I often hear the awfully misinformed and false claim: They have been
killing each other forever and they will just keep at it. The truth is
that, for 1400 years, Muslims ruled Palestine and the entire region, and
Muslims, Christians and Jews had lived in peace. Of course, there were
exceptions, such as when the European Crusaders, mowing down the
inhabitants of Ma`arrat al-Nu`man on the way1 , invaded Jerusalem and
killed every man, woman and child, and 10,000 people in the Al-Aqsa Mosque
alone.2 So, yes, there were massacres and ethnic cleansing but it was, as
should be to no one’s surprise, at the hands of an invading imperial Europe.
Bishop Riah Hanna Abu El-Assal, Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem from 1998 to
2007 said in an interview, “In the first place, Arab Palestinian Christians
and Arab Palestinian Muslims lived side by side for the past 1400 years.
For anybody to say that the Arab Palestinian Christians have been
persecuted recently by Muslims is absolutely another big lie, like the big
lie that spoke of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.”
In another interview, he stated, “We were not party to persecuting the Jews
in modern-day times. They lived among us from 70 A.D. until recently. We
became enemies because some Western powers had a hidden agenda—the whole
question of oil in the Arab world. They allowed Israel to come. They
persecuted the Jews in Europe and made the Palestinians pay. ”
Not until Palestine was handed over to European Jews to create Israel after
World War I did the killing begin. Begin. Interesting word. Because one of
the first terrorist organizations in the Holy Land was the Irgun, a Jewish
organization targeting the British, both civilian and military. Founded in
1935, they were responsible for the King David Hotel bombing of 1946 that
killed 91 people and injured dozens.3 Irguns leader was a Jewish immigrant
from Russia by the name of Menakhem Volfovich Begin. He would later adopt
the more Hebrew sounding name Menachem Begin and become the 6th Prime
Minister of Israel. Another prominent member of Irgun was a man by the name
of Icchak Jeziernick. But Irgun proved too soft for him, so he joined the
even more militant Lehi, also called the “Stern Gang”. Under the Stern
Gang, he masterminded and conducted the 1944 assassination of British
Minister for Middle Eastern Affairs, Lord Moyne.4 Jeziernick, also a
Russian import, would later adopt the more Hebrew and less Slavic sounding
name of “Yitzhak Shamir” and follow Menachim Begin to become the 7th Prime
Minister of Israel.
After the 1935-39 Arab revolt against the British in Palestine, the British
disarmed the entire Palestinian population but, peculiarly, left the
Zionist militants armed to the hilt. As a result, the Palestinians suffered
violent pogroms and ethnic cleansing at the hands of Jewish extremists in
the Holy Land5 , but they still would not take up arms in any organized
fashion until 30 years later. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)
was founded in 1968. The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, often called
“Islamic Jihad” for short, was founded in 1979. Hamas was founded even
later in 1987.
Thane Rosenbaum, Law Professor at Fordham University, and Director of the
Forum on Law, Culture & Society, and unabashed Israel apologist stated in
his Wall Street Journal Op-Ed this despicable indictment of the entire
population of Gaza:
On some basic level, you forfeit your right to be called civilians when you
freely elect members of a terrorist organization as statesmen, invite them
to dinner with blood on their hands and allow them to set up shop in your
living room as their base of operations. At that point you begin to look a
lot more like conscripted soldiers than innocent civilians. And you have
wittingly made yourself [sic] targets.6
Really? Then what does that make Israel? Should we tell the Israelis “you
have wittingly made yourself (sic) targets” since 1977 because they elected
the biggest terrorists in the history of the region, twice in a row, as
their 6th and 7th Prime Ministers? A professor and an intellect such as
Thane Rosenbaum knows full well that what he is saying flies in the face of
well-documented history. But, at the expense of truth, his objective is to
indoctrinate the American people into perpetuating the flow of U.S. tax
dollars into what has become no less than genocide. It is to fund an
Israeli colonialism which, according to the father of modern Zionism,
Theodore Herzl, and according to many a Rabbi in Israel today, will have
it .
s borders reaching from Egypt in the West all the way to Iraq in the
East.7
This opportunistic feeding upon the generosity of the Western world and its
collective guilt over the Holocaust has created a nation of spoiled brats
who feel no shame in boasting about their manipulation of Western
governments.