That master of falsehoods, fabrications and breathtaking mendacity, Saeb Erakat, is at it again.
Ambassador, Alan Baker, who is the Director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and who served as Israel’s ambassador to Canada, penned an article titled, “
Changing the Historical Narrative: Saeb Erekat’s New Spin”
Erakat, who is the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator in the delusional “peace talks” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, has yet again made the hoary old claim and fairy story that the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians are descended from the extinct Canaanites.
Lewis Carrol who wrote about Alice in Wonderland and her strange descent down the rabbit hole would have been highly impressed at Erakat’s fantasies during Erakat’s own descent into wonderland.
Erakat will, alas, no doubt attract so many in the world who are only too pleased to deny the Jews any history or legitimacy. So they will flock to repeat ad nauseum his canard that the “Palestinian Arabs” are the “true” indigenous people of the area and predate by millennia the emergence of the Jewish people around the year 1,750 BC.
But Erakat goes further. No doubt smoking something truly potent in his hooker, he portrays himself as being a direct descendant of the same extinct Canaanites who were there 5,500 years before Joshua destroyed the town of Jericho.
Ambassador Baker points out, however, that Erakat belongs to the Huweitat Bedouin clan originating near Taif in the vicinity of Mecca. The family to which Erakat belongs settled in Abu Dis, near Jerusalem, during the illegal Arab immigration into British occupied Mandatory Palestine during the early 20th century.
These Arabs infiltrated the geographical territory known sometimes as Palestine often with the British authorities turning a blind eye. The Arabs flooded in primarily as a result of the burgeoning agricultural advances and opportunities being accomplished by the Jewish pioneers as they redeemed the long neglected land which had lain fallow and barren since Roman times under a succession of alien occupiers.
I once wrote an article titled: Lies, damned lies, and Palestinian propaganda in descending order. That title paraphrased British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli’s, 19th century aphorism: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Few have mastered the art of dissimilitude more than long time Palestinian Arab spokesman, Saeb Erakat
Few have mastered the art of dissimilitude more than long time Palestinian Arab spokesman, Saeb Erakat, who continues to be taken seriously by the ever gullible western media. Erakat continues to spew howlers as he has been doing for several decades, yet he still retains the confidence of mainstream western journalists and reporters.
This is the man who bamboozled the world on CNN in April 2002 by baldly stating that Israel had, “massacred at least 500 people in Jenin and that women and children were missing.”
This outrageous lie was effectively dismissed by Colin Powell himself and its fabrication subsequently confirmed by the UN, which went on to report that 56 Arabs were killed (34 of them armed combatants) in fighting by the IDF against Palestinian Arab terror squads infesting the Arab city.
This is the city from which some 28 suicide bombers had infiltrated the Jewish state, perpetrating atrocities against hundreds of Israeli civilians during the previous 18 months. Erakat knew his words were false but he also knew the effectiveness of the “big lie.”
No Arab civilians were missing. However, many of the 22 civilians killed were used as human shields by the Arab terrorists – in itself a Palestinian Arab war crime that remains unpunished.
Erakat’s outright lie was hardly challenged, nor his credibility dented. After all, he has made a perverse career of half-truths, mistruths and spectacular falsehoods over several decades while acting as a Palestinian spokesman and latterly a negotiator in what is called the, “peace process.”
In an article by Bret Stephens titled “Liar, liar” in December 2002, published in the Jerusalem Post, it was pointed out that up to that date, “Erakat has had no less than 11,382 citations in the English language press since 1988” – a veritable Niagara Falls of falsehoods that have done so much to poison the minds of countless readers against Israel. Since then the torrent of Erakat whoppers has washed away any sense of historical accuracy.
Here are a few of the many deliberate lies Mr. Erakat has uttered:
Erakat has often claimed to the Western world and through its media that, “Palestinians are committed to two equal states for two peoples.” Sounds nice to western ears, but facts tell a very different story especially when he and other PA leaders spew their poison in Arabic.
Well over 60% of Arabs calling themselves Palestinians reject outright such an Erakat claim. And Mahmoud Abbas himself, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, rejects utterly any willingness to accept Israel as a Jewish state. He just told Obama that.
Erakat can provide no evidence that he or his cronies seek peace, while Israel can show near suicidal peace offers and breathtakingly perilous Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, all of which were rejected. In fact the Palestinians could have had a state existing now since 1937 but then, as now, they want a state – not side by side with Israel – but instead of Israel. Therein lies the tragedy.
