Posts tagged Sharpe
A guide to the perplexed
Jun 20th
by Victor Sharpe
I was asked by a friend recently to assist a Christian Zionist lady who had received some anti-Israel propaganda at her church and was perplexed and swayed by the opposing points of view she was reading. I have taken the liberty of using as my title the same one used in the great work of Moses Maimonides who clarified Jewish law during medieval times. I have used only the first letter of the lady’s name and replied to her as follows:
Dear C, Israel is the ancestral and biblical homeland of the Jewish people. Not only is it their spiritual homeland but they are the indiginous, native people of the land. Simply read the Bible. It is not only the word of Almighty God but a remarkable and accurate history book. Though Arab propagandists attempt to accuse Israel of rejecting peace, the facts are that the reborn Jewish state has offered repeatedly to make the enormous sacrifice of sharing its tiny land – no larger than Wales or New Jersey – with its Arab neigbors, but this has been rejected time and time again.
The tragedy is that those Arabs, who call themselves Palestinians, do not want to live in a state side by side with Israel – they want a state instead of Israel. The ultimate tragedy for the world is that wherever the Muslim foot has trod triumphal – as in the 7th century Arab invasion of the Jewish homeland – that land is forever considered in Islam as part of the Umma, the Muslim community, and, if lost, must be recovered through endless war. Thus, while it remains free of Muslim occupation it is considered in the Dar al-Harb, the House of War.
This means that Islam will not permit any non-Muslim state to exist in land the Muslims consider was once theirs. The same applies to Spain and Portugal, which once were conquered by Muslim armies, along with vast areas of France, Italy, Sicily, the Balkans, Southern Russia, Greece – even up to the very gates of Vienna in Austria. All these territories were once invaded and conquered by Muslim armies and must be returned to Islam according to Islamic teaching.
I merely write the above so that you will see that whatever Israel offers the Arab and Muslim world in a heartfelt plea for peace it will always be rebuffed and rejected. The terrible proof of this is the breathtaking concession that Israel made in 2005. It took the immense risk for peace and left the Gaza Strip for the Arabs to begin creating a nascent and peaceful nation, which would hopefully build schools, libraries and hospitals and all the trappings of a civilized and democratic state.
Israel’s government at the time even forcibly removed the 10,000 Jewish villagers from their productive farms throughout the Gaza Strip and left the greenhouses and agricultural infrastructure behind for the Arabs to use. Instead, the farms were trashed and the remaining synagogues desecrated. Meanwhile the exiled Jews still live as refugees inside Israel. Shortly after, the Islamist Hamas organization, which calls in its charter for the slaughter of the Jews in Israel and the destruction of the reborn Jewish homeland, launched a bloody civil war against the Fatah organization and occupied the Gaza territory.
Immediately, Hamas began to fire missiles into Israeli scholls, kindergartens and civilian homes. To date, Hamas has launched over 12,000 rockets into Israeli villages and towns and continues to smuggle in ever lethal and advanced weapons to kill and maim Israeli civilians. Israel’s amazingly risky decision to leave Gaza and help the Arabs to create the beginnings of a viable and peaceful state were torn to shreds by the Hamas and Islamic jihad terror machine, which now has given the world empirical proof that the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians want NO peace with Israel ever.
One vital matter you must also understand is that there has never, in all of recorded history, been an independent – let alone Arab independent – state of Palestine. That word was created and employed by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who destroyed the Jewish homeland in 135 AD, and who renamed it Philistia, which morphed into Palestina and Palestine, because he knew that the ancient and hated enemies of the Jewish people were the Philistines and he chose to insult the surviving Jews by changing the name of their homeland thus.
The land remained merely a geographical territory in name only, just as Siberia and Patagonia for example are not independent nations but merely geographical regions. Despite an endless succession of alien occupiers, Jews always remained in the land in whatever numbers they could sustain. Wherever Jews lived throughout the long years of dispersion, Israel was and is always a focal point in the synagogue service. The very agricultural cycles of Israel are celebrated in various Jewish harvest festivals.
No other people has such an inextricable religious and national relationship with the Promised Land; a special place that the first Jew, Abraham, was led to by God and through Isaac and Jacob – not Ishmael – became a special people unto the Lord. In time, Moses, the Lawgiver, led the Jews from Egyptian bondage back to the Promised Land and the biblical narrative proceeds from there.
