Edward Said Falsifies History -- But You're Not Surprised, are you?

Lying seems to have come naturally and comfortably to the late Professor Edward Said, a prof of comparative lit at Columbia University, who was somehow able, with the help of the organized American communications media, to change how Americans, especially would-be intellectuals saw Islam and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Here is one of his gems:

p56 ". . . . both [Zionism & Judaism] speak of Palestine as the land of Israel. . . . Zionism sees itself as redeeming the land whose natives [Said means the Arabs] have called it 'Palestine' for over a millenium." [emphasis added, see: Edward Said, Peace and Its Discontents (New York: Vintage Books 1995), p 56]

Said was a professor so he could get away with a Big Lie as long as he delivered it in a very Authoritative manner, allowing no contradiction or nuance. In fact, Jews have traditionally called the Land the Land of Israel. This usage appears in the Christian New Testament [Book of Matthew, chap. 2, vv. 20-22]. So Christians have been aware of the name Land of Israel since the New Testament circulated among them in the first centuries of the Common Era. Indeed, Said was right about what Jews called the Land, and this usage was maintained by Zionists. However, Jews were not the only ones to be aware of it. Christians who read the New Testament were too. The New Testament also calls the country Judea, which was the usual Greek and Roman/Latin name for the whole country up to the Bar Kokhba Revolt [approx 131-135 BCE]. So Said is not lying as to the name that Jews and Zionists used for the country -- Land of Israel. Watch out for the usage in the New Testament. In some places in the NT Judea refers to the whole country. This is the broad Greco-Latin usage. However, in some passages in the NT, the term "Judea and Samaria" is used. In these passages, Judea refers only to the south of the country, including Jerusalem. That is, the former kingdom of Judah. This is the narrow Jewish usage of the term Judea [and Judah], whereas  Greek and Latin writers used the broader meaning of the name.

His lie has to do with what the Arabs and Muslims in the country and beyond generally called it.  After the Crusades, the Mamluk and Ottoman Empires saw the country as an undefined, indistinct part of bilad ash-Sham [variously translated as Levant, Syria, Greater Syria]. The Muslim Arab majority did not call the land Palestine.

Few except for the rare scholars among them [and illiteracy was very high] even knew that once, before the Crusades, the Arab and Muslim rulers had used the term Filastin for the southern part --roughly speaking-- of the country, of the Land of Israel. Filastin did not mean the whole country but only what today we call southern Samaria, Judah [not Judea but Judah, the territory of the southern Israelite kingdom], and the southern and middle coastal plain and coast. The Arabs took the term Filastin from the Roman district of Palaestina Prima which had roughly speaking the same borders. Palaestina Secunda, northern Samaria, the Galilee and Golan as well as territory east of the Jordan River was called Urdunn by the early Arab conquerors.

Judea was in fact in Roman usage the name for --roughly speaking-- what the Jews called the Land of Israel. See an authentic Roman document, a metal military discharge certificate [called a diploma] which attests to a veteran of the Roman legions having served in Judea [IVDAEA in Latin]

Another of Said's lies was calling the Arabs in the country the "natives." The Jews were the indigenous population of the Land, inhabiting it long before the Arab invasion of the 7th century. The Jews were reduced by the Crusader massacres to a small fraction of the population but Jews have always lived in the country since ancient times, for more than 3000 years. So out of three assertions that Said makes in this short excerpt, two are false.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Historical sketch of the land  and its name [here]

Jewish exile from Jerusalem [here]

The usage of the name Judea or PROVINCIA IVDAEA by Rome [here]

My assertion that the Arabs generally did not call what is today Israel by the name "Palestine"  or "Filastin" is acknowledged by one of Said's professorial Arab friends, none other than Rashid al-Khalidi, who just so happens to be a good buddy of one Barack Hussein Obama, the previous president of the United States. Khalidi acknowledged this, for instance, in an article in the journal International Journal of Middle East Studies in the year 1988 or about then. I do not now have the exact citation but you can check the journal for the years 1988, 1987, and 1989.

