Showing posts with label revisionist history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label revisionist history. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

Guest post by Andrew Pessin: (Subscribe to his free substack)

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“I was forced to leave my study group because my group members told me that the people at the Nova music festival deserved to die because they were partying on stolen land.”

--M.I.T. student Talia Kahn on her campus environment


1. 2023 and 1948

It may be 2023 but campus responses to October 7 show that, for many, it’s still 1948.

Many campuses exploded in outright celebration of the barbaric violence, the enthusiasts typically invoking, by way of justification, the massacre’s “context” or “root causes” (in Israel’s “occupation,” “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” etc.) and the legitimacy of “resistance” to those evils “by any means necessary.” Even many who didn’t quite “celebrate” the violence invoked the same by way of explanation quickly bleeding into justification. And many of those who remained silent about October 7, too, were no doubt thinking the same when they said things such as “I need to learn more about this complex situation before rendering judgment.” Now normally after watching armed men tie up a mother and father and three small children and burn them alive you don’t need to “learn more” to determine who the bad guys are, but hey, it’s “complex.” I’ve argued elsewhere that that silence amounts to complicity, to borrow the popular expression many progressives apply everywhere except to themselves: you’re in favor of October 7 or you’re against, in other words, and silence entails the former.

But now this shocking campus response itself has its own “context” and “root causes.” In my view the twenty-year-long campus Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) campaign of lies against Israel combined with the more recent expansion of progressivism (aka Critical Race Theory, DEI, Wokeism, etc.) has amounted to a campaign to delegitimize and dehumanize not just Israeli Jews but all Jews; and the clear success of that campaign explains why so many are somehow unable to see that the torture, mutilation, rape, and murder of babies, children, women, pregnant women, the disabled, and the elderly is a straightforward moral atrocity constituting a mass terror attack. If every Jew is fundamentally guilty, then their torture and murder is not merely permissible but even obligatory; if every Jew is guilty, then nothing you do to the Jew can make the Jew a victim.

So what does this have to do with 1948?

The dehumanization campaign above in fact ultimately rests on the premise that the 1948 establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel was a massive injustice. For consider: if that establishment were perfectly just, then the efforts to prevent it then and the 75 years of nearly continuous “resistance” to it since, whether military, terrorist, diplomatic, cognitive, or other, would be unjust. In turn, many of the measures that Israel has taken over the years that detractors cite as “root causes” above—as Israel’s “oppression” of Palestinians, as mechanisms subserving its “occupation” and “apartheid,” etc.—would be seen not as illegitimate aggressive measures of domination but as legitimate reactive measures of self-defense. Take just two examples, the security barrier along western Judea and Samaria and the blockade on Gaza instituted after Hamas took power there by an illegal violent coup. Detractors call the former an “Apartheid Wall” and say of the latter that it makes Gaza an “open air prison.” But to those who see the establishment of Israel as just these are legitimate defensive measures justified by the unremittent preexisting violence directed toward Israelis by Palestinians.

If Jewish sovereignty there is legitimate, in other words, then Jews are ordinary human beings with ordinary human rights including the right to defend themselves, by walls or blockades as need be. But if Jewish sovereignty is not legitimate then Jews are simply evildoers who, per campus dehumanization, lack even the basic human right to defend themselves, and all such measures become aggressive mechanisms of an unjust occupation. On this view every Jew is guilty and therefore worthy even of the atrocious harms of October 7, including the babies, and Hamas is not a genocidal Jew-hating terrorist group but “freedom fighters” fighting for “decolonization.”

If 1948 is just, in short, then 2023 is a terrorist atrocity; if 1948 is unjust then 2023 is political liberation.

So 2023 really still is about 1948.

This point has actually been clear for some time. Those who follow the campus scene know that the anti-Israel movement long ago gave up on the demand merely for a Palestinian state alongside Israel in favor of undoing Israel entirely. The popular chant, “We don’t want two states, we want 1948!,” states that about as clearly as can be. But it took October 7 to see how profound and visceral that demand is, as it manifested itself in the celebration of the slaughter. For them, the massive injustice of 1948 means that the Israeli Jews of today have it coming to them, as the M.I.T. student above quoted her antagonists.  

Clearly Israel advocates need to double down on disseminating their “narrative,” the one grounded in the long Jewish history in this land, and on finding ways to do it that will break through the ideological fortress that BDS and progressivism have established on our campuses.

But here I sketch an alternative, complementary strategy.

2. Grant Them (Most of) What They (Falsely) Claim

Let’s for the moment (falsely) grant the detractors what they claim, or most of it, namely that the establishment of Israel was an injustice: per their narrative, that Jews were “settler-colonists,” outsiders who, via “ethnic cleansing,” took over the land that became the State of Israel.

Even if so, I suggest, the campus anti-Israel movement of 2023 is morally objectionable. And once we see that this movement—that aims to undo the Jewish state “by any means necessary,” to “dismantle Zionism,” to remove its supporters from campuses, with events, talks, panels, conferences such as this one numbering in the thousands across hundreds of campuses in recent years—in fact is morally objectionable, then we can begin to see it for what it actually is: a campaign of dehumanizing hate that grotesquely leads its proponents to see the mutilation and mass murder of Jewish children as the moral high ground.

