Showing posts with label Petra MB. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Petra MB. Show all posts

Thursday, March 05, 2020

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

  
If you read part 1 of this documentation, you know already that Bernie Sanders surrogate Amer Zahr hates Israel, but got an Israeli passport for himself and regularly visits to perform his “comedic routines” – which presumably include an act on the topic “BDS for thee but not for me.”

Unsurprisingly, it turned out that Zahr is also not particularly honest when he claims that he comes from a family of Palestinian refugees. His maternal grandparents apparently decided to emigrate from Israel to the US; but what about his paternal grandparents – and how come Zahr was born in Jordan?

The relevant story is recounted in a post on Zahr’s website, which – all too predictably – includes some creative re-writing of history. The two sentences that deal with the birth of Zahr’s father are a good example: “In March 1948, George [i.e. Zahr’s father], their first child, was born. […] One month later, Zionist forces (with the support of the British government) took Yafa by military force, forcing tens of thousands of Arabs from the city, including Elias, Salma, and their infant child” [i.e. Zahr’s grandparents, who were Christians, and his father].

Zahr could probably learn a lot about what really happened in Jaffa from the book of his maternal great-grandfather (see Part 1) – though he might not like what his great-grandfather wrote. In any case, Zahr is wrong: “Zionist forces” – which did NOT have “the support of the British government” – didn’t take Jaffa in April 1948, but only on May 13, 1948. Most importantly, however, the “Zionist forces” did NOT force “tens of thousands of Arabs from the city.”

The supposed ethnic cleansing of Jaffa by evil Zionists is a fairly popular myth, but it is well documented that the more affluent Arab residents of Jaffa set an example for the rest of the population by starting to leave the city soon after the United Nations Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947. Jaffa’s poor neighborhoods had been swelled by tens of thousands of migrants since the early 1920s, and many of the local migrants soon decided to return to the villages they had come from, while migrants who were from further away may have tried to get back to wherever they had come from.

More recent research has also shown that tensions between the politically moderate Arab upper- and middle classes in Jaffa and supporters of the militant mufti and Nazi collaborator Amin al-Husseini (whom the French had allowed to escape to Egypt) created chaos in Jaffa – indeed, as Amer Zahr surely knows full well, his own maternal great-grandfather “fled from Jaffa to Ramallah in December 1947” because he feared being assassinated by Husseini’s people. In addition, “violent clashes erupted and tensions ran high between the local population and the Arab Army of Salvation recruited by the Arab League, which consisted of Syrian, Iraqi and other volunteers, if not mercenaries […] Many Arab testimonies […] describe cases in which the foreigners engaged in looting and arbitrary confiscation of merchandise from local Arab shopkeepers.”

The vast majority of Jaffa residents who left the city well before “Zionist forces” took over in mid-May 1948 fled preparations for a war instigated and pursued by an Arab leadership and Arab governments resolved to prevent Israel’s re-establishment with “a war of extermination and momentous massacre.” Already in October 1947, Arab League secretary-general Azzam anticipated that this war would “be an opportunity for vast plunder,” but while he insisted it would be seen “as dignifying every Arab and every Muslim throughout the world,” he also expected “horrible battles.”

In order to avoid getting caught up in these “horrible battles,” Amer Zahr’s grandparents left Jaffa with their newborn son and, as Zahr puts it, “refuged to Amman.” According to Zahr, the family had a “hard life in Amman,” because although “Palestinians were granted citizenship in Jordan, they were and remain second-class citizens. King Hussein constantly cracked down on them, most notably during the fighting of the fall of 1970, dubbed ‘Black September.’ During that time, the Jordanian army killed at least 10,000 Palestinians.”

Zahr apparently hopes that those who have no clue about the “Black September” fighting won’t suspect that it was a result of the reckless conduct of Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which used Jordan as a base for a terrorist war against Israel in total disregard for the interests of Jordan’s government and King Hussein.

But it seems that Amer Zahr’s grandparents managed to get through “Black September” unscathed, and after his father George Zahr “graduated from college in Jordan,” he went “to study further in Beirut, and eventually earned a PhD from the University of California-Berkeley, where he married a fellow Palestinian refugee.”

However, Zahr’s mother was not a “refugee,” and it also doesn’t make much sense to describe his father as a “refugee.” It’s true that Zahr’s paternal grandparents had left Jaffa with their newborn son to escape the bloody war that Arab League secretary-general Azzam had anticipated so eagerly, and they may not have intended to settle permanently in Amman. But as Amer Zahr acknowledges, “Palestinians were granted citizenship in Jordan,” i.e. both his grandparents and his father, who grew up in Jordan, presumably had Jordanian citizenship.

Moreover, by the time George Zahr met his future wife during his studies at Berkeley, she was already living in the US for about a decade, and it’s reasonable to assume that she had acquired American citizenship (in addition to her Israeli citizenship). Since George Zahr participated in research “sponsored by the United States Government” at Berkeley, he also might have applied for, or acquired, American citizenship.

