For a full critique of the fairy tale history of Palestine and it's poeple as embodied by this article, you could do far worse than look at Norman Finkelstein's excellent site. Norman is the son of two Haulocaust survivors who has sought, successfully, to be debunk the Zionist propaganda masquerading as history peddled by so many appologists for the state of Israel.

It is a telling fact that while he has had to suffer much abuse from those Americans who would seek to hide the crimes of Israel behind the piled high corpses of the victims of Nazism, he has never been sued by the Anti-defamation League.

 http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/default.htm

Indeed, this is just another regurgitation of Joan Peters' massive fraud, exposed by Norman Finkelstein in an essay published in "Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine conflict". Interestingly, Alan Dershowitz recently even plagiarized Peters' fairy tales in his "The case for Israel".

No sane soul dares to repeat the "Arab leaders ordered the Palestinians to leave" lie (incidentally for a long time the official Israeli position on the issue). Whalid Khalidi and Erskine Childers alreay exposed the myth in the early 1960s, by reviewing British and American transcripts from radio traffic and not finding anything even closely resembling Israel's claim. Indeed, what they found was the opposite: calls from Arab officials telling the Palestinians to stay put. Later on, Benny Morris, the famous Israeli "New" Historian finally landed the last nail in the coffin. Reviewing Israeli army archives, he concluded there wasn't a shred of evidence to suggest arab leaders ordered Palestinians to leave.

ah yes, joseph farah the PHALANGIST...great love for Palestinians this guy has, just like his cohorts who massacred Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila not that long ago...

Pleas remove this offensive fascist shit. It should be no more welcome on Indymedia as the BNP, the NF, and The ( imperialist ) Labour Party. Common sense does not even understand the meaning of the term 'common sense' - itself culturally loaded.

For those interested in genuine Palestinian Christians I recommend the website of Sabeel: The Palestinian Centre for Liberation theology (which I think is www.sabeel.org) who have published many books about Christians who trace their lineage from the first Christian church in historical Palestine founded by the apostles.

Also the autobiography of Elias Chacour, "Blood Brothers" and Naim Ateek's "Justice and only Justice: A Palestinian theology of liberation".

I also recommend William Dalymple's travel book "From the Holy Mountain" which highlights the difficulties of Palestinian Christians under Israeli occupation as well as other interesting anecdotes about the contemporary situation of Christians across the Middle East.

On the subject of land theft. Their are several excellent books by Israeli historians that document the land theft through ethnic cleansing by the Israeli state in 1948 including the work of Ilan Paape, Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim, and Benny Morris.

The last of these historians Benny Morris did pioneering work uncovering Israel's thnic cleansing of Palestine. Unfortunately he has recently lurched to the far right arguing that Israel's mistake in 1948 was not completing the job leaving Palestinians in Israel and not expeling all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza strip. The factual material he has collected documenting Israeli attrocities in 1948 cannot be refuted.

To be fair the Phalangists were the targets of genocide by the PLO who fought with the Syrians against Lebanon between 1975 and 1982 when 95,000 people were killed. By the time Israel went in the PLO had taken their villages and were using them to shell Israel. A week after the PLO murdered the Lebanese President and much of his government in a bomb attack Phalangists who had been appointed by Israel to root out 200 PLO guerillas from the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, went in and slaughtered hundreds - Lebanese police said 460, Israel said up to 800 - which although it included Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian and foreign fighters also included innocents including 25 women and children. No single such awful act of warfare is excusable but we only know of this outrage because Israel had a commission investigate and sacked then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, and the Chief of Staff Raful Eitan. Whereas no Arab commission has ever investigated similar atrocities by Syria and the PLO against the Lebanese, including the 1985 storming of Shatilla and a neighbouring camp killing 635, the 2000 subsequently killed or the 700 civilians killed by Syria in Lebanon 1990. The PLO reign in Lebanon was one of utter deprivation, torture, brutality, rape and casual murder. By comparison the displaced Lebanese who indeed saw Israel as an ally were a beacon of respectability. Please feel free to add to my points.

In fact the PLO did not wage war on Lebanon, they took one side in a civil war between different Lebanese groups that had its roots in the Maronite Christian hegemony established by colonial powers in Lebanon.

Your claims that the PLO committed genocide in Lebanon are rubbish and not substantiated by any serious historian or journalist.

Finally you repeat Israeli state propaganda about the ritual slaughter of 2,000 men, women and children in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla by Christian Phalange aided by the Israeli Army who sealed the camps and guarded them while the Phalange militia carried out the slaughter.

There were no PLO in Sabra and Shatilla otherwise the Phalange might have had a fight. The PLO had evacuated Lebanon under a deal brokered by the UN who promised to send a peace keeping force to protect the refugees and families left behind.

FOOTNOTE

2 excellent books about the Lebanon War - "PITY THE NATION" By Robert Fisk (respected Journalist who writes for the independent and "THE FATEFUL TRIANGLE: ISRAEL, THE U.S AND YHE PALESTINIANS" by Noam Chomsky, excellent book written in the aftermath of the Lebanon war.