C, please do not be swayed by emotional claims from the Arab world, and from those in your church who would deceve you as they have themselves been deceived, unless you can find the truth and the proof to back up their statements. Feel free to run them by me at any time if it helps. I will certainly be willing to answer your questions.
Best wishes, and because you want to understand and learn, let me write in Hebrew this honorific:
Kol HaKavod (All honor to you).
Victor Sharpe
Israeli and Kurdish victims of Turkey
Jun 17th
by Victor Sharpe
Sometime ago, before Turkey chose to lurch further into the deadly embrace of Islamism, I received a plea from a Kurdish friend who remains supportive of Israel’s epic struggle to survive among its hostile Arab neighbors. He is also devoted to the Jewish people for he knows of the shared ethnicities believed to exist between Jews and Kurds dating back millennia.
Here is some of my Kurdish friend’s impassioned letter from two years ago, which uncannily warned against any alliance with Turkey:
“I wish the Jews in Israel and abroad would know better about the policy of their leaders concerning the Kurds, because it happens in the name of Israel, and that should matter to all Jews. Turkish oppression of the Kurds is unknown to most Israelis. It is hard for me to understand how Israel’s cooperation with Turkey does not take into account the misery that it imposes upon the Kurdish people who yearn, as the Jews have for centuries, to be free from terror and persecution?
“Not so long ago, the Jews in Europe endured the Shoah (he used the Hebrew term for the Holocaust — VS) and they know better than anyone else the horrors of that experience.
“Of course it’s not only Israel but the whole world that is pro-Turkish and anti-Kurdish. It is not fair to criticize Israel only, but given the history of the Jewish people, there should be a heightened sensitivity towards Kurdish suffering.
“We Kurds have shared so much culture together and we still remember fondly the Jews who lived with us for centuries. But the Turks waxed and waned in their attitude towards the Jews; sometimes they were tolerant and sometimes hostile. There are many Turks today who share Islamist ideas and proclaim hostility towards the Jewish state. Within Turkey lies the same pestilence of anti-Semitism that exists throughout the Arab and Persian world.
“I remember your moving article in which you categorically made clear that the people who truly deserve an independent sovereign state are the Kurds; not the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. I also feel deeply that one day there will be an abiding and honorable alliance between the Jewish state and a free and independent Kurdistan. But arming Turkey, our people’s oppressor, is morally and geographically not to Israel’s advantage. Israel’s cooperation with Turkey is, in reality, a misguided support for political Islam and its oppression of the Kurds. It undermines Israel’s credibility with the only true friend it has in the Middle East.”
Now in hindsight, it is glaringly obvious how correct my Kurdish friend’s warning at the time was.
Turkey is now an enemy of both Israel and the Kurdish people. In a previous letter, as Turkish troops were invading Kurdistan and jet aircraft were bombarding Kurdish villages in northern Iraq, my friend was more pointed in his criticism of the Israeli leadership’s shortsightedness. He defended without question what he called, “Israel’s cause and the undying truth that Jews are the rightful owners of the historic Jewish lands — now partially occupied by the Arabs. But he also pointed out that, “the legitimate arguments and rights Israel has are the same rights and truths it denies in its official policy towards the Kurds. For now and for the future, everything looks black. I fear the worst for us. The whole world is against us, and on the Turkish side there is no change….”
Coincidentally, Ruth King, a freelance writer who is a columnist for several magazines, urged those who read, “feelgood stories about Turkey” to remember the ship, Struma. In 1941, while carrying 769 Jewish refugees fleeing from the Nazi German killing machine, it was not permitted to land in Turkey and sank with appalling loss of life.
With the reality of Israel’s reconstitution as a sovereign nation in its ancestral and biblical homeland has come the equal reality of its uniqueness and isolation within a hostile world.
The rush to bash Israel by hypocritical national leaders and the falsehoods perpetrated by international news agencies such as the Associated Press (AP) despite the video tapes and pictures showing pipe wielding, masked thugs, screaming “kill the Jews,” while beating up Israeli soldiers — armed at first only with paint ball guns — is despicable. Thugs, Islamists, and jihadists claiming to be “peace” activists aboard a Turkish ferry boat, with the Turkish Prime Minister’s own direct collaboration, should be an indictment of Turkey, not Israel. But this is not a moral world.