After finishing his studies (in chemistry) in 1976, George Zahr was apparently hoping to pursue an academic career, and in 1977, “he returned to Amman and became a professor at the University of Jordan.” Soon afterwards, Amer Zahr was born, but he didn’t get to grow up in Amman, because in 1979, “as a result of an ugly and unjust political episode, George, wildly popular with his students, was fired from his post.  He was exiled from Jordan and found a new life in America.”

Needless to say, Amer Zahr thinks that this made him a “refugee”. As he wrote in a 2001 article entitled “On visiting the place of my birth”:

“While I am Palestinian, my roots in Jordan are deep. After being expelled as a refugee at the age of one month in 1948 as a result of the creation of the state of Israel, my father was raised and attended university in Amman. Amman was his home in exile, and it was also the place of my birth. At the age of three, amid my father’s political “disagreements” with the government of Jordan, I became a refugee and was subsequently raised just outside of Philadelphia, PA (Incidentally, the ancient Roman name for the city of Amman was ‘Philadelphia’). When it comes down to it, my father and his families were expelled from Palestine in 1948 for being Palestinian and expelled from Jordan in 1980 for acting Palestinian.”

But it seems Zahr doesn’t really bear a grudge against Jordan. After all, it’s an Arab country where hatred of the world’s only Jewish state runs deep – which is something that makes Amer Zahr very happy. As he posted in December 2018: “Jumana Ghunaimat, Jordan’s minister of media affairs and communications, stepped on the Israeli flag at a building in Amman. Jumana, that leaves with me with one question: Are you single? #FreePalestine #Palestine #Jordan.”



It’s worthwhile to look at one more version Amer Zahr offers for the “refugee” story of his father. In a post written in May of last year under the title “DON’T MESS WITH PALESTINIANS!”, Zahr pondered the Palestinian “nakba”, i.e. catastrophe, and presented his father as an example for his claim that “this whole Nakba-Naksa-Youm El Ard stuff has actually made us [i.e. Palestinians] stronger.” According to Zahr, Palestinians are now “the hardest working people in the world” and “the smartest people in the world”:

“To illustrate all these points, I’d like to tell you of the case of a particular refugee I know quite well. His name is George Zahr. He was born in Yafa, Palestine in March 1948. At one month old, he became a refugee. He grew up in Jordan, starting his education in UNRWA schools. Then, he finished high school with honors, college with honors, master’s degree with honors, and a doctorate degree in chemistry with honors. As you can see, there’s a theme.
His education got him a professorship, then a well-paying research position in America for thirty-five years. A big house. Nice cars. College-educated kids. That’s the Palestinian story. From nothing to everything.
Education catapulted my dad from a shoeless Palestinian refugee to a spoiled American who owns a triple-control, seven-jet, multi-functional, Bluetooth-enabled, state-of-the-art, voice-activated shower. I love this country.
And it all happened because Israel tried to get rid of him.”

It’s nice to hear that Amer Zahr loves America – which you wouldn’t always know from his social media posts. And it’s of course very nice to hear that his father was so successful in pursuing the American dream. But it didn’t “all happened because Israel tried to get rid of him”: Zahr’s father was born before Israel was established, and his parents fled the preparations for “a war of extermination” that Arab leaders and governments threatened and incited in order to prevent Israel’s re-establishment.

Reading Zahr’s “nakba” post from last year illustrates not only his usual disregard for facts and his seething hatred for Israel, but it also reveals his almost pathological Palestinian nationalism. This is how he concludes his post:

“Remember how I said Israel created 800,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948? Well, that was true. But they didn’t get everyone. About 150,000 Palestinians remained in what is today Israel. Now, if those 150,000 people had increased at the average global population growth rate, today they should number about 350,000-400,000 people. But they’re not 350,000-400,000 people. Nope. They’re 1.8 million people. That’s right, they drop bombs, we drop babies. They have tanks and helicopters, but we have the strongest weapon in the world.
And that population spike is not our fault. When you shut down the roads, deprive us jobs, and confine us to ghettos, there’s a lot of free time to fill. And don’t forget, two thousand years ago, we got a woman pregnant without touching her. What did you think was gonna happen when we started touching each other?
So, I guess my message is this. Don’t push us. Don’t challenge us. We end up as multilingual, super-educated, hyper-reproductive, overachieving marvels.
That’s right. Don’t mess with us Palestinians. If you do, we will outwork you, we will outsmart you, and we will, if necessary, outfuck you too.”

Perhaps Zahr feels he can write like this because people will keep in mind that he’s a comedian and be inclined not to take him too seriously. But when he boasts that “two thousand years ago, we [Palestinians] got a woman pregnant without touching her,” he picks up a recurring theme of his activism that should be taken seriously, because it echoes the long and bloody history of Christian antisemitism.

