Christmas is cancelled in Gaza

While crowds of anti-Zionists protested at Israel's 'criminal siege of Gaza' outside the Israeli embassy in London yesterday, Gaza's few remaining Christians concluded a very sombre Christmas.

In a report from Gaza City, The Guardian's Pheobe Greenwood said she had been told that by local Christians that after seizing control of Gaza in 2007, Hamas effectively cancelled Christmas, and that any open celebration of the holiday is met with threats of arrest or worse.

The manager of Gaza City's Bible bookshop was brutally murdered soon after Hamas took power.

'People here do not celebrate Christmas anymore because they are nervous,' Imad Jelda, an Orthodox Christian, told Greenwood. Fewer than 1,400 Christians now live among Gaza's 1.5 million Muslims.

Two brothers from another Christian family explained that most of their family had been forced to flee Gaza under threat of Muslim violence.

One of the brothers told Greenwood, 'This is not a Christian environment. There are no good universities [for Christians], there is no opportunity to work, no apartments to rent and so no way we can get married. We have no future here.'

Meanwhile, Israel's enemies continue to blame Israel for the dwindling number of Christians in the Holy Land.

Expect Israel's antagonists to gloss over and dismiss The Guardian's rare truthful report regarding the true reasons behind the disappearance of Christian communities in the region.

Abbas in high profile meeting with child murderer

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is a controversial figure and some of his remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian situation have been extreme.

Neveetheless, his belief that a genuine peace deal with the Palestinian Authority is not possible at present is justified.

The Islamist takeover in Egypt, the fragility of Iraq's democracy, the ongoing bloodshed in Syria, according to Lieberman, make it clear that now is not to the time to push for a Israeli-Palestinian peace arrangement.

Lieberman asked rhetorically,'In the midst of an earthquake do you start to lay the foundations for a new building?'

As he has in the past, Lieberman suggested that the focus of Israel and the international community should be maintaining the status quo in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while trying to improve economic conditions in Palestinian-ruled areas.

As further evidence that a true peace is currently impossible, Lieberman referred to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' visit to Turkey last week, during which he had a highly publicized meeting with the female Palestinian terrorist Amneh Muna (shown above).

In 2001 Muna used the Internet to lure 16-year-old Ofir Rahum to the Palestinian town of Ramallah, where she and her accomplices brutally murdered the Israeli youth. Muna was released from an Israeli prison in the recent prisoner swap that saw Israel free over 1,000 terrorists in exchange for abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Lieberman pointed out that Abbas had no reason to visit Amneh Muna except to glorify the terrorist murder of Israeli Jews, even when the victims are children. With such people, he said, it is impossible to have truly peaceful coexistence.

'An organised hypocrisy'

For years a small group of nationalist religious Jewish youth has been carrying out ‘price tag’ acts of vandalism to demonstrate to the Israeli government that it cannot surrender to international demands regarding control of the Land of Israel without causing problems with its own people.

Over the past month those attacks have escalated, culminating in a raid on an Israeli army outpost in the Jordan Valley that had allegedly been tasked with forcibly uprooting a nearby Jewish community.

These attacks are regrettable and they are wrong but they have not so far resulted in a single casualty. However, they have exposed the deep-rooted hypocrisy of the international community and local Arabs when relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Last Tuesday, the four current European members of the UN Security Council – France, Britain, Germany and Portugal – released a statement that included a detailed condemnation of the ‘price tag’ attacks:

One of the themes that emerged was the severely damaging effect that increased settlement construction and settler violence is having on the ground and on the prospects of a return to negotiations.

By contrast, the international community has never viewed Palestinian terrorism, which has claimed the lives of many Israeli Jews, as impeding peace efforts. Terrorist murders of Jews usually galvanizes the world to urge Israeli to make greater concessions.

Deadlocks in the peace process are always blamed on Israel, while systematic Palestinian intransigence and officially-sanctioned violence is swept under the rug.