3. The Child As a Metaphysical and Ethical Fresh Start

Let’s start with a repulsive practice that occurred for a while soon after October 7: activists not ripping down the posters of Israeli hostages but instead replacing their “Kidnapped” headings with the word “Occupier.” There was a photo of a sweet little kidnapped three-year-old girl, for example, labeled as an “Occupier.” A three-year old who was born in this land, very probably to parents who were born in this land, very probably to parents who were born in this land, and so on, possibly stretching way back.

In contrast consider how refugees and immigrants are considered in pretty much any other country in the world. Someone moves to Canada, and maybe in time becomes, feels, is a Canadian; but their children are largely raised as and feel Canadian, and certainly their grandchildren. Three of my own four grandparents immigrated as refugees from Russia to the United States, and my parents, and certainly I myself, feel as American as can be. One or two generations is more than enough, generally, for assimilation and ultimately legitimation. Anyone who claims otherwise—who tells the children or grandchildren of an immigrant that they don’t belong here—would instantly and correctly be branded a racist.

Well, those who put the word “Occupier” on the photo of a three-year old are saying that no matter how many generations her family may have lived in this land, even if her family is one of those whose roots trace back two or three thousand years, then she can never belong there.

They may as well put a target right on her head—as Hamas in fact did.

Now what, exactly, is so repulsive about this practice, beyond its obvious racism? It’s that that little girl is entirely innocent, she cannot be blamed, for anything that may have preceded her in this world. She is simply not responsible for the alleged sins of her parents, or of her grandparents, or great-grandparents, any more than the small child of a Hamas member is responsible for his parent’s terrorist activities. Nobody is responsible for what anybody did prior to their own birth. Nor is it her fault or responsibility that she was born when and where she was.

A child, a new generation, is fresh start, a “do-over” in the most profound metaphysical and ethical ways.

Keep this child in mind as we next consider the question of how to rectify large-scale historical injustices.

4. On Rectifying Large-Scale Historical Injustice

Take your pick for an example; there is no shortage of historical injustices. Obviously, unfortunately, we have no time machine, no way to literally undo the event or retroactively prevent it. Uncountably many innocent lives have been lost and shattered in every terrorist act or war, but there’s just no way now to make Sept 11 not have happened, or the Vietnam War, or World Wars II or I, or the American Civil War, or the French Revolution, or the 30 Years War—or the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (which, curiously, is pretty much the only major historical event that large numbers of people around the world ever even express interest in undoing).

So that’s off the table.

The next best thing would be to compensate those individuals who actually suffered the injustice. But if the injustice involved their death that’s also impossible; and unfortunately for those who survive the injustice, they die off too as the event gradually sinks into history. If there are ways to identify and compensate any remaining survivors of specific concrete injustices, by all means have at it.

 The most plausible mode of rectification for some large-scale historical injustice, then, is to compensate not the individuals who suffered the injustices but their descendants. And that’s where things immediately get tricky.

First, from whom, exactly, should they get their compensation? Presumably from descendants of those who perpetrated the original injustice. But a child, we just saw, is a fresh start, a “do-over,” who cannot be held responsible for the sins of her forebears. It seems very unjust to demand recompense from someone who is in no way responsible for the injustice in question.

Nor, though it’s more complex, is it obvious that the descendant of the original victim should actually be entitled to anything, period, especially as the generations go on. If a new child is not responsible for the sins of her ancestors, neither is she deserving of any of the merits or blessings of the ancestor; nor is she automatically entitled, by virtue of being born, to restitution of something that may have once belonged to them or compensation for something that may have happened to them. Obviously where there is some concrete property in question and a relevant enduring legal system in place there may be laws governing inheritance and restitution, but that’s not what we’re discussing here. The fact that something unjust happened to my grandparents or they were unjustly deprived of something does not automatically mean that I am owed anything. I didn’t suffer the loss, after all, and nothing was taken from me; I was born long after, into the new reality created subsequent to the loss—a fresh start.

Of course an objector might imagine here a counterfactual such as, “Well, if the loss hadn’t occurred then I would have been born into a better situation, so I did after all suffer the loss myself.” If so, then she might be entitled to restitution or compensation.

Perhaps, but this objection opens up a whole set of problems. Once you open the counterfactuals then almost anything goes. If the loss hadn’t occurred then many things would have been different, a whole other course of life would have ensued, and who can know what that may have included? Perhaps in this new course of life your grandfather would have been hit by a truck or died of a heart attack and never sired your parent, so you would never have been born—but if you owe your very existence to the loss you can hardly claim that the loss harmed you! Or perhaps if the loss hadn’t occurred you would have ended up far worse than you in fact are, so the loss actually improved your condition. Millions of people have become refugees and ended up resettling elsewhere, where their children, or grandchildren, eventually end up with much better lives than they would have had had the ancestors stayed put. Even if we grant that the historical loss resulted in a negative outcome for you, it’s not clear that that outcome can be blamed entirely or even maximally on the loss itself. In the case of the Palestinian refugees, for example, even where we grant that their contemporary conditions are poor, should we blame those conditions on the 1948 war—or on the 75 years of their mistreatment and mismanagement since, at the hands (for example) of the refugee agency UNRWA and the many Arab states who resisted their rehabilitation and resettlement?

