Facts and truths held for generations no longer matter. They are distorted and tossed aside, all as part of the war on the Jewish right to self determination.
“The first casualty of war is the truth” goes the old maxim. It has proven especially true when it comes to the Arabs and Israel. The many misconceptions and outright lies about Israel have flourished and multiplied during the past seventy years. Years which have witnessed military, economic, information, cultural, and legal warfare — or more precisely, jihad — that the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, have unleashed against Israel, that continue to this day.
Even those who are not directly involved in this war, have taken sides. They are openly aiding and abetting the jihad through financial means. The Palestinian Authority is one of the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid, estimated at $25 billion since the mid-1990s. Five billion dollars of that aid has come from the United States alone.
Historically, it is extraordinary that such a large part of the world community has chosen sides in what is, essentially, a very local conflict, thus making it international and cheering it on for decades.
It is also highly unusual that such a large part of the world community is so ideologically drugged that it participates in the continued slow butchering of the first victim of this long war: The Truth.
As the Jewish radical and anti-Semite, Ilan Pappe, told the Belgian newspaper “Le Soir” in 1999: “Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers.”
Jordanians and Palestinians are “one people living in two states”, President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who is currently in the twelfth year of the four-year term he was elected to on 9 January 2005, told a meeting with the Mayor of Amman on November 24 according to the Jordan News Agency. In other words, what the president of the PA admitted is that there is no such thing as ‘Palestine’.
This, ‘oops, I did it again’ moment echoes the other times when the so-called Palestinian Arabs have admitted that they are simply just Arabs and that there is no such thing as ‘Palestine’.
“Before the Balfour Promise, when the Ottoman rule [1517-1917] ended, Palestine’s political borders as we know them today did not exist, and there was nothing called a Palestinian people with a political identity as we know today”, an Arab historian Abd Al-Ghani said on official PA TV on November 1.
These admissions are completely ignored by the world community. Given large parts of that community’s stance on Israel, this is unsurprising. The truth is highly inconvenient.
Worse, however, is that the government of Israel continues to ignore these admissions as well. Ever since Israel — in an incredible display of bad judgment — decided to play along with the charade by entering into the Oslo accords and the subsequent establishment of the Palestinian Authority, it appears to have failed to realize that this kind of pretense is the recipe for endless war.
Anyone with a need to lash out against the Jews can engage in the war against the truth about Israel. The most outlandish and outrageous claims are routinely leveled at Israel with seemingly no consequences for those who utter them, because this is the astoundingly low level that has become acceptable in discourse about Israel.
Recently, the son of Nelson Mandela, Mandla Mandela, visited Israel and claimed with a straight face, “Israel is the worst apartheid regime”. Mandla Mandela is so blinded by his ideology that even seeing Israel with his own eyes cannot bring him to tell the truth.
The war on truth is not only fought in and around Israel but in places as far away from Israel as the US.
The New School in New York co-sponsored a panel on antisemitism this week, led by terrorist sympathizer and sharia activist Linda Sarsour, who is against the existence of a Jewish homeland. Also attending were Rebecca Vilkomerson, the executive director of Jewish Voices for Peace, the anti-Semitic organization that most recently supported convicted Arab terrorist Rasmea Odeh, who was involved in the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969, which killed two students.
In the war on truth, there is no such thing as stooping too low: Jew-haters, who would like nothing better than to see Israel destroyed and the Jewish people exiled again, can lead a panel on antisemitism at a leading New York university. The son of an anti-apartheid hero can shamelessly declare Israel ‘the worst apartheid regime’.
There is a different standard applied to any kind of discourse on Jews and Israel, where anything goes, regardless how untruthful and disgraceful it is. Exactly like it was with the “old” antisemitism, where any made up outrage and blood libel against the Jewish people was enthusiastically grasped by the masses and distributed as truth. The times have not really changed all that much.
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Judith Bergman is a columnist and political analyst
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