History and Context Israel and Palestine
"Those who don't study history are condemned to repeat it". What are the roots of this problem? Is history repeating itself? What must be understood to understand the situation, draw valid conclusions, and make workable solutions?
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
"the Jewish-Israeli pupil "knows" that the Arabs are a primitive people with a murderous religion and a miserable culture"
March 26, 2007 | Reality Must Change First | Schoolbooks and Borders | By URI AVNERY
Incredible! In Palestinian schoolbooks, there is no trace of the Green Line! They do not recognize the existence of Israel even in the 1967 borders! They say that the "Zionist gangs" stole the country from the Arabs! That's how they poison the minds of their children!
These blood-curdling revelations were published this week in Israel and around the world. The conclusion is self-evident: the Palestinian Authority, which is responsible for the schoolbooks, cannot be a partner in peace negotiations.
What a shock!
................
Well, what about our side? What do our schoolbooks look like?
Does the Green Line appear in them? Do they recognize the right of the Palestinians to establish a state on the other side of our 1967 borders? Do they teach love for the Palestinian people (or even the existence of the Palestinian people), or respect for the Arabs in general, or a knowledge of Islam?
The answer to all these questions: Absolutely not!
Recently, Minister of Education Yuli Tamir came out with a bombastic announcement saying that she intends to mark the Green Line in the schoolbooks, from which it was removed almost 40 years ago. The Right reacted angrily, and nothing more was heard about it.
From kindergarten to the last day of high school, the Israeli pupil does not learn that the Arabs have any right at all to any of this land. On the contrary, it is clear that the land belongs to us alone, that God has personally given it to us, that we were indeed driven out by the Romans after the destruction of our Temple in the year 70 (a myth) but that we returned at the beginning of the Zionist movement. Since then, the Arabs have tried again and again to annihilate us, as the Goyim have done in every generation. In 1936, the "gangs" (the official Israeli term for the fighters of the Arab Revolt) attacked and murdered us. And so on, up to this very day.
When he comes out of the pedagogic mill, the Jewish-Israeli pupil "knows" that the Arabs are a primitive people with a murderous religion and a miserable culture. He brings this view with him when he (or she) joins the army a few weeks later. There, it is reinforced almost automatically. The daily humiliation of old people and women--not to mention everybody else--at the checkpoints would not be possible otherwise. ...
March 26, 2007 | Reality Must Change First | Schoolbooks and Borders | By URI AVNERY
Incredible! In Palestinian schoolbooks, there is no trace of the Green Line! They do not recognize the existence of Israel even in the 1967 borders! They say that the "Zionist gangs" stole the country from the Arabs! That's how they poison the minds of their children!
These blood-curdling revelations were published this week in Israel and around the world. The conclusion is self-evident: the Palestinian Authority, which is responsible for the schoolbooks, cannot be a partner in peace negotiations.
What a shock!
................
Well, what about our side? What do our schoolbooks look like?
Does the Green Line appear in them? Do they recognize the right of the Palestinians to establish a state on the other side of our 1967 borders? Do they teach love for the Palestinian people (or even the existence of the Palestinian people), or respect for the Arabs in general, or a knowledge of Islam?
The answer to all these questions: Absolutely not!
Recently, Minister of Education Yuli Tamir came out with a bombastic announcement saying that she intends to mark the Green Line in the schoolbooks, from which it was removed almost 40 years ago. The Right reacted angrily, and nothing more was heard about it.
From kindergarten to the last day of high school, the Israeli pupil does not learn that the Arabs have any right at all to any of this land. On the contrary, it is clear that the land belongs to us alone, that God has personally given it to us, that we were indeed driven out by the Romans after the destruction of our Temple in the year 70 (a myth) but that we returned at the beginning of the Zionist movement. Since then, the Arabs have tried again and again to annihilate us, as the Goyim have done in every generation. In 1936, the "gangs" (the official Israeli term for the fighters of the Arab Revolt) attacked and murdered us. And so on, up to this very day.