It’s unclear if Zahr identifies as a Christian because his father was born to Christian parents. Zahr’s mother is Muslim, and it seems that Zahr sometimes performs at events where organizers probably assume that he is Muslim. Most likely, Zahr views religion like he views facts: as something that can be twisted, or ignored altogether, depending on what’s more convenient.

But Zahr’s efforts to use Christianity in order to promote an antisemitic message are quite serious and sustained. At the time of this writing, Zahr’s pinned tweet is from December 2018 and announces: “Merry PALESTINIAN Christmas! Jesus was one of us! Palestine is full of history. Could you be named after a Palestinian? #MerryChristmas #Palestine #FreePalestine #Jesus #JesusIsPalestinian”



The clip featured in the tweet is downright idiotic and leaves you wondering if Amer Zahr is perhaps not particularly bright, or if he just thinks his followers are hopelessly dim.

Zahr starts out claiming that celebrating Christmas means “celebrating the birth of a Palestinian.” He goes on to list figures from the New Testament, including Mary, the mother of Jesus, and tells his viewers that anyone sharing any of the names of these New Testament figures is named after a Palestinian.

It gets even more ridiculous when Zahr asserts: “Jesus fought against occupation and tyranny” – but if that’s what you believe, it’s obvious that Jesus would have fought against the Roman occupation of his ancestral Jewish homeland. When the Romans executed Jesus, they mocked him as “King of the Jews”; and it was of course the Romans who eventually “exiled the majority of the Jewish people and renamed Judea ‘Palestina’. To be clear, ‘Syria Palestine’ officially became a Roman province about a century after Jesus’ crucifixion. The idea was to erase the Jewish presence from Judea and to designate their homeland with reference to their Biblical enemies”,  i.e. the Aegean people (from what is now Greece) called “Philistines”/ “Plishtim.” The “Philistines” had disappeared centuries earlier, but the Roman renaming of the Jewish homeland was obviously intended as “a last humiliation.”

The Jew-haters of today may enjoy it when people like Zahr try to re-enact the Roman humiliation of the Jews, and Zahr is only too happy to promote antisemitic Palestinian propaganda by abusing Christian holidays for his “Jesus was a Palestinian” nonsense.  


But while the kind of Palestinian propaganda promoted by Zahr might seem ridiculous, it shouldn’t be ignored that it reflects the roots of Christian antisemitism. As the eminent scholar Walter Russell Mead has emphasized, some of the writings in the Christian New Testament illustrate that it was considered “extremely important that Jesus was a Jew and that the story of Jesus is part of the story of God’s encounter with the Jewish people.” However, “Christians going back to the first century AD have often wished this wasn’t so. In ancient times, various Greek and Roman cults grew up that detached the figure of Jesus from this Jewish context […] More recently, the Nazis in particular hated the idea of Jesus being a Jew, and some of them went so far as to invent an “Aryan Christianity” with an Aryan Christ. The Nazis were picking up on a kind of anti-Semitism that flourished in the first and second centuries after Christ as theological writers like Marcion argued that the Jewish God of the Old Testament had nothing to do with the much higher, more noble, and philosophically acceptable deity proclaimed by Jesus.”

One of the links Mead provides leads to a book on “The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany,” which seems sadly relevant for Palestinian efforts to “dejudaize” Jesus. Here is the introductory paragraph: 



The Palestinian need to deny that Jesus was a Jew is of course rooted in the refusal to acknowledge that the Jews are indigenous to today’s Israel and the historic areas of Judea and Samaria; needless to say, this also includes the denial of the fact that Jerusalem became a holy city for Christians and Muslims because the Temple Mount had first been – and remains – Judaism’s holiest site.

Putative “progressives” like Bernie Sanders surrogate Amer Zahr would never even dream of denying the history of indigenous people anywhere – except for the Jews. Zahr may be a comedian, but there’s nothing funny about the endless lies and fabrications he comes up with in order to demonize the world’s only Jewish state.





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Monday, March 02, 2020

By Petra Maquardt-Bigman

 Sanders surrogate Amer Zahr has never tried to hide his hatred for Israel, and like most anti-Zionists, he thinks it’s perfectly fine to talk about the Jewish state pretty much like the Nazis talked about Jews. But in order to illustrate how fanatic Zahr is, a few pictures are worth a thousand words.

Zahr isn’t shy about announcing his agenda: getting rid of the world’s only Jewish state.



While Zahr will usually proclaim that his Palestine from the river to the sea should be democratic, secular and open, his current Facebook cover photo reflects a different vision: Palestine is Muslim and Christian, Judaism is erased.



Another photo Zahr used as his Facebook cover reveals his support for terrorism: it shows him serenading convicted supermarket bomber and US immigration fraudster Rasmea Odeh. (Here is another photo of Zahr and Odeh having a jolly good time together; and last year, Zahr posted a photo of notorious terrorist Leila Khaled for International Women’s Day. He also seems to be an admirer of the Tamimis, whose most celebrated family member is Sbarro massacre mastermind and facilitator Ahlam Tamimi.)



