The Genocide Myth

The "Israel genocide of Palestinians" charge is a classic. So let's quickly put it to bed, shall we?

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

With the intent to destroy a national/ethnic/racial/religious group?

Palestinians identify as part of the Arab nation.

Palestinians are a part of the Arab, Semitic Ethnicity/Race. 

Palestinians are of the Islamic religion. 

So for such a charge to logically stand, Israel must be trying to destroy the Arab Nation, the Arab race, or all Muslims. Now, as for the 'national group' charge. There was never a country called Palestine. In 1948 the land was given to the Jews by Britain which was recognised by the UN, thus Israel became a nation. The Arab Palestinians decided to reject this and go to war with Israel, sending in the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank by Egypt and Jordan respectively. This was an illegal occupation but nobody seemed to complain. In 1967, Israel took Gaza and the West Bank from Egypt and Jordan. Suddenly, it's occupation! But staying on task, there has never been any entity called Palestine in the entirity of human history. The idea of 'Palestinian' identity arose in 1967 out of Arab hopes of destroying Israel. With that hope, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation or PLO was formed. When Egypt and Jordan occupied what is now seen as being 'Palestinian land', the PLO didn't complain. It only called for the end of the 'Zionist entity'. The Palestinian claim to a nationality is born out of hatred and thus illegitimate. Their very national narrative is based on the hope of expelling the Jews from the land of Israel and their children are taught that Israeli soldiers are devils and that martyrdom is glorious (ergo, the recent Hamas training camp for 30,000 Palestinian children to hone their military skills). I'm pretty sure that expulsion is a violation of the genocide treaty, and as such the idea of a 'Palestinian Nationality' in itself is genocidal. 

But if we take that a step further, and assume that 'Palestinians are a valid national group'

About 14,500 Palestinians have died since 1948. There are 11 million Palestinians in the world and they have a birthrate higher than that of Pakistan (one of the highest in the world). 

The Palestinian Authority controls the lands of 94% of West Bank Palestinians, the elected Hamas Government (70% majority vote elected Hamas into power) controls 100% of Gazan Palestinians. The conditions of the people in these areas are directly in correlation with the actions of the governments that control them. Hamas launched rockets and imported weapons with which they hoped to kill Israeli civilians, and thus a blockade was imposed. So the move is hardly 'calculated to bring about a group's physical destruction'. Israel is not trying to wipe out any of the 'groups' that the Palestinians qualify to be members of, religious/racial/ethnic, and Israel is not trying to wipe out their 'national group'. Even if you identify them as a national group, genocidal measures aren't even being taken. 

Go figure.

Favourite Twitter Hatemail of the Week

As much as I love Twitter, is is admittedly a soapbox for those with the most absurd, disgusting, insane, wacky, and generally stupid things to say. Every week, it seems, we're set to get a good share of idiotic tweets from idiotic people. They're often quite funny and sometimes quite enlightening- a chance to expose and explain the crazy lies that have unfortunately entered the consciousness of both the media and the public at large. Without further ado:

"You belong to Khazaria"
The classic "all Jews belong to Khazaria" myth. The Khazars were a Turkic people who existed in the 700's. With that myth, people try to deny that there is any link whatsoever between the Jews and the land of Israel. This is an extreme lie, and a classic piece of anti-Semitism made famous by Helen Thomas when she said that the Jews should "go back to Poland and Germany" a few years back.

However, many Jews are actually from the Middle East, India, and North as well as sub-Saharan Africa. Jews do not come from Khazaria and DNA has proved that. Jews do not have Turkic DNA but contrastingly, DNA that comes from the Middle East according to any studies. Culturally, Ashkenazi European Jews have no Turkish or Asian customs. Linguistically, the Yiddish language has no Turkish influences. Meanwhile, history shows that only around 100 of the Khazarian elite converted to Judaism, and there is no proof of any mass conversion of the rest of the population at all. Because clearly, there wasn't one.

