Friday, April 12, 2013

History, Shmistory: West Bank "Naqba" Museum Takes a Creative Approach to the Truth (and to the Supposed Antiquity of the Palestinians)

As they learned from the Soviets, who were masters at the craft, when history doesn't jibe with your narrative, you can simply make it up:
Rather than be open to the charge that the idea of a “Palestinian people” was invented only as a reaction to the Six-Day War, this Arab museum’s sponsors start with the fiction that such a people existed 200 years ago. 
The bigger lie is the 3,500-year Palestinian history, dating back to the Bible, which, as everyone knows, incorrectly states that the forefather Abraham bound his son Isaac (Yitzchak) for a sacrifice to God. 
Everyone knows just as well as Arab clerics that the Bible really speaks of the Binding of Ishmael, Abraham’s son conceived through the non-Jewish handmaid Hagar. The Jews, of course, changed the original version. That’s what happens when someone controls the media. 
And everyone knows that Jesus was a Palestinian. 
And everyone knows that Rachel’s Tomb is actually the Bilal ibn Rabah mosque, dating back more than 2,000 years before Islam was founded. 
The Palestinian Authority  first made that claim in 1996, but obviously it did not so earlier because of fears of Israeli retaliation, or more likely, because the whole world would have fell over laughing since at that time the Palestinian Authority was far away from using the  peace process to disguise itself as a terrorist organization under the guise of a peace process. Just don’t tell the State Department because no one there has a sense of humor. 
Still, 200 years of history is not a bad lie, and one good lie breeds a another, through the courtesy of international media that insidiously indoctrinates the public.
The Palestinian people may not go way back, but Islamic supersessionism (and what else is the "naqba" museum but a prime example of that?) sure does--all the way back to the Middle Ages, in fact.

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