Israel in the News Nov/Dec 2004
‘All terrorists are Muslims’
ARUTZ-7—”The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!” So writes Abdulrahman al-Rashed, general manager of AI-Arabiya television, in his daily column published in the A-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper.
“Our terrorist sons are an end product of our corrupted culture,” writes Al-Rashed, as reported by Susan Sevareid of the Associated Press. He reviewed a list of recent attacks by Islamic extremist groups-in Russia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.
“Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools, and residential buildings around the world for the past ten years have been Muslims,” wrote Al-Rashed. He said that Muslims should not try to ignore the facts, and that they will be unable to cleanse their image unless “we admit the scandalous facts…. The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us.”
Sevareid also quoted Ahmed Bahgat, an lslamist columnist for Egypt’s leading pro-government newspaper, AI-Ahram, who wrote that the images “showed Muslims as monsters who are fed by the blood of children and the pain of their families.” “If all the enemies of Islam united together and decided to harm it,” Bahgat wrote, “they wouldn’t have ruined and harmed its image as much as the sons of Islam have done by their stupidity, miscalculations, and misunderstanding of the nature of this age.”
PA says Bible not Jewish but Arab history
ARUTZ-7—A recent educational program on Palestinian Authority (PA) TV taught that the Jews of biblical history and those of today have no connection, and that accepted Jewish history in the land of Israel is essentially “Arab history.”
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a watchdog organization monitoring PA media, reports that two senior PA historians, guests on the television program, went to great lengths to deny ancient Jewish history and erase the Jewish connection to Israel while at the same time describing a contrived, ancient Palestinian-Arab history and creating a historical connection to the land that never existed.
“Two central components of this Palestinian myth,” PMW Director Hamar Marcus writes, “consist of turning biblical Israelites into Muslim-Arabs, while teaching that the Palestinians are the descendants of the biblical Canaanites, who are also turned into Arabs. With both the Canaanites and Israelites becoming Arabs and the religion of ancient Israel becoming Islam, the PA takes authentic Jewish history, documented by thousands of years of continuous literature, and crosses out the word Jewish and replaces it with the word Arab.”
Marcus continues, “This creative historical revisionism is not new in the PA….The PA is struggling with the challenge of creating a Palestinian national identity when no Palestinian national history exists.”
PMW notes some of the main points brought out in the broadcast:
(1) The Hebrews of the Bible have no connection to the Jews of today. (2) The Hebrews of the Bible were Arabs. (3) The prophets of the Bible were Muslims. (4) Biblical King Solomon was a Muslim prophet. (5) Solomon’s Temple was not built by Israelites but by Arab Canaanites. (6) The Canaanites are the forefathers of the Palestinians. (7) The Bible is legends based on what Jews imagined and not on history. (8) The Jews today are descendants of a 13th Century Khazar tribe with no history in the land of Israel. (9) The location of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is a Zionist invention. (10) Zionism is Racism.
Four Israelis almost lynched
ARUTZ-7—”They are simply animals. They walk around freely amongst us, but if we make a mistake and come to their areas, it could cost us our lives.”
So said Yaakov Shabo, one of four Israelis who made a wrong turn into an Arab-populated neighborhood and were saved at the last moment from a lynching. “Another minute and I would have been dead,” another of the Israelis said.
Shabo said that he and three others were on their way from Beit El to Jerusalem when they arrived in the area of the Atarot Airport and turned right instead of left: “The problem was that our driver didn’t know the way, and the escort somehow got lost, and when we arrived at the checkpoint, the soldiers waved us on [assuming we were Arabs] instead of checking us. Very soon we realized our mistake, and tried to turn around, but then a mob of Arabs came out and started stoning us rocks, metal pipes and debris, concrete blocks, whatever they had.”
Shabo said that among the hundreds who attacked, “they were all happy to kill Jews. None of them tried to save us-except for two who acted like human beings. They told us to get out of the truck and they would get us out of there safely. I said, ‘What about the truck?’ They said, ‘Forget about the truck! You have to get out of here!’ So I ran with them to the checkpoint and told the soldiers that they have to save my friends who are about to be killed.”
Scenes of the near lynching caught on film show Arabs pelting the truck from all sides, with one man attacking the door of the truck with a metal pipe. The army sent in a force to extricate the three remaining Israelis.
France: A bad place for Jews
ARUTZ-7—French anti-Semitic violence reached the Jewish Community Center in Paris when a fire broke out in the building, destroying it almost totally, and anti-Jewish graffiti was scrawled at the site. No one was hurt.
“To be a Jew in France today is a difficult thing,” Israeli sources in Paris said. “You can’t identify yourself as a Jew because it is dangerous.” It has been widely noted that the officials in France are attempting to fight the growing phenomenon. French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac’s office, as well as the mayor of Paris and the local police chief, issued statements condemning the attack.
A week earlier, anti-Semitic graffiti was sprayed near the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, including swastikas and “Death to the Jews.” A few days before that, 60 graves in the Jewish cemetery in Lyon, in south eastern France, were vandalized. Among the desecrated gravestones was a large one in memory of Jewish soldiers killed during World War II.
Another recent French attack on Jews occurred in Auschwitz, when French tourists accosted a visiting group of Israeli Jews. One young Israeli woman, wearing an Israeli flag, was assaulted by a French anti-Semite, who also
repeatedly cursed and insulted her.
Waqf endangers Jewish holy site
ARUTZ-7—Jewish visitors to the gravesite of the patriarchs and matriarchs recently noticed an unusual sight: A cement truck outside the Machpelah Cave, spewing concrete atop the large Hall of Isaac where Muslims generally conduct prayers. Jews are usually permitted to pray in the smaller Halls of Abraham and Jacob, as well as in an adjoining outdoor room. On several days each year, the entire building is open exclusively to Jews, and the same is true for Muslims.
Hebron Jewish Community spokesman Noam Arnon told Arutz-7 that the laying of a concrete platform atop the holy site is, “in addition to the dangerous precedent it sets, a dangerous addition of weight atop this 2,000-year-old building. The problem is that the Arabs here do almost exactly what they want, without permits or anything. When we saw this, we called the police, the army and everyone else to ask if anyone had given a permit for this type of work. No one said that they had, yet they refused to take the elementary step of stopping the work until it could be clarified what was going on.
“You could imagine what would have happened if a Jew had tried to make even a small change in the building. They would grab him and arrest him and a whole scandal would erupt.” Amon condemned the fact that the police, army and Antiquities Authority had turned a blind eye to what happened.
Blasting away food allergies
ARUTZ-7—Scientists at the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa have developed a method to neutralize a protein that causes food allergies.
Although the research is in its early stages, Technion scientists have thus far been able to neutralize a sesame seed protein that causes allergic reactions in many people. They believe the technique can also be used to eliminate allergens in milk, peanuts, and other common foods.
The Technion method utilizes high-frequency sound waves as a bludgeon to destroy the allergenic part of the protein, known as an epitope. In 95 percent of the cases in experiments with rats, the allergic qualities were completely neutralized, the researchers reported.
Prof. Shmuel Yanai oversaw the research, along with Prof. Yuri Kogan, both of the Technion’s biotechnology and food engineering faculty.
