RUTHFULLY YOURS

 On Friday the odious BBC carried a report about an Arab singer from Haifa who has won an Israeli talent show featuring Mizrachi music, part of her act featuring a Hebrew song that commemorates Israeli soldiers slaughtered by Palestinian “militants”. Instead of dwelling on the positive aspects of the young woman’s victory, the BBC used the report, written by Farhana Dawood, as a hook on which to hang gratuitous propaganda against the Jewish State.

There’s the bludgeoned-home (wrongful) message that Mizrachi music is yet another thing that the grasping Zionist usurpers have stolen from the Arabs:

‘Ala Hlehel, a well-known Arab writer and cultural commentator, says Mizrahi music is very popular in Israel but he insists its roots are Arab.

He feels the music is an imitation of Arab music utilising similar instruments and vocal techniques.

“You know the Mizrahis have a serious identity problem. Call a Mizrahi an Arab Jew and he’ll kill you,” he says.

“They don’t want any relationship with us because it will make them less in this country if you are connected with Arabs. And yet they make a lot of money from this music, which is Arab and the most popular music in Israel.”….’

As Lyn Julius, an expert on the history and culture of the Mizrachim, notes in her able exposé of Dawood’s report, its biases and inaccuracies, this final paragraph contains the “antisemitic image of the money-grabbing Jew”.

In typical Corporation fashion, facts that sit uncomfortably with the BBC’s agenda are distorted or omitted.

Thus, writes Ms Dawood, before proceeding to quote from a biased leftwing source:

“Mizrahim arrived in Israel from countries like Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen and Iran in the years following its establishment.

They were met with condescension by the European establishment who saw them as inferior and threatening because of their resemblance to the perceived Arab enemy….

…. Despite several areas of common ground, there is no real closeness between Israel’s Arab citizens – who mostly identify as Palestinian and make up about 20% of the population – and the Mizrahim.“

There’s no reference to the Mizrachim who were settled in Eretz Israel long before 1948, of course. There’s no reference to the persecution that the-post 1948 Mizrachi olim faced in the Arab world, and that they fled Arab lands as refugees.

So keen is Dawood to demonise Israel that the Arab singer who won the contest is virtually eclipsed amid the propaganda.

The BBC’s continual pro-Palestinian (note the alacrity with which it reported Oxfam’s latest anti-Israel propaganda) underlines the thesis of an excellent article that concludes

‘ …..The Jews, as a minority in every country in which they live outside of Israel, have today become silenced by the noise and clatter of Islam’s culturally perpetuated anti-Semitism. Any voice they might have raised in defense of their ancient homeland is muted by the Arab-Muslim slander which equates Zionism with Nazism. This slander was born in the offices of the UN and given legs by impudent Western journalists who care little about the truth and even less about the Jews. No lie is too big or too obscene for Islam’s anti-Jewish hatred, so long as it serves the needs the wicked require of it. And that need is a silenced Jewish minority.’

One of the latest lie Israel-demonising lies to be exposed concerns the so-called children’s drawings from Gaza (see image above for a taste) on exhibit in North America; these faked images have rightly been described as “slander”. And there’s a lot of such slander about.

David Bukay, a political scientist at Haifa University, has written a detailed, footnoted, thoroughly readable article about how the Palestinians have distorted Jewish history in Eretz Israel, in order to intrude their own claims, and how in the process they are succeeding in hoodwinking the world.

‘….The Palestinian objectives are to disqualify Israel’s historical standing and to inherit its belongings by delegitimizing and even dehumanizing its national identity and personality….

Rewriting the history of the Land of Israel by erasing Jewish history and replacing it with a fabricated Palestinian history is a central goal of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and something that the early generations of Palestinian leaders, including the notorious Hajj Amin Husseini, who led the Palestinian Arabs to their 1948 defeat, dared not do. This fictitious history, which ignores all historical documentation and established historical methods, is based on systematic distortions of both ancient and modern history with the aim of denying Israel’s right to exist….

In the official Palestinian narrative, the Palestinian people are authentic and indigenous while it is the Israelis who are the foreigners, invented, and sown in a land that is not theirs. According to Nabil Alqam, a PA historian, the Israeli state concerns itself with cultural theft and with stealing, distorting, and erasing the Palestinian heritage, which has a historical depth of 4,000 to 5,000 years. The state of Israel attempts to steal Palestinian symbols and to create a fake Israeli identity. In his book, Jerusalem, City of Allah, Yunes Amr, president of the al-Quds Open University, claims to disprove all Israeli connections and the history of the Jewish presence in Palestine, both historically and linguistically, by exposing the falsification of facts and affirming that the Palestinians are Arab Canaanites indigenous to the land…..

