Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The History Men: Truth versus Falsehood

Daphne Anson
30 May '11

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/05/history-men-truth-versus-falsehood.html

Historical revisionism is becoming a lethal weapon of the Palestinian Authority. You may recall that the map on the PA's London Embassy website shows the whole of Israel as "Palestine". http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/05/paint-it-black-and-green-and-red-that.html

Pro-Palestinian groups in the West enthusiastically aid and abet historical revisionism, and what was conceived as the national liberation movement of the Jewish People is routinely presented as an ugly and unacceptable manifestation of European colonialism.

As with this poster, Israel's ill-wishers even stoop to appropriating travel posters designed for the Yishuv by refugee from Hitlerism Franz Krausz, as if those posters were the work of Arabs and in order to advance the notion that "Palestine" (incorporating all of Eretz Israel) was, and should again be, an autonomous Arab land.

Earlier this year, Bibi Netanyahu gave a trademark impressive speech in Jerusalem to a visiting contingent of European Friends of Israel.

As proves so often the case, he manifested his obviously deep and genuine feel for history.

In the course of his address, he noted:

"Now people say, well, you don't really have an attachment to this land. We are new interlopers. We are neo-crusaders.... [F]rom the place next to the Temple wall, the Western Wall from around the time of the Jewish kings, they found a signet ring, a seal of a Jewish official from 2700 years ago, and it has a name on it in Hebrew. You know what that name is? Netanyahu. Now, that's my last name.


My first name, Benjamin, goes back a thousand years earlier to Benjamin the son of Jacob who with his brothers roamed these very hills. So we have some connection with this land but we recognize that others live in it too. We want to make peace with them but we have this basic millenial connection to this land.


Part of the campaign against Israel is the attempt to distort not only modern history, but also ancient history. There was no Jewish Temple - did you hear that one?


Well, I'd like to know where were those tables that Jesus overturned? Were they in Tibet? There's an attempt to rewrite history - ancient and modern and to deprive the Jewish people of their connection to their ancestral homeland ..."

Mahmoud Abbas is not averse to distorting history - as witness that despicable doctoral dissertation of his, completed in the Soviet Union in 1982 and published in book form a couple of years later as The Other Side of the Secret Relationship Between Zionism and Nazism. Not only does it allege that Zionists, eager for as many victims of genocide as possible in order to advance their aims, were in cahoots with the Nazis, it suggests that the actual number of Jews who perished in the Shoah was perhaps less than one million.



Disturbingly, this dissertation, with its obscene tissue of lies, has enjoyed wide circulation in the Palestinian Authority, forming the basis of Holocaust studies there. See http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/143752

In Gaza on "Nakba Day," a fiery representative of Abbas deliversed the latter's speech that stated, with forked tongue:

"National reconciliation [between Hamas and Fatah] is required in order to face Israel and Netanyahu. We say to him [Netanyahu], when he claims - that they [Jews] have a historical right dating back to 3000 years BCE - we say that the nation of Palestine upon the land of Canaan had a 7000 year history BCE. This is the truth, which must be understood and we have to note it, in order to say: 'Netanyahu, you are incidental in history. We are the people of history. We are the owners of history.'"



Comments Elad Benari:

"The Palestinian Authority leadership, while telling the world it supports peace talks with Israel, continues to say otherwise when talking to its people through its own television channels....


The canard that Palestinians are Canaanites was claimed by Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi tens of years ago in National Geographic and received with amusement. The Canaanites, as well as the other peoples mentioned in the Bible as living in the parts of the land of Israel, disappeared as distinguishable nations thousands of years ago. Except for the Jewish people, they are untraceable today.


... Abbas’ so-called history is a brazen distortion of known facts. Judean and Israeli history in the Land of Israel, says the report, dates back thousands of years and is documented by ancient Jewish and non-Jewish sources.


"Palestinians", however, is a term that has only recently begun to be used to identify Arabs in the region ...


There is no reference to a Palestinian-Arab nation in antiquity as Abbas claims. ... Islamic sources as well do not refer to Palestinians. In fact, the holy Muslim book, the Quran, refers to the people of Israel and to the destruction of their Temple in Jerusalem.'
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/144470



Read more: http://cifwatch.com/2011/05/29/the-myth-of-historically-arab-east-jerusalem/

Meanwhile, correspondents from that terrible twosome, The Guardian and Al Beeb, just happen to have been taking tours of the abandoned Arab village of Lifta [pictured], west of Jerusalem, with the same Arab guide, Yacoub Odeh, and - quelle surprise! - have slanted their reports accordingly.

As Simon Plosker observes:

'Both media outlets seem determined to bring the focus of the Arab-Israeli conflict back to the events of 1947/8 – a tactic employed by the Palestinians to present Israel as being “born in sin” and responsible for the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians and the creation of the refugee problem. [My emphasis]


The fact that one Yacoub Odeh is the former Lifta resident guiding the BBC’s Wyre Davies and the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood separately would suggest that this “tour” was a well-organized effort offered to the international media and eagerly picked up by those outlets sympathetic to the Palestinian narrative from 1948.'

Harriet Sherwood has made serious errors, points out Plosker: She wrote:

"Out of sight of Lifta's ruins, but built on its former farmlands are the Knesset (Israel's parliament), the supreme court, the Hadassah hospital, the Hebrew University and [Jerusalem's] central bus station."

In fact, the Knesset was built not on Arab farnland but on a plot leased from the Greek Orthodox Church, while the other institutions referred to are located some distance from Lifta.
Read more and view video: http://honestreporting.com/backspin-blog/
See also:http://www.oyvagoy.com/2011/05/30/the-lifta-question/

Al Beeb's Yolande Knell, also milks the lachrymose Lifta angle:

'Its 3,000 residents were forced out or fled in fighting that erupted before the creation of Israel in 1948, which Palestinians view as the "nakba" or catastrophe. They were not allowed to move back....'

Her online article comes complete with a photo - a mutely accusatory piece of propaganda, by the seem of it - of Israelis enjoying a picnic in Lifta, where there are plans for "a luxury housing project".

Ms Knell concludes with the observation that "the most contentious points in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" are "the right of return and the struggle to control the historical narrative".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13373719

Like the Palestine Solidarty Campaign and similar bodies, as well as Al Grauniad, Al Beeb appears to be doing its best to ensure that the latter is a struggle that Israel loses.

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