The Right To Destroy Jewish History

[Sixties Fan]

A recently released report from the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) takes aim at the push to introduce a divisive ethnic studies curriculum, which paints Jews and Israel in a negative light.

American schools have long taught history and the accomplishments of minority peoples to bring students together, the report authors note. Yet, “a nationwide movement called ‘liberated ethnic studies’ seeks to introduce a divisive politicized project into the nation’s K-12 curriculum that disavows this central tenet of education fostering national unity and cohesion,” they report.

“The movement’s teacher-activists aim to indoctrinate teachers, encouraging them to enlist students into an effort they claim is necessary to address systemic racism in America,” according to the report.

Further, many of the leaders of the liberated ethnic studies movement are also prominent supporters of the BDS movement. They “profess their allegiance to anti-Israel activism and have shaped the movement’s content and direction sharply towards their views,” the report states, adding that their goal “is to inject anti-Israel propaganda into American schools at all grade levels.”

CAMERA plans a series of such reports on the liberated ethnic studies movement.

‘Liberated ethnic studies’ K-12 curricula target Jews, Israel

A recent CAMERA report finds support for boycotting Israel accompanies a proliferating education approach.

www.jns.org

 

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Part 1

Just where on earth was ‘Palestine’?​

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (source unknown, but often attributed to Mark Twain).
The ‘success’ of ‘Palestine’-related myths provides excellent examples of how we are surrounded by Orwellian inversions of truth. From the Guardian and the BBC to the Washington Post and NYT, the mainstream media are all likely to promote some elements of the fictional tale of the history of ‘Palestine’. Given how often we see these errors, I am actually left wondering whether today’s journalists actually have access to the archives of the very newspapers that they work for.

Truths that cannot be spoken​

There are truths that today cannot be digested in the mainstream. Those that promote them are swiftly labelled ‘extremists’. Push these notions persistently and you will find yourself ‘cancelled’ -‘ no-platformed’ – and silenced, as a ‘racist’, or purveyor of hate.
Three examples:

• Most ‘indigenous’ Palestinians are from families who migrated into the area in the last 170 years.
• ‘Palestine’ has no form, was alien to Muslims, and was kept alive only as a romantic thought in Christian ideology.
• The notion of the Palestinian ‘refugee’ in 2023 is just an absurdity.

It doesn’t matter how these statements may disturb your inner peace – they are either true, or they are not. The modern Palestinian cause is a toxic cocktail that was originally made up from an exercise in denialism, an attempt to deprive Jews of the right to self-determination, western thirst for oil, Christian supersessionism, antisemitism, rising Arab nationalism, Islamist ideology, and political horseplay between the world’s superpowers. If you mix these all together and let the cocktail fester for 100 years, then today’s pro-Palestinian movement, which toxifies everything it touches, becomes the inevitable result.
We are witnessing a concentrated rewrite of history.

Absurdity​

It is within this false paradigm that Nur Masalha, a ‘pristorian’ (‘propogandist revisionist historian’) can produce a book like this, suggesting ‘Palestine’ ‘has a four thousand year old’ history:

In his fictional tale, Masalha hysterically tries to grab at every historical mention of the word ‘falastin’ that he could find, putting them all together in a ridiculous attempt to suggest ‘Palestine’ had real meaning outside of a religious Christian concept. The result is a convoluted, pathetic, mess.
As an example, on page 259 Masalha references a Syrian writer’s travelogue from the late 19th century (‘Numan Al Qasatli’) which had the term ‘Palestine’ in the title. Given Al Qasatli was employed by the British to help with the Christian funded ‘Palestine Exploration Fund’, I hardly think this is evidence of anything. But Masalha’s book was not written for critical eyes. The very fact Masalha needs to rely upon maps drawn for European Christians (such as by the monk Fra Mauro) in his attempt to prove that ‘Palestine’ existed, just tends to help prove the opposite. It is all far too desperate.

Just where on earth was 'Palestine'?

Exposing the media myth: Palestine - a land of authentic 'splendour' filled with indigenous Palestinians. Or was it? Have a read inside.

david-collier.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Most of the examples of Holocaust distortion by the PA minimize the numberof Jewish victims of the Nazis, claiming that the Jews “exaggerated” and “inflated” the number to “gain sympathy.” But sometimes Palestinian Holocaust distortion is pure libelous hate speech. Recently, a Palestinian researcher claimed that the Nazi government organized training of “Jewish fighters.” These Jews were taught to “carry out despicable acts of murder here without feeling anything.” The researcher claimed that the Germans would deliberately free Jews from the concentration camps and “prepare them” for combat against Arabs in Palestine:

Researcher and author Aziz Al-Asa: “Many of the Jewish fighters during the Nakba (i.e., establishment of Israel, 1948) came from Germany… They were trained to carry out despicable acts of murder here without feeling anything, without using their humanity… Imagine that the Jewish soldiers used to kill and weep loudly… The Zionist movement reached an agreement with the German government that it would take the young people from the [concentration] camps, the young Jews, train them, and prepare them.”

