Community | December 11, 2011 | 1 comment

A dangerous ignorance leads US Republican politics astray

The half-educated man is dangerous because, as the adage goes: "Knowing a few things, he thinks he knows everything." There is bizarrely something of the half-educated man in the Republican presidential candidate and front-runner Newt Gingrich. A PhD "historian", Mr Gingrich certainly "knows" a few things.

Perhaps Mr Gingrich should read the ancient world's most celebrated historian, Herodotus, who wrote in the 5th century BC of the Palestini people, who inhabited a strip of land on the Mediterranean from Phoenicia down to Egypt. Numerous Greek and Roman historians followed suit, referring to the land of Palestine or to the Palestinian people, a mix of Christians, Jews and later Muslims from the southern Levant.

Mr Gingrich is confused. The Palestinians are not an invented people. What he is (presumably) trying to say is that since the Palestinian state of the 20th century was either part of the Ottoman Empire or a British mandate, it never counted as an actual sovereign "state" and what never "existed" should, presumably in his view, never exist in the future.

Mr Gingrich is mixing up nations and peoples. Nations are always "invented". Peoples are not. The American revolutionaries who courageously shook off the yoke of British imperialism "invented" a nation with a flag, a progressive constitution and laws that govern the land

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