The war against the Jews

Sunday, 2nd March 2008

So which British media outlets used the erroneous Reuters' translation of Matan Vilnai’s speech (see post below) to produce the latest version of the blood libel, that Israel is planning a ‘holocaust’ of the Palestinians? Many of them, including all the broadsheets.

As I said in my post below, the Hebrew word ‘shoah’ is never used in Israel to mean 'holocaust' -- a term which in modern Hebrew is translated as 'hashoah' which includes the all-important definite article and is only used to denote the genocide of the Jews -- but means instead, and was used by Vilnai to mean, ‘disaster’. The readers’ comments on my post below which claim the opposite are (other than those which are simply malevolent) confusing the ill-informed and sloppy English use of the word ‘shoah’ with its use in Hebrew as spoken in Israel. While the original story was based on the Reuters' mistranslation, there was simply no excuse for any outlet continuing to make this false statement once it was pointed out that this was not the meaning of the Hebrew term. At that point, a mistake turned into a blood libel.

The BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen repeated it on the Today programme, dismissing the explanation that Vilnai had not said this as the work of an Israel government spin-doctor. (His entire item, which purported to put the current escalation in Gaza into context, was disgraceful, and I will deal with it in more detail later)

As predicted, the Arabs are making hay with this shocking abuse of language to whip up an incendiary hysteria towards Israel as it steps up its raids against Gaza’s terrorists in an attempt to halt their rocket bombardment of southern Israel. BBC News online reported:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas described the Israeli raids as ‘more than a holocaust’. Mr Abbas was apparently alluding to controversial remarks made on Friday by Israel's Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai, who said Palestinians risked a ‘shoah’ - the Hebrew word for a big disaster as well as for the Nazi Holocaust. Mr Vilnai's colleagues insisted he had not meant ‘genocide’.
But Mr Abbas told reporters in the West Bank town of Ramallah: ‘It's very regrettable that what is happening is more than a holocaust. We tell the world to see with its own eyes and judge for itself what is happening.’ Hamas's exiled leader Khaled Meshaal went further. ‘Israeli actions in Gaza since Wednesday is the real Holocaust,’ he said in the Syrian capital, Damascus. He said Israel was ‘exaggerating the Holocaust and using it to blackmail the world’.

The basic fault lies of course with Reuters which put out the false translation. But those media outlets which continue to repeat the libel are actively fomenting hysteria and hated and providing a grotesque alibi and even further incitement for the would-be perpetrators of an actual second Holocaust — who also of course deny the first — as they go about their infernal business.

The Times ran a second piece by James Hider which was also breathtakingly twisted. His story ran:

Jewish settler groups are digging an extensive tunnel network under Muslim areas of Jerusalem's Old City while building a ring of settlements around it to bolster their claim to the disputed city in any future peace deal, anti-settlement campaigners have told The Times. One group, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said that settler tunnels could one day extend under the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third-holiest site, and claimed that extremists could use the access route to attack the structure in an attempt to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Settler groups flatly deny such allegations.

The tunnels are largely based on historical water wells or buried pilgrim routes, stretching from the Pool of Siloam in the Palestinian district of Silwan, where Jesus Christ is said to have cured a blind man, to the south and joining up with the Western Wall, the Jewish holy site. Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and member of the anti-settlement group Ir Amin, believes that the underground system will then extend from the Western Wall tunnel, which is already open, via settler-owned properties in the Muslim quarter and eventually link up with an ancient quarry, run by a right-wing Jewish group and known as Solomon's Stables, on the north side of the Old City, near the Damascus gate.

The selectivity and distortion in this piece are jaw-dropping. These ‘historical water wells’ are historic because they were created by the Jews. In the 8^th century BCE the Jewish King Hezekiah, who anticipated the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem, secured the city’s water supply by diverting the waters of the Gihon spring in the Kidron valley outside Jerusalem through an ingenious network of underground tunnels to an inner-city reservoir called the Pool of Siloam. This is referred to in the Hebrew Bible (Kings 20: 20) which states that Hezekiah ‘made a pool and a conduit and brought water into the city’.

The ‘ancient quarry’ known as Solomon’s Stables was part of the Temple built by King Solomon, the very heart of Judaism. A guidebook published by the Supreme Muslim Council in 1924 says of the Temple Mount: ‘This site is amongst the oldest in the world. It is beyond any doubt where Solomon’s Temple once stood’ and described the site of Solomon’s Stables as part of the Temple. Today, however, Solomon’s Stables has been turned in the last few years into a mosque, during the construction of which the Arabs consigned the priceless archaeological evidence of the existence of Solomon's Stables to the Jerusalem municipal garbage dump.

The vandalism of the Temple Mount is a deliberate attempt to erase the historical proof of the Temple and with it the truth about the origins of Israel as a Jewish state long before the Arabs ever got there. In 2000, the Arab Waqf -- which administers the Muslim holy sites on top of Temple Mount, which were only built in the first place in order to assert supremacy over the Jews of whose ancient nation and religion the Temple was the focal point -- dumped 13,000 tons of rubble from the First and Second Temple periods in various waste sites around Jerusalem where they were mixed with local garbage to hide any historically significant objects. Archaeologists forced to scrabble frantically in this rubble to rescue what they could found a clay seal bearing the name Immer, the last name of Pashur ben Immer described in the book of Jeremiah as an important priest in the First Temple, and other artefacts including stone plaques with Greek inscriptions from the time of King Herod warning non-Jews not to enter certain areas of the Temple.

This is the real story about the Temple Mount — the appalling desecration and vandalism of the Jewish foundations of the Temple by the Arab Waqf. It is an act of cultural and religious destruction beside which the destruction by the Taleban of the Buddhist statues in Banyan pales into insignificance. It is a systematic attempt by the Arabs to rewrite history by destroying the archeological evidence of the ancient Jewish claim to Jerusalem. It is an outrage of global proportions. Yet the Times makes no reference to this whatsoever, regurgitating instead the pilgeresque claims of Israeli ideological activists which put Israel in the dock instead.

Obscene, and murderous. All of it.