Given Zahr’s intense hatred for Israel, it’s hard to describe how stunned I was when the awesome kweansmom recently found out that Zahr has Israeli citizenship. Inevitably, this discovery also trains a spotlight on the truly breathtaking hypocrisy of Zahr’s anti-Israel activism, and it’s hardly surprising that the stories he likes to tell about the bitter “refugee” background of his family turn out to be not particularly truthful.

Since this post is based primarily on material shared on Facebook, it should be noted that all cited material is freely accessible at the time of this writing; the links I provide are to archived copies of Facebook posts so that I cannot be accused of making stuff up in case anything is deleted or access is restricted.

Let’s first look at how the Jordanian-born Zahr got Israeli citizenship. Ususally, Zahr claims that his parents were Palestinian “refugees” who were “driven from their birthplaces of Yafa and Akka by Israel.” Yet, as Zahr told The Jerusalem Post in an interview four years ago, he “comes to the Palestinian territories and Israel between one and three times annually” to perform his “comedic routines” – which also means that his BDS advocacy takes the form of “do as I say, not as I do.”

During one of his visits to Israel in 2015, Zahr  boasted on Facebook: “At Tel Aviv airport, Israeli security asked me, “What is the purpose of your visit?” I said, “What is the purpose of yours?” #colonizers”. Naturally, some of his followers then wondered why the evil Zionist entity would let him enter the country – after all, it would probably not be advisable to respond like this to a US border security official.

Zahr then explained: “i hold their passport.” When asked how he got “their passport,” Zahr responded: “israeli laws allow for the children of “israeli” mothers to be “naturalized” even if they are born abroad. my palestinian mother was born as an israeli citizen in akka after 1948. so even though i was born in jordan, i could get the passport.” He added sarcastically: “i’m sure that law was meant for cases like mine of course.” To which I’d like to add: I’m sure that Amer Zahr realizes that his relentless demonization of Israel is undermined by the fact that he could get an Israeli passport as the Jordanian-born son of an Arab-Israeli mother who left Israel as a child.

And obviously enough, if Zahr’s “palestinian mother” was “born as an israeli citizen in akka [Akko/Acre] after 1948,” and he was able to get an Israeli passport because of his mother’s Israeli citizenship, it’s doubtful that his claims about her being a “refugee” who was “driven” out by Israel are true.

This apparent lie prompted kweansmom and me to dig a little deeper. After all, Zahr is not only a surrogate who might remain influential if Sanders becomes the Democrats’ presidential candidate or even wins the election, but his anti-Israel activism will arguably benefit in the long run from the visibility he now enjoys as a Sanders surrogate.

As is so often the case with anti-Israel activists, Zahr seems resolved not to let facts ruin his demonization of the world’s only Jewish state. So let’s try to find out how Zahr’s “palestinian mother” became a “refugee” who was “driven” out by Israel while retaining her Israeli citizenship.

Zahr repeats the claim that his mother and her family “were forced out of their homeland” in a Facebook post from February 2018 that includes a photo which, according to Zahr, was taken in “Akka, Palestine in the 1960s,” showing his mother as a child along with one of her sisters and a cousin.

In another post that Zahr wrote when his maternal grandmother passed away in December 2016, he shares some further details: “In 1965, Laila [Zahr’s grandmother], Muhammad [Laila’s husband, i.e. Zahr’s maternal grandfather], and their four daughters [incl. Zahr’s mother] embarked on a boat ride from Haifa to New York, then a bus ride from New York to California, where Muhammad planned to educate himself for two years and then return with his family to Palestine. In 1967, the Israeli state took the opportunity of this short absence to exile Laila, Muhammad, and their children from their ancestral homes. The six became refugees in California.”

Zahr seems to keep his story intentionally vague, but it is not particularly credible for several reasons. From what Zahr writes in this post about his grandmother, it is clear that she married in 1950, when she was just 16. However, it is reasonable to assume that the man she married was at least a few years older. If her husband was just 20 when they got married, he would have been 35 in 1965 – which, at the time, was considered middle-aged. It would have been rather unusual for a middle-aged man with a wife and four children to decide to uproot the whole family to travel half around the world just “to educate himself for two years.” Needless to say, it would also have required considerable financial resources.

But there is another, much more credible version of this story that was posted by Amer Zahr’s aunt, i.e. his mother’s sister (whom he had identified and tagged in the previously cited post from February 2018). In August 2015, Zahr’s aunt posted an old family photo and wrote: “August 8, 1965, fifty years ago, my father, Mohammad Jardali, and my mother, Leila Hawari Jardali, made a life changing decision to move the whole family to the U.S. I am amazed by my parents’ courageous and bold move which encouraged many from our home town in Acca, and family members from Nazareth to follow suit.”