Moreover, why isolate and emphasize only that single counterfactual concerning your grandfather? What if your grandfather himself had acquired the thing in question by some unjust means? Or inherited it from people higher up the ancestral ladder who had done so? As you go up the ladder there are surely many injustices to be found, perhaps in great quantities, particularly given the long history of human warfare across the globe. If you insist that the descendant of the person who stole it from your grandfather doesn’t have rightful claim to it, then what happens to your grandfather’s claim to it if he only had it because one of his ancestors had stolen it from another? Shall we go all the way back to the 7th-century Muslim Arab conquest of the Land of Israel, which took the land ultimately from (say) the descendants of the 1st-century Roman conquest of the Land of Israel, which took it from the Jews? Shouldn’t we in that case give it all back to the Jews, or the descendants thereof? If we insist on “root causes,” shouldn’t we go all the way back to the roots?

So, yes, maybe you would have been born into a better situation had one particular injustice not occurred—but you equally might have been born into a worse situation had all sorts of other older injustices not occurred. If you are contemplating counterfactuals and thus undoing history, justice requires undoing them all.

If your grandparents did something unjust to my grandparents, then, that does not automatically give me a claim against you: you didn’t do anything, and I didn’t suffer anything. More broadly, the fact that one community did something unjust toward another community does not entail that all future generations of the latter have any legitimate claims against all future generations of the former. In fact if we go quantitative and acknowledge the enormous growth in the relevant populations over time, then it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that demanding compensation from later descendants of the original injustice-doers would end up perpetrating against them an even greater injustice than the original one their ancestors perpetrated. And it could hardly be just to demand the rectification of some historical injustice by means of some even greater contemporary injustice.

Let us repeat that point:

It is not just to demand the rectification of some historical injustice by means of some even greater contemporary injustice.

5. Still Not Convinced?

Even if you still have some intuition that later descendants of injustice-victims should have such claims, trying to accommodate those claims would literally be both impossible to do and a formula for disaster. If we inherit both the sins and the claims of our ancestors then we will live in a perpetual Hatfields v McCoys world in which everyone ultimately has a claim against everyone else. World history both distant and recent features massive injustices on inconceivable scales; as Arab intellectual Hussain Abdul-Hussain has put it on social media, everybody’s grandfather lost something, so everybody will have various, multiple claims to compensation. Even restricting ourselves to the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim Conflict (IPJAMC), even where we’re (counterfactually) granting that the Jews came from outside and took over via ethnic cleansing, who exactly were these perpetrator Jews? In the standard anti-Israel narrative these Jews came from Europe—whence they fled overwhelmingly as refugees escaping the massive injustice of persecution and pogroms. A simple glance at 19th century European antisemitism, culminating in mass-murderous pogroms of 1881 and 1903 among others (not to mention in 1930s Germany and the Holocaust), will easily demonstrate that. In addition to these Jews of course were the hundreds of thousands who fled Arab and Islamic persecution and pogroms across the Middle East and North Africa, leaving many lives and much property behind. These Jews were all victims of injustice, even if, on the anti-Israel narrative, they then victimized the innocent Palestinian Arabs. How can one demand today’s Israelis compensate today’s Palestinian Arabs without also demanding that most Middle East and North African countries compensate the Israelis? Throw in the fact that many Arabs themselves emigrated from those countries to Palestine in the 20th century and they, and/or their immediate relatives, may well even have participated in the persecution of the Jews who fled those countries. So today’s Palestinians also owe something to today’s Israeli Jews!

Everybody’s grandfather lost something. To look backward, to maintain and pursue all those claims, is only a formula for propagating violence and instability.

All the more so when we step a bit closer to reality, acknowledging the actual long history of Jews in the Land of Israel and remembering that at the time of the U.N. Partition proposal’s passing in November of 1947 there were zero Palestinian refugees. Zionism itself, in other words, displaced no one. There was, in fact, room enough for everyone in Palestine, until the Arabs launched the civil war and then the multi-Arab-army international war. In the process one percent of the Jewish population lost their lives, tens of thousands were injured, Jews were ethnically cleansed from those parts of the land that Egypt and Jordan conquered, and so on. So even if the Jewish immigration into the land (which displaced no one) were itself an injustice, consider the disproportionate injustice then perpetrated against them in the murderous military and terrorist activity that followed. If the Arab descendants of 1948 have a legitimate claim against the Jews of 2023, again, then surely the Jews of 2023 have similarly legitimate claims against their contemporary Arabs.

So there may well have been some massive injustice in the past. But it’s literally impossible to undo that injustice, and any efforts to compensate for the injustice will only perpetrate further, almost surely greater injustices, if not directly sink the region into the pre-modern Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all, in which everybody loses.

Everybody’s grandfather lost something. And so unless we accept the idea that every new child is a fresh start, then everybody has a claim against everybody and all is lost.

(part 2)


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!

 

 

Monday, September 18, 2023

Al-Khanadeq, a Lebanese pro-Iranian Shiite news site, describes how Jews control the United States. It was written by Nasib Shams, who has had bylines in other popular Arabic media. 
There has always been talk about the Jews in the United States , their power and influence in decision-making, and there has also been talk about the power of the Israeli lobby. But how did the Jews get to the United States? What is their history in this country?

The history of Jews in America begins with the beginning of Christopher Columbus, when more than 300,000 Jews were expelled from Spain on August 2, 1492, and Columbus sailed, carrying a number of Jews with him. His first letter explaining his discoveries was addressed to a Jew. Columbus's supporters were rewarded with a number of privileges. As for him, he became the victim of the conspiracy hatched by the ship's Jewish doctor.