The international outpouring of imbecilic hatred towards the embattled Jewish state for merely trying to defend its citizens from a future maritime pipeline delivering lethal weapons and deadly missiles into Gaza to be used to kill Jewish civilians is one of the most depressing indictments of humanity. In this, Israel shares with the Kurds a familial fate. Both endure relentless aggression from their neighbors. Even though it lives in a terrible neighborhood and desperately seeks friends, Israel must not evade its unique responsibility towards the Kurdish people, who also suffer from the depredations of their hostile neighbors — especially Iran, Syria, and last but not least, Turkey.
The Jewish state, now undergoing what individual Jews endured for centuries — a bloody and irrational persecution – must now, more than ever, not ignore the Kurds, who remain stateless and shunned by the world and who seek, at last, the historic justice they have craved for centuries but have been denied; an independent state of their own.
According to an article titled “Can Israel make it alone?” written some years ago by James Lewis in the American Thinker, Lewis wrote: “Nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests — like survival.” With the stark reality now of a profoundly less friendly Obama Administration, it is more important than ever to see what he wrote: “If the United States abandons the Jewish State, Jerusalem will have to seek new alliances.”
Turkey has now chosen to break its alliance with Israel and instead has sought alliances with rogue states such as Iran and Syria, along with the Hamas occupied and terrorist infested Gaza Strip. It has turned on Israel with a viciousness that is desolating to watch. It is a nation turning its back upon the Ataturk secular revolution of the 1920s. Instead, it is sliding remorsefully back to the 7th century mindset and cesspit that so many of its neighbors wallow in.
The Turkish regime is allowing ant-Semitic films and documentaries to be broadcast relentlessly, thus poisoning the minds of both its secular and Islamist population. One need only hark back to the demonization and vilification spewed against the Jews for years under Hitler in Nazi Germany to see how most Germans behaved and what horrors resulted.
Whether or not President Barack Obama continues to act negatively towards the Jewish state, any new Israeli alliances should include the restoration of a profoundly just, moral and enduring pact with the Kurdish people, and assistance towards creating a future independent State of Kurdistan. That may be the silver lining from the present international flotilla of xenophobic hatred presently sailing towards Israel’s shores.
Victor Sharpe is the author of Volumes One and Two of Politicde: The attempted murder of the Jewish state, available at LuluPress or on Amazon.com
The many fables of Saeb Erakat
May 23rd
I once wrote an earlier article, which was titled: Lies, damned lies, and Palestinian propaganda in descending order. That title paraphrased British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli’s, 19th century aphorism: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Few have mastered the art of dissimilitude more than long time Palestinian Arab spokesman, Saeb Erakat, who continues to be taken seriously by the ever gullible western media. Now in his late middle age, Erakat continues to spew howlers as he has been doing for several decades, yet he still retains the confidence of mainstream western journalists and reporters.
This is the man who bamboozled the world on CNN in April 2002 by baldly stating that Israel had, “massacred at least 500 people in Jenin and women and children were missing.”
This outrageous lie was effectively dismissed by Colin Powell himself and its falsehood subsequently confirmed by the UN, which went on to report that 56 Arabs were killed (34 of them armed combatants) in fighting by the IDF against Palestinian Arab terror squads infesting the Arab city. This is the city from which some 28 suicide bombers had infiltrated the Jewish state, perpetrating atrocities against hundreds of Israeli civilians during the previous 18 months. Erakat knew his words were false but he also knew the effectiveness of the “big lie.”
No Arab civilians were missing. However, many of the 22 civilians killed were used as human shields by the Arab terrorists – in itself an Arab war crime that remains unpunished.
Erakat’s outright lie was hardly challenged, nor his credibility dented. After all, he has made a perverse career of half-truths, mistruths and spectacular falsehoods over several decades while acting as a Palestinian spokesman and negotiator in what is called the, “peace process.” In the latest round of indirect talks between the Israelis and the Arabs, who call themselves Palestinians, brokered by George Mitchell at the behest of his master in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, Erakat is again front and center obfuscating and manipulating the clueless media in the way he knows best.
In an article by Bret Stephens titled Liar, liar in December 2002, published in the Jerusalem Post, it was pointed out that up to that date, “Erakat has had no less than 11,382 citations in the English language press since 1988” – a veritable Niagra Falls of falsehoods that have done so much to poison the minds of countless readers against Israel. Since then the torrent of Erakat whoppers has washed away any sense of historical accuracy.
