UNESCO's Cancelled Exhibition Gets The Go-Ahead

Great news, contained in a circular the Simon Wiesenthal Center has sent out to its supporters; let's hope UNESCO means what it says this time:

'The Simon Wiesenthal Center announced today that its joint exhibition with UNESCO, “Book, People, Land - The 3,500 Year Relationship of the Jewish People With the Holy Land”, will open on June 11, 2014, at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The date was confirmed in an exchange of letters between Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO and Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean, Simon Wiesenthal Center [both pictured above, in 2012]. 

“It was simply ludicrous for the 22-Arab states that belong to UNESCO to attempt to torpedo the exhibition, just days before its opening, on the grounds that it interferes with Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to jumpstart the Middle East peace process. Our exhibition, vetted and approved by both the UNESCO and Wiesenthal Center’s teams, had nothing to do with the peace process,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier. 

“It is ironic, that while the Arab League was trying to kill this exhibition and all the attention was focused on Paris, the UN headquarters in New York is hosting an exhibit entitled, ‘Palestine’, based entirely on the Arab narrative, which was not criticized as an interference with Secretary Kerry’s mission.”

The Center wishes to thank the US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, Foreign Minister of Canada John Baird, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, B’nai Birth International, the CRIF, and our many supporters from all over the world for weighing in so strongly. 

The exhibition was written by Hebrew University Professor Robert Wistrich, and co-sponsored by the governments of Canada, Israel and Montenegro. Members of the exhibition’s honorary committee include: Elie Wiesel; Lord Carey of Clifton, former Archbishop of Canterbury; Boualem Sansal, Algerian author; and Professor Irwin Cotler, former Canadian Justice Minister.'

 Read more here

Timeline Palestine: "Is The British Museum Rewriting History?" (with update)

That's the question posed by one of my much valued Christian readers, Ian G, who earlier today visited the Birmingham (UK) Museum to see a British Museum touring exhibition about the Pharoahs.


He wrote on its blogsite:

"I have just visited the exhibition in Birmingham. I was exceedingly disappointed with an overpriced and dull waste of an hour. Furthermore, there was a gross inaccuracy that would appear to be supporting the bogus Arab claim that Palestine pre-existed Israel. On the time-line you state that one of the Pharoahs conducted campaigns against Nubia and Palestine in 2055 BC.  It was, at that point, Canaan. The Sea People, later the Philistines, did not occupy what we now call the Gaza Strip until the 12th Century BC.

The name of Palestine was not commonly given to the whole of the land until the Romans ethnically cleansed Israel in 70 AD. Palestine was never an independent Kingdom and did not include any Arabs until after the Islamic conquests. Finally, it was part of the British Mandate and Israel was re-established by the League of Nations and then by the UN in 1947. The Gaza Strip was taken by Egypt and Samaria (West Bank) by Jordan and it has been Arab occupied land since then.  Yasser Arafat created the notion of an Arab Palestine after the Arab defeat in 1967.

It seems that you are colluding in the rewriting of history in order to give an Arab Palestine a bogus history and to deny Israel's legitimacy. Using Palestine as a substitute for Canaan is disingenuous as you do not explain where Nubia was.

Will this egregious mistake be corrected or will you continue misleading the public over this politically sensitive issue?"

Update:

The British Museum has replied to Ian:

"I am sorry to hear that you did not find the exhibition engaging. In archaeological and Egyptological discourse, ‘Palestine’ (and ‘Syro-Palestine’) refers to an area (broadly from the north of Sinai to Kadesh, and from the Mediterranean to the current Jordan border), not a present or past state. Similarly ‘Nubia’ is an area that overlaps the boundaries of several historic polities, including today. “Israel” is generally used to refer to the modern state, and “Israelites” as the group of people first mentioned in ancient texts on the stela of Merenptah in the 13th century BC. There is no reference to Arab peoples, or the Palestinian Authority in the exhibition, which would of course be inappropriate given the timeframe covered. Please accept our apologies if the wording has caused any offence. Neal Spencer, British Museum"

And Ian has responded:

"I agree that Nubia needs explanation which isn’t given on the timeline. Clearly, Palestine also needs explanation. It is a politically charged term and gives rise to the misconception that Palestine pre-dates Israel.