Since that time, Jews began to look to America and began to immigrate there, and more and more to South America, especially Brazil . When the conflict occurred between the Dutch and the Brazilians, they were forced to immigrate again to the Dutch colony, which is today called “New York.”

The Jews controlled the cinema, sugar and tobacco industries, half of the canned meat industry, the shoe industry, etc., and trade in particular. Which made the American people dissatisfied with the global Jewish plan to transfer financial markets to the United States.

The Jews enjoy a strong and absolute influence in America, and they do not hide it. They claim that “the essence of American life is Jewish, not Christian,” and that “American history must be rewritten to recognize the glories of Judas and the virtue of the Jews.” Also, the problem is not a problem of the Jewish people, but rather a problem of Jewish thought and the use of the people as a tool to harness the idea. One of its primary goals is to destroy the true values ​​of workers. The influence of the Jews on the thinking of the workers was very bad. The other area of ​​the Jewish idea focused on the churches. They invaded hundreds of Christian churches. They controlled the church in its doctrines.

Jewish ideas have invaded the minds of university students, as Jews led all revolutionary or anarchist movements in the student field. They worked to secularize public schools, and to keep children in their early stages of education away from any word that might help the American child learn about the “Jewish element.” Through the secularization of schools, it became possible to “Judaize universities.”

The Jews are mostly men without religion, and they use the slogan "religious persecution" to arouse people's feelings, but the issue is a matter of race and nationality, not a religious issue. No president of the United States dares to include in his first presidential speech any excerpts from the New Testament for fear of being exposed to the wrath and denunciation of the Jews. No man in the public service in America can say that the Christian religion is the one he believes in, because in this case he would be exposed to blame and classification of the Jews. Because the Jews' hopes were in the Jewish prophecy (the elimination of Christianity).

The number of Jews in America is not really known by non-Jews, as the numbers are the property of the Jewish authorities alone, and whenever US circles try to find out, Jewish influence is on the lookout to prevent that.

The increase in Jewish immigration to the United States made the Jews call it “the Land of the Jews,” where the Jew does these:

He opposes any legislation restricting his entry into the country.
He opposes any racial classification of his group after they enter the country.
He claims in front of others that he represents a religion, not a race.
He has two opinions: he confronts non-Jews with one of them, and keeps the second for himself and does not express it publicly except in front of Jews.
Therefore, there will be no census of Jews in the United States.

If we want to talk about the nationality or religion of the Jew... then “every Jew, whether he wishes to or not, is closely linked to all Jewish nationalism.” And that "the Jewish religion above all else...is Jewish patriotism." The United States Supreme Court justice said, “Our instincts and actions have determined for us the meaning of the word Jew.”

What is noteworthy is that the opening ceremony of the “American Jewish Committee” in 1906 was attended by delegates representing 222 Jewish associations, religious, political, industrial, and sectarian. A year later, the organizations subject to this committee became 688 organizations, and then the number rose in 1921 to more than 1,000. After that, the statistics are no longer known.

The Jews also tried to make New York a Jewish city, and thus the United States, a Jewish country. The conservative Jews were terrified as they expected that the American people would not tolerate this. In the beginning, it was the committee called Kehilla New York, then it expanded its work and became called the World Jewish Congress. The Jews of New York constituted the driving force of the international Jewish apparatus.

This is the tip of the iceberg about the history of the Jews in the United States, and this is how they began in the United States.   
The article is illustrated this way:


Because that's what the Jews who control the US look like.




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!

 

 

Friday, August 11, 2023




The Samer Theatre in the Agouza district of Cairo is showing a production of The Jew of Malta, a play written in 1590 by Christopher Marlowe, several years before Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice. This follows a successful run of the play in Alexandria earlier this year.

The main character, Barabas, is a Jew whose fortune was confiscated by the governor of Malta. He devises plans of revenge that end up becoming murder sprees to silence witnesses. He engages in political intrigue and double-crosses to pit the Muslim and Christian leaders jockeying for rulership of the island against each other. In the end, he dies in a fiery cauldron that he had built for his enemies.

Like The Merchant of Venice, there is controversy about whether The Jew of Malta is truly an antisemitic play, since it appears to be critical of all religions. But the Egyptian production, starring Sameh Basioony, is certainly antipathetic to Jews.

One review says that as Barabas "breathes his last, in a concluding scene, he affirms that he 'will not end' and many will come after him to realize the great (eternal) dream of 'ruling the world.'"

Marlowe's play has no such text.  

Which means that the director modified the play to ensure that its message was one of a Jewish plot to control the world.

Popular Egyptian news site Youm7 writes in its review:
The show reviews Zionist deceptions and control of the world through the character of Barabas, the cunning rich man who lives on the island of Malta and works to spread the wedge between the Christian governor of  Malta and the Turks. His plots were not limited to only them,  rather, they extended to the split between countries, and he succeeds in that.

The antisemitic (and anti-Zionist) message of the play is being received loudly and clearly by Egyptian audiences.





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!

 

 


The UN has a webpage where it shows a timeline on the "Question of Palestine."

It is biased as hell. 

It starts with "1885 – The term 'Zionism' first coined by the Viennese writer, Nathan Birnbaum."

There is no mention of Jewish history in the region for thousands of years. No mention of Jewish kingdoms. No mention of the centrality of Eretz Israel and Jerusalem to Judaism.  No mention of the Bible. 

But after that, it simply ignores or whitewashes every single act of terrorism by Palestine's Arabs. 

