A Time To Speak

Vol. III:10 (No. 34)

October 2003 -- Tishri-Heshvan 5764

WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE

You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

-- Daniel 5:27

A pair of scales or balances is used to weigh material substances, from grain to gold dust. Sometimes in it is used metaphorically to weigh words and deeds, or merits and demerits. In the instances below, words and deeds on opposite sides of the balances are not those of parties on opposite sides, but of a party that contradicts itself to suit occasion or audience.

1] ON THE HISTORY OF ISRAELITES AND JEWS

"The Arabs may try to turn their mythology into history,
but we will never let them turn our history into mythology." 

-- Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, New York

Arab authorities on Israelites and Jews heap one side of the balances with scholarly assertions that

    -- ancient Israel never existed.

    -- maybe it existed, but if so it was somewhere else -- never in Palestine

    -- there were no Israelites

    -- maybe there were Israelites, but if so the Jews are not descended from them

    -- Jerusalem was never an Israelite or Jewish city

    -- There was a King David in "Zion" but Zion was in Arabia not Palestine

    -- Jews never had a Temple on Temple Mount.

    -- maybe Jews had a Temple somewhere else -- maybe in Yemen

    -- there is not a single relic of the existence of Israelites or Jews in Palestine --

          not a structure, not an inscription, not a relic, not a coin . . .

    -- the history in the Bible is false -- it never happened

    -- maybe some of it happened somewhere else, but not in Palestine

In contradiction to these doctrines, the prominent Egyptian professor of law Dr. Nabil Hilmi accepts the accuracy of the Bible as an historical record, Indeed, it requires it as admissible evidence for his forthcoming lawsuit against all the Jews of the world. His brief: It is stated in Exodus 15:33-36 that the Children of Israel took Egyptian household goods with them when they left. According to Professor Dr. Hilmi's assessment of the value of those goods, plus compound interest for millennia, the descendants of those Children of Israel now owe Egypt trillions of dollars.

The claim stirred some amusement among those familiar with the tradition that Egyptians had presented it to Alexander the Great and lost. Yet it contains an implicit acknowledgment that (a) biblical texts do indeed have historic validity, and (b) the Jews of today are the heirs of the biblical Children of Israel.

Implications of this acknowledgment are extrapolated by David Ben-Meir, Director of Research and Education, Israel Peace Initiative, 18 September 2003:

[. . . .] The news of the lawsuit filed by an Egyptian law professor has probably made the rounds by now. But what is not generally known is that this lawsuit, no matter what its final resolution, when combined with a seldom-quoted Qur'anic text, offers a just and ineluctable resolution to the Arab-Israel conflict.

[. . . .] Dr. Hilmi's lawsuit is ostensibly being filed against 'all the Jews of the world' for recovery of property allegedly stolen during the Exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt approximately 3300 years ago. Citing the Torah, Dr. Hilmi is demanding, presumably on Egypt's behalf, the return of 'gold, jewelry, cooking utensils, silver ornaments, clothing and more,' not to mention interest thereon, taken by the ancestors of today's Jews 'in the middle of the night' -- a 'clear theft of a host country's resources and treasure, something that fits the morals and character of the Jews.'

[. . . .] His gift to us, though, is more than a good laugh . . . . His gift to us is really the Egyptian/Islamic/Arab legal proof that the Jews of today, in Israel and all over the world, are the direct descendents of the Jews that exodus'd from Egypt 3190 years ago. When we combine this Egyptian/Islamic/Arab legal breakthrough with the Qur'an, Surah 5, verse 20 (in which the Angel Gabriel tells Mohammed that Allah told Moses that under Allah's guidance Moses would lead the Jewish people from Egypt to the Holy Land and give it to them as an eternal inheritance), we get the equation that settles once and for ever the current conflict.

1.) On the basis of the Qur'an, sacred to all Moslems and deemed infallible by Islamic tradition, it was by Allah's will, and under Allah's guidance, that Moses led the people of Israel from Egypt to the Holy Land. The Biblical text, to which the Qur'anic text refers, makes clear that the Holy Land is Israel (north of the Sinai peninsula, west of the Jordan River, in which Jericho and Jerusalem, Hebron, Shechem and Hazor, are all major and well-known cities).

2.) This same Holy Land, per the same Qur'anic quote, is the inheritance of the people of Israel, the descendents of the Jews whom Moses led from Egypt.