You claim that the term is part of archaeological and Egyptological discourse. G.W. Anderson some-time Professor of Hebrew and O.T. Studies at Edinburgh in his book ‘A Critical Introduction to the Old Testament’ ( published 1959 and revised several times till 1972) never refers to the Land as Palestine. Similarly, ‘Bernhard W. Anderson Living World of the Old Testament (2nd Edition 1967)’ which has even more archaeological content that his namesake. Also John Bright ‘A History of Israel’ only uses the term on maps and then not until the Maccabees. By then, some Greek writings were using the term. Hardly surprising, considering the origins of the Philistines. More recently, the Illustrated Bible Dictionary IVP 1980 has an extensive entry for Palestine, but only for geology, geography, agriculture and the like. For history, it cross-refers to Canaan, Israel, Judah and the Philistines. For archaeology, it refers to individual sites. Some entries do use the term Palestine rather loosely but the current revisionism was not really underway in 1980.

The use of Palestine and Syro-Palestine date from Roman times. This latter term, along with period of Syrian occupation well before the Romans, provide the basis for modern day Syria’s claims to Israel as a province of Syria. These terms are loaded.

Nubia, was at various times and with various borders, an independent, self-ruling, political entity. Palestine has never been an independent, self-ruling, political entity. Nubia existed in 2055 BC. Palestine did not. To use both words in the same sentence and in the same way must lead to the inference that they are similar entities.

Currently, the Palestinian Authority, the Waqf and various other ‘scholars’ are promulgating a version of history which eradicates Israel from the Land altogether. Although to any rational scholar this is ridiculous, many people now believe it.

In Theology, the term ‘myth’ has a precise meaning and does not, necessarily, imply that an event is unhistorical. Most people think it means ‘fairy tale’. When educating the general public one needs to be aware of this sort of misunderstanding.

I don’t accept that Palestine is a scholarly term, in common scholastic use and (especially since 1947), referring to a particular or general area. You draw its border at the Jordan, but the British Mandate included Trans-Jordan (now the Kingdom of Jordan) and I have maps that include what is now part of Syria. In other words, the term you are using as a general scholarly term is, in fact, politically defined.

On the time-line Palestine is used to refer to Canaan in 2055 BC. The area you define as Palestine would not include parts of Canaan!

It’s just too confusing.

Which is my point. It would have been simple to include a foot-note explaining where Nubia and Canaan were. In the case of Canaan; Israel, the disputed territories and part of Jordan. In the case of Nubia; parts of Southern Egypt and Northern Sudan.

In the meantime, your exhibition states that Palestine existed in 2055 BC. At best, this is poor scholarship, bad teaching and dangerously ignorant of politics. At worst, it is collusion with those who seek to eradicate Israel ‘from the River to the Sea’. ” (broadly from the north of Sinai to Kadesh, and from the Mediterranean to the current Jordan border) “.

It is not a matter of offense to me. I am not a Jew or an Israeli. It is a matter of scholarly accuracy and, also, sensitivity to the current and volatile situation in the Land."

The Palestinian Arabs: Delegitimising Israel, Islamifying Jesus, & Fooling The World (Plus A Willing BBC) With Fabricated History

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 bias (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 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 – hat tip reader Rita –   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.

Isi Leibler On The Noxiousness Of Nakba Propaganda

I often describe Isi Leibler as "a prophet for our time", and it's a description well-merited.  For a cogent, concise article on the Nakba commemoration and its noxious implications, we need look no further than his latest column in the Jerusalem Post, of which I provide a taster below:

'No revisionist or post Zionist spin can plausibly deny that the War of Independence was an attempt by a coalition of Arab states to annihilate us. But as Goebbels used to say “Repeat the same lie again and again and ultimately people will believe it”.