It doesn't mention the murderous Palestinian pogrom against Jews in 1929.

It says, "1936/1939 – Palestinian rebellion against the British Mandate and Jewish immigration." But not that Arabs murdered Jews, just that it was a "rebellion." 

It doesn't say anything about the Arab League boycott of Jews. 

It doesn't mention any Arab attacks on Jews in 1947-48. No outbreak of hostilities hours after the UN Partition resolution, no mention of the constant attacks on Jewish civilians, no mention of the Hadassah Hospital convoy massacre or the many other attacks on Jewish civilians - but it does mention Deir Yassin, and exaggerates the number of dead as "hundreds." .

The UN gets the date of Israel's independence wrong, saying it happened on May 15, 1948.

There were scores of fedayeen attacks by Palestinian Arabs against Israel in the 1950s and 60s, and hundreds of Israelis were killed. Not one incident is mentioned.

But the UN describes the 1966 As-Samu incident, where Israeli and Jordanian troops battled after a land mine killed 3 IDF soldiers, as a "massacre" of Palestinians. 15 Jordanian soldiers and three civilians were killed. It was not a massacre by any definition. 

There is not one mention of Palestinian airplane hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s. 

It says, "1987 –  First 'Intifada' begins in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip." It doesn't mention that the intifada killed hundreds of Israelis. The many terror attacks that occurred during the Oslo process are nowhere to be found. 

Similarly, it says, "Ariel Sharon’s al-Haram al-Sharif visit in September 2000 triggers the Second Palestinian Intifada."

Not a word about Palestinian suicide bombings, or bus bombings, or attacks on pizza shops and Passover seders and bar mitzvahs.

And of course no mention later about rockets from Gaza, massacring rabbis or kidnapping and murdering kids. Hamas is not mentioned as a terror group - or even militant group. In fact, the word "terror" is nowhere to be seen. Neither is "Islam," "Muslim" or "Jihad," although Jews are mentioned.

The Holocaust is not mentioned either. There is simply no information on why Jews might want to have their own homeland in the region.

There is plenty of other anti-Israel bias in wording and choice of incidents. 

According to this official UN history, Palestinians have not attacked, let alone killed, a single Jew. The only aggression mentioned is from Jewish and Zionist groups.

The UN's anti-Israel bias is unmistakable even in this public document that is pretending to be objective. 




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!

 

 

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

The Guardian reported last week:

An investigation into a massacre in a destroyed Palestinian village carried out by Israeli forces in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation has identified three possible mass graves beneath a present-day beach resort.

Palestinian survivors and historians have long claimed that men living in Tantura, a fishing village of approximately 1,500 people near Haifa, were executed after surrendering to the Alexandroni Brigade and their bodies dumped in a mass grave believed to be located under an area that is now a car park for Dor Beach. Estimates have ranged from 40 to 200 people.

In recent years, a growing body of evidence for the Tantura massacre has generated significant controversy in Israel, where atrocities committed by Jewish forces in 1948 remain a highly sensitive subject: an Israeli-made documentary about what happened in the village faced widespread backlash on its release last year.

The extensive new investigation by the research agency Forensic Architecture identifies what it says is a second mass grave site in the former village of Tantura, as well as two more possible locations, in the most comprehensive research yet.
There is a difference between history and conspiracy theory. In legitimate historical research, you start with all the facts that then look for larger historical patterns that the facts lead to. With conspiracy theories, however, you start with the theory, and then look for the facts (or half facts) that support the theory and ignore or disparage anything that contradicts them.

The Forensic Architecture "analysis" of Tantura, like their others, is a conspiracy theory dressed up as scientific research.

Historian Benny Morris has dismantled the Tantura massacre myth, using the tools of a historian. Morris has documented every major event that happened in 1948, including what would be considered war crimes today. In every case the Arab victims and victims of relatives spoke about the events in real time, loudly, to whomever would listen.  Yet, he notes:

If there was a massacre of 200 to 250 people at Tantura, it was the largest of the 1948 massacres. But there is no available document from 1948 that mentions a massacre at Tantura, apart from one document, which I’ll come back to below, that deals with the execution of a handful of Arab prisoners of war on the fringes of the village. Strange, very strange, because all the massacres perpetrated by Jews in 1948 are at least mentioned, if not described, in documents from 1948. These include documents of the Haganah, the main Jewish militia until the end of May 1948, the Israel Defense Forces, the UN (which had observers on the ground from May 1948), the Red Cross (whose officials operated in the country from April 1948), as well as records by the British and the Americans, whose representatives reported from Israel to London and Washington about the wartime events.

Deir Yassin, Burayr, Ein Zeitun, Lod, Hunin, Dawayima, Eilabun, Arab al-Mawasi, Majd al-Kurum, Saliha, Jish, Safsaf, Bi’na-Deir al Asad – the massacres perpetrated by Jews in these places and others are all mentioned in contemporary 1948 documentation, and in some cases are described in detail. Just not Tantura, not one mention.

