Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question Subsequent Edition

I chose this rating because I felt this book should be read by anyone interested in politics or international affairs. It was factual and explained in detail how people have been deceived by the media and governments. The language is fairly heavy going but well worth struggling through and one can get the main meaning of the sentiments expressed in this book. This book is for anyone who wants to know the truth and feels that being part of a democracy means representation of the individual and not a plutocracy where the voice of the people is ignored. The Palestinians have endured much oppression because of ignorant policies and people should know the truth. Christopher Hitchens to my knowledge has never put his name to anything that is not true. World leaders should read this book.

This is one of the smartest books I've ever read, and I've read a lot of books.

Said does superbly the work of a master propagandist--turn reality into fantasy and the wronged into the sinner. Selective editing, narratives missing the key points that would damn his conclusions and putting the consequences of actions and their antecedents in reverse order. Therefore:
Those who begin aggressive wars are the peace-loving victims: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria, Morrocco, Libya, Saudi Arabia--all taking part at various times in making war, unprovoked against Israel, are the victims of Israeli aggression!
Persons, organizations and states that promote, fund, arm and carry out terrorism are the victim or the Israeli terrorists!
Collective punishment is a charge against Israel but terrorism is the ultimate act of collective punishment!
The Arabs who fled during a war they started, a war of genocide, are the victims of the people they were intending to annihilate!
Israeli's are racists when the Arabs teach racism to their children in the crib.
Oppression is the Jewish crime--yet the Arabs in Israel are the freest, most prosperous Arabs in the world--while the Jews in Arab lands were victims of mob massacres, imprisonment, public hanging, rape, maiming, confuscation of all property, burning of synagogues, homes, businesses and holy scrolls, etc. etc. etc.
Ethnic cleansing? The Arabs ethnically cleansed Jerusalem, Hebron, all of Judea and Samaria. The Jewish state in their declaration of independence declared equal rights for all regardless of race, creed, religion--and they have continued to do so in the 100 years since the Mandate.
Injustice to the refugees? The Arab leaders discussed the purpose of keeping these people in camps, withholding citizenship and equal rights--its was a living propaganda spectacle. While 650,000 Jews were brought from their oppressive homes in Arab lands, to live in tents in Israel--they were all, within a few years living in their own homes, learning the language, working and being educated with full rights as citizens to all benefits such as health care. The Arabs are still oppressed by their own people.
Violating UN resolutions is Israel's crime? UN resolution such 181 (partition) that demanded no military action to be taken in contradiction of the resolution was immediately violated. Expelling UN Peacekeepers in 1967 in order to launch another war of annihilation--I suppose that is in accordance with UN rules? Initiating an aggressive war in itself is contrary to the UN charter. Blockading the international waterways of a sovereign state is illegal. Shutting the Suez canal was illegal. The treatment of prisoners of war by Syria, a bone-chilling barbarity--illegal. Shooting 10s of thousands of rockets into Israel by Hamas, Hezbollah, the PLO, Syria--at farmers and children!--illegal! Boycotting Israel--illegal! The list is endless. As Goebbels, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Arafat, Nasser, and the numberless Imans and dictators of the Middle East have always known--make the lie big enough and repeat it often--this is the way to win a war of words and ideas (if truth, integrity and justice are meaningless).
Obviously lying is not a crime in the halls of international power or in the dictator-controlled presses of every Muslim state in the ME, but the laws of morality condemn the Arab states. It isn't an accident that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kamph are best sellers in Arab countries--after all, Haj Amin al Husseini was a Nazi collaborator, Sadat was a Nazi supporter and many Arabs were part of the Nazi war machine.
Victim blaming is a heinous act--the raped becomes the perpetrator (like under sharia)--blamed for "asking for it." Millions of words could be written to catalog the outrageous misrepresentations of the leaders (and followers) of Arab-Islamic states. The greatest victims, are their own people, especially their children. Psychological child-abuse is a matter of fact status quo in these countries. Any child can be brainwashed to be a racist--and this is exactly what these countries have done. But they don't stop at merely teaching their babies to hate another people, using grotesque lies as their tool, no, they teach 3-year olds to want to stab the pigs and dogs--the Jews--on television! Would you want people like this living next door to
you?