There’s no denying that in 1965, it made a lot of sense for Israeli Arabs to emigrate to the US in search of a better life. Israel was still a fledgling state, surrounded by hostile neighbors bent on its destruction, and the assumption that the Arab minority would be sympathetic to efforts to eliminate the re-established Jewish state meant that until 1966, martial law was imposed on Israeli Arabs. But the perhaps most compelling reason to contemplate emigration was economic: when Israel was founded, its standard of living was just 30 percent of the US standard of living, and particularly in its first decade, the country was still reeling from the War of Independence and strained almost to the breaking point by the challenges of absorbing hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees from all over the Arab-Muslim Middle East.

Zahr proudly describes his grandfather Muhammad as “smart and industrious,” and obviously, his decision to emigrate turned out well: Muhammad “was able to find work and made a respectable and comfortable life for himself, Laila, and his four daughters.” And as we know from the post of Zahr’s aunt, this American success story “encouraged many” from Akko, as well as “family members from Nazareth to follow suit.”

Perhaps Zahr would like us to pity them all as “refugees” and blame Israel for their decision to emigrate to the US?

But it was interesting to find out that there was at least one member of Zahr’s family who apparently reconciled himself early on with Israel’s existence – even though his motivation might have been that he simply hated the Arab regimes more than the new Jewish state: meet Amer Zahr’s maternal great-grandfather Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari.

I chanced upon Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari when I noticed a comment on the post Zahr had written about his maternal grandmother in December 2016. Zahr mentioned that his grandmother Laila Muhammad Hawari was the daughter of “Muhammad … a well-known judge and lawyer in mandate and post-mandate Palestine, hailing from a well-known family in Nazareth.” A man named Faisal Saleh, who describes himself as “Founder and Executive Director of Palestine Museum US”, posted the following response [emphasis added]:

“Our deepest condolences to the Jardali and Hawari families for their loss. It is a small world but I have a connection, though by friendship not blood, to the Howari [Hawari] family. My father […] was best friends with Muhammad Hawari senior - the lawyer and judge - both of them were active members of the Najjadeh movement in pre-1948 Palestine. Muhammad was the commander and overall head of the organization headquartered in Yaffa and my father was the commander of the Salameh area (5 km East of Yaffa). After the 1948 Nakba, Muhammad returned to his native Nazareth choosing to live there rather [than] under the corrupt Arab regimes. […] Muhammad Hawari wrote a book called سر النكبة The Secret of Nakba covering the events and circumstances that lead to the loss of Palestine. A copy of the book was donated to the @palestine Museum US […]. The book, on exhibit at the Museum, was banned in most of the Arab countries.”

One might think that Zahr is bursting with pride that his great-grandfather was among the first to devote a whole book to the “nakba” – so wouldn’t it be a great idea for a committed anti-Israel activist like Zahr to translate the book and use it in his activism?

Well, maybe not. The fact that “The Secret of Nakba” was “banned in most of the Arab countries,” and even more the fact that its author preferred to live in Israel rather than “under the corrupt Arab regimes” indicates that Zahr’s great-grandfather blamed the plight of the Palestinians primarily on the Arab leadership. (See also e.g. here: “Hawari, whose writing is very emotional, concentrates his efforts and energy on attacking the corrupt Arab leadership, particularly the Mufti”.)

The biographical information on Muhammad Hawari’s that is available in English also suggests that he was a complex figure whose story might not go well with his great-grandson’s simplistic anti-Israel activism.


For Zahr, the perhaps most uncomfortable aspect of his great-grandfather’s remarkable story is that, due to his political pragmatism, he was regarded as a “collaborator” in some circles. A very interesting article entitled “The Intimate History of Collaboration – Arab Citizens and the State of Israel” discusses Hillel Cohen’s book “Good Arabs” and claims that Israeli officials admired Hawari’s “charisma” and sponsored him, hoping he would be able to establish a new anti-communist Arab party:

“In the higher echelons of collaborative politics, the state sponsored public figures such as Archbishop George Hakim as anti-communist leaders. Another sponsored anti-communist was Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari, founder before 1948 of the al-Najjada paramilitary brigades. Because al-Najjada participated in the fighting against the Zionist militias, but also because Hawari negotiated with Haganah to avoid fighting in Jaffa, by the end of the war he became a refugee in Lebanon. Admiring his charisma, Israeli intelligence decided to allow his return to Israel in 1950 as an alternative anti-communist leader. The idea was that Hawari would establish a new Arab popular party. Based on reports of collaborators from within Maki [Israeli Communist Party], Cohen covers the fascinating struggle between Hawari and the communist organization, which ended with the former’s defeat. When politics failed, Hawari became a judge in the municipal circuit court in Nazareth.”

As a judge and public figure, Hawari was apparently greatly respected: a 1969 photograph from Israel’s National Library shows him as one of the prominent members of a council that was established to investigate the devastating fire that was set by a mentally ill Australian tourist at the Al-Aqsa mosque.