Not that Haganah/IDF officers ignored Tantura in 1948. Accounts of the battle, the expulsion, the demolition of buildings afterward, all appear in the documents. Just not a massacre. On June 18, during the war’s First Truce, under the supervision of the International Red Cross and the United Nations, more than a thousand refugees from Tantura were transferred in an army convoy to Tulkarm, then under Iraqi army control. A document in the Haganah Archives sums up Arab radio broadcasts of that period (Haganah Information Service, “E.I. [Eretz Israel, Mandatory Palestine], June 21-22, 1948”): “An Arab woman from Tantura… relates that the Jews are raping Arab women and demolishing the place.” But according to the report, the woman did not mention by so much as a word that the Jews also massacred hundreds of her fellow villagers. (A slightly different version of this report states that the woman related that the Jews “raped women in addition to the acts of robbery, theft and arson.” Again, no mention of a massacre). These items were broadcast on Radio Ramallah.

In addition, as far as I was able to discover, the archives of the UN and the Red Cross – whose officials organized and escorted the move of the Tantura refugees to Tulkarm and reported frequently to their headquarters – contain no mention of a massacre at Tantura. Does it stand to reason that among the thousand deportees, who were no longer under Jewish control, not one bothered to tell the Iraqi officers or the UN and Red Cross officials that, by the way, they had endured a horrific massacre of their fathers, brothers, sons, as described by Katz and Schwarz and their supporters? It is simply inconceivable, if a large-scale massacre that they had eyewitnessed or at least heard about had indeed occurred.
Morris admits that there is evidence that the Israeli troops killed between 8-10 snipers in the village. That's it. No civilians. 

He brings plenty of other evidence that the modern blood libel is false and that the current "researchers" are knowingly lying.

Forensic Architecture, however, is looking for a huge massacre. And when you start from that perspective, just like with 9/11 "truthers" or Holocaust deniers, it is easy to find "evidence" that fits your preconceived notions.

In this case, the entirety of the "evidence" they discovered are two shadows in 1949 aerial photos that they didn't see in 1947 photos.



According to them, the only possible explanation for these shadows are that they are man-made earth mounds that would be the site of mass graves. They even do some helpful math:

We believe that if bodies were laid shoulder to shoulder and oriented northwards in a single layer, there could be around seventy bodies under a mound of this size. Were the bodies to be layered on top of each other, as one testimony suggests, the total number could be double that, up to approximately 140 bodies. Thus, our assessment is that the total number of bodies contained in a mass grave site such as this would be in the range of seventy to 140.

... As we did with Earthwork 1, we used the measurements of the mound to calculate the likely number of bodies which could be buried there. Our assessment is that the total number of bodies in a mass grave of this size is in the range of forty to eighty.
Ta-da! Shadows have now become proof of the murder of 240 people, coincidentally the highest amount that people made up fifty years after the event!

At times, FA doesn't even pretend that they are merely guessing. In this diagram, they refer to the supposed earth mound they claim the shadows indicate definitively as a mass grave, no questions asked:


So what if decades of research since this "Tantura massacre" allegation first appear in the 1990s have not uncovered the name of a single victim? We have shadows! 

It's science!

There are two years between the two photographs they are comparing. As is obvious, there are other changes between the 1947 and 1949 photos besides these shadows - new buildings and roads being built. Israel did move quickly in 1948 to build new villages to house immigrants, and Tantura was one of the spots where there was building activity (Palestine Post, August 2, 1948).

All of those require moving earth. 



The Nachsholim settlement was built there.

But Forensic Architecture knows that those shadows were created on May 24 or 25, 1948, and not in the months before or afterwards. How? 

Because, like all conspiracy theorists, they aren't considering any other possibility, and will not admit that any other theory is possible.

Let's say that they are correct and that these faint lines really represent two long 85 centimeter high earth mounds. What could be the reason?

Maybe the animals in the village who were not being fed died and needed to be buried. Maybe the graves of the snipers really are there and there are only 10 or so people buried separated by three meters out of respect. Maybe the kibbutzniks decided to build a fence between the trees and the field and cleared the area with a bulldozer. Maybe the leftover earth cleared for the new buildings and road was, for some reason, deposited on the edge of the field perhaps as a marker. Maybe there was a garbage dump that was attracting insects or animals that needed to be buried. 

The point is that when you only are willing to accept the most obscene explanation at the outset, you aren't engaging in research - you are just looking for proof of a conspiracy theory. 

And only antisemites would assume that the most likely explanation for two shadows is the existence of mass graves that contain some 240 people murdered by Jews whom no one can name and whom no one heard about until 50 years later.

No amount of 3D reconstruction can make up for the fact that the "researchers" at Forensic Architecture are anti-Israel bigots who consistently start their "research" with their conclusion and then connect the dots to reach it after the fact. 






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Tuesday, May 02, 2023

Sometimes I can get the message across in a cartoon or meme far better than I can in an article. 
















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Tuesday, March 28, 2023



Journalist Rula Jebreal tweeted about the large rallies in Tel Aviv, "This reminds me of the 1st intifada/popular uprising of 1987... Palestinians gathered under the banner: ”End the occupation, No annexation...yes to PEACE.” Then she added that "I was 15 during the First Intifada. We protested daily & peacefully in Jerusalem."

This has been a theme among Israel haters, that the first intifada was peaceful. They never mention that about 200 Israelis were killed in these "peaceful" times. Middle East Monitor, an anti-Israel English language publication, says, "It involved many forms of civil disobedience, including: massive demonstrations, general strikes, refusal to pay taxes, boycotts of Israeli products, graffiti and underground 'freedom schools', as well as unarmed forms of resistance such as stone-throwing and Molotov cocktails."

Not exactly what one would call "peaceful."

