Pages

Wednesday, December 07, 2022

Wow: @UNESCO honors a Jordanian dish, mansaf, which literally symbolizes hate for Jews



From Arab News:
UNESCO has included mansaf, the national dish of Jordan, on its list of intangible cultural heritage.

A file was submitted to the organization, “Mansaf in Jordan: A Ceremonial Feast and Its Social and Cultural Connotations,” in March 2021, in a bid to include the dish on the list, the Jordan News Agency reported.

Makram Qaisi, Jordan’s permanent representative to UNESCO, said that the addition was announced during the 17th session of the intergovernmental committee for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage, being held in Rabat, Morocco, from Nov. 27 to Dec. 3.
Jordanian media has been celebrating UNESCO's honoring of mansaf.

Arabic media, though, adds a little bit of color about the legendary origins of the dish. From Al Jazeera:
The history of Mansaf dates back more than 3,000 years, according to historians, when the Moabite king Mesha asked his people in the 19th century BC (sic)  to cook meat with milk, contrary to the Jews who forbid cooking meat with milk or milk, and so that he could distinguish the sons of his people for the Jews.
This is a whitewash of the real story, which I discussed in 2014 based on an article in Jordan's Ammon News:

According to the article, some historians say that the name of the dish comes from the root NSF which means "blowing up", "blasting", "destroying." A legend is told of an ancient "Arab" Moabite king from 885 BCE, Mesha, who asked that this dish be created as a way of expressing his animosity towards the Jews, whom he knew were planning to betray him.

Mansaf is made of lamb cooked in a yogurt-based sauce and is not kosher because of the Jewish prohibition of eating meat cooked in milk. Therefore, the article claims, the dish was originally created to insult Jews.

The article says that the king of Moab created the dish as a "declaration of his people's hostility to the Jews since 885 BC. " His people enthusiastically responded, "knowing that this is nothing but a declaration of hostility against the treacherous Jews."

The article ends saying, "Jordanians enjoyed this food and continued to cook it to this day with optimism about victory, and everyone who inhabited the land of Jordan took Mansaf as their favorite food, in which they obligated their guests, feasted on them, acknowledged them and determined to do so, declaring their enmity towards the Jews until the Day of Judgment.

One commenter said, "If this is true, then eating mansaf is a sort of jihad against the Jews."

The origin legend is nonsense, but that isn't the point. The national dish of Jordan is meant to symbolize hate for Jews - forever.

It is not at all possible that the Jordanians who submitted this dish to UNESCO didn't know this; in fact is is highly unlikely that UNESCO itself doesn't know this. There are scores of articles that emphasize that mansaf was meant to insult Jews. 

And they see nothing wrong with honoring a dish that is literally a symbol for everlasting hate for Jews.





Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!