Lucas Smalldon

“Michigan is the capital of Arab America.” Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed makes the claim during remarks in Washington, D.C., pointing to Michigan’s large Arab American population.

I've been in politics for a quarter century. It's hard to express how staggering it is to see a conversation like this on corporate US media. The Morning Joe panel gobsmacked by the directness of @AbdulElSayed's points. (clip via @DropSiteNews)

Enough with your disingenuousness and sleight of hand @mehdirhasan. Now pay attention people! 1. What is your obsession with Israel? Seriously - is this really the most important thing in the world? 2. Jews owned 7% of the land in 1947. So who owned the other 93%? Not who you think. According to British Mandate records, Arabs owned roughly 49%, Jews 6–7%, and the rest was public or unassigned land, much of it in the Negev. 3. But here's the bigger distortion: The UN partition plan wasn't about dividing private property. It was about establishing two sovereign states. Arab landowners in the proposed Jewish state would have retained their property, just as Jewish landowners in the proposed Arab state would have. By this logic, no country could claim sovereignty over territory unless its citizens already owned every acre of it. You can debate the fairness of partition. But confusing private landownership with national sovereignty isn't a historical argument, it's a category error. 4. The UN partition plan of 1947 would have given an Arab Palestinian state significantly more territory than the Jewish one that emerged. The Arabs of Palestine (not yet calling themselves Palestinian or seeing themselves as a distinct group from Syrians or Lebanese Sunnis) preferred to deny the Jews a state on a minority of the land and lost. The Arab states invaded...and lost. Losing wars that you start has repercussions. 5. Like any of the major wars around the globe between WWI and WWII....... there were forced or voluntary population moves and exchanges. 6. Glass houses @mehdirhasan When British India was partitioned in 1947 to create Pakistan, some 14–18 million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims fled or were driven across the new borders in one of history’s largest population exchanges—yet nobody argues Pakistan’s legitimacy depends on how much land Muslims privately owned before partition. Nobody argues Pakistan is an illegitimate state. And that is despite it being a largely failed state by all accounts while Israel is a thriving democracy. 7. The Israeli-Arab conflict saw roughly an equal and painful exchange of Jewish and Muslim populations in the Middle East- around 1.5 million in all. A touch smaller than in your native land. Jews who had lived as indigenous communities long before Islam or Christianity were expelled from their homes - forced to abandon properties and businesses - including my family. Where is your obsession with seeking justice for our cause? By contrast, the Arabs of Palestine mostly fled and were not expelled...the 2 million Israeli-Arabs who are full citizens of Israel and kept their properties, by and large, are the proof of this. Where are the once thriving Jewish communities of Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Sanaa, Tehran, Cairo, Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers and the cities of Morocco??? Where are they Mehdi???? 8. I wish your obsessions were fair and proportional - but you are a fraud with a big vocabulary and a good research team. Qatari funding will allow that. Why don't you go find a new hobby.