Israeli Arab lawmakers succeeded in introducing a new Knesset bill demanding harsh punishment for ‘price tag’ attacks. The bill calls for tough punishment for vandalism against any holy sites, be they Muslim, Christian or Jewish. It also stipulates imprisonment for incitement against another religion or its adherents.

The explanatory notes to the bill, however, make clear that the bill is not as unbiased as it would appear. The sole target of the bill is the Jewish nationalist movement:

In the wake of the wave of arson against mosques, this proposal is inevitable and we cannot settle for weak condemnations.

The two MKs who submitted the bill, Ahmed Tibi and Ibrahim Sarsour, have for decades been at the forefront of fomenting hatred for Israel’s Jews and dismissing Arab Muslim violence. Tibi in particular has cried out loudly whenever a Muslim leader is arrested for inciting violence against Jews and has been conspicuously silent when Muslim vandalise Jewish holy sites, such as the weekly defacement of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus.

Israel, meanwhile, has strongly condemned ‘price tag’ vandalism, demonstrating once again that it is not like its enemies. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to take firm action against the perpetrators, as he would against any criminal, and has condemned their actions as immoral, despite the possible legitimacy of their political concerns.

A group of students from a Torah academy cleaned up a mosque that had been vandalized. Rabbi Yair Ansbacher of the Eitan Academy in Maaleh Adumim told Israel National News:

We discussed the issue and decided to express our total opposition to these acts by going to a mosque and cleaning it up.

Rabbi Ansbacher lamented that the positive actions of his students had been totally ignored by the media which, instead, focused its attention on the Jewish vandals in an effort to paint all Jewish settlers as hostile and aggressive.

The Palestinianisation of Jesus

Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber turned Jesus into a Superstar, to Kris Kristofferson ‘Jesus was a Capricorn’, to Judy Tzuke, ‘Jesus was a Cross Maker’ and to Sir Elton John, Jesus was (what else?) a ‘super-intelligent gay man’. I've also heard that Jesus was a Buddhist priest, a spaceman and a time traveller. Now he’s a Palestinian hero.

It’s nothing new for the Palestinians to claim that Jesus was one of them. Yasser Arafat used to declare as much every Christmas in Bethlehem. Arafat may be gone but the malady lingers on, as demonstrated last week in a statement from the Palestinian Authority’s ‘moderate’ Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

'Christmas is an opportunity to celebrate the Palestinian identity of Jesus Christ,’ Fayyad declared when he flipped the switch lighting a 50-foot Christmas tree in Bethlehem's Manger Square last week.

The notion that Jesus was a Palestinian permeates Arab society in the region. In an interview on 3 December last year, the author Samih Ghanadreh was interviewed on Palestinian Authority TV about his book Christianity and its Connection to Islam. Ghanadreh recalled with fondness that Arafat labelled Jesus ‘the first Palestinian Shahid (Martyr),’ to which the host responded that no one denies ‘Jesus was a Palestinian.’

Earlier in 2010, the Communications and Education Authority of Fatah issued a statement on its official website:

If we are proud of the holiness of our land, then we are proud and pride ourselves that the first and most important holy woman among the nations and peoples is from the holy land: The Virgin Mary – the woman of love and peace – is of the nation of Palestine…

In 2009, the Mufti of Jerusalem Mohammed Hussein, who was appointed by Mahmoud Abbas, preached on Palestinian TV:

Jesus was born in this land; he took his first steps in this land and spread his teachings [of Islam] in this land. He and his mother [Mary], we may say, were Palestinians par excellence.

The belief that Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, was a Palestinian and a pre-Islamic Muslim to boot is ingrained into the Palestinian communal psyche. All historic or religious ties between Jesus and the Jews have been severed, just as the Palestinians have severed all historic and religious ties between the Jews and the land of Israel.