Abbas Lied in Washington when He Claimed that His "palestinian authority" Was Promoting Peace Education for Arab Children

This post consists mainly in quotes from Palestinian Media Watch showing the mendacity and hypocrisy of Mahmoud Abbas and his distaste for peace with Israel:

The PA leadership publicly proclaims that it is promoting peace education. Mahmoud Abbas recently announced during a press conference with US Pres. Donald Trump: "I affirm to you that we are raising our children and our grandchildren on a culture of peace." [White House Press Conference, May 3, 2017]

But Abbas' embracing a "culture of peace" in Washington is meaningless when his schools in Ramallah embrace a culture of terror. Indeed, Palestinian youth themselves make a mockery of Abbas' claim, as children in the schools named for terrorists declare that those terrorists are their role models.

[the Palestinian Authority habitually names schools and other public places and institutions after Arab terrorists & Arab Nazi collaborators. The paragraphs from PMW below list schools named after prominent palestinian Arab Nazi collaborators]

The following is a list of schools the PA has named after Nazi collaborators:

The PA has named one school after Nazi collaborator and war criminal Amin Al-Husseini.

1.The Amin Al-Husseini Elementary School - El-Bireh

Amin Al-Husseiniwas the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at the time of the British Mandate. During World War II he moved to Berlin, where he was a Nazi collaborator and an associate of Hitler. Al-Husseini was on Yugoslovia's list of wanted war criminals, and was responsible for a Muslim SS division that murdered thousands of Serbs and Croats. When the Nazis offered to free some Jewish children, Al-Husseini fought against their release, and as result, 5000 children were sent to the gas chambers.

  

Amin Al-Husseini meeting with Adolf Hitler (December 1941)

  

The PA has named two schools after Nazi collaborator Hassan Salameh.

2.The Hassan Salameh Junior High School for Girls - Gaza

3. Hassan Salameh Elementary School - Gaza

Hassan Salameh was a leader of Arab gangs in the Lod and Jaffa region in the 1930s and 1940s. He was a loyal follower of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin Al-Husseini, who spent World War II in Berlin supporting the Nazi war effort. In 1941, Salameh was recruited to be a Nazi agent, and in 1944, he was sent on a mission by the Nazis in the British Mandate of Palestine, with the goal of starting an Arab revolt against the British and poisoning Tel Aviv's water sources. The plot was discovered and thwarted by the British. In 1947, Salameh was appointed by the Mufti as Deputy Commander of the "Holy Jihad" Army that fought Israel in the 1948 War of Independence. In June 1948, he was killed in battle.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

This story of Arab Nazi Collaboration should be more widely known but it is not. There are those who want to make the world  forget thi ugly chapter in Arab history.

See more on Arab Nazi collaborators on our blog:

The anniversary of Amin el-Husseini's first visit with Hitler [here]

PLO/Palestinian Authority Revise Christian Tradition to Rewrite the Jews Out of It

The PLO for many years claimed the Jesus revered by Christians as a "Palestinian." The Palestinian Authority that was set up in 1994 continues this tradition. Yet the Christian holy book, the New Testament, repeatedly makes clear that Jesus was a Jew. Indeed, there was no "palestine" on the ground at the time of Jesus. The Romans and Greeks called the whole country Judea, although the Jews themselves called it the Land of Israel. Jews used Judea in a narrow sense [when writing or speaking Greek], referring to the territory of the former Kingdom of Judah wrecked by Nebuchadnezzar's Babylonian forces.

