[pnews-news] Misreporting about Palestina

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"The Zionist Ghetto of Israel Must Be Destroyed"
(Farouk Kaddoumi, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 1975)
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In 1857, the British Consul in Palestine reported:
"The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and
therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population."
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Misreporting about Palestina
   Hank Roth

I have read a lot of Robert Fisk's reporting and opinion in the American
left wing press and the Independent of London and I appreciate his
on-the-ground journalism because he goes where the action is. That doesn't
mean he will always get it right. I don't expect some/maybe most of you
will believe me about this, but I know Robert is wrong about Israel most
of the time.

It is not too hard to see where his sympathies lie. He sides with those he
believes are the victims and so do I. I always have which is why I
considered myself a leftist and always felt it was my duty to challenge
authority because as a Jew I could relate to the Jewish condition; as a
child, growing up among those who held anti-Jewish prejudices and
expressed them, and as a person angered by injustice and unfair and unjust
enrichment. When I because a socialist it was after I educated myself
about class struggle after reading Michael Harrington, Erich Fromm, Karl
Marx and others on the left.

Good intentioned people can look at what they know of the facts and come
to diametrically opposite conclusions. The reason for this is not so much
of an enigma because we all come to those facts with a different set of
biases and experiences and we read different interpretations which then
become our own.

Robert recently (April 1, 2006) wrote an essay in The Independent called,
A lesson from the Holocaust for us all." (The Independent (London,
England); 4/1/2006) In it he quotes from a German Jews diaries, Victor
Klemperer, who wrote about his terrifying and horrible experiences living
in Germany from 1933 to 1941. Robert says it was a strange feeling for him
to read Victor's description of survival for him and his wife in Dresden
but especially moving for Robert was where Victor expressed such "great
compassion for the Palestinian Arabs of the 1930s who who feared that they
would lose their homeland to a Jewish state."

    "`I cannot help myself,' Klemperer writes on 2 November 1933, nine
    months after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. `I sympathize with
    the Arabs who are in revolt (in Palestine), whose land is being
    'bought'. A Red Indian fate, says Eva.' (Victor's wife)"

    "Even more devastating is Klemperer's critique of Zionism - which he
    does not ameliorate even after Hitler's Holocaust of the Jews of
    Europe begins. `To me,' he writes in June of 1934, `the Zionists, who
    want to go back to the Jewish state of AD70 ... are just as offensive
    as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient 'cultural
    roots', their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world
    they are altogether a match for the National Socialists...'"

Not all of the Jews were Zionists, even those who experienced the
Holocaust -- and much of what Robert quoted was written before the death
camps got going and the wholesale slaughter became worse. In fact of world
Jewry at the time many Germans were not Zionists because they considered
themselves Germans first, and even considered themselves more German than
Jewish - though the Germans felt otherwise and certainly Hitler felt much
differently about the Jews than the Jews felt about Hitler and some even
voted for him.

    "Yet Klemperer's day-by-day account of the Holocaust, the cruelty of
    the local Dresden Gestapo, the suicide of Jews as they are ordered to
    join the transports east, his early knowledge of Auschwitz - Klemperer
    got word of this most infamous of extermination camps as early as
    March 1942, although he did not realize the scale of the mass murders
    there until the closing months of the war - fill one with rage that
    anyone could still deny the reality of the Jewish genocide." (Fisk)

In his article Robert also draws a connection between Israel and the other
horrors which have been blamed on them, even where it was not true though
I am glad at least he mentioned the Phalangist who were responsible for
Sabra and Chatilla even though Sharon has taken the political heat on this
(because someone had to) for "indirect responsibility" said the Kahan
commission even though he knew nothing about it until after it happened.

Robert wrote:

    "Note here how there is no attempt to enumerate the comparisons. Six
    million murdered Jews is a numerically far greater crime than the
    thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja or the 1,700 Palestinians
    murdered by Israel's Lebanese Phalangist allies at Sabra and Chatilla
    in 1982. But Yashayaie's letter was drawing a different kind of
    parallel: the pain that the denial of history causes to the survivors."