What about the slogans Jebreal claims they chanted? 

It seems unlikely that they chanted "no to annexation," since that wasn't a talking point then. But did they say "yes to PEACE"? 

I found a fairly comprehensive list of slogans chanted by Arabs in the first intifada. The very few that mentioned peace were veiled threats, such as "before we touch the trigger, we raise the call of peace
....Raise the flag of peace and cheer for freedom, and adhere to the gunpowder."

But there were lots of slogans that called for violence.

- Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, Muhammad's army will prevail

- Say Allahu Akbar, Muslim, say Allahu Akbar, the head of the Zionist is destroyed

- Say takbeer, O Muslim, say takbeer, the throne of the Zionist was destroyed
Glory and eternity to the holy martyrs

O martyr, relax, relax, and we will continue the struggle

With the spirit and blood we will sacrifice you, O martyr

With soul and blood, we will sacrifice you, O Palestine

The only good thing you can say about the first intifada is that it wasn't nearly as violent as the second intifada. But it wasn't peaceful and it wasn't in any way equivalent to the massive demonstrations in Israel over the past two months.  





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Wednesday, February 01, 2023

Rabid Israel hater "Rabbi" David Mivasair tweets what he considers to be a "gotcha" for Zionists:

I love this old menu on the wall of a Jewish deli in my hometown of Baltimore.  It tells quite a story. "Buy Palestine Matzo"

Anyone need to have that explained?

I'm always amused when I see modern antisemites triumphantly bring pictures of old coins or stamps that say "Palestine" as if that means there was a state of Palestine before 1948.

I mean, does Mivasair think that Jews in Baltimore considered buying matzoh from an Arab country a selling point? There were lots of Jews in Egypt, Iraq and Syria at the time - but no one in the US cared about buying their matzohs!

"Palestine" was simply the English translation of "Eretz Yisrael" before 1948. 

But for those who really love to see the word "Palestine" used before 1948, here are some great examples:












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Monday, January 09, 2023



The website of the Jordanian Royal Committee for Jerusalem Affairs includes a brief English-language history of the city originally published in 2005.

It glosses over any historic Jewish connection to the city by framing Jews as one of many invaders:

3000 B.C. :  
The Arab Canaanites established the city in the third millennium B.C., as archeologists state.

1879 B.C. :  
in the Egyptian Tablets, called the Texts of the Curse, the name Ur Salim (the city of peace) was mentioned as the name for the city . The name reoccurred in the year 1300 B.C. in the Tal Al- Amarnah Tablets. At that time, the city was inhabited by the Arab Yabusites.

1300 – 63 B.C. :
The city suffered invasion, occupation and destruction. It witnessed important events during this period . It was occupied by the Egyptians, the Jews, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians and the Greeks.

63 B.C – 636 A.D. :
This was the era of the Roman rule, which lasted around 700 years. The most important events during this period were :

– The appearance of Jesus Christ (the Messiah) around the first year B.C.
– 70 The city was destroyed by the Roman Emperor Titus.
The Canaanites were not Arabs.

There is no mention of Jewish kingdoms, Kings David or Solomon, the Temples, or even the Bible. Even the Quran says far more about Jews in the land than this commission does.

Well, there is an indirect mention of the Temples when it discusses the different names of the city:
Bayt Al-Maqdis (Al-Quds; The Holy) : The name given to the city by Muslim Arabs.
That name, of course, is a corruption of the Hebrew "Beit HaMikdash" - the Holy Temple.

Practically every mention of Jews in this history is a lie. A couple of examples:
1882: The start of the waves of mass Jewish immigration from Russia to Jerusalem and Palestine. 
Only from Russia? Plenty of Jews came from many countries, including Arab countries like Yemen, in the 19th century.
June 1967: Confiscation of 116 dunums within the old city and the demolition of the buildings therein for the purpose of building new ones to house the Jews.
That is the restoration of the Jewish Quarter that was destroyed by these Jordanians in 1948.
21 August 1969: The Jew, Michael Denis Rohan, set fire to the blessed Aqsa Mosque.
Rohan was a Christian.
Jerusalem : The Inhabitants

– In 1918, the number of Palestinians in Old and New Jerusalem was circa (ca.) 30,000 .
– In 1918, the number of Jews in Old and New Jerusalem was ca. 10,000.
I cannot find any record of a 1918 census of Jerusalem, but this is all clearly a lie. In 1922, there were 34,000 Jews in Jerusalem, outnumbering Christians (15,000) and Muslims (13,000) combined.

This official Jordanian document also says:
– In 2000, the number of Jews in the western part of Occupied Jerusalem was ca. 275,000 colonial Jews.

Here and elsewhere, it refers to all Jews in Israel as colonialist - not just the "settlers." 

Finally, it falsely claims that the number of Christians in Jerusalem has gone down from over 18,000 in 1967 to 5,000 in 1998. In reality, the number plummeted under Jordanian rule from 29,000 to 12,000 in 1967, and it has modestly increased to about 16,000 today.

 This is Jordanian, state-sanctioned antisemitism.


(h/t Irene)



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Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Palestinian routinely claim that the Kotel, or Western Wall, is really a Muslim shrine - the Buraq Wall, where Mohammed supposedly tethered his flying steed during his miraculous "night journey."

It turns out that most Muslims never believed that until the 1929 riots and after Israel built the plaza in front of the Kotel in 1967.