[Official PA TV, Debunking the Zionist Narrative, Feb. 4, 2023]​

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) defines Holocaust distortion this way:

“Distortion of the Holocaust is rhetoric, written work, or other media that excuse, minimize, or misrepresent the known historical record.“
[www.holocaustremembrance.com]

Among the 10 types of Holocaust distortion it has defined, the IHRA mentions “state-sponsored manipulation of Holocaust history to sow political discord within or outside a country's borders.”



But this libel is way beyond Holocaust distortion. This is demonization designed to present Israeli/Zionist self-defense actions against Arabs as a copy of Nazi atrocities.

The Nazis trained Jews “to carry out despicable acts of murder here without feeling anything” - Palestinian researcher distorts history | PMW Analysis

Palestinian researcher distorts history

palwatch.org

 

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Israeli officials were shocked this week to discover that a road had been paved by the Palestinian Authority over archaeological ruins at Sebastia National Park in the heart of Samaria.

Sebastia, which once served as a capital city of the ancient Kingdom of Israel, is the site of many antiquities, including pillars from the First Temple period and a giant amphitheater from the days of King Herod in the Second Temple period.

Members of the Shomrim Al Hanetzach organization, which monitors the destruction of antiquities in Judea and Samaria, first identified the wreckage, which included the destruction of a wall dating back to the period of King Herod and burial caves from the Second Temple period, according to Israel National News. Heavy construction equipment was found at the scene.


In addition, officials from the Palestinian Authority reportedly threw pig carcasses into the ancient graves.

On Wednesday, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu and Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman toured the ruins, vowing to promote a government decision to develop the area, Israel National News reported.

“The serious damage to the National Park and outside of it in recent years, while erasing the remains of the capital of Samaria and one of the most important sites in the history of the Jewish people, is also our erasure from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The war on Sebastia is also the war on Tel Aviv. In the coming days, we will work to promote a government decision that will allow the development of area,” said the ministers.

Samaria Regional Council Head Yossi Dagan, who accompanied the ministers, called the destruction “an attempt to systematically and decisively destroy any connection between the State of Israel and the Jewish People, and one of our most important cultural and historic sites.”

Palestinian Authority Paves Road Over Jewish Antiquities in Samaria National Park | United with Israel

The destruction is 'an attempt to systematically destroy the connection between the Jewish people and one of its important historic sites.'

unitedwithisrael.org

 

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The bizarre maps erasing Israel in Jordan's geography textbooks​

Jordan complained that Bezalel Smotrich stood behind a map showing Jordan as part of the Jewish state under the original definition of Palestine before Sykes-Picot. They were quite insulted.

So I looked at the Jordanian geography textbooks, and saw plenty of maps (not all of them) that erased Israel, like this one:


But this map in a seventh grade geography book from 2019 has nothing to do with reality.


From left to right, the first one is captioned "1946."

The second one shows the 1947 UN partition plan that was never accepted by anyone, and the caption is "1949-1967."

The third shows the Green Line created in 1949, and is captioned "2008."

The key shows green as "Arab lands" and the white as "occupied lands."

According to this textbook, all of Israel is "occupied," and somehow in 1967 Israel occupied the lands it gained in 1948. (As far as I can tell, Israel isn't mentioned.)

If Jordan is going to complain about Smotrich's map, they should explain maps like these.

The bizarre maps erasing Israel in Jordan's geography textbooks

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Raja Abdulrahim wrote an article in today's New York Times that is ostensibly about how difficult Israel is making it for Muslim artisans to repair damage from clashes on the Temple Mount.

From start to finish, the article is a very sophisticated piece of anti-Israel propaganda.

The propaganda begins in the headline:



According to the headline, the "Al Aqsa Mosque" and the "Temple Mount" are two names for the same thing. While the article itself says "Al Aqsa Mosque compound" this is part of a relatively new campaign by Muslims to rename the entire Mount as "Al Aqsa Mosque," the third holiest site in Islam, a holy place for Muslims, and not just the mosque itself which is now referred to as the "Al Qibli Mosque." Up until recent years, the Waqf called the building the Al Aqsa Mosque and the compound the Haram al-Sharif.
-------------




More bias:

The workers at the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, need approval from the Israeli authorities for repairs or replacements, down to every broken window or smashed tile, according to the workers, administrators of the site, and Israeli rights groups.