3.) On the basis of the current law suit, the Jews of today, including those living in Israel, the same Holy Land into which Moses led the Jews per Allah's will and which Allah decreed to be the Jews' inheritance, are the direct descendents of the Jews mentioned in above Qur'anic citation.

Therefore, the Jews of today, some of whom have resettled in the Holy Land mentioned in the Qur'an and made it into the modern State of Israel, are heirs of the Jews of Moses' time: inheritors not only of their liabilities per the lawsuit, but also of their assets per the Qur'an -- the asset of the Holy Land real estate that the Qur'an says Allah gave to the Jews. [. . . .]

The capacity to espouse several contradictory convictions at the same time is not limited to ancient history. It applies even to events that are within living memory and voluminously attested by witnesses, documents and photographs. Thus the official Arab attitude toward the Holocaust is that --

  -- The Holocaust never happened. It is a Jewish-Zionist lie to gain

           sympathy and reparations.

  -- Hitler and the Nazis did a noble deed in ridding the world of so many Jews.

  -- The Holocaust was a good start, but did not kill enough Jews.

  -- The Israelis are worse than the Nazis in the way they treat the Arabs.

      [Comment: this is the only context is which "Nazi" is pejorative.]

* * * * * * *

2] ON JERUSALEM

"You ought to let the Jews have Jerusalem; it was they who made it famous"

-- Winston Churchill, 1955

"Mecca is holy to Muslims, Jerusalem is holy to Jews."

                                                   -- Yakut, 13th-Century Arab Geographer

The Arabians who conquered the Middle East in the seventh century CE gave little heed to Jerusalem, that they knew only as "Aelia", a name imposed by the Romans for their own political purposes. Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran, it had no special status or meaning to Muslims, and did not appear on their early lists of holy cities or sites. It was merely a neglected and decayed village in a neglected and decayed province of an empire ruled from Damascus or Baghdad. It was never even a local administrative center for that province.

In contrast, the Arabs now proclaim such passionate devotion to a Jerusalem that they cannot live without sovereignty over it. This enables a terror-chief to stir up a crowd to chant "A Million Martyrs Marching To Jerusalem". They call it Al-Quds [The Holy], because the Jews long before them called it Qadosh [Holy]. They call Temple Mount Haram al-Sherif [Noble Sanctuary}, because the First and Second Temples stood there. Simultaneously, they deny that the Temples ever existed, while diligently obliterating all all traces of them. The ultra-sanctity of the Al-Aqsa Mosque -- a converted Christian church -- is invoked to justify riots, killings and jihad.

This pretense has been absorbed without question by diplomats, academics, commentators and reporters, who declare Jerusalem is held sacred by "Christians, Muslims and Jews" or, alternatively, by "Muslims, Christians and Jews". Comment: Unlike Winston Churchill, they rarely allow the Jews even chronological seniority.

In contrast, Ahmad Muhammad 'Arafa, writing in the Egyptian Ministry of Culture's journal Al-Qahira in August 2003, has actually examined the evidence for Muslim claims of sanctity. His work has been translated by MEMRI and published on its website www.memri.org. The gist of them is:

   -- Muhammad's "Night Journey" to an unnamed al-aqsa [far-off place] was to Medina, in Arabia. The claim that it was Jerusalem served later political ends of rival dynasties.

   -- Muhammad at first made Jerusalem the qibla [direction to turn in prayer] but soon changed the qibla to Mecca, where it has remained ever since.

'Arafa concludes that "Jerusalem . . . no longer deserved to be respected by Muslims beyond what any historical city in their domain deserved."

Excepts from "If I Forget Thee: Does Jerusalem Really Matter to Islam?" by Daniel Pipes, New Republic, 28 April 1997, full text on www.danielpipes.org.

[. . . . ] In Jerusalem, the theological and historical arguments matter, serving often as the functional equivalent of legal claims. [. . . . ] Already we hear the ritual and relativistic cliché that Jerusalem is "a city holy to both peoples." But like most cliches, this one is more false than true. Jerusalem stands as the paramount religious city of Judaism, a place so holy that not just its soil but even its air is deemed sacred. Jews pray in its direction, invoke its name at the end of each meal and close the Passover service with the wistful statement "Next year in Jerusalem."

