Selling the big lie

Nowhere can we find a better pack of heinous lies than in the Palestinian fabrication of history.

By ELWOOD MCQUAID
Yasser Arafat 311 (photo credit: REUTERS)
Yasser Arafat 311
(photo credit: REUTERS)
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.
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 this very thing when he began creating a preposterous revision of history that few thought would gain traction in the real world. 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 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. Furthermore, today’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 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 humus. In this bizarre version of history, 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 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 writer is executive editor for The Friends of Israel.