Jews believe that the compound is the location of two ancient temples and consider it the holiest site in Judaism. In recent years, Jewish worshipers have prayed inside the compound, a violation of an agreement that has been in place since 1967.

Calling Al Aqsa the "third holiest site in Islam" is said with no caveats, even though for Sufi Muslims this is not so obvious, and this is controversial in Shiite Islam as well, as some believe that the Al Aqsa mosque mentioned in the Quran exists only in heaven.

But while the Sunni Muslim beliefs are written as fact, the location of the Jewish Temples are framed as something that Jews merely "believe," despite the quite clear evidence of the 2000 year old remains of the Temple compound that exist today and a continuous historical thread since Biblical times.

. With the overlapping holidays this year, there are concerns that increased visits and unauthorized prayers could provoke further clashes between the Israeli police and Palestinians, as has been the case in previous years.

Jews quietly and silently praying "provoke" clashes? No, Muslim intolerance for Jews is the source of the violence, not devout Jewish prayers.

But perhaps the biggest problem with this article isn't how Abdulrahim artfully manages to avoid running afoul of the New York Times fact checkers while injecting so much bias. The major problem is that she doesn't say a word about why Israel is so skittish about unauthorized and unsupervised repairs on the Temple Mount.

Because Muslims had lied about this before and used those lies to build a massive underground mosque that destroyed and carted away tons of the most valuable archaeological and religious treasures on Earth. And the destruction of valuable treasures continues today. Even during last year's riots the Muslim youth broke some ancient columns, with not a word from the New York Times.



By not reporting about this wholesale destruction done by the Waqf and Palestinians on the Temple Mount, Abdulrahim frames this as Israeli meddling in Muslim culture just to harass them.

Put it all together, and this isn't a news article. It is anti-Israel agitprop that twists and chooses facts to give an entirely wrong impression to the reader.

The @NYTimes is whitewashing Muslim desecrations on the Temple Mount

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Carter and Israel

Carter is also given credit by his apologists for helping to broker peace between Israel and Egypt at the 1978 Camp David Summit. That’s true, but it must also be remembered that the peace process was begun by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat with his historic 1977 flight to Jerusalem took place in spite of Carter, not because of him. Carter had tried initially to involve the Soviets in Mideast peace efforts, something the Egyptians rightly feared.

Carter despised Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin for his tenacious defense of Jewish rights and unwillingness to bow to U.S. pressure. He always blamed Begin for somehow deceiving him about Israel’s intention to defend the right of Jews to settle in Judea and Samaria, which the president wanted to end. But that was not true since, if anything, Carter deceived himself about what Begin’s promise of limited autonomy for Palestinian Arabs in the territories really meant.

Carter’s hostility to Israel was no secret, and it played a part in the failure of his bid for re-election in 1980. Reagan achieved a modern record of 40% of the Jewish vote not so much because of his appeal but because of Carter’s unpopularity—something that Republicans have failed to remember as they’ve sought in vain to replicate that feat.

Carter blamed the Jews for his defeat; it colored his post-presidency as he began a decades-long effort to promote Palestinian statehood and to smear Israel. He was not the only person to be wrong about the necessity for a two-state solution, but few matched the virulence with which he assailed Israel, and especially its American supporters, for their refusal to listen to his bad advice.

That culminated in the publication of his 2006 book—Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid, which in no small measure began the effort, at least in the United States, to mainstream the big lie that the Middle East’s only democracy was in some ways morally equivalent to apartheid-era South Africa.

For all of the applause he has received for his life as an ex-president, Carter’s animus against the Jewish state and willingness to use his moral standing and influence to besmirch it and aid the efforts of antisemitic hate-mongers and terrorists to undermine its existence is also part of his legacy.

Don’t believe the Jimmy Carter revisionists

Despite the natural sympathy for a dying man, the revisionist attempt to erase his failures and their consequences should not prevail.

www.jns.org

 

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[Endless attempts of stealing Jewish land, by lying ]


A Palestinian Authority TV program erased the Jewish heritage in a discussion on “holy sites in the Old City” of Jerusalem, when it claimed that the Western Wall, a remnant of the Jewish Holy Temple, was “Islamic.”

The program, identified by Palestinian Media Watch, states, ““It is easy to go from [the Austrian Pilgrim Hospice] to the holy sites in the Old City [of Jerusalem], such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Islamic Al-Buraq Wall [i.e., the Western Wall], and even the Mount of Olives.”