The Shaw Commission report of 1930, about the riots that started at the Wall in 1929, describes the competing religious claims to the wall - and does not mention the legend of the Buraq at all, only that it is part of the Haram esh Sharif like all the other walls. 

One of the Holy Places in connection with which it has not infrequently been necessary to give rulings of the character indicated above is the Western or Wailing Wall; in Jerusalem. This Wall; forms part of the western exterior of the ancient Jewish Temple; being the last remaining vestige of that sacred place it is regarded with the greatest reverence by religious Jews, whose custom of praying there extended back to at least the Middle Ages. ....The Wall is also part of the Haram-esh-Sherif, which is an Islamic place of great sanctity, being reckoned next to the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina as an object of veneration to Moslems.

If the Kotel was considered the holy "Buraq Wall" by Muslims at the time, certainly that would have been mentioned here. Although it must be mentioned that the testimony included the idea that the Muslims had exaggerated the importance of the Buraq Wall:
Merriman introduced part of Chancellor’s statement to the Permanent Mandates Commission in July, in which he stated that the Moslems are trying to invest El Burak with a sanctity never before attached to it. Merriman implied that the Government was as skeptical as the Jews regarding the sacredness of the pavement to the Moslems.
Wikipedia points to an obscure German source from the 1860s that appears to say that the Muslims claimed the entire Western wall of the Temple Mount to be the Buraq Wall. 

A 1932 academic paper in the Journal of Biblical Literature, by C. D. Matthews, discusses the topic of where Muslims believe Mohammed tied the steed and entered the Temple Mount:

Among the orthodox who maintain the legends of Islam as historic truth, the famous "Night-Journey" of the Prophet sanctifies, as could nothing else, Jerusalem as a city of Muslim shrines, especially the Rock itself, from which Mohammed ascended into Heaven, and the Wall of al-Buraq, where Gabriel, the angelic conductor, tied up the divine steed on the arrival at the "further mosque" from Mecca.  Unfortunately, this last spot is identified as the same as the "Wailing Wall," involving a clash of religious sentiments which has often led to tragic results. Of course, the factious can always find factors. But is the Wall of al-Buraq the same as the Wailing Wall? The spot of contention is the southern end of the western wall of the Haram area. Muslim tradition is now well established that this is the holy station of their Prophet. Some accounts of the Night-Journey, as for instance our own author, say that Mohammed entered through a "gate through which the sun and the moon incline"--or shine at setting. This would indicate, of course, a western or southwestern gate. It agrees with the ordinary identification as the now walled-up Bab an-Nabi underneath the Gate of the Moors, Bab al-Maghribah, just south of the Place of Wailing, in the western wall of the Haram. 
He's saying that the Muslim consensus in Jerusalem was that the Buraq was tethered to the south of the Kotel, under the Mughrabi Gate - not where the Kotel is, north of the gate.

But that's just the beginning:

Further, Ibn al-Fakih (903) says the place of the tying up of al-Buraq is in the angle of the southern minaret-which was at the southwest corner of the Haram. And Ibn 'Abd Rabbih (913) says it is under the corner of the masjid-which Le Strange (in his book Palestine Under the Moslems) takes to mean the Aqsa but which can as well refer to the entire Haram and therefore Aqsa, mean the same as the statement of Ibn al-Fakih. 
But Muqaddasi (985), a citizen of Jerusalem and a most careful writer, speaks of the "two gates" of the Prophet, in such terms as positively to identify his choice as the ancient double gate in the south wall of the Aqsa. There used to run here a large entrance which is still a subterranean opening from within the mosque. The location of the former double gate is just as near the southern minaret on the southwestern corner as is the Gate of the Moors in the southern portion of the western wall. 

Further, Nasir I Khusrau (1047), despite the earthquake which came between Muqaddasi and him, resulting in changes of structure and name, still speaks of this gate under the Aqsa as the gate of the Prophet. He says (as quoted by Le Strange, P. M., pp. 178-9): "The gate of the Prophet... which opens toward the kiblah point-- that is, towards the south... The Prophet... on the night of his ascent into heaven, passed into the noble sanctuary through this passageway, for the gateway opens on the road from Makkah." It is only when we come to Mujir ad-Din, as late as 1496, an author whose work was almost entirely of secondary material, that we have a definite change of reference to the southwestern gate in the western wall as the gate of the prophet; and even here the author is speaking mainly of the Gate of the Moors over the walled-up gate which he says incidentally is also called Bab an-Nabi. (See Le S., p. 182.)

Finally, Le Strange (p. 182), who had studied thoroughly all the Arab geographers and historians on Palestine, takes the gates of the Prophet as named (not in order) by the two earliest writers Ibn al-Fakih and Ibn 'Abd Rabbih, to be identifiable with those named in the southern wall by Muqaddasi and Nasir. This places the weight of testimony on the western portion of the southern wall of the Haram area, not the southern portion of the western wall, as the proper Wall of al-Buraq of Muslim tradition.   
The blue section is where the Kotel is, the green is where the Buraq Wall was accepted as Muslim tradition as of 1932, possibly at the southern corner, and the orange outline covers areas where the original Muslim traditions placed the Buraq Wall.


So when Palestinians today claim that the Western Wall is really a holy Muslim Buraq Wall, they are lying. And it is a lie about Muslim tradition itself, meaning that they are willing to change their own history and legends just to take away any Jewish claim in Jerusalem.

That is what hate looks like. 




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