But it’s not only Palestinians that are being indoctrinated. Western Christians are very susceptible to Palestinian propaganda. Some years ago I attended a symposium in London at which one speaker recounted that on his first encounter with Palestinian Christians he had asked when they became Christians. There response was one of annoyance. How dare he ask that question? Their people had been Christians since the day of Pentecost!

A biblical scholar I admire very much has stated that on the day of Pentecost, Peter preached in Arabic!

Other western Christians can do even better than that. One evangelical author knows Palestinian Christians who have been faithful to the Saviour since the magi visited Bethlehem, while another knows Palestinian Christians who are descended from the shepherds to whom the angels appeared!

Well, as they say, this is a magic season, so we shouldn’t be surprised that there are conjurors around who can turn Israel into Palestine, Jesus into a Palestinian and Christianity into Islam.

Vote, vote, vote for Hamas. We kill more Jews.

Last Wednesday, Hamas marked its 24th anniversary by publicising the number of Jews it has murdered. The highly publicized event (and grisly casualty figures) came just months before Palestinians are scheduled to go to the polls to elect a new parliament and president.

In an official statement, Hamas' military wing the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade, boasted of killing 1,365 Israelis and wounding another 6,411 in 1,117 terror attacks over the past twenty years. The Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigade claimed it had fired over 11,000 rockets and missiles from Gaza into southern Israel.

Hours later, tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered in Gaza City to celebrate Hamas' founding and its successes against the hated Jews of Israel. Speakers at the event reiterated Hamas' dedication to eliminating Israel, and decried ongoing Middle East peace negotiations as a failed experiment.

Many in Israel saw the public event as the start of Hamas' campaign for the next legislative and presidential election, which Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has announced will take place in May 2012.

Hamas leaders expect to score another landslide victory when next the Palestinians go to the polls. The 2006 Palestinian election produced a surprise Hamas takeover of the Palestinian parliament, a result that left clueless Western diplomats baffled.

If recent electoral results in Egypt, with successes for the Muslim Brotherhood which begot Hamas are any indication, the general sentiment on the street has only drifted closer to the Islamist viewpoint in the intervening years.

And what will the international community do in the face of Hamas’ electoral campaign? If Hamas is victorious at the polls, Israel will be urged to talk to Hamas.

Picture this. A group of thugs has murdered all your family and they are threatening to kill you also. You go to the police and the sergeant behind the desk responds, ‘Have you tried talking to these people sir?’

‘They’ve killed my parents, my wife, my children and they are after me too,’ you shout.

‘Well sir,’ says the sergeant, ‘I’m sure these people can be made to think differently if you just have little talk with them.’

Surreal? Of sourse. But that’s essentially what the world has been saying to Israel for the last two decades.

Conspiracy for Dummies

Some conspiracy theories are sophisticated and compelling while others are so crude you’d have to have the IQ of a walnut to be taken in by them but tens of thousands are duped by such things. I was reluctant to post this because readers might think I doubt their reasoning faculties but sometime in the future you might receive an email with the headline ‘Full Speech Of Rabbi Rabbinovitch Found’ and a ‘Commentary by Rose Rabbinovich’.

Two days ago I received such a message.

The email informed me that a ‘report from Europe carried the following speech of Rabbi Emmanuel Rabinovich before a special meeting of the Emergency Council of European Rabbis in Budapest, Hungary, January 12, 1952: ‘Greetings, my children; You have been called her to recapitulate the principal steps of our new program [a la The Protocols of the Elders of Zion]…’

There is enough in that one short excerpt to tell anyone who knows anything about Judaism that it is a fake. When do rabbis address their fellow rabbis as their ‘children’? Rabbis are not Catholic priests.

‘Emergency Council of European Rabbis’? Oh, please…

A meeting of rabbis in Budapest in the Communist-ruled People’s Republic of Hungary in 1952? I don’t think so.

