Palestinian Child Sacrifice

During the Cold War, Sting hoped 'the Russians loved their children too.' Sadly, if Australian Darly Johns is right, Israel cannot entertain the same hope about their Palestinian neighbours .

Johns was so affected by media pictures of dead and wounded Palestinian children, allegedly the victims of Israeli aggression that she decided to do something about it. She went as a volunteer peace activist in the Palestinian Authority but when she arrived she was greeted by a far different reality. Johns discovered to her horror that Arab children are actually the victims of child abuse from their own society.


The following video is one of the most moving and disturbing I have ever seen. In it, Johns tearfully recounts how she came to realise that many of the children whose pictures she had been presented as evidence of Israel's cruelty had in fact died while attacking Jewish men, women and children at the behest of their elders.

The video includes clips of Palestinian children reciting hatred for the Jews and expressing a deep desire not for peace, but for war and Israel's demise.


Subtitles are all in French and Hebrew, but the following is a translation of most of the statements by the Arab children and where they can be found on the six-minute film:

1:38 - [Announcer] Her uncle was a martyr and went to Paradise. He's now in heaven! [To the young girl] Your uncle?

1:45 - [Girl] He's in Paradise.

2:42 - [Boy] We should show how our fighters resist. Like the young engineers Mohammed Sawimih and Abu Gnadl.

2:50 - [Interviewer] What did they do?

2:53 - [Boy] They are young engineers who set death traps. They blew up tanks of the Jews.

3:03 - They threw stones on the tanks. We went to see when they buried the martyrs. And a tank arrived and we threw stones at it, and the soldiers fled.

3:22 - It's true that we are a small country, but we have young engineers who can make grenades and bombs to blow up the tanks and cause the [Israeli] soldiers to flee.

3:37 - [Boy] We don't want peace!! We don't want peace!! We want war! We don't want peace. We want to die like all the martyrs in Jenin.

3:51 - [Interviewer] What chance is there for peace, if the children are educated to die? The youth do not forget those who died as martyrs?

3:54 - [Boy] How can we forget them? We do not forget them. We do not forget the blood of the martyrs. It is a martyr, he is with Allah. We do not forget him. We fight until we [also] die as martyrs.

4:44 - [Boy] Allah willing we will have a future, and I will be just like Sheikh Mahmud. That is my future.

4:52 - [Interviewer] Who is this Sheikh Mahmud who you want to be like?

4:55 - [Boy] He was an engineer of planes and everything. He built bombs and sent martyrs to blow up everything, buses and everything.

5:03 - [Interviewer] Do you see your future as a martyr?

5:06 - [Boy] No, that's not my future... [Interviewer] Then what is your future?

5:09 - Our future is for Israel to disappear. That is our future. That Israel will disappear, Allah willing.


In the interview Johns expresses her opinion that the willingness of Palestinian parents to encourage their people to die is like the ancient pagan practice of sacrificing virgins. She concludes the interview with the observation that the Palestinians 'never had any other intention except to eliminate Israel.'

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...

Israelis View Foreign Media as ‘Anti-Semitic’

According to Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu on the Arutz Sheva website:

Nearly three-quarters of Israelis view the foreign media as being negative towards Israel, according to a recent poll revealed by Professor Avraham Tzion of Ariel University Centre, located in Samaria. Speaking at the annual conference on media and communications held there, he said the survey also showed that 88 percent of the respondents cited anti-Semitism as the main reason for Israel's negative image.

The Palestinian Authority’s information campaign and poor public relations by the Israeli government were close behind as reasons for the bad image.

The poll of 500 Jews from all sectors of society also revealed that about two-thirds view foreign reports in Judea and Samaria as being unfair and unreasonable.

Left-wing groups, such as Peace Now and B’Tselem, were viewed as contributing to Israel’s negative image by 64 percent of the respondents, while residents of Judea and Samaria (“settlers”) and nationalists, known as the “right wing,” were blamed by 58 percent.

U.S. President Barack Obama ranked relatively low as being a cause of the negative impression, with half of the respondents blaming him.

A breakdown of the statistics disclosed that anti-Semitism was cited more often as the main reason for Israel's image problem among female respondents and people under the age of 35. Respondents who defined themselves as on the right side of the political spectrum were inclined to point the finger left-wing groups and President Obama, besides anti-Semitism.

Those on the left end of the spectrum blamed the government’s information campaign and “settlers” as the main negative influences.

One surprising result of the poll was that 18 percent of Israelis are not aware of the legal standing of Judea and Samaria.