Sunday, February 25, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
Dr. Qasem Abdu Kassem is the head of the History Department, at Zagazig University. "Jerusalem ... History and a Civilizational Identity - Jerusalem tells its story", is not meant to be read by scholars, though - it is propaganda meant to be read by Arabs in the form of an "autobiography" of Jerusalem.
Extended quotes from the book are written in two separate reviews published since the US announcement of moving the embassy.
The very beginning exposes the lies that underlie the book:
I am not a normal city like all the cities in this world: I have been a holy city since my birth.....There is no evidence that pre-Israelite Jerusalem was a holy city when it was founded, although there is some Biblical evidence that it had achieved that status in Abraham's time.
I was born when my family built me: the Jebusite Arabs who had migrated from the Arabian Peninsula with the Canaanites in the fifth millennium BC. ...
There is no evidence that the Jebusites (or any of the Canaanites) are Arabs who migrated from the Arabian Peninsula.
The book goes on to claim that the Israelites were Bedouin nomads for hundreds of years:
For one reason or another, the Jews fled from Egypt to Sinai and lived in the [Sinai] peninsula for a period of time. The period was called "Taha" because they were wandering in the Sinai ...This is obvious anti-Israel propaganda, written by a respected historian (who had previously written many more academically-oriented books about Egypt's history) as a popular history of Jerusalem.
After the departure of the Israelites from Egypt, the Prophet Moses did not know me, and I did not know him: he never reached Palestine. Moses' journey in the Sinai with the Israelites was not easy at all; they lived on the peninsula, which was the "land of tranquility" for them for hundreds of years: they worshiped the [golden] calf without God, and resisted Moses, peace be upon him. They only reached Palestine after three hundred years or more. They lived the hard-boiled Bedouin life that made them forget the stable urban life they knew in Egypt. And so their generations were then nomads ...
It seems likely that variants of this fiction are being taught to children, today.