In any case, this theory acts as if the only Jews that exist are Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. It utterly disregards Mizrachi or Eastern Jews as well as Sephardic Jews from North Africa, who lived in the Middle East for thousands of years, practiced Judaism and maintained the customs of the Jewish people with no 'mass conversions' or 'foreign influences' to even be suggested. Sephardic Jews form around 50% of the Israeli population.



"The British gave the Jews the land of the indigenous people of Palestine"'
Here again, the myth of the indigenous people of Palestine. So, as late as 985 (according to the Muslim Arab writer Al-Muqdassi) the Jews constituted the majority of Jerusalem. In the 1300's, Ibn Khaldun (one of the most famous Arab historians) wrote: "Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel extended over 1400 years... It was the Jews who implanted the culture and customs of the permanent settlement". Yet above all, in 1695 the Dutch linguist and cartographer Adriaan Reland visited the land of Israel to write a book, Palestina. He documented the names of over 2000 settlements in the land and sourced the origin of the name to the Bible, the Talmud, or a Greco-Latin word. Yet as late as 1695, despite there being Ottoman settlement by then, there was not a single settlement with an original Arab name with a historical Muslim or Arab root. Most of the inhabitants of the area were Jews, the others were Christians according to Reland. Muslims were a tiny minority in the region. In his book (which is available on Google) the town of Umm el-Fahem was a village of 10 Christian families. Over 300 years, it somehow grew to be an Arab city of over 43,000 Muslims. So those Christian families converted to Islam and had a breedathon? Nah. 

That, and why is there no Palestinian culture? No Palestinian language? No Palestinian leaders or movements or countries that span back more than 200 years? No original Palestinian word for 'Palestine'? (A word that has a Hebrew root) and no Palestinian language or dialect from before 1911? (Palestinian Arabic was regarded as Syrian Arabic until 1911) Why do Palestinians identify as Arab Muslims, the people who invaded the land in the late 600's, and only invoke the idea of being 'natives' when it plays at the heartstrings of Westerners? Why can less than 50% of Palestinians trace their heritage back more than 3 generations?

And contrastingly: Why are the Jews the only ones with a claim; linguistic, historical, cultural, religious, and moral, to the land? Why is Hebrew the only 'canaanite' language alive, the Canaanites being the very first inhabitants of the land? Why does Jewish history include the history of the region, and why do Jews pray facing Jerusalem? Looks like the Jews are the true natives... 



"You're dumber than a bag of bagels"
This Tweet made me laugh. But it also made me hungry. So I went to the bakery and got some bagels, and I will eat them for lunch. :))



"the good ppl of earth dont need your media 2 tell us that israel is evil & needs to stop stealing land, go2 hell"

To quote @FriendsOfBibi : "I'd rather go to hell than this dude's idea of heaven."



"You are Right. The British gaveToThe Jews theLand ofThe indigenousPeople of Palestine whoAre the Palestinians.YouBelong 2Khazaria"

A culmination of the Khazaria myth, paired with the indigenous people myth, into a cocktail of bullcrap. ("You are right" is to my sarcastic comment: "10,000 Palestinians over 65 years is worth 17 million people over 4?")

So according to this lunatic:

The 10,000 Palestinians who have died over the course of 65+ years in a wartime situation.

are equivalent to/worth more than:

The lives of 6 million Jews as well as 11 million people from other groups, being exterminated for their race, religion or ethnicity. This is just a show of how insane these people are, how they foam at the mouth with hatred and actually believe that the Jews are some sort of murderous monsters that must be compared with the Nazis. Oh well. 






Hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing! Shabbat Shalom!

The Reason for the Wall

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that are easily persuaded by Palestinians guilt trips in the world. A large part of the Palestinian claim to Israel being an Apartheid State is the West Bank barrier; a wall built along the border of Israel and the regions of Judea and Samaria in the West Bank. This claim is extremely prominent on twitter, with countless tweets and pictures describing or depicting the lines of Palestinians going through checkpoints along this wall in order to enter Israel. Those living on the wrong side of the fence and their very narrow minded supporters around the world would have you believe that the reason for this concrete monstrosity, and there is no doubting the ugliness of the wall, is to cage them up like dogs or to dehumanize. There are a couple of things you should really think about here before you believe this simple-minded approach.