If Amer Zahr wasn’t a bigoted anti-Israel activist, he could be very proud of his great-grandfather.


[…to be continued with a post exploring why Zahr was born in Jordan, even though his mother had emigrated from Israel to the US]



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Monday, February 17, 2020

  • Monday, February 17, 2020
  • Elder of Ziyon

Meet Muhammad Shehada – the Forward’s (not so) new columnist and Hamas apologist

When the Forward announced at the end of last year that they were “adding five contributing columnists” to write for their op-ed pages, I felt that professor Deborah Lipstadt had gotten a rather bad deal. As a highly regarded scholar, she was by far the most prominent among the new columnists, and the Forward rightly noted that she is also widely known outside academia ever since she “famously vanquished Holocaust denier David Irving in court after he sued her for libel.” But now this fierce fighter against antisemitism was listed just above professional Hamas apologist Muhammad Shehada.



For Shehada, this is of course a great line-up. Almost exactly five years before he officially became a Forward columnist alongside Deborah Lipstadt, he had proudly posted what he called “a selfi with the ex-Prime Minister Of #Gaza and the leader of #Hamas: #Ismail_Haniya.” The photo shows Shehada smiling and with his hand on the shoulder of Ismail Haniyeh, one of the veteran leaders of the Islamist terror group Hamas.




So it’s quite pointless to get upset about Shehada writing articles that whitewash Hamas. The Forward and other media outlets – notably the Israeli paper Ha’aretz – that publish him regularly do so precisely because Shehada skillfully poses as a likeable and eminently reasonable progressive Palestinian who ardently defends Hamas as a legitimate group that must not ever be condemned for terrorism, while at the same time pretending to be all for some kind of vague kumbaya-style coexistence.

As far as Shehada is concerned, “Hamas incurred the ‘terror’ label for political reasons,” and it would only be fair if everyone realized that the thousands of rockets that have been launched from Gaza since Israel withdrew from the territory should be dismissed as “Hamas’s occasional projectile attacks,” while the violent Hamas-orchestrated border riots incited with murderous antisemitic slogans should be appreciated as a “non-violent grassroots protest.”  And in any case, if there ever is anything for which Hamas might deserve a slightly raised eyebrow, it’s Israel’s fault. You can see that idea nicely reflected in the hyperlink for Shehada’s recent Forward article: https://forward.com/opinion/439846/israel-is-clearing-the-way-for-more-violence-by-demonizing-moderate/ -- it’s of course Israel that “is clearing the way for more violence.”

But while Shehada considers Hamas as a legitimate Palestinian group that deserves to be defended, he has some really harsh words for the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas, which he has denounced as “tyrannical, careless and unpopular.”

Shehada’s eagerness to serve as a Hamas apologist while also pretending to be vaguely for peaceful coexistence (presumably under the benevolent rule of Hamas from the river to the sea) imbue his usually very well written articles with a marked disingenuity. Camera highlighted some of the omissions and distortions in several of his articles last year. But the question who Muhammad Shehada really is, or what he really stands for, seems also worthwhile asking given that, for a young man from Gaza who appears to be on very friendly and familiar terms with a senior Hamas leader, he has managed very quickly to establish himself as a regular contributor for a major American Jewish site like the Forward – for which he has written regularly since January 2018 – and Israel’s Ha’aretz – for which he has written regularly since July 2017.

It seems that Shehada first tried to make a name for himself as a writer in English in May 2016. Nowadays Shehada usually presents himself as “a writer and civil society activist from the Gaza Strip and a student of development studies at Lund University, Sweden,” as well as a former “PR officer for the Gaza office of the Euro-Med Monitor for Human Rights.” However, when Shehada started out in mid-2016, he chose a very different biography: “Born in Egypt, raised in diaspora, Palestinian by blood, Egyptian by birth. With progressive endeavours towards democratic reforms and deradicalization, religious tolerance and coexistence, social equity and feminism, I aspire to construct an intellectual debate that corrects the misconceptions about the Middle East and offers a clear picture of Palestinian daily life, which will be my main focus.”

So if Shehada was “raised in diaspora,” where did he grow up? Perhaps he regards Gaza as some kind of “diaspora,” because he seems to have spent at least part of his childhood and his teen years in Gaza. This is at least what he claims in an article marking the anniversary of the end of Operation Cast Lead, where Shehada offers a harrowing account of living through this war in 2008/09 as a fourteen-year-old.

There are several noteworthy points regarding this article from January 2018. First, it was published by Ali Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada – and Abunimah, who is an outspoken supporter of Hamas, can be counted on to publish only articles by authors he considers as reliable allies. Secondly, the article offers a glimpse of Shehada’s life in Gaza: while he refers to “a family house in Cairo,” he writes that in Gaza, his family lived in the Tal al-Hawa area, which – though he doesn’t mention it – is regarded as a fairly affluent neighborhood not far from the Hamas-dominated Islamic University. Indeed, Shehada’s family lived in a house that even had underground parking, and they owned a car.