When he comes out of the pedagogic mill, the Jewish-Israeli pupil "knows" that the Arabs are a primitive people with a murderous religion and a miserable culture. He brings this view with him when he (or she) joins the army a few weeks later. There, it is reinforced almost automatically. The daily humiliation of old people and women--not to mention everybody else--at the checkpoints would not be possible otherwise. ...
Monday, March 19, 2007
US... approval to a continuing abomination that must inevitably, and sooner now rather than later, result in some very bitter chickens coming home ...
February, 2007 | Why Does America Support Israel? | By Lawrence DiStasi
For many years now, and increasingly these days, this has been the question of questions. Israel, a nation that routinely violates United Nations resolutions, a nation that maintains a brutal occupation of an indigenous people, depriving that people of almost every human right-this nation of Israel is and has for over fifty years been given full and unqualified support by the United States.
This is a United States that professes to be in favor of self-determination for all peoples, that routinely offers sympathy and empathy and military aid for such nations in their struggles for "freedom." And yet there persists the fact of US support for Israel that in dollars alone has amounted to some $109 billion over the last fifty years.
...
The key, it seems to me, lies in the past. I mean the real past, not the mythologized past, and the parallels that lie in the founding of both nations.
Consider Israel first. Though most Americans probably accept the myths perpetrated by Leon Uris in his novel, Exodus, the truth is something quite other.
The land of Palestine was not, in May 1948 at Israel's founding, the mythologized "empty desert" made to bloom by Israeli settlers. Rather, it was a land occupied by indigenous Arabs-farmers, tradesmen, village dwellers, artists, teachers-for countless generations. In 1919, for example, Jewish immigrants amounted to only 10% of the residents of the land called Palestine that had been placed under British mandate after World War I. And that mandate to the British was mainly designed to ensure that the 90% majority Palestinian people achieved self-determination.
One qualifier, deriving from England's Balfour Declaration of 1917, added that there should be a "Jewish national home" in Palestine, but the mandate also noted that "nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine..."
Despite that, despite several partition plans offered by both the British (the Peel Plan of 1937; the White Paper of 1936), the UN (several plans by UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) and the United States-plans which offered two-state solutions which partitioned the original land of Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state (the latter usually being significantly larger to reflect the overwhelming advantage in population held by Palestinians, at least 65% even as late as 1948)-the Zionists in control of Jewish policy chose war as their opportunity to seize the vast majority of Palestine.
This was done in conventional battles, but also in terrorist attacks that were designed, via a well-known strategy called Plan D, to terrorize Palestinian civilians into fleeing. In the almost total absence of a competent Arab fighting force, and aided by the outright betrayal of the Palestinian people by Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan, the Zionist strategy worked.
Massacres of whole villages such as Dir Yassin created fear and terror in the Palestinian population, and in the end, some 750,000 Palestinians fled from their villages, villages which were then seized by Jewish forces and either obliterated, or completely occupied by Jewish immigrants pouring from Europe into the newly declared state. Tellingly, that new state, and its constitution, never declared what its boundaries were, this in order to adhere to the original Zionist intention, i.e. that the Jewish state was, sooner or later, to be comprised of all of Palestine.
But how could a new Jewish state take all of Palestine? What of the Palestinians? Zionism has always been very clear about this: the Palestinians would have to go. There is voluminous historical evidence to support this fact. To cite only a few cases:
In 1948, David Ben-Gurion said, "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population. (Edward Herman, "Benign Ethnic Cleansing," www.Znet.com 8/9/06)
At about the same time, Menahem Begin, future Prime Minister of Israel and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, put it in even stronger language: "The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever." (Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, p. 161)
In 1998, prime minister Ariel Sharon made clear that despite much hoopla about peace agreements in the years from 1948 to the century's end, nothing had changed: "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonization or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." (Herman, op cit.)
And as recently as May 24, 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said this to a joint session of the US Congress: "I believed and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land." (Herman, op cit.)
But, one must ask, how could presumably rational people believe they could get away with such open and massive theft? The answer must lie in what Edward Said called the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever assembled, a machine that began its work very early to denigrate Arabs, to slander Palestinians, to deny their very existence. For example, in October of 1947, American rabbi and Zionist leader Abba Hillel Silver said: "There has never been a politically or culturally distinct or distinguishable Arab nation in Palestine. Palestine dropped out of history after the Arab conquest." (UN Weekly Bulletin, Oct. 14, 1947, p. 477.)
