In this Issue, we start by examining hoaxes -- the kind the Muslims play upon the rest of the world, and the ones they inflict on themselves.

There was a science fiction story a half century ago about a culture that worshipped a god-person, the Supreme Being named, if I remember rightly, Garoma -- well, something like that. As the story develops, we learn that his psychiatrist who knows everyone's secrets believes himself the real power behind the throne, while Garoma is just eye candy for the crowds. Shaggy dog past the number of people who believe they are the real power to the one who really does hold the world in his power. As the story ends, Garamo is being paraded down the street, and everyone screams enthusiastically, "Help us, Garoma." -- including the ultimate holder of power.

By analogy, the Arabs and their pro-peace marxist Pals are excellent at creating realistic hoaxes. With the help of the lackey-media, these hold up, at least until someone looks at them logically. Or until someone takes a photo of the directors setting up the hoax.

What is also becoming clear is that apparently it is as easy for the hoaxsters to fool themselves as it is to fool anyone else. They begin to believe their own lies. The world then can not be trusted. Whoever doesn't agree with them must be lying. Whoever denies Arab claims is conspiring against the Arab world. It can't possibly be that they themselves are not credible. This is not a mentality that is attuned to progress or new knowledge. It won't reject ideas that don't stand up to experience. Indeed, the opposite is true. The world and all within it must conform to the notions the Arab know to be true. There is no room for argument.

So it is that what starts out as a mild self-serving lie becomes a self-induced deception. For the lie to be maintained, the environment often needs to be restructured. The hoax is the natural medium to refit the environment to the proper shape, to provide the right context.
 

HOAXES, STUNTS, SETUPS, MISINTERPRETATIONS, COME IN ALL SIZES of believability. Some assertions have such shock value, their sheer impossibility is ignored. In August 2009, the Swedish journalist Donald Bostom created a blood libel against the Jews out of whole cloth. He claimed some Palestinian Arabs told him how their dead son was taken away by the IDF and returned with large stitches in his midsection. The implication was clear: the Jews were ripping the organs out of innocent terrorists for organ transfer. When you get past the shock value, this is giggle-making. Organs from bullet-riddled terrorists are not suitable for organ transfer. Extracting, preserving and inserting vital organs are tricky procedures; they aren't done under field conditions. What's interesting is that the dead terrorist's relatives initially denied that he was an involuntary organ donor. But after other families took up the charge, they came to claim it as the truth.

Way at the other end of the scale of taking a bizarre interpretation seriously has been the universal reaction to the announcement that the Saudis had captured a Mossad spy -- a vulture. The bird was equipped with a ring with "Tel Aviv University" written on it and a global positioning satellite (GPS) so the Israeli researchers could keep track of their subjects, the birds. Naturally, the Saudis suspected the bird of spying for Israel. Almost everyone treated the story with sarcasm. No one insisted that the Jews come up with evidence the vulture was not a spy. Nor did the Jews volunteer any evidence. It was a pleasant change from the pathetic way Jews explain that, gee whiz, the Temple Mount really does belong to us, honest. Don't ya read the Bible? Who but reactionary Marxists ever doubted it?

The non-people who call themselves Palestinians but can't pronounce "Palestine", having no P sound in their language, assure us that Israel is occupying their land. Many people who believe them that Israel is occupying Palestinian land are just ignorant of the facts. And who can blame them? Israel hasn't been forthcoming about getting the news out that the same authority that made Mandated Palestine into an irrevocable trust for the Jews divided the 99.9% rest of the Ottoman Middle East into Arab states. If Israel isn't legal, then what makes the Arab states legal?

Too many Israeli diplomats and politicians seem incapable of using plain and simple facts that buttress Israel's ownership of Israel and the Territories. They don't firmly state the land is Jewish by history, by Bible, by devotion and habitation over the centuries, by irrevocable International Law, and by conquest. No sir. Either they talk about security, which doesn't really address the question of ownership. Or they talk about the disputed land! Why in the world would Jews describe their land as disputed? It is Jewish. Period. And we won't give it or sell it or have the world sucker it away from us. But no, the diplomats talk about disputed land, showing us they are taking the high ground, the fair way, the way to doom.

THE ARTICLES IN THIS SECTION EXAMINE SOME FAIRLY RECENT HOAXES. It is too early to say whether they will be as memorable or as effective as the Mohammed al Dura hoax. According to Arab eye witnesses, he was shot by the Israelis. When eventually people got around to calculating possibilities based on where the Israelis were and where Mohammed was, the investigators were left with two possibilities. Either Israelis can shoot around corners and fire in circular trajectories. Or they couldn't have hit the boy, who just happened to be crouching in line of sight and a short distance away from some Arab sharp shooters.

And then there was Rachel Corrie, one of a group of young people sent by the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) to shield Arab homes from the IDF and prevent the IDF from destroying the tunnels for smuggling weapons that exited in these houses. Maybe she'd even get a chance to shield some Gazan Arabs, going about their business of killing Israelis. Eye witness members of her group asserted that she was deliberately run over -- twice -- by a bulldozer. This gained her the right-on-target moniker, St. Pancake of IHOP, because such an experience would flatten anyone. Actually and miraculously, ISM's own photos show her 3-dimensional. And definitely alive A.T. (After Tractor). Her cell phone (cropped in later photos) seems not to have suffered damage. Things changed of course. She was taken by ambulance to an Arab hospital. She either died there or earlier in the ambulance -- the pictures of a bunch of guys without face masks standing around Rachel on the "operating" table or posed near an X-ray machine aren't convincing. The latest examination of the evidence indicates she was struck by some debris thrown by the tractor's shovel. So she died either at the hands of her Arabs handlers or as a result of her injury. It would be ironic, wouldn't it, if it was by a stone of the type the press reassures us can't kill anyone when flung by an Arab delinquent. Either way, her death gave the pro-Palestinian cause a gift beyond price.