It seems that Shehada eventually went to study computer engineering at the Islamic University. At the university, he became friends with a murky figure who makes an appearance in the work of British antisemitism researcher David Collier. In the course of a project that focused on supposedly independent “activists” from Gaza with a sizeable social media following, David encountered Walid Mahmoud/Walid Mahmoud Rouk, whose “reporting” from Gaza always seemed to echo Hamas propaganda. More bizarrely, Walid Mahmoud was involved in, and even administering, Facebook pages followed by tens of thousands of supporters of British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. These Facebook pages included countless posts demonizing Israel, Zionism and Jews. But it turned out that Walid Mahmoud also used his social media clout to fundraise for all sorts of ostensibly charitable projects that he claimed to have started – and he actually managed to take in tens of thousands of dollars in various campaigns (see e.g. here).

Needless to say, Walid Mahmoud was not accountable to anyone and free to use the money as he pleased, but as David Collier rightly points out, it is hard to imagine that Hamas would be unaware of a social media activist in Gaza “with an audience of 100,000s, access to sympathetic political players in the UK and the ability to generate hard foreign currency.”

At one point, Walid Mahmoud apparently also tried to use his fundraising skills for the benefit of his friend Muhammad Shehada; nowadays the two continue to collaborate on journalistic projects (see e.g. Walid Mahmoud’s author page at Al Jazeera, where all articles are co-authored with Shehada).

But back to Shehada’s time as a student at Gaza’s Islamic University. In 2015, he was interviewed by a fringe website, where he was introduced as a “21 year-old engineering student” and a “a community translator and researcher for outspoken author and critic of Israel, Professor Norman Finkelstein.” Given that Finkelstein’s work has made him “a superstar for antisemitic websites,” it seems safe to assume that having a soft spot for Islamist terrorists and obsessively hating Israel is a requirement for working for him.

Shehada called Finkelstein “my dear friend” in a Facebook post in March 2017, when Finkelstein apparently gave a talk at Harvard that Shehada joined via Internet. And in fall 2016, when Shehada was leaving Gaza for Malaysia – much to the regret of his friend Walid Mahmoud – Finkelstein shared on his website an appeal for donations ‘to help a Gaza student resettle in Malaysia.’

In this fundraising appeal, Shehada described himself as “a junior 21-year-old writer and civil society activist from the Gaza Strip” who was planning to “start a program of Business Administration at the University of Malaya, for the next three years.”

But luckily for Shehada, his worries about how things would work out for him in Malaysia proved unwarranted.

When the veteran Malaysian politician Mahathir Mohamad – who also happens to be a notorious Jew-hater – won elections in May 2018, Shehada offered his heartfelt congratulations in a Facebook post, accompanied by a photo that showed him shaking hands with Mahathir Mohamad. As Shehada explained: “Malaysia was one of the most crucial milestones in my life! There, I was reunited with my heart and soul. It is where I met some of the most extraordinary friends who overwhelmed me with unique kindness and selflessness. In my first few days in Kuala Lumpur, I was introduced to the founder of modern Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, a sweet dedicated father and lovable grandfather who nonetheless commands enormous respect. His support of the Palestinian cause is greatly remarkable.”



Well, it is certainly a fabulous stroke of good luck if you come to a foreign country as a penniless 21-year-old student and happen to be introduced to one of the country’s most prominent and powerful politicians right away.

Those of us who don’t believe all that much in such extremely happy coincidences can of course only speculate about the connections that got Shehada his lucky break. The most obvious possibility is that Shehada had contact with the network of Hamas operatives based in Malaysia. The country has been described as “Hamas’ gateway to Asia,” and only a few weeks ago, Mahathir Mohamad was happy to receive Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and to tweet about their get-together extensively (see this thread and the retweets here and here).

But whatever happened to make Malaysia “one of the most crucial milestones” in Shehada’s life, he apparently didn’t stay there too long. Instead of studying business administration at the University of Malaya, he seems to have moved on to Sweden some time in 2017 to pursue development studies at Lund University.

Perhaps his association with the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med Monitor) had something to do with this move. As mentioned previously, Shehada claims in some of the biographies for his op-eds that he was a “PR officer for the Gaza office of the Euro-Med Monitor for Human Rights.” In his current Twitter biography, he claims to be “Manager at @EuroMedHR” and links to the organization’s website, where he is indeed featured as the first of the “leadership team,” though it seems somewhat odd that his area of responsibility is given as “Europe Affairs.”