Supply factual info. I am open to being corrected, but my point stands that you are presenting selective parts of a complex history. What I have said is intended to flesh that out, not to contradict you. The PLO remains heavily entrenched and responsible for dire atrocities in Lebanon which you appear to disbelieve. Out of curiosity, where are you from? I am from London and lived in Israel and in Arab East Jerusalem.

I wish people could stop quoting norman finkelstein, who wrote a ridicolous book about how the jews exploit the holocaust to get simpathy and -guess what- money form germany for fake survivors, which is untrue. he uses typical antisemitic claims about how the jews feel superior to everyone else because they talk about the holocaust like the apotheosis of 2000 years of antisemitism, apparently "forgeting about the other victims". it's the usual old crap. if jews aren't angels, then they're devils ofcourse.
the fact finkelstein is jewish counts for nothing. so is this joseph farrah arab, and anyway the term self hating jew exists for a purpose

and to reply to mark r, indymedia should accept thisw post. it is not downright racist. it simply expresses a point of view. if you find it distastefull, what about the many posts bordering on the antisemitic which don't get hidden. what about the posts with lies and mis-information on israel?

An enemy of the people
Norman Finkelstein's book shows him as a Jew who doesn't like Jews

Jonathan Freedland
Friday July 14, 2000
The Guardian

Perhaps he thought the sky would fall in. Perhaps Norman Finkelstein imagined his ?explosive? new polemic, The Holocaust Industry, serialised in the Guardian, would drive the Jewish world crazy with fury. Maybe he is a little disappointed that, in Britain at least, that hasn?t happened yet.

But there is good reason. For though Finkelstein likes to cast himself as the brave prophet, nobly confronting his wayward people with a truth only he dare tell, his claims are not nearly as shocking to Jews as he would like to imagine. Indeed, the chief questions he raises have been at the heart of Jewish debate for at least a decade. So he tells us that the Holocaust should not be treated as a sacred mystery, impervious to human inquiry - and that its lessons must be applied to genocide and suffering the world over. Most Jews accepted that long ago. More controversially, he insists that the Holocaust is not unique - as if unaware that a debate has long raged on this very question.

Some insist that the Shoah did indeed witness an unprecedented convergence of state bureaucratic power and modern technology in a systematic, industrialised attempt to extinguish an entire people. Others counsel against ?hierarchies of oppression,? in which Jews claim first place in an Olympic games of world suffering. It is a loud, important debate - but it did not begin with Norman Finkelstein.

The same goes for the ?memory? industry, the abundance of museums, films, books and conferences commemorating the Holocaust. Finkelstein is no pioneer here either. Indeed it was a former Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban, who first quipped that ?There?s no business like Shoah business? (a trade, incidentally, which this latest book has now joined).

Thoughtful Jews have been questioning for a while the wisdom of making the Holocaust the centre of Jewish identity. Peter Novick?s landmark book, The Holocaust in American Life, makes this case far more powerfully than Finkelstein. He offers a moving plea for today?s Jews to define themselves as a people with a rich, vibrant culture - rather than as a ghost-nation, a walking version of the corpses of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Novick is just as appalled by Holocaust theme parks and Auschwitz tourism as Finkelstein. But there?s a crucial difference - which explains why Novick?s book was welcomed for posing some awkward but necessary questions, while Finkelstein?s has been dismissed or condemned. Novick wrote as a Jew, concerned that his fellow Jews were taking a path that could only end in harm. This new book has none of that sensitivity or human empathy - surely prerequisites of any meaningful debate about the Holocaust. It asks some legitimate questions, among them whether the Shoah was used unfairly to immunise Israel from criticism. But it reads like a rant, with splenetic attacks on individuals, many of them survivors, and vast generalisations about the whole of world Jewry.

In a telephone call to Brooklyn yesterday, I asked Finkelstein why he reserved his most scathing language for his fellow Jews - much harsher than any words he had for the Nazis themselves. ?If I was writing a book about the Nazis, I?m sure I?d use scathing language about them,? he said, rather feebly. It is perhaps too easy to write off a critic like Finkelstein as a self-hating Jew, but it is striking to hear someone who appears to have nothing but contempt for his own people. He issues the same call sent out by David Irving in the high court this year - that Jews should not simply condemn anti-semitism, but examine their own role in provoking it. Like Irving, Finkelstein sees Jews as the authors of their own suffering. He claims that Jews have made up stories of persecution and that there are too many survivors to be true - another Irving favourite. In fact, what this claim amounts to is the fair statement that Jews expanded their definition of survivor to mean not just those who were held in camps, but those who fled or hid from the Nazis. But to put it like that would be to give Jews the benefit of the doubt. And Finkelstein, like Irving, is not in that game.

Besides the animus and the vitriol, there is a subtler way in which Finkelstein does the anti-semites? work for them. He constructs an elaborate conspiracy theory, in which the Jews were pushed from apathy to obsession about the Holocaust by a corrupt Jewish leadership bent on building international support for Israel. He has no truck with the idea that Jews might themselves have changed their attitude to the Shoah, for a complex range of reasons. Instead Jews are mere sheep, pushed around by a wicked Jewish elite.