In contrast, Jerusalem is not the place to which Muslims pray. It is not directly connected to any events in Muhammad's life. And it is not even mentioned by name in the Koran. The city never became a cultural center or served as capital of a sovereign Muslim state. Jerusalem has mattered to Muslims only intermittently over the past thirteen centuries, and when it has mattered, as it does today, it has been because of politics. [. . . . ] Muslims have taken serious religious interest in Jerusalem at times when it has most conspicuously served them politically; and when the political climate has changed, the religious interest has flagged. [ . . . . ]

[During the Crusades] Christian knights traveled from distant lands to make Jerusalem their capital made the city more valuable in Muslim eyes. [Historian Emanuel] Sivan writes, 'It was a city strongly coveted by the enemies of the faith, and thus became, in a sort of mirror-image syndrome, dear to Muslim hearts.'

The city then lapsed into its usual obscurity for nearly eight centuries. The Temple Mount sanctuaries were abandoned and became dilapidated. [. . . . ] Gustav Flaubert of Madame Bovary fame visited in 1850 and found 'ruins everywhere.' Mark Twain in 1867 wrote that Jerusalem 'has lost all its ancient grandeur, and [has] become a pauper village.'

In modern times, notes the Israeli scholar Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Jerusalem 'became the focus of religious and political Arab activity only at the beginning of the present century, and only because of the renewed Jewish activity in the city and Judaism's claims on the Western Wailing Wall.' [. . . . ]

[During the British Mandate] Arab politicians made Jerusalem a prominent destination; Iraqi leaders frequently turned up, where they demonstrably prayed at Al-Aqsa and gave rousing speeches. But when Muslims retook the Old City with its Islamic sanctuaries in 1948, they quickly lost interest in it. [When held by Jordan] In fact, the Hashemites made a concerted effort to diminish the holy city's importance in favor of their capital, Amman. [. . . .] Once again, Arab Jerusalem became an isolated provincial town, now even less important than Nablus. The economy stagnated and many thousands left Arab Jerusalem. . . . . Jordanian radio broadcast the Friday prayers not from al-Aqsa Mosque but from a mosque in Amman. [. . . .]

All this abruptly changed after June 1967, when the Old City came under Israeli control. As in the British period, Palestinians again made Jerusalem the centerpiece of their political program. Pictures of the Dome of the Rock turned up everywhere, from Yasir Arafat's office to the corner grocery. The PLO's 1968 Constitution described Jerusalem as 'the seat of the Palestine Liberation Organization.' [. . . . ] As it was under the British mandate, Jerusalem has since 1967 again become the primary vehicle for mobilizing international Muslim opinion.

[. . . .] Since Israeli occupation, some ideologues have sought to establish the historical basis of Islamic attachment to Jerusalem by raising three main arguments, all of them historically dubious. First, they assert a Muslim connection to Jerusalem that predates the Jewish one. [. . . .] Jerusalem's founding antedated Islam by about two millennia, so how can that be?

Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations explains: 'the Muslim attachment to Jerusalem does not begin with the prophet Muhammad, it begins with the prophets Abraham, David, Solomon and Jesus, who are also prophets in Islam.' In other words, the central figures of Judaism and Christianity were really proto-Muslims.

[. . . . ] some Muslims deny Jerusalem any importance to Jews. Abd al-Malik Dahamshe, an Arab member of Israel's parliament, flatly stated last month that 'the Western Wall is not associated with the remains of the Jewish Temple.' A fundamentalist Israel Arab leader went further and announced that 'It's prohibited for Jews to pray at the Western Wall.'

[ . . . .] Muslim interest lies not so much in controlling Jerusalem as it does in denying control over the city to anyone else. . . . ."

Comment: It can be expected that diplomats, academics, commentators and reporters will nevertheless continue to demand that Israel honor the Muslim sanctity of Jerusalem and surrender its own ancient capital and holy city and holy places.

If Israel now breaks it 3,000-year-old vow "If I forget you, O, Jerusalem . . . ", it breaks its own heart and dooms itself. The enemies of the Jews, wherever they be, know this well and it fuels their lust for such a surrender.

* * * * * * *

3] ON PALESTINE

"There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not."

                                   -- Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian

                                       to Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, 1946

Until 1967, the Arabs insisted that there has never ever been a nation of Palestine. In that they were entirely correct. [See Issue 2]

In 1937, the British Peel Commission studied the situation in Mandate Palestine and a spokesman for the Arabs therein assured the Commission that "There is no such country as Palestine. 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented. . . . Our country was for centuries part of Syria. 'Palestine' is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it."