Golda Meir, the much venerated Israeli prime minister, in 1969, repeated the same notion: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist. (London Sunday Times, June 15, 1969)
In his Memoirs, David Ben-Gurion repeated the theme, with variations, noting that the Palestinian had no "emotional involvement" with the land of Palestine, for "Why should he? He is equally at ease whether in Jordan, Lebanon or a variety of places. They are as much his country as this is. And as little." (Ben Gurion, Memoirs, p. 118)
And if denying the reality of the Palestinians were not sufficient to justify taking their land, then some more vivid epithets about their level of humanity could always be employed. So we hear the likes of Menahem Begin (the same Menahem Begin who, during the 1948 war, led the Irgun in its infamous massacre of some 200 men, women and children at Dir Yassin) referring to Palestinians as "two-legged beasts."
Other officials have referred to Palestinians as "cockroaches," "lice," "grasshoppers," a "cancer," and other terms to dehumanize them. Most telling of all, perhaps, is Rabbi Yaacov Perin's statement that "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." (Herman, op cit.)
Finally, there is the widespread and self-justifying myth that by taking Palestine from its original, backward inhabitants, Israelis were and are "redeeming the land." This is a justification that is meant to recall the Bible's account of the Jewish expulsion of the Canaanites and Philistines. Though the original, secular Zionists placed little faith in religion per se, they were not averse to using the Bible as a holy precedent for expelling the Palestinians from the "historic" land of Israel.
One Jewish leader said that, after the 1967 war, Israel should not return the lands it had conquered (and still occupies to this day) "because wars of conquest were mandatory in Jewish tradition in order to redeem the Holy Land" (Donald H. Akenson, God's People: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster, Cornell University Press, 1992, p. 321).
Noam Chomsky has cited the journal of a West Bank settlement to give us an equally shocking example: citing the Jewish authority Maimonides, the writer notes that Gentiles are "a people like a donkey," that "conquered" peoples "must not raise their heads in Israel but must be conquered beneath their hand...with complete submission," and that "in a divinely-commanded war [milhemet mitzvah] one must destroy, kill and eliminate men, women and children." (Chomsky, op cit, p. 124, citing Yedidia Segal in Nekudah, Sept. 3, 1982.)
Thus, Israel has long and consistently employed the notion of a Jewish "divine right" to the historic land of Israel (inconveniently called "Palestine" on pre-war maps) to justify the theft of that land, and the oppression and expulsion of its people.
And it is this that lies at the core of America's otherwise astonishing acceptance and approval of such a theft. For at the root of America's founding, its founding myth, lies the same notion of divine writ sanctioning a similar theft, oppression and ethnic cleansing. I am referring, of course, to the by now well-known, though not universally accepted idea that the European settlers who journeyed to the North American continent after 1492 did so not as peaceful pilgrims, but as invaders implementing the large-scale expulsion and decimation of the indigenous peoples who lived there. And the same kinds of divine justification, often referencing ancient Israel as precedent, were offered to rationalize and valorize that theft.
Listen to a few of the statements made by early colonial officials, most of whom believed they had been ordained and guided by God to the New World.
John Winthrop of New England: "We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.
Alexander Whitaker of Virginia: "God hath opened this passage unto us, and led us by the hand unto this work."
Samuel Langdon in 1788: "We cannot but acknowledge that God hath graciously patronized our cause and taken us under his special care, as he did his ancient covenant people."
Thomas Jefferson himself, hardly a conventionally religious man, used the same kind of imagery in his 1st Inaugural: "I shall need... the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessities and comforts of life." (this and previous three quotes from Conrad Cherry (ed.), God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Prentice Hall, Inc., 1971).
By contrast, the Native Americans who had occupied the land for millennia were denigrated in every way possible, beginning with the notion that they were children, not the children of God, but of Satan. They were "savage and brutish people," unskilled in all the arts of agriculture, industry, culture and civilization. They lived in squalor, hardly separate from nature at all, at home even in dense forests which everyone knew to be the domain of diabolical powers. To eject them from such places, English settlers used every means including purchase, trickery, and outright seizure. ...
