For many observers,
Dick Armey's opposition to American intervention in
Serbia was a telling sign. Armey was willing to do nothing as
Slobodan Milosevic carried out a campaign of
ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. But even though the GOP withheld congressional support for
NATO airstrikes, President
William Jefferson Clinton perservered. NATO bombing eventually subdued Milosevic and led to his removal from power and trial for
war crimes.
In Kosovo the Christians were "cleansing" their land of Muslims. One had to wonder if Armey would have been so complacent if the roles had been reversed. Still, one couldn't draw the conclusion that Armey supported ethnic cleansing as a final solution to the centuries old conflict.
Fast forward from 1999 to 2002 and another ethnic conflict - this time in the middle east. Israel's military is destroying the infrastructure of the would-be Palestinian state. Schools, hospitals, power plants, water systems, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education, and the Palestinian's one lone airport are ransacked, looted, and/or destroyed by an avenging IDF.
As the Mideast crisis peaked and the world community called for intervention, Dick Armey spoke out:
I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank. I'm also content to have the Palestinians have a homeland and even for that to be somewhere near Israel...
Isn't that special.
Dick Armey is content to let the Palestinians live somewhere near
Palestine.
There are many Arab nations that have many hundreds of thousands of acres of land and--and soil and property and opportunity to create a Palestinian state.
An almost unbelieving
Chris Matthews, on conservative friendly
FOX News, wanted to be absolutely clear:
MATTHEWS: Well, just to repeat, you believe that the Palestinians who are now living on the West Bank should get out of there?
DICK ARMEY: Yes.
Israel was created with the slogan, "People for a land, for a land without a people." Of course that land already had people living on it - Palestinians. Millions of Palestinians have fled
Palestine since the creation of the state of Israel, and those that remain are largely
refugees in their own land.
Dick Armey's solution is that we should complete the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine and remove them all to somewhere else.
Sources:
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/04/28/nkosovo.declaration/
http://www.counterpunch.org/armey0502.html
http://www.zmag.org/content/Mideast/avnery-real-aim.cfm