In 1956, eight years after the rebirth of the State of Israel, the delegate of Saudi Arabia to the United Nations testified to the Security Council that "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria."

From 1948 through 1967, the war of the Arab nations against Israel -- including military attacks, terrorism, blockades and international boycotts -- was meant to destroy Israel, take its lands and fruits for themselves, and slaughter, drive our or subjugate the Jews. Judea-Samaria was seized and held by Jordan and dubbed its "West Bank". The Gaza Strip was seized and held by Egypt. The Arabic-speaking residents of these regions made no claims to a national identity or to independence. The erection of a new state for them was not on any Arab agenda.

When the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) was founded in 1964, it defined its purpose as the destruction of Israel; it did not seek a state for itself. Three years later, Egypt, Syria and Jordan launched a war of annihilation against Israel, and at the end of the Six Days Israel had won back its own historic Judea-Samaria (Yesha) and held the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights as well.

In this new scene, Arab rhetoric on "Drive The Jews Into the Sea" had gone stale. They revised the rhetoric, but not the intent. Outsiders and onlookers who might still be a bit squeamish about condoning the destruction of Israel and another massacre of Jews were susceptible to a sham appeal of justice for deprived and dispossessed Arab victims. So a new ancient national identity was invented. The same voices that had so recently been insisting that "Palestine" did not exist in Arab history, suddenly cried out for The Inalienable Rights of The Palestinian People.

The Arabic-speaking peoples who had settled west of the Jordan River -- most of them in recent years -- were suddenly discovered to be sons and daughters of an ancient Palestinian Nation, whose roots went back thousands of years to the beginning of recorded history if not to the creation of the world. The same Arabs world that in 1947 violently rejected an Arab state west of the Jordan, discovered in 1967 that it must have it, and sprayed terror around the world to make the point.

The new line of propaganda met with great success. It was wide indifference to the fact that the two slogans of "Drive the Jews Into the Sea" and "Rights of the Palestinians" promoted the same unchanged goal. This is openly proclaimed by the PLO itself in its 1974 Plan of Stages:

Stage 1: "Through violent struggle, establish a combatant national authority over any territory that is liberated from Israeli rule."

Meaning: Trick Israel into permitting a PLO Authority or a PLO-state in any plot of land west of the Jordan.

Stage 2: Use the territory of the national authority as a base for attacks on Israel. Provoke an all-out war to "liberate all Palestinian territory" 

Meaning: Obtain a regional base and then use it for the on-going assault against the existence of Israel.

Zuheir Muhsin, of the PLO's Military Department and Executive Council,.1977:

"There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity, because it is in the interest of the Arabs to encourage a separate Palestinian identity. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel."

Explicit and public statements of such intent did not deter the Israelis who perpetrated the Oslo Accords in 1993, thereby making Stage 1 a reality.

The pretense and the reality were both on the scales on the day in September 1993 when those lethal accords were signed on the lawn of the White House by Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel, and Yassir Arafat, Chief of the PLO, with the President of the United States as witness and the cameras of the world fixed on the ceremony.

The words of the pretense are set out in the Declaration of Principles of the Oslo Accords:

"The PLO considers that the signing of the Declaration of Principles constitutes a historic event, inaugurating a new epoch of peaceful co-existence, free from violence and all other acts which endanger peace and stability. Accordingly, the PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence and will assume responsibility over all PLO elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance, prevent violations and discipline violators."

The words of the reality were spoken the very same day, when Arafat speaking in Arabic over Jordan Radio assured his audience that the Oslo Accords are Stage 1 of the Plan-of-Stages. He elaborated upon this in 1994, in a statement to those of his followers who did not grasp the value of the Oslo Accords:

In order to obtain the goal of returning to Palestine, all of us sometimes have to grit our teeth. But it is forbidden that this harm the continued struggle against the Zionist enemy. Cooperation and understanding between the PLO and the rejectionist organizations is what will lead to the speedy retreat of Israel from the occupied territories in the first stage, until the establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem. Only a state like that can then continue the struggle to remove the enemy from all Palestinian lands.

To the Arabs, "Palestine" never means the territories of Judea-Samaria-Gaza. It always means all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including Israel. Thus, pleas for the "two-state solution" are unwittingly or wittingly based on a delusion and/or a deceit. These delusions and deceits weigh on one side of the scale of balances. On the other side are the open but widely ignored avowals of purpose.