...
To see that the rape of the north American continent by successive waves of European colonizers was just as abominable as the rape of Palestine by the European Jewish movement known as Zionism. Just as racist. Just as cruel. Just as outrageous and illegal and unjustifiable in any world in which the word justice has the slightest meaning.
And so most Americans do not question. They do not read. They do not notice the lies and evasions and self-justifications in their own histories, or in the histories of Israel. They simply nod their heads and agree that this never-ending conflict must be due to the terrorists, to the flaws in the Arab mind, in the Muslim religion, to something in the middle eastern air. And give their approval to a continuing abomination that must inevitably, and sooner now rather than later, result in some very bitter chickens coming home to roost. As a December 3, 2006 Los Angeles Times article, "Middle East Allies Near a State of Panic," concluded: "Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, warn(ed) that the Middle East was becoming "an abyss.... The region is facing real failure."
February, 2007 | Why Does America Support Israel? | By Lawrence DiStasi
For many years now, and increasingly these days, this has been the question of questions. Israel, a nation that routinely violates United Nations resolutions, a nation that maintains a brutal occupation of an indigenous people, depriving that people of almost every human right-this nation of Israel is and has for over fifty years been given full and unqualified support by the United States.
This is a United States that professes to be in favor of self-determination for all peoples, that routinely offers sympathy and empathy and military aid for such nations in their struggles for "freedom." And yet there persists the fact of US support for Israel that in dollars alone has amounted to some $109 billion over the last fifty years.
...
The key, it seems to me, lies in the past. I mean the real past, not the mythologized past, and the parallels that lie in the founding of both nations.
Consider Israel first. Though most Americans probably accept the myths perpetrated by Leon Uris in his novel, Exodus, the truth is something quite other.
The land of Palestine was not, in May 1948 at Israel's founding, the mythologized "empty desert" made to bloom by Israeli settlers. Rather, it was a land occupied by indigenous Arabs-farmers, tradesmen, village dwellers, artists, teachers-for countless generations. In 1919, for example, Jewish immigrants amounted to only 10% of the residents of the land called Palestine that had been placed under British mandate after World War I. And that mandate to the British was mainly designed to ensure that the 90% majority Palestinian people achieved self-determination.
One qualifier, deriving from England's Balfour Declaration of 1917, added that there should be a "Jewish national home" in Palestine, but the mandate also noted that "nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine..."
Despite that, despite several partition plans offered by both the British (the Peel Plan of 1937; the White Paper of 1936), the UN (several plans by UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) and the United States-plans which offered two-state solutions which partitioned the original land of Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state (the latter usually being significantly larger to reflect the overwhelming advantage in population held by Palestinians, at least 65% even as late as 1948)-the Zionists in control of Jewish policy chose war as their opportunity to seize the vast majority of Palestine.
This was done in conventional battles, but also in terrorist attacks that were designed, via a well-known strategy called Plan D, to terrorize Palestinian civilians into fleeing. In the almost total absence of a competent Arab fighting force, and aided by the outright betrayal of the Palestinian people by Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan, the Zionist strategy worked.
Massacres of whole villages such as Dir Yassin created fear and terror in the Palestinian population, and in the end, some 750,000 Palestinians fled from their villages, villages which were then seized by Jewish forces and either obliterated, or completely occupied by Jewish immigrants pouring from Europe into the newly declared state. Tellingly, that new state, and its constitution, never declared what its boundaries were, this in order to adhere to the original Zionist intention, i.e. that the Jewish state was, sooner or later, to be comprised of all of Palestine.
But how could a new Jewish state take all of Palestine? What of the Palestinians? Zionism has always been very clear about this: the Palestinians would have to go. There is voluminous historical evidence to support this fact. To cite only a few cases:
In 1948, David Ben-Gurion said, "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population. (Edward Herman, "Benign Ethnic Cleansing," www.Znet.com 8/9/06)
At about the same time, Menahem Begin, future Prime Minister of Israel and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, put it in even stronger language: "The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel] will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever." (Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, p. 161)
In 1998, prime minister Ariel Sharon made clear that despite much hoopla about peace agreements in the years from 1948 to the century's end, nothing had changed: "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonization or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." (Herman, op cit.)