….Palestinian Arabs, as opposed to Arabic-speaking residents, have not been in the area west of the Jordan River from the Islamic occupation, from the Ottoman Empire, or even from British rule since 1917. No Palestinian state has ever existed, and so, no Palestinian people has ever been robbed of its land. There is no language or dialect known as Palestinian; there is no Palestinian culture distinct from that of surrounding Arab ones; and there has never been a land known as Palestine governed by Palestinians at any time in history. For these reasons, Palestinians have been driven to fabricate a past by denying and expropriating that of Jews and Israel.’

Inter alia, Bukay notes that

“Another Palestinian tactic is aimed at co-opting Christianity. For the PA leaders, Jesus is defined as a Palestinian who preached Islam, thus denying not only Jewish history and Christian legitimacy but also strengthening ancient Palestinian history. According to this narrative, Jesus was a Muslim prophet, like all other Jewish-born figures, who was born in Bethlehem, lived in Nazareth, and moved to Jerusalem. Therefore, Jesus the messiah is a Palestinian par excellence, the son of Mary the Palestinian. The Virgin Mary, the woman of love and peace, is of the nation of Palestine, whose roots are grounded in the depths of history. Jesus is a shahid, a holy martyr of Islam, the only Palestinian prophet, and the first Palestinian shahid who was tortured in this land.”

As Bukay notes:

‘The alleged Zionist process of theft and usurpation is, in fact, precisely the official Palestinian policy toward Jewish history.

Most of the population now known as Palestinian descended from migrants originating from the surrounding Arab countries and from local Bedouins. Many migrated in waves from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Others were imported by the Ottoman Empire and by the British for infrastructure and agricultural projects, or migrated to the region following Zionist economic success, which produced a staggering population growth. Palestinians are perhaps the newest of all peoples, comprising many scattered groups. In fact, in origin they are more Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, Lebanese, and mainly Bedouin, than Palestinian.

Perhaps the most conspicuous fact regarding the novelty of the Palestinian nation is that when it was within their power, the Arab leaders never seriously sought to create a Palestinian state during the 1940s, and after the establishment of the State of Israel, from 1948 until 1967, when the West Bank and Gaza were under Egyptian and Jordanian direct rule. Moreover, during that time all Arab leaders referred to the Palestinian issue as a refugee problem. They did not call for the creation of a Palestinian state for the Palestinian nation. Even after the 1967 Six-Day War, United Nations Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967, mentions only “refugees,” not even “Arab refugees”—let alone a Palestinian people and a Palestinian state. Calls in earnest for a Palestinian state did not begin in the United Nations or elsewhere until the late 1960s or the early 1970s.’

He points out that

‘The Kurds and the Berbers …have lived for centuries in the Middle East. They are distinct and ancient peoples that were not invented in the full light of history, but unfortunately, their existence does not translate automatically into statehood. If it did, such a process of granting statehood to all peoples would begin to unravel the fabric of the modern Arab world.’

Most importantly, he considers the Palestinians’ ultimate aims:

‘All their leaders’ declarations and policies clearly show that they have never moderated their primary objective, which is to eliminate the State of Israel. From the Abadan (“never”) rhetoric of the 1920s through 1948 to Arafat’s “phased strategy,” adopted at the June 1974 Palestinian National Congress, Palestinians still lay claim to a land “from the river to the sea.” Palestinians appear unwilling to compromise, to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, or to accept an Israeli state on any territory they call Filastin.

…. Palestinian political evolution is closely tied to Israel’s territorial and political development in two continuous phases. The first emerged after Israel’s independence in 1948 and differentiated the Palestinians as a social group of Arab refugees, also called “Palestine Arabs,” and lacking obvious cultural, social, or political characteristics that distinguished them from their Arab kin, who largely reviled them. The second phase developed after the 1967 Six-Day War; Palestinians then became a political group seeking to develop a national identity during the period of global anti-imperial and anti-colonial ferment. But even as a Palestinian national identity has been developed and marketed, it is overwhelmingly founded on the negation of its rival, namely Jewish and Israeli identity, rather than on positive attributes or real history.

….The question remains why the international community accepts the Palestinians’ claims regarding their fabricated past and the corresponding negation of the Jews. Oil, ignorance, anti-Semitism, and a politically correct unwillingness to offer any challenge to such falsehoods, all play a role. Still, it is difficult to recall a time in modern history when one group of people openly expressed such visceral animosity and hatred and declared its eagerness to eliminate a neighboring state and its people while the international arena ignored and, in fact, enabled and legitimized it.’

Read David Bukay’s entire article (with footnotes) here
Read Khaled Abu Toameh on why Mr Abbas will never make peace with Israel here

Incidentally – to judge from this – it’s not only Islamic extremists like the notorious British national pictured who insists that Jesus was a Muslim (if so inclined, read more about his December 2011 broadcast and get a link to the video here). Nor only those who EDL leader Tommy Robinson spoke about recently in a speech that touches on Israel and Jews – hat tip reader Shirlee – before the European Parliament, the Islamists who unfurled a big banner saying “Jesus Was A Muslim” in Birmingham city centre and proceeded triumphantly to convert a young boy to Islam.