All the evidence suggests that Rabbi Emmanuel Rabbinovich never existed but if anyone knows anything about the man who supposedly headed up this fictional shadowy group of Elders of Zion, I'd be interested to know about a man who was clever enough to remain hidden until now but not so smart as to make sure his explosive document was never discovered.

‘Rose Rabbinovich’ who sent the speech to Jeff Rense, labels herself a ‘Former Zionist’. She apparently lives in Melbourne, Australia and her email address is listed as rabbinovich@bluemail.ch.

When I received the mail, I strongly suspected that ‘Rose Rabbinovich’ was as non-existent as her rabbinic namesake; today I know it. Though she apparently lives in Melbourne in Australia, I noticed she uses a Swiss email address, so I emailed Ms Rabbinovitch just to ask if she really existed and, as I expected, I received the following message:

Postini rejected your message to the following e-mail addresses:
rabbinovich@bluemail.ch (rabbinovich@bluemail.ch)
Postini gave this error:
550 : User unknown

I decided this morning to try to set up an email account with the Swiss company 'Bluemail', also known as 'Bluewin'. I received this message:

Unfortunately, Bluewin registrations are not possible outside Switzerland.
If you are in Switzerland, this page is unlikely to appear. But if it does, please call our Customer Service (free of charge) on 0800 800 800. Our operators are there to take your call seven days a week. For SME customers 0800 055 055.

Not only is the so-called Rabbinovich speech a fabrication, so also is Rose Rabbinovich. I suspect the flambuoyant Jeff Rense (just look at his picture on his website!) wrote the letter in an attempt to add some kind of authenticity to the hoax.

The fictitious ‘Rose Rabbinovich’ says she received ‘hundreds of emails to her ‘non-existent email address’ after the speech was posted. ‘If any of you had email “problems,” trying to contact me,’ she says, ‘please try again.’

Anyone who used the supplied email address would have had ‘problems’ trying to contact the elusive Ms Rabinovitch because the address is fictitious.

For clarity, I will now place all quotes from Rabinovitch in bold.

One question which was repeated in many of the emails to me was: 'How can we find the full Rabbinovich speech?'

I searched the Internet, but all websites with Rabbi Rabbinovich speech have been 'cleaned up' or blocked (I assume by the Zionists, as usual). Since I remember hearing from my grandfather about this speech already in the fifties, I decided to contact my Rabbi. He searched his favourite website http://www.facebook.com/l/QAQEcG1xDAQHy85IkcrGbodyiAQpAmI508-0sfi0s-1PUVw/abbc.com/ and found the full article. I am enclosing here the full speech by Rabbi Rabbinovich…

Now, let me get this straight. Ms Rabinovich sent the full text of the speech to Jeff Rense, who published it on his website.

'Hundreds' of people who read the speech then asked her where they could find the speech.

Ms Rabinovich couldn't find the speech she had sent to Rense because the nasty Zionists had managed to expunge it from every site on the World Wide Web. She then asked her rabbi to find the speech and he found it not on the Rense website where she'd published it but on a site that sells books…

Am I missing something here? I find Quantum Physics easier to understand than Rabinovich’s account.

In fact, about the only place where you can’t find the speech is at the ‘favourite website’ of ‘Rose Rabbinovich’s’ rabbi. Try it. Just Google ‘Rabbi Rabinovich’s Speech of January 12th 1952’ and in 0.22 seconds your get 33,100 results! Not only are these anti-Zionist bloggers liars; they are stupid to boot. Do they not realise that their readers know how to use search engines? Sorry. That was a stupid rhetorical question.

To tell you the truth, I was surprised at the fantastic reaction of your readers to this speech. After all there is little new in that speech, and most people who read the Elders Of Zion Protocols are already very familiar with this information.

Unfortunately we Jews are NOT allowed to read the Protocols, as the Zionists want to keep us uninformed to [sic] the hidden agenda of Zionism.

‘The Zionists’ don’t allow Jews to read the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ How on earth can Zionists prevent anyone from reading any book? The book is readily available at Amazon and in bookshops. It is also freely available on Islamic and anti-semitic websites.

