Selling the Big Lie

Explaining why she left her job, a reporter for a major organization in Washington, DC, said recently, “I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day.”

Of course, not everyone in politics is a compulsive liar, but people who say we live in a “culture of lies” have a point. Sometimes lying is frivolous or self-serving. But when the objective is to inflict deliberate injury or destruction on others, lying is heinous, as well as sinful.

Nowhere can we find a better pack of heinous lies than in the Palestinian fabrication of history meant to destroy Israel and legitimize a mythological Arab state that has not one shred of evidence for its existence. However, big lies told long enough will attract a following.

The late Arab terrorist Yasser Arafat counted on that fact when he began creating a preposterous revision of history that few thought would gain traction. But it has, and from the halls of the UN to some of the courts of Europe and streets of the Western world, we hear lies passing for truth.

Dr. David Bukay’s recent piece in The Middle East Quarterly, “Founding National Myths: Fabricating Palestinian History,” provides a sharp, insightful look at the magnitude and seriousness of the Palestinian propaganda attack on Israel and the Jewish people—as well as the attack on Christianity.

According to the Palestinian Authority’s version of history, the Palestinians are direct descendants of the ancient Canaanites and Jebusites and have been in “Palestine” for more than 7,000 years. Some Palestinians claim they’ve been there since the beginning of creation.

Of course, not a speck of evidence exists to back up their claim. In fact, Joan Peters, in her book From Time Immemorial, documented the fact that most Arabs who claim to be “Palestinians” are not. During the British Mandate over Palestine, the British government allowed thousands of Arabs to flood into the land illegally, while refusing access to Jews:

While the Jews were working furiously at clearing land that had been ignored or dismissed by Government “authorities” as “uncultivable,” and created places that Government insisted “did not exist,” those opened-up places . . . [were] expropriated by the Arab in-migrants and immigrant community—Syrians, Egyptians, Hauranis, Algerians, Hejazis, and others camouflaged as “natural indigenous Palestinian population since time immemorial.”

Furthermore, Palestinians claim the world’s Jewish people are not Jewish at all, but transplants created by the Europeans who founded Zionist Israel as a means of “stealing” Palestinian land and identity. These so-called thieves, they say, co-opted virtually all Palestinian history by creating false names for towns, destroying communities through terror, and taking as their own everything they could steal—even down to music, falafel, and hummus. In this bizarre scenario, all land under Israeli control is illegitimately “occupied territory,” and Israel must be erased from the map.

Arafat even claimed Jesus was a Palestinian freedom fighter. The current, refined version says Jesus was a Muslim martyr (shahid). In His death, therefore, Jesus had the unique distinction of being, not a Savior sent from God to bear our sins, but the first Palestinian martyr tortured in “Palestinian” land.

Ironically, this reinvention of Christianity (which is not Christian at all) is, at its core, a Muslim version of Replacement Theology. Yet it has a more violent application than the one used by pseudo-Christian, Protestant theologians who promote the fiction that the church has replaced Israel and is now the sole beneficiary of the inheritance God has reserved for the Jewish people. The difference is that Palestinians make Christianity Muslim, while Replacement theorists dump Israel into the trash bin and fabricate a new brand of biblical interpretation—one that denies all of God’s promises to His chosen nation.

Clearly, in this new culture of lies, truth becomes a casualty, while chaos and uncertainty become the legacy of myths peddled and bought as reality.

The battle being waged is for truth—truth that for more than 70 years has been the foundation of the mission and message of The Friends of Israel. As we prepare to celebrate the matchless Incarnation and thank God for all He has given us through His Son, Jesus Christ, we can assure you that our foundation will not change. Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (Jn. 8:32). We believe Him.