A simple solution: Let’s pay them to stop murdering us

It was a rather remarkable story. Although quite minor in scope and importance, it was newswire story that appeared last week, and which captured our attention if only for a few fleeting moments. Perhaps because it was so absurd. So irrational. So illogical. And it seems, so laughable – that it conveniently traveled from the newspapers’ front page to its last in no time. But it was worth noting.

Here’s the short version: In the United States, a Baltimore, Maryland convict and community activist, Tyree Moorehead, who spent 18 years in prison for second degree murder, has come up with what he says is “a solution to the city's soaring murder rate – paying killers not to shoot people.”

Not exactly novel, we find out. Deserving nothing but ridicule, this radical strategy had been contemplated before, in 2016, when officials in Richmond, California, tested a program where they paid young offenders for staying out of trouble (read: to lower that city’s murder rate).

Rational minds would readily dismiss such nonsense. And yet – on a much grander scale – this thinking is one of two central philosophical cornerstones that underscores the argument made by so many for the establishment of a state of Palestine.

One doesn’t have to be MENSA-eligible to understand that 1964 preceded 1967 chronologically. That the establishment of the PLO – three years before Israel “occupied” (their term, not ours) the territories is evidence enough...
First, let us dismiss the other “cornerstone” – that Palestinian Arabs “deserve” a state of their own. Without offering a long-winded historical treatise of the various embryonic territorial divisions of Mandatory Palestine dating back to San Remo in 1920, the Peel Commission in 1937, and the 1947 UN Partition Plan – and the obvious “Jordan is Palestine” argument that follows – we recall that the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded before Israel was an “occupying” state.

That is not inconsequential, but it is quite readily – willingly and willfully – ignored. A truthful translation: the PLO, ostensibly representing the Palestinian nationalist movement, was not founded in 1964 to establish Palestine but quite clearly to nullify the existence of Israel.

As evidenced by the fact that “the territories” were occupied by Jordan between 1948 and 1967, with no tangible undertaking to fulfill the aspirations to establish Palestine, it was axiomatically quite clear: it was about ending Israel. READ MORE