Some of the email I received claimed that The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion are [sic] a forgery.

To this I have five comments:

1. If it is a 'forgery', it implies that there is an original somewhere, WHERE IS IT? WHO WROTE IT?

The document was forged by a Russian secret police agent, Pytor Ivanovich Rachovsky, who claimed a secret Jewish network was plotting to take over the world. It was first printed in 1897. But Rachovsky copied it from the nineteenth century novel Biarritz by German author Hermann Goedsche who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Sir John Retcliffe’. Goedsche had stolen the idea from Maurice Joly’s Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864), a satire aimed at Napoleon III.

2. Whether it is a forgery or not IS IRRELEVANT for the simple reason that our Zionist 'Jewish' 'brothers' have already implemented most, if not all of it. That is a fact. Every Jew who reads the Protocols knows that it was written by Jews, NO ONE ELSE could have written them.

First: So it’s ‘IRRELEVANT’ that, since it was published, this gross forgery has caused untold suffering for the Jewish people? The most charitable thing that can be said about the author of the letter is that she/he is a moral pygmy. The author is trying to cover her/his lies with an appeal to pragmatism.

Second: The author first of all tells us that Jews are not allowed to read the ‘Protocols’! Now she/he tells us they know what what ‘every Jew’ who has read the ‘Protocols’ thinks about them.

Third: No one but a Jew could have written the Protocols? Give me a break! If this is so, then Gentiles are not only ‘stupid’ but must also be illiterate!

3. The gentiles are really stupid (sorry), until now, they did not realise yet that the Zionists essentially control them.

Only those who are gullible enough to believe this half-baked, mendacious, anti-Semitic, badly written, amoral, illogical effluence.

4. It is VERY sad that most honest and honorable Jewish thinkers and intellectuals' articles are posted today on Moslem websites only.

If the Muslims are so great, why doesn’t the author become a Muslim? Obviously because ‘the Zionists’ won’t let Jews convert to other faiths.

5. As a person who grew up on Jewish ethics, I am at a great loss and shame to see our Zionist Rabbis justifying the present Moslem holocaust in the name of God and our Jewish religion. One thing I am sure of, if there is God, he is NOT 'Zionistically' Jewish. After reading many non-Zionists Jewish websites, I started believing as do many Rabbis in New York, that Zionism is: Satan hijacking our Jewish religion.

‘Moslem [sic] holocaust’? What is that about?

Some of the emails were complaints that they could not buy The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion. This is true, as we Jews control most of the printing and book distribution in the USA and many other countries. I had to go myself to: http://www.facebook.com/l/DAQFQn4wwAQFmOMgs1gmvx7Sxpeph7VlAWnRwi_n0IX6v8g/churchoftrueisrael.com/protocols/

Then how come I was able to buy a copy?

‘We Jews control most of the printing and book distribution in the USA and many other countries’?

If ‘we Jews’ control The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, the BBC, or The New York Times et al, they have a remarkable talent for shooting themselves in the feet! The only pro-Jewish media mogul was Rupert Murdoch and his empire has just gone down the pan. Even if the empire survives, Murdoch’s son James is no friend of Israel.

These 'Elders of Zion' couldn't organise a booze-up in a brewery, let alone covertly control the world!

As Charles Haddon Spurgeon once remarked: You wouldn't know some people had brains if it wasn't for the fact they had addled them.

Lies, Damned Lies and the Khazar Theory

In response to my reply to the Facebook posting of a fake quote from Ariel Sharon, I received the following:

… just a quick response to your posting on my wall. I guess it will be impossible to get at the real truth. Even if he did not utter those words exactly as reported, I am convinced he believes them in [sic] anyway. I want to make clear that I am not talking about a man who is from the seed of Israel and a true Jew but a man who is a rabid Zionist who’s [sic] bloodline can be traced to Eastern Europe and is as Jewish as Obama. There is no doubt in my mind that Zionist Israel have [sic] massive control over the USA.