(full article online)

Western Wall is ‘Islamic,’ Says Official Palestinian Authority TV | United with Israel

In discussion on 'holy sites of Jerusalem,' Palestinian Authority TV program calls Western Wall, a remnant of the Jewish Holy Temple, the 'Islamic Al-Buraq Wall.'t

unitedwithisrael.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

While Agha tells viewers that part of her family moved to a place called Dalhamiya in the mid to late nineteenth century, no mention is made of the history of that village of tenant farmers in the Jordan Valley. Following the First Egyptian-Ottoman War (1831 – 1833), the conquering Egyptians established four villages in the Jordan Valley with the aim of settling their own countrymen there, one of which was Dalhamiya. After the Ottomans retook power in 1840, those villages were abandoned by their Egyptian settler inhabitants. At least part of Dalahamiya’s lands were sold to the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association (PICA) and Kibbutz Ashdot Ya’akov was established there in the 1930s.

When Sarah Agha visits the site of Dalhamiya in episode two of the series she speculates that her ancestors may have left their homes due to the evacuation of the Arab population of Tiberias in April 1948 by British forces after the Haganah “seized control” of the town. Agha’s account of course does not include any mention of the Arab attacks which preceded the evacuation that was requested by the Arab forces themselves.

Although Agha’s local guide tells her that “the Jordanian army asked the people of Dalhamiya to move” ahead of the invasions in that area by Iraqi and Syrian forces, Agha declares herself “sceptical” and goes on to object to the fact that people who evacuated themselves to an enemy country were “not allowed to come back”.

That motif of passive Palestinians ‘forced out’ – with remarkably very little explanation of the invasions by Arab forces before and after May 1948 or the part played by Palestinian fighters – is repeated in the two additional stories from the Palestinian side.

The BBC’s original press release promoting this series stated:

“Rather than presenting a comprehensive history, the series lets the human stories of the time speak for themselves, enabling viewers to reach a richer understanding of the divisions that have lasted to this day.”

Indeed, no effort was made to present the comprehensive history which includes the fact that during Ottoman and British rule over the region, people such as Sarah Agha’s ancestors moved from other countries and regions to settle in the area. Barely any mention is made of the ancient Jewish communities in places such as Jerusalem, Tsfat, Tiberias and Hebron which predated Jewish immigration from elsewhere.

Hence, the overall result of the framing presented in this series portrays Palestinians as wronged and passive victims who lost land, homes, money and status (while ignoring the topic of the Arabs who did not leave), whereas Jews are presented as immigrants (rather than refugees), however unfortunate, who came from elsewhere to seek “sanctuary” and “build something new”.

By employing that selective framing, the BBC taps into the narrative of “competing stories” which in fact actively hinders audience understanding of the history and “the divisions that have lasted to this day”.


(full article online)

BBC Two’s ‘The Holy Land and Us’ chooses narrative over history

The BBC Two series “The Holy Land and Us – Our Untold Stories”, aired in two parts on March 14th and March 21st, has rightly been criticised for failing t

camera-uk.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

On the evening of March 22nd the BBC News website published a report by David Gritten titled ‘Oldest most complete Hebrew Bible goes on display in Israel before sale’ on its ‘Middle East’ page.

The majority of that report about an ancient manuscript headed for auction is unremarkable but in one paragraph there is an omission of a kind all too frequently found in BBC content.

Referring to a different manuscript, the report tells readers: [emphasis added]

“The Aleppo Codex, which was assembled around 930, is considered the most authoritative Masoretic text. However, damage from a fire in the Syrian city of Aleppo in 1947 means that only 295 of the original 487 pages survive today.”

Gritten’s reference to a fire in Aleppo in 1947 is not inaccurate but it comes nowhere near to telling the whole story.

That fire – at the city’s Central Synagogue, where the Aleppo Codex was kept – was one of many organised attacks on Aleppo’s two-thousand-year-old Jewish community of around 10,000 people that took place immediately after the UN vote in favour of partition of Palestine. Some 75 members of the community were murdered during around three weeks of rioting, hundreds were injured and around half of the community then fled. As Matti Freidmanwrote in 2012:

“On November 30, 1947, a day after the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into two states, one for Arabs and one for Jews, Aleppo erupted. Mobs stalked Jewish neighborhoods, looting houses and burning synagogues; one man I interviewed remembered fleeing his home, a barefoot nine-year-old, moments before it was set on fire. Abetted by the government, the rioters burned 50 Jewish shops, five schools, 18 synagogues and an unknown number of homes. The next day the Jewish community’s wealthiest families fled, and in the following months the rest began sneaking out in small groups, most of them headed to the new state of Israel. They forfeited their property, and faced imprisonment or torture if they were caught. Some disappeared en route. But the risk seemed worthwhile: in Damascus, the capital, rioters killed 13 Jews, including eight children, in August 1948, and there were similar events in other Arab cities.