Said is like his colleague Ilan Pappe--willing to falsify quotes, narratives, timelines and events in order to manipulate those who are merely seeking the truth behind a very complicated subject. They know that very few have the time to devote themselves to researching the original documents in libraries and other archives to verify the truth of their statements. Not only do they not have the time but they would have to have access and know Hebrew and Arabic as well. This is why the responsibility of an historian is so great and sadly, the standards of scholarship have slipped to a dismal low in the last 100 years.

Search for articles cataloging the outright fabrications of Said, Pappe and Morris. Buy their books and then the books of their critics--read both--it will blow your mind.

The unhappy title of this book is no accident. It attempts to play on a problem that has plagued the Jewish people throughout history. The Arabs of Palestine have certainly been victimized. But unlike the Jews, who have consistently been victimized by others, the Arabs can legitimately blame only their own misguided leaders for their predicament. The supreme irony in the book's audacious subtitle is that its authors dare to accuse others of sins they have themselves committed many times over in this book.

Rashid Khalidi especially claims that the population of Palestine was overridden by Europeans. But this is false: In 1554 the land was populated by 205,000 Moslems, Christians and Jews, whose numbers reached only 275,000 by 1800. Records from 1830, 1863, 1878 and 1893 and 1917 show that when the heaviest Jewish immigration began in 1880, a large proportion of the 425,000 to 440,000 Arabs in Palestine were themselves recent immigrants.

Palestine fellaheen, urban dwellers and Bedouin were thinned and forced out by Ibrahim Pasha's 1831 invasion, a great 1837 earthquake and successive epidemics. In 1880, the Arabs in Israel were mostly Egyptians who settled in large numbers in Akko (6,000 in 1831 alone), Jaffa (in 1893, the majority) and the Beit Shean, Jordan and Hula Valleys. Through World War I, Arab and Muslim immigrants also came from Algeria, Damascus, Yemen, Afghanistan, Persia, India, Tripoli, Morocco, Turkey, Iraq, Algeria (whose immigrants spoke Berber), and the Caucasus, despite numerous hardships that were offset by Palestine's booming economy.

These essays ignore all those nasty facts, attempting to prove prove that the Jewish people always planned to expel the Arabs of Palestine. The reading is imposed on a situation and history that shows no such thing.

Then we move on to Edward Said, who misrepresents the writings of Theodore Herzl. The latter devoted twenty pages of his June 12, 1895 diary entry to reflections on the problem. Said quotes Herzl as saying that "both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly,"[45] and that "we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment in our own country."

Actually, Herzl refers neither to economic nor physical force. Furthermore, before and after these seemingly damning statements are others that substantially mitigate the "intent" that Said hopes to "prove."

Herzl wrote that upon occupying the land, the Jewish people "shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us." (Herzl, Complete Diaries, Vol. 1, p.88). In other words, the Jewish people would BUY the land. In the 19th century, the Jewish people were buying land at prices considerably above-market--and "expropriating" land ONLY via purchase. Thus, Herzl proves the righteousness of the effort and great sensitivity to others.

Second, Herzl afterwards wrote that it went without saying, "we shall respectfully tolerate persons of other faiths and protect their property, their honor, and their freedom." He added that the "harshest means" would be used against all persons who abused the rights of others. He intended to "set the entire old order a wonderful example," (Ibid), which is precisely what the Jewish people did.

Far from admitting Said's charge, namely "to a policy of systematic ethnic cleansing," Herzl promised to violently oppose anyone who might harm any people already living in the land.

Several exceedingly thorough scholars have already studied the false (albeit politically charged) purpose of this set of authors: Bernard Lewis (Islam and the West); Efraim Karsh (Fabricating Israeli History); Erich and Rael Jean Isaac ("Whose Palestine?" Commentary, July, 1986); Justus Reid Wiener (Commentary, Sept., 1999); and Werner Cohn ("Partners in Hate," online).

These are the facts, whereas each essay in this book is nothing more than a tissue of lies.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

This work seems to exist in another time,for it echoes with as relevant now after many turns of the merry-go-round as it did when written. It strikes the keynote of the last fifty years of the Arab-Israeli conflict as it ticks over in its basic manufactured fallacies, invariant through all policies, editorials and intiatives. The work opens with an account of the appearance of Peters' From Time Immemorial, a concoction of disinformation on the history of Israel, in the myth of the 1948 and the non-existence of the Palestinians. As the Oslo cycle joins the rest, and the next cycle of the basic swindle begins, one might as well go backto the future by rereading this work.