Othman Abu-Gharbiya, PLO Director of Political Indoctrination, 1999:

Every Palestinian must clearly understand that the independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital, is not the end of the process but rather a stage on the road to a democratic state in the whole of Palestine. This will be followed by a third phase, namely Palestine's complete amalgamation in the Arab and Islamic cultural, national, historic, and geographic environment. This is the permanent-status solution.

Faisal el-Husseini, high-ranking PLO and "minister" for Jerusalem, 2001:

If we agree to declare our state over the West Bank and Gaza, our ultimate goal is the liberation of all Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea. We distinguish the strategic long-term goals from the political phased goals, which we are compelled to temporarily accept due to international pressure. 

The current political-diplomatic hallucination of a self-appointed international quartet, is that peace lies at the end of its "roadmap" to Jewish and an Arab states living tranquilly side by side within the tiny bounds of the Land of Israel. The PLO has publicly accepted and committed itself to this roadmap, while simultaneously violating every responsibility that the plan imposes upon it and demanding concessions from Israel that do not appear in the plan.

At the same time it gives lip-service to the designs of the quartet, its own designs are broadcast on its official television station. A video film that shows the forthcoming death of Israel by stoning, followed by the rise of the Palestinian flag over all the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Comment: It can be expected that diplomats, academics, commentators and reporters will, despite the unconcealed elucidations, continue to mis-define the Oslo War as "an uprising for independence" or "an insurgency for statehood".

* * * * * * *

4] ON AMERICA

Scores of Americans have been victims of the PLO terrorism. Sometimes they are included by chance in indiscriminate attacks. Sometimes they are singled out, as when Arafat ordered and supervised the abduction and murder of the U.S. Ambassador and the Charge d'Affaires in Khartoum, Sudan.

When America suffers, the "Palestinians" cheer. They greeted the mass murders of September 11 with public celebration, dancing, singing and distribution of sweets. In PLO-land, media and clergy routinely incite hatred of America and pray that disaster befall it.

Against this background, three members of an American group in Gaza to interview Arab candidates for Fulbright Scholarships for study in the United States, were murdered by PLO terrorists.

Reported by Itamar Marcus, PMW (Palestinian Media Watch), 15 October 2003:

PMW has been documenting the duplicity of the Palestinian Authority towards the United States for years. In its English statements, the PA presents itself as an American ally, while its Arabic messages incite its people to hate and kill Americans. Never has this hypocrisy been more striking than today, after the Palestinian ambush that targeted and killed three American diplomats in the Gaza Strip. The official PA rushed to condemn the attack -- even as the PA-controlled media continues its relentless campaign of anti-American indoctrination. [. . . .]

During the war in Iraq, the PA actively endorsed the killing of Americans, and even produced a music video celebrating the deaths of US soldiers that was broadcast repeatedly on official PA TV [, . . .] In the months before the Iraq war, the official PA daily published calls to Saddam Hussein to turn Iraq into a graveyard for American soldiers. At a pro-Iraq rally they “praised the role of Iraq and the Commander Saddam Hussein, and stressed that Iraq’s land will be a graveyard for the American soldiers...”

[. . . .] This past Friday, the PA sermon broadcast on official PA TV included the following threats and warnings to the US: 'We hear statements by the little American President, oppressive statements. He says Israel has the right to defend itself… These statements carry destruction for America itself . . . We warn the American people that this president is dragging them to the abyss… [Allah] take vengeance on your enemies, our enemies, enemies of religion.” [. . . .]

Clearly, the American diplomats were murdered today by Palestinians fulfilling their role in their war against Americans, as they have been taught by their leaders, through years of hate-mongering and calls for violence against Americans.

The same source that heaped one side of the scale with leaden weights of loathing, seeks to balance them out with one crocodile tear on the other side:

From the PLO website for 15 October 2003:

President [sic] Yasser Arafat, in a statement, drew strong denunciation today over the crime that targeted a US Diplomatic convoy in Beit Hanoon, north of Gaza Strip, which left three people dead.

The statement said that he issued orders to establish a joint Palestinian-American panel to investigate such heinous crime. President Arafat also paid his attributes and heartfelt condolences to the American President Bush and the bereaved families."

END