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.