Here are a few of the many deliberate lies Mr. Erakat has uttered:
In the International Herald Tribune (11/26/05) , Saeb Erekat wrote “Israel is a nuclear power boasting the fifth-largest military in the world.” Correction (1/3/06): “While there are various ways to measure military strength, in terms of manpower alone and counting both active service members and reservists, Israel’s military ranks 18th globally, according to data in the latest edition of “The Military Balance,” a reference by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.”
Erakat has often claimed to the Western world and through its media that, “Palestinians are committed to two equal states for two peoples.” Sounds nice to western ears, but facts tell a very different story. Well over 60% of Arabs calling themselves Palestinians reject outright such an Erakat claim. And Mahmoud Abbas himself, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, rejects utterly any willingness to accept Israel as a Jewish state. Erakat can provide no evidence that he or his cronies seek peace, while Israel can show three peace offers in the past decade. But according to the current Palestinian narrative, effectively conveyed by Erakat, the fault for the absence of negotiations or peace lies with Israel.
Erakat claims repeatedly that Israeli villages in Judea and Samaria, which Erakat describes in the anti-Israel nomenclature as “settlements in the West Bank,” cover 42% of the disputed territory when in fact they control barely 5% of the ancestral and biblical Jewish heartland. Bret Stephens pointed out in his December, 2002 article that, Erakat says “settlers” are stealing Palestinian water resources. Yet almost all “settlers” are linked to the central Israeli water grid and do not use local wells.” What is fact is that the Arabs pollute the scant water resources and aquifer within Judea and Samaria and the very term, Palestinian water resources, is to implicitly pre-judge whose land it truly is.
He also mentioned that, “Erekat says Israel plans to deprive Palestinians of everything but “an insignificant presence in Jerusalem.” Yet at Camp David, much of east Jerusalem was theirs for the taking. They refused it.”
Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, proved that telling a big lie over and over again assured that most people would come to believe it. However, Saeb Erakat also proves that if you tell a multitude of small lies over and over again, a multitude of people will believe them without question.
Erakat’s career has been just such a monument to dissimilitude. Sadly, there are many people anxious and willing to accept any nonsense uttered by such a master of deceits – which brings me to his latest outrage.
According to Israel National News, Saeb Erakat has criticized Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for mentioning the Jewish people’s historic ties to Jerusalem as described in the Bible. He accused the prime minister of, “using religion to incite hatred and fear.” Biblical references it seems are now considered hate mongering by the Islamic world. The Holy Jewish Bible refers to Jerusalem and Zion, which are synonymous, 850 times.
The Holy Christian Bible refers to them some 154 times. The Holy Koran does not refer to Jerusalem at all. Instead the Koran commands Muslims to: “ … fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.” Koran 9:5. Propaganda is a stratagem of war and Mr. Erakat knows all too well how to wage it.
Erakat has often sought to dismiss the inextricable 3,000 year old Jewish ties to Jerusalem and has claimed that Jewish heritage on the Temple Mount, the site of the two ancient Jewish Temples, are a threat to Islam.
The neighborhoods illegally occupied by the Jordanian regime from 1948 to 1967 are now claimed by the Palestinian Authority as the future capital of a PA state. They include the Old City, the City of David and the Temple Mount. But Jewish residents of these very neighborhoods were expelled from them by the British officered Jordanian Arab Legion in 1948.
Erakat warned just this last week that, “East Jerusalem cannot continue to be occupied if there is to be peace.” This too will be believed by many in the international corridors of power and the media even as they know in their heart of hearts that if Jerusalem was again divided – like Berlin once was – there still will never be peace from the Arabs.
Saeb Erakat will continue to obfuscate and dissemble in his inimitable fashion, ever hiding the empirical fact that the Muslim world will never accept a Jewish state however much of its biblical and ancestral patrimony it gives away in pursuit of peace. Mr. Erakat well knows that even if Israel shrank to one downtown square in Tel Aviv its existence would still be a provocation to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
The one truth that Erakat will never reveal is that the Palestinian Arab leadership will never accept a “two state solution.” They want no Jewish state side by side with their Arab and Muslim state.
Indeed, they ultimately want one state stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the borders of Iraq – that is an Islamic state, including the present day Kingdom of Jordan, in which neither Jews nor Hashemites will be permitted to remain. It will inevitably become a Hamas controlled state willingly tied to the baleful influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran – an extension of Islamist and jihadist influence on the very doorstep of Europe and a bridgehead for the dreamed of worldwide Islamic Caliphate.
Victor Sharpe is the author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.