What is relevant to the PLO/PA claim that Jesus was a "palestinian" is that the New Testament
itself says that the Bethlehem where Jesus is supposed to have been born is called Bethlehem of Judea [book of Matthew 2:1]. Get that. The NT itself says that Jesus was born in Judea. No mention of  palestine. Apparently, this is a usage of Judea in the narrow Jewish sense referring only to the former kingdom of Judah, not the broad Greco-Roman usage of Judea which referred to the whole country, all of the Land of Israel, roughly speaking. I deduce that from the fact that the same chapter of Matthew calls the country "Land of Israel" twice [2:20-21]. There appears to have been another Bethlehem in the country, Bethlehem of Galilee, although this point is of lesser importance. Be that as it may, in Jesus's time the country was not called "palestine" either by the Jews, the people of the land, or by the Roman Empire or by writers in Greek and Latin. In Jesus' time nobody knew about any so-called "palestinian people."

This is my introduction to an excellent article by Evelyn Gordon on the historical revisionism of the PLO/PA and on the failure of the major Christian churches to object to this denial of their own Christian Scriptures:

Why Do Christians Tolerate  Palestinian Historical Revisionism?
 by Evelyn Gordon

Christmas this year brought the usual spate of Palestinian historical revisionism, including the by-now routine claim that Jesus was a Palestinian. This, as Jonathan Tobin noted, tells us a lot about the Palestinian mindset and prospects for peace. But to me, the most striking aspect of this story is that objections to such historical revision come almost exclusively from Jews, whereas many Christian churches and organizations seem to have no problem with it. After all, it’s not only Jewish history and the Jewish religion Palestinians thereby erase; they are also erasing Christian history and the Christian religion.
What, for instance, becomes of the famous scene of Jesus evicting money-changers from the Temple if, as Palestinian officials claim, the Temple never existed? (They refer to it strictly as “the alleged Temple”; for examples, see here and here.) Or what becomes of Mary’s husband Joseph, who was “of the house and lineage of David” (Luke 2:4), if, as Palestinians claim, the Davidic kingdom never existed?
Even if you want to claim, in defiance of all the evidence, that Jesus himself wasn’t a Jew, his entire story as related in the Gospels takes place in a Jewish state with a largely autonomous Jewish political and religious leadership, albeit subject to some control from the Roman Empire. According to the Gospels, it is this Jewish leadership that arrests and tries Jesus, though the Romans ultimately crucify him. If no Jewish state with the power to arrest and try ever existed (as Palestinians, again, routinely claim; see here or here, for instance), how did this most foundational of all Christian stories ever occur?
Granted, the Christians most sympathetic to this Palestinian revisionism generally represent liberal churches that aren’t wedded to a literal reading of the Bible. Nevertheless, belief in Jesus is ostensibly fundamental even for liberal Christians–and absent the historic Jewish kingdom of the Gospels, there quite literally is no Jesus.
This ties in with a related issue: Many of these same liberal Christian groups have also turned a blind eye to the ongoing slaughter of Christians in Syria and Iraq, the worsening persecution of Christians in Egypt and various other anti-Christian atrocities worldwide, preferring to focus all their energies on vilifying the one Middle Eastern country where, to quote Israeli Arab priest Father Gabriel Nadaf, “We feel secure” as Christians. As I’ve noted before, this contrast between the terrible plight of other Middle Eastern Christians and the safety they enjoy in Israel is increasingly leading Israel’s Arab Christians to rethink their former identification with the state’s opponents; one result is that the number of Arab Christians volunteering for service in the IDF shot up more than 60 percent this year (though given the minuscule starting point, the absolute numbers remain small). But no such rethinking has occurred among anti-Israel Christians in the West.
In short, the leadership of groups like the Church of Scotland or the Presbyterian Church seem prepared to sacrifice both historical Christianity and real live Christians on the altar of their single-minded obsession with undermining the Jewish state. The million-dollar question is how long their rank-and-file memberships will continue tolerating this travesty.

 - - - - - - End - - - - - -

I differ with Evelyn Gordon on two points:
1-- The Christian New Testament is not part of the Jewish Bible, almost all of it written in Hebrew with much of the books of Daniel and Ezra and some other parts in Aramaic. The Jewish Scriptures are distinct from the Christian Scriptures although the NT repeats parts of the Jewish Scriptures. [The paragraph has been corrected in regard to the Aramaic in the Jewish Bible, 1-4-2014]

2-- There was never a people called "palestinians." Nobody ever heard of such a people  until the 1960s when the notion of a "palestinian people" was introduced to the world by British psychological warfare experts.

