This month marked the twelfth anniversary of my Dad's passing. Seems like it was yesterday.



After reciting Kaddish, I stared long and hard at his picture hanging in the house. Given the turmoil in the Middle East, recollections Dad shared with me many years before now came to mind.



Dad quit Philadelphia's prestigious Central High School at age seventeen and had to have my grandfather, a naval veteran of World War I, sign for his permission to join the fight against Hitler, as Dad was only seventeen years old.



Competing against older recruits, Edward Honigman excelled and was scheduled for officer training.



And then there was the interview when Dad was asked what kind of name Honigman was. Somehow, Dad wound up, soon afterwards, in the Armed Guard branch of the Navy instead. What a coincidence. These were the guys who had to run interference with German U-Boats and such to protect Allied shipping - extremely high casualty rates. Dad's own sister ship went down. There, but for the grace of G_d, go I....



One particular story that especially came to mind occurred during Dad's participation in the Rommel Campaign in North Africa (he was involved in many others over the four years that he served in World War II).



Dad and several friends were on leave in Aden in the southeastern part of the Arabian Peninsula (now Yemen). His buddies decided to "have some fun," and so asked him to call the Arab attendant carting them around town "yahudi". Here was the latter's response:



"Please, sir, curse me, spit on me... but never call me that."



My Dad, G_d rest his beloved soul, had called this Arab a Jew.



Sixty years later, in the wake of Yasser Arafat's death, Jimmy Carter now readies himself to oversee elections among Palestinian Arabs. The latter, like many of their brethren elsewhere, have been raised on such "religious" teachings as those that call Jews descendants of apes and pigs, that charge Jews with using the blood of non-Jews to make Passover matzoh, with killing the prophets and other such goodies. You get the idea.



Oh yes, "Jew" was also a common adjective in the Arab world. Kilab yahud -- "Jew dogs" -- was the common appellation for the "Arab World's" native Jews, who make up one half of Israel's Jewish population. And if you buy the Arab line that this was only a recent development, due to the rise of modern political Zionism (how dare those Jews want the same thing in one tiny state that Arabs have conquered from others and created for themselves in some two dozen!), then I have not one but two bridges to sell you. The works of the Egyptian Jewess and scholar Bat Ye'or, and those of Professor Albert Memmi of the Sorbonne, whose family dates back hundreds of years in Tunisia, are must reading.



Jimmy Carter runs off to once again promote his pet international project, the creation of the Arabs' state no. 22 or no. 23 (and second, not first, Arab state within the original borders of the 1920 Palestinian Mandate), and demands, as he always does, that Israel cave in to all that the Arabs ask, despite the risks, and despite the fact that the Arabs openly admit that their end goals for Israel remain the same as Hamas', with or without Arafat. Is it not reasonable to ask him to demand that Arabs offer concrete evidence that they can be trusted by those whom they see as the equivalent of dogs, pigs and apes?



Will he demand a real revision of the Palestinian Arab Charter, which still calls for Israel's destruction?



Will he lecture Arab leaders -- as he freely and frequently does Israel's -- that the Palestinian Authority's schools, textbooks, maps, insignia, newspapers, mosques and the like must stop preaching hatred of Jews, recognize Israel as a Jewish State, and show a proposed "Palestine" existing alongside Israel, instead of replacing it?



Will Mr. Peanut explain to his Arab friends that theirs is not the only justice in this world, and that any compromise over the disputed territories -- as in any other conflict -- must take into consideration territorially the needs of both parties to the conflict? Will he not focus solely on forcing Israel to allow those who continue to plot its destruction (as the "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas and other PA leaders, not to mention the Hamas crew, have openly called for on recent trips abroad, in interviews and such) to have their way with it?



And finally, will he tell Arabs that they'll have to resettle their own refugees, created due to their own assault on a reborn Israel in 1948, the same way hundreds of millions of other non-Arab refugees have been resettled; that they must give up on the idea that Israel will be fool enough to consent to the Arab "moderates'" plan to overwhelm Israel's Jews "democratically", instead of blowing them up (or at least put the latter method on hold for a while)?



If Carter isn't willing to do these things, then let him stay home. For he'll only be up to his same old hypocritical, double standard manure regarding this conflict.



Now, some advice for Israel as well.



Carter will accept no concession nor compromise as "fair", unless it involves the Jews caving in to all that those who still openly plot their disappearance call for. He is an enemy, pure and simple. Like others of his ilk, he'd rather eulogize over dead Jews than empathize with live ones. And that's the best that can be expected from him. He usually blames the Jewish victims of Arab barbarism themselves for their own deaths.



List Mr. Peanut persona non grata, don't allow him into Israel. Let him stay in some Arab hotel while he continues his love-fest with those who demand that you bare the necks of your kids in return for a temporary lull in violence, designed only to bring about your destruction.



And, oh yes. Dad would agree.