 Recent years have witnessed successful efforts by increasing numbers of radical Israeli-Arabs, in conjunction with their kinsmen beyond Israel, to project into the public discourse a narrative which portrays their antecedents as innocent victims of a conflict which led to their dispossession and expulsion. They mourn the consequences of the War of Independence but suppress the fact it was their fathers who rejected the UN partition plan and embarked on a war of annihilation against Israel. Their approach is akin to Germans mourning the tragedy of their losses during World War ll, implying that it was a byproduct of Allied criminality rather than Nazi aggression.

It is understandable that Israeli-Arabs lament the fleeing and even expulsion of their kinsmen in the course of war. But in lieu of mourning their losses or commemorating humanitarian tragedies, their leaders are promoting hatred of the people amongst whom they live, garnering support for vengeance and delegitimization of the Jewish state....

Describing such activity as treasonable, shocking though it may sound, is justifiable. The Nakba commemoration operates in complete synchronization with the orchestrated global campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel. It is part of the new assault which seeks to suppress the reality that Israel fought in 1948 to defend itself against forces seeking its annihilation. It amounts to an attempt to delegitimize Israel by transforming public discourse about the rights and wrongs of the Arab-Israeli conflict to one in which “the injustice caused to the Palestinians” is defined as the source of the problem. If we fail to challenge and repudiate this false narrative, we do so at our peril and expose ourselves to immeasurably horrendous long term negative repercussions.'

News in Brief: Three Reasons To Smile ...

First, there's the welcome news that, following complaints, the British Advertising Standards Authority has banned the PA's Mission (or Embassy, as it seems to like to term itself) in London from wiping Israel from the map, at any rate on its website, and making egregiously misleading statements.

Secondly, as Ray Cook reminds us in his latest blogpost, a British Muslim, Kasim Hafeez, runs a website called theisraelcampaign.org, which, in Ray's words, "attempts to describe the current anti-Israel and antisemitic trends of Islam in the UK and abroad and put the record straight" and his postive comments at the recent Big Tent for Israel event in Manchester "made a huge impression on several hundred people, mostly Jewish".

Thirdly, here's a case of Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense.  Shook me to the marrow, it did.  I mean, those are four of a girl's recommended "five a day".
(Come to think of it, perhaps a more appropriate response than mirth is sadness that anyone should have such a warped attitude to elongated fruit - and to women.)

Paint It Black (and Green and Red): That Old "Free Palestine" Trick Again

Just in case you haven't already seen (and read about) this on Elder's blog: http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2011/05/uk-palestine-embassy-website-wipes.html
And as Challa Hu Akbar noted recently, that Palestinian eagle looks a bit dodgy too: http://challahhuakbar.blogspot.com/2011/01/palestinian-nazi-symbolics.html

The Lowdown on the BDS Movement and the Apartheid Libel (video)

Here's Professor Gerald Steinberg, founder of NGO Monitor, in a most informative interview about the heinous worldwide push to delegitimise Israel:

Delegitimising Israel by Delegitimising Scripture

In 2002 the BBC’s execrably biased-against-Israel Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, though neither historian, theologian nor archaeologist, was trotted out to present an Al Beeb documentary on Moses,who of course was the great Lawgiver of the Jewish People.

Bowen was true to his and Al Beeb’s agenda-laden form.

He loftily pronounced the biblical account of Moses and the Exodus to be “a fanciful tale ... the stuff of fairy tales”.

“If the Hebrews were never in Egypt then perhaps the whole epic was fiction, made up to give the Jewish people a history and a destiny,” he declared. And he scoffingly dismissed what he called “the religious justification of the State of Israel” – Moses’ “burning bush” encounter with the Almighty.