The Name "palestine" an Imperialist Imposition

When the Roman empire under Emperor Hadrian had suppressed the last major Jewish revolt in the Land of Israel, the Bar Kokhba Revolt [135 CE], the Romans renamed the Province of Judea "palaestina," more exactly Syria Palaestina, using "palaestina" as an adjective and thus subordinating the country semantically to Syria. That is, as by Herodotos much earlier, Israel was seen by the Romans as a mere section of Syria, the "palestinian" section. The historian and classical archeologist, Elsa Laurenzi, affirms that although "palestine" had been used in early classical times by Herodotos [also as an adjective for what he believed was part of Syria], the term was not generally used in the Roman period until it was brought back from "the dustbin of history," so to speak, after defeat of the Bar Kokhba Revolt. I see the name change as a sign of Roman triumphalism and vindictiveness, an expression of antagonism to the vanquished Jews.

Palestine
This place name, connected with the Philistine population, is first found in the classical [Greek] sources in Herodotos [5th century BCE]. It was introduced as the official name for the region by the Romans after the events of 132-5 [CE], deliberately counterposing it to the official name Iudaea, traditionally used up to that time, in the setting of a series of repressive actions. As such it is often rejected in Jewish circles who prefer "Land of Israel."

Palestina
Questo toponimo, legato alla popolazione dei Filistei, si riscontra per la prima volta nelle fonti classiche in Erodoto (V secolo a.e.c.). E` introdotto come nome ufficiale della regione dai Romani dopo gli avventimenti del 132-5 [e.c.], contrapponendolo programmaticamente a quello di Iudaea, tradizionalmente usato fino a quel momento, nell'ambito di una serie di interventi repressivi. Come tale e` spesso respinto negli ambienti ebraici, che preferiscono "Terra di Israele." [Elsa Laurenzi, Le Catacombe ebraiche (Roma: Gangemi 2011) p22].

Again, as Laurenzi says, "palestine" was a name imposed on the country by enemies of the Jews. It was part of a series of repressive actions by imperialists who had defeated a Jewish rebellion. Nevertheless, the Romans too considerably regretted the Bar Kokhba War which had seen many Roman soldiers slain by the Jews, as the Roman Fronto pointed out. As least one full legion was wiped out, the XXII Deiotariana Legion. Maybe one more met the same end. In the view of the Bar Kokhba Revolt making such an important impact on both the Jews and the Roman Empire, it is curious that Laurenzi refers to the uprising as "the events of 132-5."

Note that in Roman usage the name Judea applied to the whole country, to all of Israel. In fact the Province of Judea and the earlier Kingdom of Judea ruled by Herod, a client king of Rome, included Samaria, Galilee, the Golan Heights, and the east bank of the Jordan River. Sometimes, as in several verses of the Christian New Testament, Judea is used in a narrow sense together with Samaria as separate regions. But this was a reflection of Jewish usage, not Roman. Jews sometimes used Judea to translate Judah [Yehudah], the ancient southern kingdom of the Israelites after the split of the monarchy.

UPDATING 8-3-2014
Gian Domenico Mazzocato in his footnote 1 to his translation of the Histories of Tacitus, on p1240 [Tacito, Publio Cornelio, Storie, Intro. Generale di Lidia Storoni Mazzolani, cura e traduzione di Gian Domenico Mazzocato (Roma: Newton 1995). Latin text on facing pages]

"Judea, in this context, indicates Palestine as a whole (that is, beyond  Judea in the true and proper sense, the Galilee, Samaria, Perea)"

"Giudea, in questo contesto, indica l'intera Palestina (cioe', oltre la Giudea vera e propria, la Galilea, la Samaria, la Perea)"