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Monday, October 18, 2021

Major Arab newspaper publishes yet another antisemitic piece

I noted last week that Al Quds al Arabi, a pan-Arab newspaper run by Palestinians in the UK, regularly posts antisemitic pieces. It is one of the most popular Arab news websites in the world, ranked #18 among all sites in Jordan and among the top 4000 sites of all kinds worldwide. In addition, the actual physical newspaper has a circulation of some 50,000 copies daily.

Today, it published another such piece, that looks at first glance to be merely "anti-Zionist" but in Arabic media there is no real distinction.

The cartoon header indicates the main idea: Jews are milking Arab money and oil from the countries that support normalization with Israel. (There is a bit of misogyny here, as the implication is that those countries are feminine and weak.)


The article, by Ihsan Al-Faqih- a new young female star in the Arab punditocracy - says:

The decision to settle the Jews in Palestine came in line with the Western imperialist vision, which aims to implant a foreign body in this region, with a different culture and a different ideology, that breaks up the unity of this region, prevents the unity of its lands, and keeps it inflamed and weak so that colonialism can control it. Behind the Western colonial trends is a religious force that intertwines with and serves political interests, giving the project a religious character, by invoking the prophecies of Armageddon and the coming of the Messiah who will rule for a happy millennium, linking this with the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the construction of the Temple on the ruins of Al-Aqsa, as a prelude to the coming Redeemer. Therefore, we are facing a Talmudic Zionist, Western imperialist alliance, both secular and theological, which was strongly demonstrated in the decision of the US Congress in its 104th session in 1995, to transfer the American embassy to Jerusalem, which included the meaning of “Jerusalem is the spiritual homeland of Judaism.”
Her ignorance is fairly typical - she claims that Zionism never supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine until after Herzl died. She says that "America's foreign policy project includes the fragmentation of Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and the North African countries." She fake-quotes Bernard Lewis as saying that this fragmentation is meant to ensure Israel's supremacy for at least half a century. This is, she says, "a global project that integrates the imperialist West with Talmudic Zionism."

Faqih also rails against how those who oppose normalization are cast as being against intolerant against Jews. Presumably, intolerance against "Talmudic Jews" is okay, though.

This feeds into another op-ed, in a Jordanian news site, that claims that the Abraham Accords are a scheme to create an entirely new Abrahamic religion where the Jews are the original and most faithful practitioners, ignoring that Jews were behind the crucifixion of Jesus and the murder of numerous prophets and Islam is the last and best religion to supersede Judaism and Christianity. 

Oh, and Jews aren't really Jews anyway, but Khazars. 

It is incredibly encouraging to see that the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco are fighting against antisemitism in their countries. They understand the poison that Jew-hatred brings to the Arab world. But there is a long way to go.