"Human rights organization says much of Middle East belongs to Israel"

The JordanZad Arabic website reports some astonishing news!

The Organization for Justice and Development for Human Rights stated that according to historical research, the existence of traces of Jewish temples in Jordan, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sinai and Palestine confirms that those countries were an integral part of the land of the kingdom of ancient Israel, which had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, which confirms a Jewish Israel.

The spokesman for the organization said that the Jews are indigenous to the Middle East and the Arab region, where they settled for thousands of years next to other peoples, including the Pharaohs, Chaldeans, Assyrians and Africans, Druze, Kurds and Armenians and Amazighs. They pointed out that the emergence of the Turks, Arabs and Persians in the area of the Middle East came through successive historical periods and they contributed to the expulsion of the indigenous people of the Middle East from their lands, including Jews, Kurds and Armenians and Amazigh.

As much fun as it is to read this in an Arab media outlet, it looks like there is no Organization for Justice and Development for Human Rights. This appears to be a very distorted version of this story (that was also in a recent linkdump):

An outspoken Moroccan poet has angered many of her countrymen by accusing the Arab world of imperialism and defending the Jewish people's right to a homeland in Israel.

In an interview with Med Radio last week Malika Mezzane, who is an ethnic Amazigh (or Berber), challenged the official line in the Arab world, where tiny Israel is accused of being "expansionist" and where Zionism - the movement for Jewish self-determination - is bizarrely equated with imperialism.

Asserting that it was in fact the Arab world which had pursued expansionist policies, Mezzane quipped that according to their own definition of the term, "Arabs are more Zionists than the Jews."

The Arab world, she said, believed that it was "God’s chosen people, and they have the right to extend their territory, at the expense of other nations."

Mezzane's own people, the Amazigh, are one of the indigenous non-Arab nations of northern Africa which who were conquered and subjugated by the invading Arab armies during the Muslim conquest in the seventh century.

Since then they have been subjected to persecution and periodic campaigns of cultural and physical ethnic-cleansing at the hands of Arab rulers in the region. In some cases, Amazigh calls for self-determination have been rejected by Arab states as somehow representative of "western imperialism" - a perverse inversion of the reality similarly employed by anti-Zionists against the Jewish state.

Further infuriating her listeners, Mezzane insisted that the Jews were justified in establishing "their state in Palestine, since it’s their homeland."

Apparently an expanded version of this interview was reported elsewhere and through the usual Arab media game of "telephone" it morphed into this story.

It is most interesting that JordanZad, which is very anti-Israel, didn't choose to dispute the history it reported.

(A small story but it seems like an appropriate one to end the Jewish year with. Shana tova!)