

Israel's population reaches 7,150,000

Israel's population increased by 121,000, or 1.8 percent, since last year's Independence Day, reaching a total of 7,150,000.

The Central Bureau of Statistics released the data ahead of Independence Day, which starts Monday evening.

The population growth was mainly a product of a high birthrate. Some 148,000 babies were born in 2006, and 18,400 new immigrants arrived.

According to the latest CBS figures, out of 24,000 Israelis who left the country in 2004 for a period of more than 12 months, 10,000 have returned.

Israel's 5,415,000 Jews and 310,000 "others" - mostly non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union or those whose Jewish status is undetermined - make up 80% of Israel's population. The Arab and Druse population numbers 1,425,000, or 20% of Israel's citizens.

The country's five largest cities, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Rishon Lezion and Ashdod, account for a quarter of the population, or 1,810,300 people. Another 462,200, or 6%, live in small towns, while just 119,700 - less than 2% - live on kibbutzim.

Approximately 47% of the population would, if born again, prefer for that to happen somewhere other than Israel, according to an "alternative survey" conducted by the Geocartographic Institute's iGeo subsidiary.

The survey, conducted in early April among 500 Israeli Jews, found that 70% of Israelis from the FSU would prefer to be reborn outside Israel, 19% of them specifying Russia as their country of choice and 15% the US.

Among wealthy local-born Israelis, 62% said they would like to be reborn abroad, 18% in the US or Canada, 8% in Switzerland and 6% in Sweden.

The survey revealed surprising findings from pensioners; 59% said they would rather live abroad. Twelve percent would choose the US, 9% Switzerland, 6% Australia and 3% would seek retirement in New Zealand.

Among the poor, 58% would have preferred to be reborn abroad, a figure close to that among the wealthy, which stands at 52%. Most in both groups mentioned the US and Canada as their chosen alternative homeland.

In contrast, 83% of the modern Orthodox sector, 80% of those living in rural towns and kibbutzim, and 65% of Israel's well off pensioners said they would choose to be reborn in Israel.

According to Prof. Avi Degani, president of iGeo, similar studies in India and China reported that 89% of Indians would choose to be reborn in India, apparently for cultural and religious reasons. Among the Chinese, 64% said they wished to be reborn elsewhere.

Not all the news was so dire, however. A poll carried out by the Geocartographic Institute for the Immigrant Absorption Ministry found that olim were proud Israelis.

Eighty percent of immigrants said they felt "at home" in Israel, while 7% did not; half said they felt Israeli in every way. Sixty-eight percent said they primarily followed Israeli news, while 23% followed mainly international news. These figures are not so different from those for native-born Israelis, 81% of whom followed primarily Israeli news, while 8% mostly followed international reports.

Over 70% of immigrants from the FSU said they felt more Israeli than Russian (or any other FSU nationality), and 70% defined themselves as Jewish. Of the remaining 30%, only 2% referred to themselves as Christian, with the rest saying they were atheist.

Still, only a third of immigrants from the FSU reported having native-born friends.

Perhaps most importantly, 72% of immigrants from the FSU said that, if given the chance, they would repeat their decision to come to Israel.

Khatami tells Israeli reporters to 'go to hell'

Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami has called for peaceful dialogue with the West, but last week cursed Israeli journalists who approached him at the sixth Eurasion Media Forum in Kazakhstan.

Khatami reiterated that Iran had a right to a peaceful civilian nuclear energy program and that it did not intend to develop nuclear weapons. "We want to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes only," he claimed.

Khatami added that his country was not striving for war, and quoted Albert Einstein, who said that no matter what weapons were used in World War III, "World War IV [would] be fought with sticks and stones."

Iran's former president also said that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was overseeing Iran's nuclear activity, and pointed out that Iran was a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while "other states in the Middle East" were treated differently.

"Why do other countries have the right to atomic energy, and we don't?" he asked, noting that "pressure should be applied to [the] Middle East states that already possess nuclear weapons."

While talking informally with former US Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrook on Thursday, Khatami said that once a new administration was elected, he was ready to travel to the US to discuss Iran's nuclear program.

Nevertheless, despite his calls for "dialogue," Khatami refused to speak to the Israeli reporters present at the talks.

Channel 10 later reported that Khatami, heading for his suite, had cursed them, saying, "Go to hell!"

On Friday, Khatami decided to skip the scheduled panel on Iran's nuclear program because an Israeli representative was slated to speak.

While commenting on the "double standards" allegedly applied to nations' possession of nuclear weapons, president of Israel's Council of Peace and Security Maj.-Gen. (res.) Danny Rothschild remarked that Khatami's absence was a sign that his calls for dialogue on Iran's nuclear program were mere words.