Tuesday 20 April 2010

Wiesel: ‘I shall never lie about Jerusalem?’

April 20, 2010 ·
On the 62nd anniversary of NAKBA (when 5,000-old Palestine was wiped-off the world map), the father of the ‘Holocaust Museums’ in the Western world, Elie Wiesel ran a full-page advertisment (estimated to cost in the range of US$500,000) in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times on behalf of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shore-up his declining popularity among Jews living outside Occupied Palestine and world political leaders. It was also a booster to World Jewish Congress (WJC) President Ronald Lauder’s open letter published a day earlier in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Lauder wrote in the letter:”Why does the thurst of this administration’s Middle East rhetoric seem to blame Israel for the lack of movement on peace talk? After all, it’s the Palestinians, not Israel, who refuse to negotiate”.

Wiesel’s rant did not carry a single new proof to support the Zionists’ claim over Jerusalem or the Palestine for that matter. His advertisement was full of usual Israel’s Hasbara lies about Islam, Holy Qur’an and the history of Jerusalem. Some of Wiesel’s lies were exposed by Yossi Sarid in Israeli daily Ha’aretz (April 18, 2010): “An outsider reading your letter would probably have concluded that peace has already taken root in the City of Peace. He would learn that in Jerusalem, Jews, Christians and Muslims worship their gods unimpeded, that “all are allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city.” Someone has deceived you, my dear friend. Not only may an Arab not build “anywhere” but he may thank his god if he is not evicted from his home and thrown out onto the street with his family and property. The fact is and always will be that this city is holy to everyone – such is its blessing and curse. That’s why the solution to the Jerusalem problem cannot wait for the end of the Middle East conflict, as you suggest, because it will have no end if its solution is postponed until “the Israelis and Palestinian communities find way to live together in an atmosphere of security”.

Wiesel, in his usual double talk wrote: “For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics”, however, in the same breath he wrote: “It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture – and not a single time in the Koran”. Yes, Jewish scriptures even describe Jerusalem as a “whore” in Ezekiel 16:23-34; Moses condemns Israelites (Deutronomy 9:24: “Ye have been rebellious against the Lord from the day I knew you”; Judah commits incest with his daughter-in-law (Genesis 38:15-30); Amnon, son of David rapes his sister (2 Samuels 13:5) while another son rapes his step-mothers (2 Samuel 16:21-23); Lot’s two daughters have sex with their drunken father and conceive children from him (Genesis 19:30-36) or Reuben the eldest son of Jacob had sex with his stepmother for which he was not punished by Jacob and the list goes on. Sir Bernard Shaw, the famous British philosopher remarked on perusing the Scriptures (Holy Bible), that it is “The most dangerous book on earth. Keep it under lock and key: your children must not have access to it.

True, Jerusalem is not mentioned by name in Holy Qur’an for some good reasons. However, its religious significance in Islam is that most of the prophets mentioned in Holy Qur’an lived in that part of the Middle East plus the city being the direction of Muslim daily prayers in the begining of the Faith and the ‘launching pad’ for the Prophet’s (pbuh) heavenly journey (Miraj) to meet the Creator (Allah) face-to-face.

Following are some more comments on Wiesel’s lies about Jerusalem from a Jewish site Tikun Olam - calling Wiesel “the Master propagandist – Any political movement would give its eye teeth to have him on its side”:

“Jerusalem doesn’t “belong” to the Jewish people any more than it belongs to Christians or Muslims whose history here is just as deep. As for Jerusalem binding one Jew to another, this is pure bravado. For many (though not all) observant Jews, perhaps this is the case. But the majority of Jews are not observant. So really, Wiesel is speaking mainly for himself and a minority of observant Jerusalem-centric Jews, yet he articulates his statement as if it’s self-evident that he speaks for us all. It’s quite brilliant, but ultimately empty rhetoric.

Wiesel of course has no way of knowing what would’ve happened if Jordan hadn’t attacked Israel in 1967. But at any event it did, and arguing that because Jordan forced us, in his terms, to die for Jerusalem means we’re not now killing for it is preposterous. The plain fact of of the matter is that Israel is killing not for specifically Jerusalem, but to enforce the Occupation of which Jerusalem is a part.

The plain fact of the matter is that Israel will have to give up its claim to sovereignty over all of Jerusalem if it wants a peace agreement. Further, Wiesel’s argument that Israel must not be forced to renounce this claim will lead to more dead, both Palestinian and Israeli. This Holocaust survivor’s God wants him to fight till the last Jew on behalf of some manufactured nostalgic Zionist vision of Jerusalem. My God wants Jews, whether in Israel or the Diaspora, to live safe, secure and prosperous lives. He (or She) doesn’t demand that a single Jew die on behalf of fantasies and delusions. My God says Jews, Christians and Muslims can share Jerusalem, not under some ersatz Israeli-defined regime, but as part of a political settlement that offers sovereignty to Israelis and Palestinians over their own respective neighborhoods.”

I believe Wiesel, well-known for his self-denial – knows deep down his heart that the conflict in Palestine has nothing to do with Islam. It’s between the uprooted Muslim and Christian Palestinians whose ancestors have lived there for many many centuries and the Western Jewish colonialists who started settling in Palestine after WW I. The Palestinians have been resisting Jewish occupation since 1930s in order to recover the land stolen from them by the Jewish settlers. Painting Palestinian resistance as Muslim hatred against Jews – is the greatest lie the Zionist thugs have come up with – because Palestinians, both Muslims and Christians, are carrying out a ‘national resistance’ – and the vast majority of the occupants are not religious Jews but atheist Zionazis.

River to Sea
 Uprooted Palestinian

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