As the London-based Israeli journalist Douglas Davis observes of that documentary, in an essay entitled “Hatred in the Air: The BBC, Israel and Antisemitism” that appears in the book A New Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st-Century Britain (2003):

“I have no problem with a documentary that suggests scientific explanations for seemingly miraculous events in the Jewish story, but I do object when I suspect that the purpose of the investigation is to delegitimize the basis of Judaism and to undermine the claim of the Jewish people to national expression in even a part of its ancestral home. ...[I]t is inconceivable that the BBC would devote an hour-long prime-time documentary to a critical investigation that served to delegitimize the Prophet Muhammed and undermine the basic tenets of Islam.”

Now, the BBC seems set on the delegitimising-Israel-through-undermining-Judaism course once again.

Aaqil Ahmed, a Muslim who to many Christians' astonishment and indeed consternation was appointed Head of BBC’s Religion and Ethics department a couple of years ago, commissioned Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou, an atheist university lecturer in theology and religion at Exeter University (for whom also see http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-bible-a-history/articles/abrahams-inheritance), to present a three-part series “that seeks to de-construct and sceptically critique the Holy Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity”.

Have a look at the presentation on King David, replete with much modern Israeli imagery, including a certain wall, beside which the presenter strides, and you’ll see what I mean: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8383956/Bibles-Buried-Secrets-BBC-Two-review.html

And please be sure to look at David Vance’s fine post on the Biased BBC website, which in discussing the Stavrakopoulou series shows how the BBC manages to decry the Bible as a fount of male chauvinism and to excoriate sexism in Christianity while treating the misogyny of the Quran and of Islam in a manner that I can only describe as respectful, if not reverential. http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/2011/03/loving-religion-of-peace-loathing.html

The comment by Max on the following thread is of interest too: http://cifwatch.com/2011/03/15/in-the-arab-world-but-not-of-it-glaring-omission-underlines-the-anti-israel-bias-of-the-bbc/#comments

A Partial Victory for Truth and Justice

Remember the bold-as-brass misleading travel ad about which I posted in January?  The one that claimed that Palestine extends from the river to the sea?  Reminder: http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/01/travellers-tall-tale-palestine-lies.html

Well, the adjudication has finally been done by the Advertising Standards Authority, and a partial victory for truth and justice is the outcome.

To quote Honest Reporting:

'The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has finally issued its ruling following many complaints. While the ASA did not agree with all of the issues raised by us and a number of other organizations, it did, however, rule the advert to be misleading on the following grounds:

We considered, however, that the line “From the famous cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, Nablus, and Gaza … Palestine lies between …” suggested that the situation and recognition of those cities as being part of Palestine was universally accepted. Because that was not the case, we concluded that the ad was misleading.

The ASA concluded:

The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Travel Palestine to ensure their ads did not suggest that it was universally accepted that locations were part of Palestine when that was not the case.

So it seems that the ASA is consistent in its view that while Jerusalem may not be part of Palestine, it is also not part of Israel. Unsurprising considering that the ASA previously, in an appalling decision, forced the Israel Government Tourist Office to withdraw an ad that featured Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, effectively banning Israel from including the Western Wall in any tourism advertising.'

Read more here: http://honestreporting.com/travel-palestine-ad-watchdog-rules-against/

A Traveller’s Tall Tale – “Palestine lies between the Mediterranean Coast and the Jordan River”. This false advertising should be protested

We’re becoming all too familiar with the fabrications that the so-called Palestinians (known as Arabs until Arafat’s clever rebranding of them) are the “indigenous people” of Israel, and that Jesus was a "Palestinian". We’re all too familiar, as well, with the impression spread by propagandists, be they deliberately malicious or naively ignorant, that Palestine (in truth a neglected province of the Ottoman Empire and then under a British Mandate) was an autonomous state snatched by Zionists.

And now another step in today’s ruthless campaign of undermining and delegitimising the sovereign state of Israel has been taken in the form of a mendacious advertisement from the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities that’s appeared in Traveler, an American magazine in the National Geographic stable.