Although the writer guesses ‘it will be impossible to get at the real truth’, he is ‘convinced’ that he actually does know the 'real truth' i.e. that Ariel Sharon (when he was capable of expressing himself) believed Israel controlled the USA and that every American knew it but that the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, did not know it! The truth is that the claim is totally bogus.

In case you are confused about the reference to the ‘rabid Zionist who’s [sic] bloodline can be traced to Eastern Europe and is as Jewish as Obama’, all will be revealed. Read on.

My correspondent (For personal reasons, I’m not going to reveal his name. I’m trying to be totally objective here) goes on:

I want you to understand though, that I make the clear and unequivocal distinction between the two peoples, the true children of Israel, Semites, and the people from Eastern Europe who chose Judaism and flooded in into Palestine after the war from all parts of the World claiming to be of Israel.

This is a reference to the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism in 749 AD. Bearing in mind that every Khazar male convert would have submitted to the rite of circumcision without anaesthetic, we may assume their conversion was not a matter of political convenience.

So what happens when a non-Jew converts to Judaism? He becomes a Jew. It happened at times in the Old Testament as, for example, when the Moabite Ruth accompanied her widowed mother-in-law to Bethlehem, vowing: ‘Were you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.’

Whether Ruth’s ‘bloodline’ was Jewish is irrelevant. She became an Israelite. She married Boaz and became the ancestor of King David and the Messiah. Irrespective of their ‘bloodline’, the Khazars who converted to Judaism became Jews and, as such, inheritors of all the promises made to Abraham and his children.

The claim that Israeli Zionists (‘rabid’ or non-rabid) are not really Jews lacks any internal logic or consistency. If the Jews of Europe and Israel and Russia and the USA and Africa are not Jews, then where are the Jews? What happened to that people whom God said would not be counted among the nations?

Every Passover Seder ends with the wish: ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’ Prayers are offered in the synagogue for the restoration of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland and the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem. What ethnic group feels indissolubly linked to a land they never inhabited?

Not even the Khazars, after their conversion, appeared to feel the need to migrate to the Holy Land, but there are people around the world who have always felt an attachment to the land.

Prior to 1967, when the Arabs were in full control of the ‘West Bank’ and Gaza, the Palestinians’ appeared to feel no intrinsic link to the land itself and had no interest in establishing an independent Palestinian Arab state. Nor, in those years, did the international community seem to care about a Palestinian state. Everything changed only when those territories fell into the hands of the Jews.

Why, if European Jews today are not really Jews, have they over the centuries made hazardous pilgrimages and dangerous journeys to the Holy Land, risking their lives to live and study there? What explains the unquenchable longing for the land, if not the fact that the Jewish people sense they truly belong to the land God promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants?

Since the time of Joshua there has always been a Jewish presence in the land of Israel. Under foreign occupation, after Israel was conquered by the Islamic armies and by the Turks, and Jews became a minority in their own country, the land languished and reverted to being desert and swamp.

In the 19th Century, ‘Palestine’ was a poor country. It was largely barren and uninhabited. Hundreds of years of abuse by foreigners had turned the country into a treeless waste, with malaria-ridden swamps and a sprinkling of towns and a desert in the south.

Mark Twain observed in The Innocents Abroad, written in 1867:

Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince … It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land … Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies … Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the accursed, lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago … Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village … Capernaum is a shapeless ruin; Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have vanished from the earth … Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?

The first modern wave of Jewish immigration began in the 1880s and in less than twenty years the Jewish population of Palestine had tripled to over 80,000. But why would any people want to emigrate en masse to one of the most inhospitable and infertile lands in the world with a view to making it their home? Why was the Jewish National Fund willing to pay exorbitant sums of money for barren land when they could have bought rich arable farmland in America for fraction of the price?