Finkelstein sees the Jews as either villains or victims - and that, I fear, takes him closer to the people who created the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it.

 jonathan.freedland@guardian.co.uk

A Johanes,

The incident I refer to was the PLO's massacre of Shatilla and Burj-el Barajneh where 635 refugees were killed. The 2,000 including civilians were killed in battles between the PLO and the Syrian Amal. I don't know what 'ritual slaughter' you're on about but evidently you make stuff up.

Without getting drawn into the debate about Lebanon, the fact is, the original article is pretty discredited by the fact the guy is a Phalangist. Its funny the way the title tries to spin it by saying 'Arab historian'. The name is not a lie, but it is a selective use of the truth.

Propoganda eh, ain't it swell?

farah doesn't deserve the honour of someone critiquing his scribbles but there is a pretty cool site which bothers below:

Exhibit 24: Joseph Farah, Crusher of Dissent
By Terry Krepel
Posted 9/8/2003
 http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/outthere/otfarah.html
How can Joseph Farah top himself after advocating the murder of adulterers?
Why, bring back the Hollywood blacklist, of course!

=======

now what kind of people actually LIKE him?

well:
Joseph Farah Speaks
 http://www.mideasttruth.com/farah.html
The following are selected excerpts from Joseph Farah's talk in Montreal at the Beit Israel-Beit Aharon synagogue October 22, 2002. Farah, founder, editor and chief executive officer of WorldNetDaily.com, was invited on a speaking tour by Bnai Brith Canada.

bnai brith canada huh...


it gets WORSE - try KACH [considered terrorists by both israel and the us]sympathisers such as those who have produced the masada2000 site below:

 http://www.masada2000.org/templemount.html
We appreciate Joseph Farah's honesty and only wish more Arab-Americans would come forward
with the same courage and honesty. Talk about the proverbial "Needle in the Haystack!"

Joseph Farah, a Christian Arab-American journalist, is the editor and chief executive officer of WorldNetDaily.com, a leading independent news site.

=======

a homophobic zionist extremist features a farah article on his blog:
 http://stevenplaut.blogspot.com/

steven is actually an academic! - he apparently teaches business administration at the university of haifa AND i'm rather STRUCK by the similarity of content/style of his writing and that of masada2000 - which features a link to his work but states there's no affiliation between them...


=======

who doesn't love him :(

 http://www.jerusalem.indymedia.org/news/2002/07/60422.php

here is farah whining about jews who don't love him...

For instance, here’s what Gershom Gorenberg wrote in his Jerusalem Report column July 1:

Among the underhanded is Joseph Farah’s article “Myths of the Middle East,” again circulating these days, in which the writer identifies himself as Arab-American and proclaims that there’s no Islamic connection to Jerusalem. The implication is that someone has let us in on what “the Arabs” really think. But a quick Web search reveals that Farah, whatever his ancestry, is a Christian fundamentalist and head of the WorldNetDaily site, packed with all the myths of the American ultra-right. As cub reporters learn, it’s worth checking who your source is.

That’s one. Here’s another. This from Rob Eshman, editor-in-chief of the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles:

“There is no editor of cyberspace, and that’s too bad. The latest e-mail craze to spread like the Melissa virus through the cc: box of various e-mails is the report of a man named Joseph Farah. Farah is an Arab-American journalist who has cashed in on some Jewish Americans’ willingness to believe exactly what they want to believe. His report, called “Myths of the Middle East” has [sic] richoted [methinks he means ricocheted] from e-mail to e-mail. It has arrived at our offices dozens of times, usually preceded by the sender’s imploring, “You MUST read this!” or “Bet you don’t have the GUTS to print THIS!”

Like Gorenberg, whom Eshman quotes in his own diatribe, Eshman doesn’t actually question a single fact from my writings. Neither of them disputes the substance nor the details of anything I have ever written. Instead, they, and others like them, use ad hominem attacks.

it reminds me of israel shamir. he is an israeli journalist who claims to be jewish, but he is a russian christian. he used to write for the far right in russia. he says typical antisemitic things, and he describes himself as a "jew criticizing his own country and tradition". he is the israeli joseph farrah

There is obviously no point debating with you Dom, you belong in the same camp as holocaust deniers who have a similar take on reality and facts.

While the number of people who were murdered in Shatila and Sabra can be debated (Lebanese and Israeli army sources gave lower figures) that a massacre took place is irrefutable.

It has been clearly and thoroughly documented that a massacre was perpertuated in 1982 in Sabra and Shatilla by Lebanese Phalange militia.

The UN recognises this. We have eyewitness reports of journalists who were there. You even alude to the Kahan Inquiry set up by the Israeli government which found Ariel Sharon and Israel indirectly responsible for the massacre.

There was a demonstration of 400,000 people in Israel to protest the attrocities!

How much more evidence can I give.

perhaps akin to Le Pen you see mass murder as "a mere detail of history".