And as recently as May 24, 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said this to a joint session of the US Congress: "I believed and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land." (Herman, op cit.)
But, one must ask, how could presumably rational people believe they could get away with such open and massive theft? The answer must lie in what Edward Said called the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever assembled, a machine that began its work very early to denigrate Arabs, to slander Palestinians, to deny their very existence. For example, in October of 1947, American rabbi and Zionist leader Abba Hillel Silver said: "There has never been a politically or culturally distinct or distinguishable Arab nation in Palestine. Palestine dropped out of history after the Arab conquest." (UN Weekly Bulletin, Oct. 14, 1947, p. 477.)
Golda Meir, the much venerated Israeli prime minister, in 1969, repeated the same notion: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist. (London Sunday Times, June 15, 1969)
In his Memoirs, David Ben-Gurion repeated the theme, with variations, noting that the Palestinian had no "emotional involvement" with the land of Palestine, for "Why should he? He is equally at ease whether in Jordan, Lebanon or a variety of places. They are as much his country as this is. And as little." (Ben Gurion, Memoirs, p. 118)
And if denying the reality of the Palestinians were not sufficient to justify taking their land, then some more vivid epithets about their level of humanity could always be employed. So we hear the likes of Menahem Begin (the same Menahem Begin who, during the 1948 war, led the Irgun in its infamous massacre of some 200 men, women and children at Dir Yassin) referring to Palestinians as "two-legged beasts."
Other officials have referred to Palestinians as "cockroaches," "lice," "grasshoppers," a "cancer," and other terms to dehumanize them. Most telling of all, perhaps, is Rabbi Yaacov Perin's statement that "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." (Herman, op cit.)
Finally, there is the widespread and self-justifying myth that by taking Palestine from its original, backward inhabitants, Israelis were and are "redeeming the land." This is a justification that is meant to recall the Bible's account of the Jewish expulsion of the Canaanites and Philistines. Though the original, secular Zionists placed little faith in religion per se, they were not averse to using the Bible as a holy precedent for expelling the Palestinians from the "historic" land of Israel.
One Jewish leader said that, after the 1967 war, Israel should not return the lands it had conquered (and still occupies to this day) "because wars of conquest were mandatory in Jewish tradition in order to redeem the Holy Land" (Donald H. Akenson, God's People: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster, Cornell University Press, 1992, p. 321).
Noam Chomsky has cited the journal of a West Bank settlement to give us an equally shocking example: citing the Jewish authority Maimonides, the writer notes that Gentiles are "a people like a donkey," that "conquered" peoples "must not raise their heads in Israel but must be conquered beneath their hand...with complete submission," and that "in a divinely-commanded war [milhemet mitzvah] one must destroy, kill and eliminate men, women and children." (Chomsky, op cit, p. 124, citing Yedidia Segal in Nekudah, Sept. 3, 1982.)
Thus, Israel has long and consistently employed the notion of a Jewish "divine right" to the historic land of Israel (inconveniently called "Palestine" on pre-war maps) to justify the theft of that land, and the oppression and expulsion of its people.
And it is this that lies at the core of America's otherwise astonishing acceptance and approval of such a theft. For at the root of America's founding, its founding myth, lies the same notion of divine writ sanctioning a similar theft, oppression and ethnic cleansing. I am referring, of course, to the by now well-known, though not universally accepted idea that the European settlers who journeyed to the North American continent after 1492 did so not as peaceful pilgrims, but as invaders implementing the large-scale expulsion and decimation of the indigenous peoples who lived there. And the same kinds of divine justification, often referencing ancient Israel as precedent, were offered to rationalize and valorize that theft.
Listen to a few of the statements made by early colonial officials, most of whom believed they had been ordained and guided by God to the New World.
John Winthrop of New England: "We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.
Alexander Whitaker of Virginia: "God hath opened this passage unto us, and led us by the hand unto this work."