This brazen distortion of reality misleads in several ways. It implies that Palestine is a sovereign country of which Jerusalem is an integral part, and that the country extends from the Jordan to the Mediterranean – from the river to the sea, to quote the notorious much-used Israel-delegitimising chant. It effectively dupes the unwary traveller by promoting sites and facilities that are not, in fact, in the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

In 2009, a poster (pictured below) for the Israeli Government Tourist Office appeared in London Underground Stations. Under the headline “Experience Israel” and superimposed on the image of a boy snorkelling near dolphins, was the text "Few countries pack so much variety into such a small space as Israel. The energy and excitement of Tel Aviv and the rich cultural experiences of the Dead Sea and Jerusalem with the sun and relaxation of Eilat make Israel the ideal multi-centre break".

Complaints swiftly followed the poster’s appearance – 600 to Transport for London and 444 (two of those from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Jews for Justice for Palestinians) to the Advertising Standards Authority. The complainants objected to the advertisement’s implication that Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights were internationally recognised as part of Israel.

Their complaint was upheld, the Advertising Standards Authority banning the advertisement from being used again “in its current form” and stating: “We noted that the map showed border lines for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but we also noted that those border lines were faintly produced and difficult to distinguish on the map itself. We understood that the borders and status of the occupied territories of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights were the subject of much international dispute, and because we considered that the ad implied that those territories were part of the state of Israel, we concluded that the ad was misleading.”

Thanks in no small way to the PSC's briefing of its members, that poster was in fifth place in the Advertising Standards Authority’s list of Top 10 Most Complained About Ads of 2009. Only one other in the list had the complaints against it upheld.

What, I wonder, will be the fate of the false advertising in Traveler.

The Zionist Federation of the UK suggests that people complain here: http://www.asa.org.uk/Complaints/How-to-complain.aspx

For although Traveler is an American magazine, the Advertising Standards Authority is empowered to stop copies of foreign magazines in the UK from running advertisements against which it rules – irrespective of where the media’s proprietorship is based.

You can see a larger version of the offending ad here, by clicking on the image that appears:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhm5wWaN1oW3PBYQJvvB380wuvjj-EMro6ZS1QOpc59gRnxWoeyUKDaEwZZK7sx-hE0SvT3rAjq8FqXIIXq91yNVWN6IGUwudPyINzmKsz7-Fy4ycD3SWneXvOmTYMOMlOv6OhgXhHrJwYJ/s1600/palestine-ad.jpg

Israel, Ignore at Own Risk: Melanie Phillips on How and Why Israel Must Win the Abdicated War for Public Opinion

In that searingly brilliant and courageous way of hers, Melanie Phillips, the renowned British columnist, broadcaster, and author of Londonistan and other trenchant analyses of the malaise and the challenges that the West faces today, gave an incisive and insightful address to the Ariel Conference on Law and Mass Media on 30 December.

Entitled “The Challenge of Public Diplomacy vis-à-vis the Delegitimisation of Israel”, it identifies the “war of the mind being waged on a battleground [Israel] never even acknowledged it was on” – a war whose protagonists reach “across the intelligentsia and political class, spreading well beyond the normal suspects on the left into the mainstream middle-classes” as “nothing short of a multi-layered civilisational crisis”.

For example,

“In Britain, the universities, the established church, the theatrical and publishing worlds, the voluntary sector, significant elements within the Foreign Office, members of Parliament across the political spectrum, as well as the media have overwhelmingly signed up to the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel. ...

The west is experiencing a total inversion of truth evidence and reason. A society’s thinking class has overwhelmingly subscribed to an immoral, patently false and in many cases demonstrably absurd account of the Middle East, past and present, which it has uncritically absorbed and assumes to be true.”

Ms Phillips says, futher:

“Because of the dominant belief in multiculturalism, victim culture and minority rights, self-designated victim groups – those without power – can never do wrong while majority groups can never do right. And Jews are not considered a minority because – in the hateful discourse of today – Jews are held to be all-powerful as they ‘control’ the media, Wall Street and America.