The wall is the same from both sides, as much as the Palestinians love to complain about how depressing the site is and draw pretty pictures as if it were the Berlin Wall of the Middle East, the same view bothers Israelis on the other side of the block. Just because they don't complain to worldwide media does not mean that they don't go through the same heartache when they see it.

Despite the aesthetic appeal (or rather, lack of it), Israeli's view the barrier with clear minds as they know it was built for one purpose, and it has been extremely successful in carrying out the task. It was built to stop terrorists. In 2002, the year before the wall's construction began, 457 Israelis were killed by terrorists in the West Bank. In 2009, that number fell to 8. Say what you want about the way it looks, but when your enemy is willing to carry out suicide missions to kill innocent civilians in your country,why should you not have the right to make it harder for these terrorists to come in?

Twitter Fail of the Day

More incoherent than BDS from a Palestine Fanboy, MisterMouse951.

"ooh we got devil worshipers, aren't u supposed to be infiltrating another religion right now?#FreePalestine"

I don't know where to start or where to finish- All I can do is laugh at how random this tweet is.  Like I always say, "there's no point commenting on BDStupidity, because they expose it when they open their mouths and touch their keyboards."

BDS Fail made my Day

The members of BDS and other pro-Palestine groups desperately scour for (non-existent) proof that a country called Palestine existed 70 years ago if at all. As proof, they often use examples such as Palestine's booming tourism industry in 1937 (sarcasm). On Twitter, "Stand Up For Palestine" (@IsraelWC1) posted the below poster as proof that 'there was a Palestine'.

The tweet read :

 "Visit Palestine poster by Franz Kraus (1936). {Israel is a War Criminal} ift.tt/KgeB6d pic.twitter.com/CeyU2BnkJ1"

with excited replies such as:

"But, but, but, there is no Palestine!" (Sadly it was sarcasm, not common-sense)

 Franz Kraus is a very Arab Palestinian name, of course. Nah, I'm playing, he was an Austrian Jew who eventually became one of Israel's most accomplished graphic designers. It's proof of Jewish settlement of the Mandate of Palestine, but no proof of an Arab Muslim country of Palestine because as ever- there is no proof of a fairytale. Good effort, though. News: This is HaTikvaBlog's first b***h-slap of a BDS activist. May there be many more!

The Holocaust and the Palestinians; the nonsensical comparison

On Holocaust Memorial Day, Twitter has been loaded with those who have the audacity to state that  Israel is somehow repeating the atrocities committed by the Nazis to the Palestinian people. That said, it is high time for some serious rebuttal to put the frankly blasphemous assertion to bed, once and for all.

To quote Wolfgang Benz, a German historian:

...the six million murder victims make the holocaust a unique crime in the history of mankind. The number of victims—and with certainty the following represent the minimum number in each case—cannot express that adequately. Numbers are just too abstract. However they must be stated in order to make clear the dimension of the genocide: 165,000 Jews from Germany, 65,000 from Austria, 32,000 from France and Belgium, more than 100,000 from the Netherlands, 60,000 from Greece, the same number from Yugoslavia, more than 140,000 from Czechoslovakia, half a million from Hungary, 2.2 million from the Soviet Union, and 2.7 million from Poland. To these numbers must be added all those killed in the pogroms and massacres in Romania and Transitrien (over 200,000) and the deported and murdered Jews from Albania and Norway, Denmark and Italy, from Luxembourg and Bulgaria.

Genocide is a key word here. We can look at the scale of death and destruction, we see millions dead over the space of a few years. We see manufactured killing, the use of industry and technology for the sake of eradicating a certain race and people off the face of the world. We see one third of an entire ethnicity, religious group and culture wiped out, with full intent to do so by the Nazis. We see death on an unprecedented scale, unrivalled in human history. We see the furthest and sickest extent of human debauchery exposed in this painful point in human memory. Concentration camps were sites of murder, forced labour, starvation, rape and execution. This is the ugly face of genocide that is commemorated every year by the world on this day.