Some Arab hoaxes involve entire villages and the collusion of the press. In Jenin, the Arabs claimed a large number of people -- anywhere from 500 to 5000, depending on the speaker -- were killed by the IDF. Arab leaders and eye-witnesses claimed the Jews buried the bodies in mass graves to cover up the massacre. The number of dead turned out to be 50 something, and most had been terrorists or those helping the terrorists. In another ambitious enterprise, Hezbollah, with the collusion of Human Rights Watch and photographers for the main stream press tried to set up a "massacre" in Qana in 2006. They were foiled by a systematic examination of the data by many independent bloggers (See here.)

Caroline Glick's essay (see here.) deals with several kinds of small-stage but deadly hoaxes. She describes an Arab that inadvertently killed his own livestock and blamed the Jews. More typically, the Arab steals crops and livestock from the Jewish farmer and when confronted accuses the Jew of doing the stealing. The police routinely side with the Arab. She also reports the routine way that the Jews of Judea and Samaria are made to appear to be fanatics who hate Arabs. The Jews are manipulated into or trapped in a dangerous situation where they can escape only by injuring one or more of the conspiring Arabs. Conveniently, photographers, complete with professional equipment, are present. The photos of this moment, and only of this moment, are distributed as proof the Jews like injuring Arabs. And she writes of a recent death that embeds a libel within the routine harassment of IDF soldiers. The local Jewish Marxists don't reserve Friday for Sabbath preparations. Instead, they drive to the Arab village of Bi'lin to join Jew-haters from foreign lands and some local arabs with nothing better to do to attack the separation fence near Bil'in, thus baiting the IDF soldiers who have the miserable duty of guarding the fence, while attempting non-violently to fend off these reckless civilian attackers. Just recently on January first, the IDF was accused of having caused the death of one of the demonstrators, who inhaled tear gas. When the propaganda fumes dissipated, it was discovered the victim was standing well away from the rioters and the tear gas.

By chance and before the Friday riot at which Jawaher abu Rahmeh was said to have died from inhaling tear gas, I received this email from some one I've known for many years. He is now serving in the IDF:

"We participate in the weekly Bil'in riots every Friday. You can see them on the youtube, but you'll only see half of what happens there. Because the people who film it are anarchists. What happens there is the Arabs who live in Bil'in come the security fence and start pulling it down. We push them away with tear gas (which is really harmless---i breathed a lot of it), and then they start throwing hundreds of rocks at our soldiers. So we go in and throw some more tear gas. This continues for a couple hours until they get tired and go back home. The people who film this, cut out every part that shows the Arabs throw rocks and just leaves the parts that show us throwing tear gas. But that's media..will never change... But I am careful.. I dodge the rocks real good :-) ."

These later hoaxes do have this in common with the Corrie and al Dura classics. Eye witness participants are part of the hoax. They deliberately lie. Earnestly and with wide-eyed innocence, they malign Israel and the IDF. They libel Jews living in Samaria and Judea without hesitation. It's probably not as surprising as it seems on the surface that many of these fellow travelers are Jewish. What matters to them is their Marxist ideology, not the accident of birth that made them Jewish.

One such eyewitness is Jonathan Polack, a founder of Israeli Anarchists Against the Wall and a member of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee. As reported by Jason Edelstein of NGO Monitor in a 4Jan11 NGO article entitled "NGO's Lack Credibility on the Death of Jawaher Abu-Rahmeh," (click here.) Jonathan Pollak stated,

I saw that Jahawer take an active role in the protest...I saw how they put her in the ambulance that took her to the hospital. I know with certainty that she arrived there and stayed there, and later died at the hospital." ("Did Palestinians lie about protester's death?" From Hanan Greenberg, YNET, January 4, 2011)

The article notes several contradictions to Pollak's statement that, in the confusion of a 1000-person riot, complete with rock throwing, yelling, rushing around and tear gas fog and fumes, he witnessed Rahmeh taking an active part in the demonstration, and saw her being put into the ambulance. According to the girl's mother, they were standing together on a hill looking down at the rioters. Moreover,

Anarchists Against the Wall's Pollak claimed that he tweeted about the incident during the demonstration. However, his tweets from during and soon after the demonstration do not mention Abu-Rahmeh, only "mass amounts of tear-gas." The first mention of an injury from "tear-gas inhalation" was Friday night at 8:16 PM, hours later.

It has also been reported that he said "Rahma suffered from severe asphyxiation caused by the tear gas. ... She had poison in her body that was the same active ingredient in the tear gas."

In 2005, ignoring massacres, intifadas, stone-throwing gangs, suicide-bombers and individual acts of murder by Palestinian arabs, he wrote, "Though Palestinians have employed nonviolence since 1929, they have seen little evidence that it will help them to achieve freedom." But he did feel the unified non-violent actions of Israeli and international activists [carrying out such non-violent acts as throwing stones at soldiers and ripping out parts of the fence - bsl] was effective. It's not surprising he saw the Bil'im riot as a non-violent demonstration.

These setups are not just silly whoppers or even nasty inventions by some nasty-minded Arabs. These hoaxes are taken seriously because these stunts and plots are certified by respected and seemingly respectable Israeli organizations: B'tselem, Yesh Din, Gush Shalom, Peace Now, Physicians for Human Rights in Israel, etc. These organizations don't just attest to the veracity of the creator of the purimspiel. In many cases, they help plan the operation and supply the necessary props. It is becoming a rule of thumb that if an lsraeli NGO has peace or human rights in its name, the probability is high that its activities are aimed at helping to destroy Israel.
 

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