by Sha'i Ben Tekoa
What exactly is Palestinian about her?
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was censured by the House of Representatives for words implying the destruction of America’s ally, the born-again Jewish state. She also could be censured for her mendacious claim to being a Palestinian when there is nothing Palestinian about her.
While the Education department in the Palestinian Authority created by Israel’s Marxist leaders thirty years ago, Isaac Rabin and Simon Peres, teaches its school children that the Palestinians have been living in Palestine for five thousand years, Tlaib surely knows not one word of the language they spoke because there never was such a language.
Her religion also is not native to what the world calls Palestine but to the Arabian Peninsula where Islam’s holy city is some 770 miles from the Jews’ holy city that the Palestinians claim is their historic, eternal capital?
For sure, Tlaib’s wardrobe also contains not one garment uniquely associated to her Palestinian nation, like the Japanese kimono, Scottish kilt, or Mexican sombrero.
And also for sure, she has not read even one book on the history of her “Palestinians” prior to the 20th century because there is no such book on any shelf in any library or book store on the planet; and there never will be.
No less in matters gustatory, with so many national cuisines found in the best restaurants in world capitals, who has ever eaten in a “Palestinian” restaurant serving down-home “Palestinian” cooking?
But in defense of Tlaib, she is hardly alone in claiming to be a child of a putatively primeval Palestinian nation. Consider the life of the late Edward Said (1935-2003), arguably in his day the foremost propagandist for Palestinian Nationalism in the English language. In 1966, one year before Israel’s miraculous Six-Day War, Said was an unknown, 33-year-old assistant professor at Columbia University, working on a PhD at Harvard, teaching a course on 18th century English Literature who told his curious English major students – a high percentage of them Jews — one of them this writer — that although he was born in Jerusalem, he was a Lebanese Christian who grew up in Cairo.
Only after the ’67 war did Assistant Professor Said morph into an “Ancient Palestinian refugee” claiming to have been robbed of his family manse in Jerusalem by the evil Zionists. Shortly before his death, Said published an autobiography that unwittingly exposed this lie. The man was an imposter, a complete fraud, as the movement he flacked for has been.
Ironically, Said’s dissertation was on Joseph Conrad, a Pole who wanted to be an Englishman, which treatise Said entitled The Fiction of Autobiography, wittingly or otherwise resonant with the fiction of his own biography and that of his father who became an American citizen during WWI. Said pere joined the Church of England, and named his son after no Ancient Palestinian hero in history but Edward, the Prince of Wales.
Little Edward Said was brought up in the upscale Zamalek neighborhood in Cairo where his father had a successful stationary business, supporting a car and driver. Little Edward was educated in an English language school and at home in the family all spoke English. For this, his own Arabic was rudimentary. Only in 1967 did Edward Said transform himself into an Ancient Palestinian Jerusalemite tragically expelled by the racist, fascist, capitalist, imperialist, neocolonial Jews.
So, in defense of Rashida Tlaib, born in Michigan in 1976, she was probably told by her parents she is a Palestinian, and if memory serves, she has whined about a grandmother in the “West Bank,” which very name is evidence of the fact the Muslims like her never in history had a name for these lands, what on all maps for millennia had labeled “Samaria and Judaea.”
Indeed, in the UN Partition Plan of 1947, those were the terms used. Not until after the Six-Day War did “West Bank” become common usage, which is a no-name name, a topographical description, versus the practice of authentically indigenous peoples who give names to their homeland’s natural features, e.g., lakes, rivers, mountains. Before the Six-Day War, the Arab and Muslim worlds had no name for what became the “West Bank.” In 1950, Jordan annexed these territories and until 1988, the kings in Amman never thought the Arabs there were another nationality besides “Jordanian” deserving of their own independent state. Indeed, these kings ruled by virtue of direct descent from Prophet Mohammad, and they did not think the Arabs on the west bank were of a different nation than those on the east bank, site of Amman, their capital.
After the 1990-91 Gulf War, this writer was commissioned by the office of Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir to do a statistical analysis of voting patterns in the UN because President Bush, 41 and Secretary of State Baker, no friend of Israel, were pushing for a peace conference under UN auspices, and Israel needed ammunition to oppose the initiative and expose the UN as an antisemitic hot air factory.
The project entailed reading 870 UN resolutions in the Security Council and General Assembly from 1945 to 1989, which produced such statistics as: the UN Security Council in that period condemned Israel — its highest rebuke — 49 times but never an Arab state. In the General Assembly too, no Arab state was ever condemned, but Israel 321 times.
Overall, in the UN’s first four decades, the number of individual member-state votes over those 870 documents against Israel came to 55,642.
But apart from doing the work commissioned, this writer kept an eye out for the first-ever document referencing “the people of Palestine” and found it: GA Res. 2628 of December 1970. Before then, the Palestinian nation did not yet exist within the halls of the United Nations or was a concern in international diplomacy. In the UN’s first quarter-century, including Arab and Muslim member-states, there was not one resolution on behalf of a people called “Palestinians” pining for a state.
