December 19, 2005:
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has garnered some unwelcome publicity by calling publicly for the destruction of Israel and, most recently, for Israel to be moved out of the Middle East, to Europe or North America. There's an irony in this, as about 60 percent of native born Israelis are of Middle Eastern heritage. After Israel was formed in 1948, most Middle Eastern countries expelled their Jewish population. These Jews had been living in the region, well, forever, and looked just like their neighbors. Perhaps Ahmadinejad, an Indo-European (Iranians are ethnically related to Europeans by DNA and language), can't tell one Semite from another. Maybe the Iranians should go back to where they came from (Central Asia), something their Arab neighbors would appreciate. Since the Iranians showed up in the neighborhood 3,000 years ago, the Semites, and other groups, have had nothing but trouble with these warlike Indo-European invaders.