So the Muslim world cannot be held responsible for blowing people up as they are the third world victims of the west; so any atrocities they commit must be the fault of their victims; and so the US had it coming to it on 9/11. And in similar fashion, Israel can never be the victim of the Arab world; the murder of Israelis by the Arab world must be Israel’s own fault."

And she warns:

"It cannot be stressed enough that the reason why those promoting genocidal bigotry are winning is that the western world has not sought to defeat them but instead has appeased them from the very start.

In Palestine under the British Mandate, when the Arabs used terrorist violence to frustrate the will of the League of Nations in restoring the Jewish home, Britain rewarded them by offering them part of the Jews’ legal and moral entitlement. When the Arabs started hijacking planes, the west’s response was to invite them to the UN to plead their cause.

And despite the Arabs’ repeated refused to accept the two state solution, offered in the 1930s, in 2000 and under Ehud Olmert and their current refusal to negotiate at all, America punishes Israel for not making enough concessions to them – while giving a free pass to those who still refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist.

It is astonishing that the west expects Israel to make any concessions to such attackers at all. After all, forcing a country which has endured more than six decades of existential siege to give any ground to its attackers amounts to forcing such a victim to surrender. This is expected by the civilised world of no other country."

While Ms Phillips does not discount the notion that giving back some land in the disputed territories might be in Israel's interests, she goes on to observe:

"But Israel and its defenders themselves have been crippled or cowed by the false analysis of the enemy’s narrative.

Even many of Israel’s friends spout the demonstrably absurd proposition that a Palestine state would solve the problem, that the impediment to a Palestine state is the ‘settlers’, but that Israel is not taking action to remove the ‘settlers’ – and so therefore they too inescapably agree that Israel is the problem.

Israel and its defenders have been fighting on the wrong battleground: the one that has been chosen by its enemies. The Arabs brilliantly reconfigured the Arab war of extermination against Israel as the oppression by Israel of the Palestinians.

That has transformed Israel from victim to aggressor – the reversal of reality which lies at the very heart of the western obsession with the ‘settlements’ and the territories.

Yet since Oslo, Israel has meekly gone along with this mad pressure. It has never said it is totally unconscionable. It has never put the all-important argument from justice on its own account. So it has allowed its enemies to appropriate this argument mendaciously as their own. But if Israel doesn’t make the case properly on its own behalf, how can anyone else do so?

To which Israel says realpolitik dictates it has to go along with the diplomatic game being played. But diplomatic realpolitik is what brought us all to this position – the brink of a terrible war with Iran which is treated by America with kid gloves while Israel is put under the cosh.

For the west to suck up to its enemies while bashing its friends like this is the diplomatic version of auto-immune disease. And eventually this disease will kill it.

What Israel has failed to recognise is that the battleground on which it is being forced to fight is not just military. It is also a battleground of the mind, and the strategy being used against it – and to which it needs to respond in kind – is psychological warfare.

The Arab and Muslim world long ago realised if it set the narrative in its own image, it would recruit millions of fanatics to its cause and also confuse and demoralise its victims. In this it has wildly succeeded.

There is therefore an overwhelming need for Israel to alter its strategy. Indeed, it needs to have a strategy.

And this brings us to perhaps the most difficult challenge in all of this – the fact that the role played by the Israel government is of critical importance. Unless it adopts the correct strategy, its defenders will remain crippled."

Ms Phillips prescribes the following, of which Israel and its supporters must take heed:

"So Israel and its defenders should be demanding of the world why it expects Israel alone to make compromises with people who have tried for nine decades to wipe out the Jewish presence in the land and are still firing rockets at it.

They should expose the pretence of Britain or European countries which claim to have Israel’s security needs at heart but forbid it from using military means to defend itself; and which – as did the British Government recently - turn Israeli self-defence against the jihadi lynch-mob on board the Turkish terror ship Mavi Marmara into an attack to be condemned, or demand the opening of the border with Gaza which would allow in arms to kill more Israelis.