But according to the current Palestinian narrative, effectively conveyed by Erakat, the fault for the absence of negotiations or peace always lies with Israel.
Erakat claims repeatedly that Israeli villages in Judea and Samaria (the biblical and ancestral heartland of the Jewish people), which Erakat describes in the anti-Israel nomenclature as “settlements in the West Bank,” cover 42% of the disputed territory when in fact they control barely 5% of the ancestral Jewish heartland.
Bret Stephens pointed out in his December, 2002 article that, Erakat says “settlers” are stealing Palestinian water resources. Yet almost all “settlers” are linked to the central Israeli water grid and do not use local wells.” What is fact is that the Arabs pollute the scant water resources and aquifer within Judea and Samaria and the very term, Palestinian water resources, is to implicitly pre-judge whose land it truly is.
He also mentioned that, “Erekat says Israel plans to deprive Palestinians of everything but “an insignificant presence in Jerusalem.” Yet at Camp David, much of east Jerusalem was theirs for the taking. They refused it.”
Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, proved that telling a big lie over and over again assured that most people would come to believe it. However, Saeb Erakat also proves that if you tell a multitude of small lies over and over again, a multitude of people will believe them without question.
Erakat’s career has been just such a monument to dissimilitude. Sadly, there are many people anxious and willing to accept any nonsense uttered by such a master of deceits – which brings me to yet another of his outrageous falsehoods.
Saeb Erakat criticized Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for mentioning the Jewish people’s historic biblical ties to Jerusalem. He accused the prime minister of, “using religion to incite hatred and fear.”
Biblical references it seems are now considered hate mongering by Erakat and most of the Islamic world. The Jewish Bible refers to Jerusalem and Zion, which are synonymous, 850 times.
The Christian Bible refers to them some 154 times. But the Koran does not refer to Jerusalem at all. Instead the Koran commands Muslims to: “ … fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.” Koran 9:5. Propaganda is a stratagem of war and Mr. Erakat knows all too well how to wage it.
Erakat has often sought to dismiss the inextricable 3,000 year old Jewish ties to Jerusalem and has claimed that Jewish heritage on the Temple Mount, the site of the two ancient Jewish Temples, are a threat to Islam.
The neighborhoods illegally occupied by the Jordanian regime from 1948 to 1967 are now claimed by the Palestinian Authority as the future capital of a PA state. They include the Old City and the City of David but Jewish residents of these very neighborhoods were expelled from them by the British officered Jordanian Arab Legion in 1948. And, of course, according to the Palestinian Authority and the Muslim Waqf, the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest of all sites, must never be shared with Jews or Christians.
Erakat has warned in the past that, “East Jerusalem cannot continue to be occupied if there is to be peace.” This too will be believed by many in the international corridors of power and the mainstream media even as they know in their heart of hearts that if Jerusalem was again divided – like Berlin once was, and Nicosia in Cyprus still is – there still will never be peace from the Arabs.
Saeb Erakat will continue to obfuscate and dissemble in his inimitable fashion, ever hiding the empirical fact that the Muslim world will never accept a Jewish state however much of its biblical and ancestral patrimony it gives away in pursuit of peace.
Mr. Erakat well knows that even if Israel shrank to one downtown square in Tel Aviv its existence would still be a provocation to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians and to all Muslims and relentless jihad and Islamic war would be waged against it.
The one truth that Erakat will never reveal is that the Palestinian Arab leadership will never accept a “two state solution.” As already pointed out, they want no Jewish state side by side with their Arab and Muslim state. Indeed any land Israel foolishly gives in the vain pursuit of peace to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians immediately becomes a launching pad for ever more brutish terrorism against what is left of the Jewish state.
Indeed, Erakat, Mahmoud Abbas and all the Palestinian henchmen ultimately want one state stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the borders of Iraq – that is an Islamic state, including the present day Kingdom of Jordan, in which neither Jews nor Hashemite Arabs will be permitted to remain. Apartheid, Arab style.
It will inevitably become a Hamas controlled state willingly tied to the baleful influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood – an extension of Islamist and jihadist influence on the very doorstep of Europe and a bridgehead for the dreamed of worldwide Islamic Caliphate.