At the time of the UN vote, there were about 10,000 Jews in Aleppo. By the mid-1950s there were 2,000, living in fear of the security forces and the mob. By the early 1990s no more than a handful remained, and today there are none. Similar scripts played out across the Islamic world. Some 850,000 Jews were forced from their homes.”

BBC portrayal of the history of Jews from Arab lands is all too often lacking and fails to fully inform the corporation’s audiences. As we see in this latest example, a state sanctioned pogrom that resulted in the decimation of an ancient Jewish community is reduced to “a fire in the Syrian city of Aleppo”.


(full article online)

BBC account of ‘a fire in Aleppo’ erases Jewish history

On the evening of March 22nd the BBC News website published a report by David Gritten titled ‘Oldest most complete Hebrew Bible goes on display in Israel befo

camera-uk.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Every Ramadan, there are lots of competing TV miniseries competing for attention. One of this year's is a crime drama from Egypt called The Canto Market.

An Egyptian newspaper describes the history of this real-life market in describing the plot:

Wekalat Al-Balah market is one of the oldest markets in Cairo. It was established in 1880, by 15 merchants from Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. With the passage of time and the increasing popularity of the market and the increase in the number of its merchants, it has become a landmark of Cairo.

During the 1930s, Egypt was hit by an economic stagnation that made these merchants sell their shops to the Jews, and at that time the market increased the used clothing trade and called it the “Canto” market, and it remained under their control until the 1950s when they decided to migrate to occupied Palestine...

The Jews that they sold the stores to were Egyptians - but in recounting the history, they are just Jews, not at all considered citizens of the nation, who then for completely unknown reasons "decided to migrate" to Israel.

There is no way an Egyptian newspaper would say that Copts bought or sold shops to Egyptians, implying that Copts aren't Egyptian themselves.

I found another description of the market's history atEgyptian Geographic:

The Al-Balah Market, which was established at the end of the nineteenth century by a number of Arab merchants coming from Syria and Palestine, witnessed a great boom at its beginning, then its glow diminished with the decline of the country’s economy in the middle of the nineteenth century until the Jews owned most of its markets and called it the “Canto Market.”...After the departure of the Jews from Egypt, the ownership of the agency returned to the Egyptians.

A similar description is given in this site, although the religion of the shop owners is a bit more relevant there because the merchants would talk to each other using Hebrew words so customers wouldn't understand (and this pidgin-like language is still used in the market today.)

When you have three articles, written at three different times, about the same topic that clearly considers Jews not to have been normal Egyptian citizens, it is pretty clear that Egyptians never considered their Jews to be full members of their society.

This has been the situation of Jews in most countries. And that is the reason Jews need their own country.

Egypt never considered its Jews to be "real" Egyptians

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Central to the Palestinian false narrative is its constant denial of Jewish history in the Land of Israel, despite the abundance of archeological evidence, including Hebrew coins and ancient texts that confirm Israel's history.

The rejection of any and all Jewish history in Israel is reinforced repeatedly by top PA officials. Many statements made by top PA officials and institutions right before the Islamic month of Ramadan, were intended to add fuel to the PA’s ever-burning incitement that the Al-Aqsa Mosque and all its plazas are “purely Islamic” and “belong only to Muslims,” and are in danger of defilement and destruction by Jews.

The PA's message derived from this lie is that Israel is a foreign colonialist state with no right to exist and is destined to be destroyed. As the PA’s Prime Minister recently worded it: “We have learned from history that colonialism passes in the end.”

The following are recent examples:

Abbas’ spokesman denies Jewish history: “No historical proof… [the Jews] had any kind of presence in this land”

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina: “The Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque are among the foundational pillars of history, and they are Palestinian holy places, and not Jewish holy places (sic.) There is no historical proof – despite all the excavations – that [the Jews] had any kind of presence in this land.”

[Official PA TV News, March 20, 2023]​

The Temple Mount, where the Al-Aqsa Mosque was built, is Judaism’s holiest site and predates the Mosque by more than 1500 years. It is because Islam has recognized the Jewish holy site that their mosque was built there.

PA PM denies Jewish history: Jews have no “connection” to the land and will eventually leave

(full article online)

Top PA officials deny Jewish history | PMW Analysis

Denial of Jewish history by top PA officials

palwatch.org

 

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'MOSES AND JESUS WERE MUSLIMS, NOT JEWS': This Insane Rally Took Place in NYC, Not Afghanistan.