So 'genocide against Palestinians'? Palestinians are part of the Arab nation, they speak, read and write in Arabic and they identify as Arabs. They are part of the Islamic faith, that they share with billions of others. They celebrate and live Arab culture. Israel does not wish to eradicate the Arabic culture, the Islamic religion, the Arab race. Indeed, many old Yemenite, Iraqi or Moroccan Jews speak Arabic, Arab Jews or Sephardim are a majority of Israel's Jewish population, and the Arabic culture is very much a part of a vibrant Israeli one. As for the "Palestinian People"? There is not one to destroy! There is no Palestinian religion, culture, language that is seperate from that of the Arabs. And there is no attempt to eradicate the streams of the Arab culture and language that have been developed by Palestinians, at all, by Israel. There is no mass killing, mass extermination, mass murder of Palestinians at all. Indeed, 14,000 people have died in the entirity of the conflict (Jews included) over the course of six, almost seven decades- The conflict has lasted well over ten times the duration of the Holocaust, and resulted in less than a thousand times less than the total death toll including non-Jewish political, ethnic and racial victims. Moreover, Gaza is a self-governed entity, and the Red Cross denies that there is a humanitarian crisis there.

It is a shame and a scandal that it is necessary to spend time explaining the immensely simple fact, that the Holocaust is incomparable to the situation of the Palestinians. But the amount of ignorance that exists in the world is tremendous, and that same ignorance is that which is penetrated by the dread spear of hatred all too often. That spear penetrated the minds of millions of Germans and ended in millions of impure ashes haunting the air of Europe forever. That spear is now entrenched in the minds of millions of Arabs across the Middle East, their hearts filled with hate for Jews. Israel is calculated as being the tenth strongest country on Earth and could wipe out the Palestinians in a day. Instead, it built a dozen universities for Palestinians where there were once none. It raised the Palestinian life expectancy by decades. Israeli food stocks the shelves of Gazan shops and Ramallah markets. The Israeli Prime Minister stands by the hope of two states for two people and a future of friendship and cooperation. Despite this, the Palestinian narrative is still laced with hatred and sustained by the hope of eradicating Israel forever. Rockets are fired at Israel; one every day since the start of 2014. The Palestinians have created a shambolic Government for themselves, with Mahmoud Abbas' Presidential term having ended over 6 years ago. Hamas runs a dictatorship of Sharia law in Gaza, constantly spewing anti-Semitic diatrabes and anti-Israel threats. It is responsible for the death of hundreds of Israelis. If the Nazis did what Israel does for the Palestinians, for the Jews- Jews who did not rise up against the Germans and who did not hate the Germans and who did not scream "Kill the German!" in their Synagogues and at their political rallies- they would not be branded by history as it's most vile perpetrators of evil. Yet they are. Those who invoke the memory of the Holocaust to apply to the Palestinians are not merely ignorant- they are committing a vile perversion of history and insulting the memory of all of the dead.

Never Forget the Holocaust, the Shoah, for what it was. The lowest point in human history, a time of mass murder and hate and evil.

Never Forget the Holocaust and the lessons that we can draw, and must draw from it, on the importance of truth and the consequences of bigotry and hatred.

Never Forget.

Shoah Remembrance

The word Holocaust means sacrifice by fire. The reason that some Jews instead refer to the atrocities by the word Shoah, is because they believe that the word sacrifice almost gives sense to the senseless killings committed by the Nazis from 1933-1945. Shoah is a Hebrew word meaning catastrophe, and that is truly the best way to remember the murder of over 6,000,000 Jews and other minorities. With the anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic comments made by many that refer to the Shoah as the excuse for a Jewish State, the word sacrifice can play into this. If you put the Jewish State to the side, please take a moment to remember the terrible catastrophes that ended less than 70 years ago. From whatever background you come from or whatever viewpoint you have, just think about the lives of those millions of innocent children, women and men that were taken. Over 6,000,000 human beings, killed for something they couldn't control.

It is only with remembrance and acceptance that we can stop these sort of catastrophes from ever happening again.

Never Forget. Never Again.