Samuel Langdon in 1788: "We cannot but acknowledge that God hath graciously patronized our cause and taken us under his special care, as he did his ancient covenant people."
Thomas Jefferson himself, hardly a conventionally religious man, used the same kind of imagery in his 1st Inaugural: "I shall need... the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessities and comforts of life." (this and previous three quotes from Conrad Cherry (ed.), God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Prentice Hall, Inc., 1971).
By contrast, the Native Americans who had occupied the land for millennia were denigrated in every way possible, beginning with the notion that they were children, not the children of God, but of Satan. They were "savage and brutish people," unskilled in all the arts of agriculture, industry, culture and civilization. They lived in squalor, hardly separate from nature at all, at home even in dense forests which everyone knew to be the domain of diabolical powers. To eject them from such places, English settlers used every means including purchase, trickery, and outright seizure. ...
...
To see that the rape of the north American continent by successive waves of European colonizers was just as abominable as the rape of Palestine by the European Jewish movement known as Zionism. Just as racist. Just as cruel. Just as outrageous and illegal and unjustifiable in any world in which the word justice has the slightest meaning.
And so most Americans do not question. They do not read. They do not notice the lies and evasions and self-justifications in their own histories, or in the histories of Israel. They simply nod their heads and agree that this never-ending conflict must be due to the terrorists, to the flaws in the Arab mind, in the Muslim religion, to something in the middle eastern air. And give their approval to a continuing abomination that must inevitably, and sooner now rather than later, result in some very bitter chickens coming home to roost. As a December 3, 2006 Los Angeles Times article, "Middle East Allies Near a State of Panic," concluded: "Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, warn(ed) that the Middle East was becoming "an abyss.... The region is facing real failure."
Debunking the ‘Suicide for 72 Virgins’ Myth
It is a sick and despicable mind that feels that it has a right to attack, steal, murder and cause harm to others but if the others dare fight back they are wrong and therefore terrorists. This one sentence describes Israeli thinking and their policies. They believe they are superior and entitled and they have a right to do anything to other people and those people better not retaliate. As a result they have done more by way of propaganda to take the legitimate fight of those who are against their wrongs and demonize them. We now have this ongoing enormous propaganda campaign to make Palestinians and anyone belonging to the same religion as Palestinians, to be seen as mindless terrorists and suicide bombers with no cause other than to do evil. And, of course, vicariously receiving 72 virgins as a reward in paradise for committing suicide to kill a few Israelis.
The Qur’an and valid authentic Hadiths are very clear about what happens to anyone who commits suicide. According to Hadiths: ...
Debunking the ‘Suicide for 72 Virgins’ Myth ... Posted March 4, 2007
One of the biggest Israeli propaganda myths is the invention of 72 virgins as a Muslim reward for suicide. This has been repeated to the western world so often that most people accept it as fact. The media wants us to believe that there cannot be anything wrong about Israelis – who must be seen as eternal victims – to cause anyone to commit suicide as a means of striking back at them. Heavens no! The motivation for suicide bombings in Israel has nothing to do with Jewish treatment of Palestinians. Instead it has to do with the evilness of the Palestinians and their religious beliefs. This is the “bill of goods” they sell the western mind while at the same time faking most, if not all the “Islamic suicide bombings” to blame on Muslims.It is a sick and despicable mind that feels that it has a right to attack, steal, murder and cause harm to others but if the others dare fight back they are wrong and therefore terrorists. This one sentence describes Israeli thinking and their policies. They believe they are superior and entitled and they have a right to do anything to other people and those people better not retaliate. As a result they have done more by way of propaganda to take the legitimate fight of those who are against their wrongs and demonize them. We now have this ongoing enormous propaganda campaign to make Palestinians and anyone belonging to the same religion as Palestinians, to be seen as mindless terrorists and suicide bombers with no cause other than to do evil. And, of course, vicariously receiving 72 virgins as a reward in paradise for committing suicide to kill a few Israelis.
The Qur’an and valid authentic Hadiths are very clear about what happens to anyone who commits suicide. According to Hadiths: ...
