Thursday 16 June 2016

"Op-Ed: The UN fails History 101," Arutz Sheva, June 6, 2016‏

From RRW

Op-Ed: The UN fails History 101

"The name “Palestine” comes from the artificial appellation associated with the Philistines, not from a chimerical Palestinian-Arab people that did not exist. Arab conquests that expanded the borders of Islam would not begin until the seventh century."

Matthew M. Hausman

Was anybody really surprised when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (“UNESCO”) adopted a resolution disparaging the Jewish connection to Jerusalem?  The UN has been undermining Israel since before its infamous Zionism-is-racism resolution in 1975, and the Arab-Muslim world has spent years denying the Temple ever stood in the Jerusalem.  Though Jerusalem always had Jewish inhabitants and never served as the capital of any sovereign Arab or Muslim nation, the UN’s actions have lent credence to the anti-Semitic fiction that Jews are colonial occupiers with no ancestral ties to the city or the land.   

Regrettably, many Jews won’t acknowledge the UN’s duplicity because it conflicts with their progressive worldview, which replaced traditional religious belief as they drifted away from Jewish observance, history and cultural literacy.  In public schools, children are taught that Franklin D. Roosevelt advocated for European Jewry during the Holocaust (he did not), and in nontraditional Hebrew Schools they are told that liberalism equals Jewish morality.  

For many assimilated Jews, Israel’s history begins in 1948 and is viewed through a revisionist lens.  They know little about critical chapters in Jewish history, such as the First and Second Jewish Commonwealths, the Jewish-Roman Wars, the genesis of the Diaspora, and the upheaval of the Muslim conquests.  Such knowledge is crucial, however, for understanding the legal and historical underpinnings of modern Israel and for responding to anti-Israel propaganda that dominates discussion of the Mideast.

Progressive antipathy for Israel arises from a refusal to acknowledge the Jewish pedigree of the lands comprising the modern state and her territories...

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