Word: pretext
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Palestine last week, an earnest gesture of peace became a clever pretext for war. Last September, U.N.'s Count Bernadotte made a ruling on the hotly contested supply routes in the northern tip of the Negeb desert. The Egyptian army, he said, could use the roads for six hours each afternoon to supply their forces in the interior across an east-west road running under Jewish guns. The Jews, in turn, would have six hours each morning to supply their settlements in the Negeb across a north-south road blocked by Arab troops. When the Egyptians rejected the ruling...
Jessup continued: "The Soviet Government has revealed the weakness of its position by adopting what I may refer to as grasshopper tactics . . . Each leap ends on a blade of grass which turns out to be a flimsy pretext requiring a jump to a new but equally unstable position . . . The long process of proposal and counterproposal, of promises made and withdrawn, made it plain that good faith-that prerequisite to settlement-was absent from the Soviet mind...
When Japan seized the country in 1905, the pretext was that Korea was a "Russian dagger pointed at Japan's heart." As long as it held North Korea the Russian hand would continue to grasp the dagger's handle. This week Rhee asked U.S. occupation forces to stay on "until the danger from the north lessens...
...Even the wives and daughters of low tradesmen," said one Smollett character, "who, like shovel-nosed sharks, prey upon the blubber of those uncouth whales of fortune, are infected -with the same rage of displaying their importance; and the slightest indisposition serves them for a pretext to insist upon being conveyed to Bath, where they may hobble country-dances and cotillons among lordlings, squires, counselors, and clergy...
...placard bearing the last name of Richard A. Van Deuren, and the slogan; "It's All Over the Yard" was among the first to go on the pretext that the "V" and "D" were inordinately large...