In 1972, Yasir Arafat, a native Egyptian raised in the Muslim Brotherhood, and Mahmoud Abbas, planned the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games, when the 11 Israeli athletes were corralled into one room and the Muslims exulted in their domination of them by castrating the weight lifter.
In 1972 as well, the PLO massacred air travelers in the arrivals’ hall in Israel’s one international airport. In May 1974, a PLO gang massacred 22 Jewish school children at Maalot, Israel, which did not stop the UN that November from inviting the mass murderer Arafat to address the UN General Assembly and receive a standing ovation.
By 1980, after a dozen years of bloody terror in Europe, the European Community (not yet the EU) at Venice recognized Arafat’s Fatah, founded by eight graduates of the Muslim Brotherhood Youth Organization, as a legitimate political entity fighting a legitimate war of national liberation. And the rest is history.
The Palestinian National Movement for the Liberation of Palestine has been the greatest historical hoax in history though now superseded as a political force by Islam. In the 60s, 70s and 80s, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was a front for more than a dozen terror clubs with faux-political names like the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) or its breakaway group the DPFLP, (Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) whose terrorists presumably broke away because the PFLP wasn’t democratic enough.
Today, in the “West Bank” and Gaza, the two principal Jew-killing fraternities are the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas) and Islamic Jihad; and notice there is nothing Palestinian about either name.
Likewise, in 1948, the aggression against Israel was labeled the “Arab-Israeli Conflict,” which in the 1970s was rebranded its conceptual opposite, the “Israeli-Palestinian” Conflict. In the first formulation, the Arabs with their 30,000,000 people and armies three times larger than those of 650,000 Israels, were “Goliath,” and Israel “David.” In the second formulation after 1967, Israel moved into the superior first position, the superpower bully oppressing its stateless “Palestinian” victims.
From day one, the “Palestinian nation” has been a fraud. In Israel recently, one popular Jew-killing technique among the Muslims has been driving a car into a group of people waiting, say, at a bus stop, killing some that way, but then the driver jumps out with a knife to stab the still living while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” There is no record of even one of them ever shouting, “Long Live Balestine!” (sic)
Tragically for Israel, the Jews themselves have been a major purveyor of the lie thanks to the Marxists, a.k.a. the atheists for whom religion was superstition and should play no part in Israel’s relationship with its Arab neighbors. Indeed, the architect of the so-called Oslo Peace Process, Yossi Beilin, speaking for his slice of anti-religious Israeli leftists said, “If we define the conflict as religious, there can be no peace, so let’s call it a political conflict between two nations,” which then required inventing this phantom nation, when for forty years after WWI, the murderous Grand Mufti in Jerusalem said there never was such a country as Filastin and over Islam’s fourteen centuries he was right.
Factually, the “father” of the new “Palestinian identity” was Egypt’s modern pharaoh Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) who in an Arab League meeting on March 29, 1959, in imitation of the situation in Algeria in its fifth year of intifada against the French, promoted the idea of a “Kiyan Filastini”/ “Palestinian entity.” In Algeria in 1954, the Muslims there revolted after 124 years of French rule, and had the brains to appeal for political support aboard not as Muslims but “freedom fighters” in a “war of national liberation.” They knew that if they cast their rebellion in religious terms, this would not win support in the France of post-religious Existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone DeBouvoir.
Nasser had been an active supporter with weapons and other assistance to the terrorist FLN in Algeria and thought transforming the “Arab refugees” of the war with Israel into a “Palestinian” nation was the way to go. Since the ceasefire with Israel in 1949, the whole world, Muslim and Arab states included, referred to the “Arab refugees” as just that, generically, because most were migrant workers from the all over the Middle East working in Mandatory Palestine who ran from the fighting with nothing “Palestinian” about them.
The “Palestinian people” is a verbal hologram, which is something that looks like it is there, but really is not. In effect, the Muslim butchers in Gaza on October 7 were the same people who brought down the World Trade Center in 2001; massacred US officers at Fort Hood in 2009; bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013; massacred a Christmas Party in San Bernardino in 2015; massacred hundreds at the Bataclan Theater in Paris that same year; massacred people in Berlin at the Christmas market; massacred scores in Nice, France in 2016, and so on and so forth ad nauseum.
Rashida Tlaib, unlike the imposter Edward Said, may be forgiven for having been lied to from the day she was born, but not for her classic, age-old, Islam-based Jew-hatred. On October 7, those maniacs were not “Palestinian freedom-fighters” but Muslim holy warriors.
Sha'i Ben Tekoa
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/rashida-tlaib-a-palestinian/
Strangely, nobody demanded “freeing Palestine” from occupiers “from the river to the sea.”