    "I have heard Israelis deny their army's involvement in the Sabra and
    Chatilla massacres - despite Israel's own official enquiry which proved
    that Ariel Sharon sent the murderers into the camps - and I remember
    how the CIA initially urged US embassies to blame Iran for the
    gassings at Halabja."

Sharon never ordered them to conduct a massacre. As a matter of fact the
Phillangists were warned not to kill civilians. But it happened. That is
the best they could do to try to pin the murders on Sharon.

But the greatest error, I feel, in Robert Fisk's article is what he writes
next:

    "Indeed, it is easy to find examples of one of the most egregious lies
    uttered against the 750,000 Palestinians who fled their land in 1948:
    that they were ordered by Arab radio stations to flee their homes
    until the Jews had been "driven into the sea" - when they would return
    to take back their property. Israeli academic researchers have
    themselves proved that no such radio broadcasts were ever made, that
    the Palestinians fled - victims of what we would today call ethnic
    cleansing - after a series of massacres by Israeli forces, especially
    in the village of Deir Yassin, just outside Jerusalem."

Those so-called researchers were indeed a minority opinion. They were part
of the left which writes a dissenting view on everything and they are
considered "New Historians" who have been largely discredited by
everything written since their charges were published - yet, they are
still widely quoted by the U.S. left and by journalists on the left, like
Robert Fisk. IT just isn't credible. They were told to leave and many
heard by word of mouth exactly what has been claimed by Israel that the
surrounding Arab countries would attack Israel and drive them out and then
Arabs who lived in Israel could return. The problem with that scenario is
the seven Arab countries lost and Israel was not driven out and while
almost 70% of those who left never, ever, saw an Israeli soldier, they
were not taken in by those Arab countries and they did not return and many
didn't even want to. Many still held out hope that the Arabs would destroy
the Jews and they could return and take over all of Israel for themselves.

Robert Fisk doesn't tell that version, the true version. And the true
version is not told by the left but it is still the right version and
Arabs have never accepted the existence of Israel in the land which was to
be all Muslim. Muslims from those Arab countries also supported Hitler and
they not only volunteered to fight in Germany to liquidate the Jews, they
also fought with the Ottoman against the West in WWI.

Arabs living in Israel were told to "run for their lives," but not by
Israelis, many of whom asked them to stay.

The Jewish Haifa Workers' Council issued an appeal to the Arab residents of
Haifa:

"For years we have lived together in our city, Haifa...Do not fear. Do not
destroy your homes with your own hands...do not bring upon yourself
tragedy by unnecessary evacuation and self-imposed burdens..But in this
city, yours and ours, Haifa, the gates are open for work, for life, and
for peace for you and your families."

In spite of this appeal (and others in other cities) a report from the
Economist, October 1, 1948 stated that only 4,000 to 6,000 Arabs of the
"62,000" who formerly lived in Haifa" remained there. They left because
they expected Israel to lose and wanted to get out of the way of their
invading Arab armies.

East Arabic Radio in April of 1948 reported that "It must not be forgotten
tha the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees to flee from their
homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, and that certain leaders...make
political capital out of their miserable situation.." (and this was cited
in Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial and from various British sources -
see also Alexander Cadogan, Ambassador of Great Britain to the UN in his
speech to the Security Council, April 23rd, 1948)

(I have written extensively about the refugee problem and the onslaught on
Israel by the Arabs which attack it and you can find those article at
http://pnews.org/archives/ .... Hank)

The war against Israel is a "Holy War". The attacks on Jews is from the
doctrine of Jihad.

"The universality of JIHAD was proclaimed from the beginnings of Islam.
Jihad has been ordered not only against specific groups or for specific
times, but, like Muhammad's mission (Qur'an 34:28), it is a universal
injunction that will endure until the only religion remaining is that of
Allah (Qur'an 2:189). The ongoing striving `in the path of Allah' triggers
the process that Huntington (Clash of Cultures) has called `Islam's bloody
borders', that is, Islam's continuous expansion through attacks on its
neighbors, in accord with the Qur'an command to `fight the unbelievers
who gird you about' (Qur'an 9:124)" (from Bat Ye'or, Eurabia, The
Euro-Arab Axis - 2006)

Hank Roth



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