Israel and its defenders should be asking why so-called friends in the west want a Palestine state, since once the IDF depart the disputed territories they will become in short order yet another Iranian-backed Islamic terrorist entity which will pose a further threat not just to Israel but to the west.

They should be asking why the EU is continuing to fund the genocidal incitement against Jews promoted by the Palestine Authority.

They should be asking so-called ‘progressives’ – including Jewish ‘progressives’ – why they support the racist ethnic cleansing of every Jew from a future state of Palestine.

They should be asking them why they are not marching against Hamas on account of its tyrannical oppression of Palestinians in Gaza. Why they are ignoring Arab and Muslim persecution of women and homosexuals.

Why they are not mounting a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Mahmoud Abbas’s PA and Hamas, on account of Abbas’s Holocaust denial and the clear evidence of continuation of Nazi Jew-hatred in a direct line of descent from predecessors who were Hitler’s supporters in Palestine.

As for western Israel-bashers, Israel and its defenders should accuse them not of Jew-hating motives that cannot be proved but of absurdities and contradictions and untruths they cannot deny. They should ridicule them, humiliate them, destroy their reputations; boycott them, not invite them to social gatherings, show them disapproval and contempt. Treat them as pariahs. Turn their own weapons against them.

They should be telling the Jews ‘own story of refugees and ethnic cleansing – the 800,000 Jews driven out of Arab lands after 1948, and who now make up more than half of Israel’s population. It’s good to see that at last Israel is beginning to bring this to the world’s attention. In Britain virtually no-one knows about it. At a stroke it takes the ground from under the feet of those demanding the ‘right of return’ for Arabs.

They should be holding Arab and Islamic democracy weeks on campus, to expose the oppression and persecution within that world against women, homosexuals and others.

They should be singling out the Anglican church and the revival of ancient theological Jew-hatred being spread within the Anglican world by the Palestinian Christians of the Sabeel centre.

At the same time, they should be focusing on their true friends within the Christian world, not just in America but also in Africa and Asia where there is an enormous reservoir of goodwill towards Israel which could be mobilised into a global fighting force.

They should be campaigning against the UN and the hijacking of international law and human rights by anti-western, anti-Jewish and anti-Christian ideologues.

They should be confronting head-on the false claim that bigotry is confined to the right. They should be pointing the finger at the ‘progressive’ left to show how it is actually supporting the mortal enemies not just of Israel but the west.

And they should be making this case to Israelis themselves, to counter the delegitimisation and ignorance in Israeli universities and to educate the Israeli young in their own national history.

In other words, both Israel and diaspora Jews have to stop playing defence and go onto the offence. Israel has nothing to be defensive about or for which it needs to apologise. It is the enemies of Israel who are promoting injustice and the denial of international law and human rights. Playing defence intrinsically cedes ground to the enemy.

It is time for Israel and its defenders to stop conniving with that smokescreen for the war of annihilation being waged against Israel – the claim that the Middle East impasse would be solved by establishing a state of Palestine to which the settlements, and thus by extension Israel, are the obstacle. It is time for them to stop agreeing that the Jews are to blame for their own predicament.

Israel and its defenders need to make the argument from justice and reclaim that moral high ground from the enemies of Israel and the west, both at home – including within Israel – and abroad. It is those enemies who deny truth, justice and human rights. It is those enemies who should be in the dock. It is time to take the gloves off and put them there.

In short, Israel and its defenders must understand that the tsunami of bigotry against Israel sweeping the west is intimately related to Israel’s seriously flawed diplomatic strategy.

For years, Israel has been playing a defensive diplomatic game, which suggests inescapably that it has a case to answer. Such diplomatic cringing has badly undermined it and hugely strengthened its enemies, who are taking advantage of such weakness over and over again.

It’s time for Israel to realise that military campaigns against its enemies are not enough. It has to call time on its false friends too, and start fighting both these and its more obvious enemies on the battleground of the mind.”

Words of wisdom from a great lady! Read the entire address here: http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=789