Also, why did the ‘fake’ Jews of Europe retain their identity during the Holocaust when they could have denied their identity? Why were they willing to die rather than deny their identity?

There is no internal consistency or logic with the ‘Jews are Khazars’ theory. It raises many more questions than it answers. In fact, it offers no answers at all; only questions. And unanswerable questions at that.

Faking it

Hi everyone. Due to other pressures, I’ve been out of circulation but something I read on Facebook propelled me back into the blogosphere. This was it:

‘Ariel Sharon: “We, the Jewish People, Control America, and The Americans Know it”!’

There are some fake quotes you can spot a mile away, and this is one of them. The fabricated quote originated with the pro-Hamas American group Islamic Association for Palestine in a press release dated 13 October 2001, which claimed its source as Israeli radio Kol Yisrael:

According [to] the Israeli Hebrew radio, Col ...[sic] Yisrael Wednesday, Peres warned Sharon that refusing to heed incessant American requests for a cease-fire with the Palestinians would endanger Israeli interests and turn the US against us. At this point, a furious Sharon reportedly turned toward Peres, saying ‘ . . . I want to tell you something clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel, we the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.’

Elsewhere in the press release, the quote was repeated, albeit slightly altered to: ‘we control America.’

Kol Yisrael political correspondent Yoni Ben-Menachem, who reports on Knesset meetings, states that there was no such broadcast and that Ariel Sharon never made such a statement.

The misquote also appears on many anti-Israel and hate sites.

Fake quotes are part of the stock in trade of anti-Zionists. For example, in Israeli Apartheid: A Beginners Guide, anti-Zionist Ben White says:

Ze’ev Jabotinski was one of the foremost Zionist leaders and theoreticians, a man who has more streets in Israel named in his honour than any other historical figure. In perhaps his most famous essay written in 1923, Jabotinsky was clear about one thing: “Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.”

White cites as his source for the quote Nur Masalha’s Expulsion of the Palestinians. But why do that when Jabotinsky’s original document is freely available as a PDF file on the web. The document nowhere has that quote but what Jabotinsky says one the first page is this:

I am reputed to be an enemy of the Arabs, who wants to have them ejected from Palestine, and so forth. It is not true.

Emotionally, my attitude to the Arabs is the same as to all other nations – polite indifference. Politically, my attitude is determined by two principles. First of all, I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine. There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority. And secondly, I belong to the group that once drew up the Helsingfors Programme, the programme of national rights for all nationalities living in the same State. In drawing up that programme, we had in mind not only the Jews , but all nations everywhere, and its basis is equality of rights.

I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone. This seems to me a fairly peaceful credo.

At the 16:55 minute mark of the film With God On Our Side, there is a fake quote attributed to David Ben Gurion: ‘The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment to make it happen, such as war.’

The source of the quote we used was The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by the notorious postmodern historian Ilan Pappe. All credit to Porter Speakman Jr, the producer of With God On Our Side, he has acknowledged that quote cannot be found in Ben Gurion’s diary, which Pappe falsely claimed was his source.

According to Speakman, ‘In an effort to be transparent and accurate, the producers have decided to take the extra step of removing [the pseudo quote] from future printings of “With God On Our Side.” We apologize for this change.’

Note, though, that Speakman apologises only for having to make the change, not for using a false quote. On 7 November, I emailed Porter Speakman:

Dear Mr Speakman,

Three questions:

Why is your acknowledgement for the quote falsely attributed to David Ben Gurion (http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/3026318192.html) not on the official With God on our Side website?

Why do you apologise only for ‘removing it from future printings of “With God On Our Side.”‘ and not for using the quote which was known to be false?

Why did you rely on a fundamentally dishonest source for the quote? I reviewed Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine in 2009 and was shocked by his evidently tendentious method of doing history: http://www.e-n.org.uk/4679-The-ethnic-cleansing-of-Palestine.htm.

Porter Speakman has not replied. If he does, you'll be the first to know...