According to its website, the Euro-Med Monitor was founded in 2011 “by a group of European youth from diverse origins, MENA [Middle East &North Africa] immigrants and students living in Europe, who were inspired by the people’s will to rebel against tyranny and oppression that swept through the Arab region in 2011.” The organization emphasizes in bold print that it is “youth-led,” though they make up for it with their Board of Trustees: the current chairman is none other than veteran Israel-hater Richard Falk, an ardent supporter of Hamas who also managed to gain notoriety as a “9/11 truther and promoter of anti-Semitism.” So in a way, Muhammad Shehada had a point when he described Falk as “legendary.”



Another not-so-youthful board member is John Whitbeck, who clearly shares Falk’s hatred for Israel and is apparently also fond of 9/11 conspiracy theories.

* * *

While it is not clear if Shehada’s eagerness to serve as an apologist for Hamas is due to any actual ties to the Islamist terror group, it is quite obvious that even though he managed to leave Gaza, he always stayed in a world where hatred of the world’s only Jewish state is not just normal, but actually useful for your career. 

Shehada knows and admires an awful lot of people who hate Israel (and Jews) just as much as Hamas does. For a young man of 26, he has already a rather promising career, and he may well have bright prospects. Hopefully he will come to realize at one point that a better Middle East, which is something he supposedly wants, can emerge only once Islamist terror groups like Hamas are firmly rejected instead of whitewashed. And perhaps now that he is officially a Forward columnist – which he currently notes proudly in his Twitter profile – he will try to widen his horizon by checking out the work of his fellow Forward columnist Deborah Lipstadt. He could start by reading this Forward column, and of course he could read her book on “Antisemitism: Here and Now.”





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Thursday, May 23, 2019

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill recently made an astonishing claim when he declared: “I literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a living.” Perhaps Professor Hill doesn’t earn his living at Temple University, because the subjects (media and education) he teaches there seem to have absolutely nothing to do with the study of Yemeni and Moroccan Jews. I was also unable to find any scholarly study of the history of Yemeni and Moroccan Jews authored by Hill.

But while Hill’s claim looks very much like a pathetic attempt to assert academic expertise, it’s noteworthy that he was apparently trying to create an aura of authority for a project he has been working on. As Hill announced: “I finished a film that devotes 20% to Mizrahis [i.e. Middle Eastern Jews]. And I talk about them regularly.”

The film Hill referred to is apparently “Black in the Holy Land”, and you can watch the trailer on YouTube – but before you do so, you should read an EoZ post from last February. Amazingly enough, the trailer for Hill’s “documentary” starts off with convicted terrorist Ali Jiddah, who “planted four hand grenades on Strauss Street in downtown Jerusalem in 1968. The blasts injured nine Israelis.”

Jiddah served 17 years in prison and was released in a prisoner swap. Since then, he has devoted himself to demonizing Israel, and as he told the Times of Israel a few years ago: “I am satisfied, and I am convinced that the work I am doing today is more effective than the bomb I planted in 1968.”


While the film is apparently not yet released, it’s clear what to expect: if your trailer prominently features a convicted terrorist who hopes to achieve with words what he previously tried to achieve with bombs, you really give your game away.

So it was hardly surprising that Marc Lamont Hill wasn’t pleased when well-known Israeli activist and writer Hen Mazzig recently wrote an excellent article that was published in the Los Angeles Times under the title “No, Israel isn’t a country of privileged and powerful white Europeans.”

If you missed the heated exchange that developed between Hen and Hill on social media, you can catch up by reading a Jerusalem Post report about it. Hill’s criticism of Hen’s widely read article included the preposterous claim that “the 20th century identity category of ‘Mizrahi’ [i.e. Middle Eastern Jews]” was created “as a means of detaching them from Palestinian identity.” According to Marc Lamont Hill, those who are now considered Mizrahi should apparently be called “Palestinian Jews” and we should all remember that they “lived peacefully with other Palestinians.”

Well, if Professor Hill studies “Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a living,” he presumably knows that they cannot really be described as “Palestinian Jews.” Those Jews who lived among “other Palestinians” – meaning presumably the non-Jews in the area that the Romans designated as “Palestine” – had to endure the fate of an oppressed minority ruled by their conquerors. And if we want to consider the barely century-old history since the local Arabs actually started to consider themselves as Palestinians, we find that the Palestinian leader of the time was the man who started his career by instigating murderous pogroms, and who later became notorious as “Hitler’s mufti.” Incidentally, the mufti was an early proponent of boycotts and would arguably deserve to be honored as the father of BDS. Under his leadership, “‘Filasteen Arduna wa’al yahud Kilabuna’ (Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs)” and “‘Itbach al Yahud’ (slaughter the Jews)” were the first rallying cries of Palestinian nationalism in 1920.

For the narrative that undergirds Marc Lamont Hill’s vile anti-Israel activism, this history has to be ignored. It’s no less obscene than Rashida Tlaib’s recent attempt to rewrite history by claiming that the Palestinians somehow provided a “a safe haven” to Jews. But at least Tlaib doesn’t claim to be “one of the leading intellectual voices” in the US, and she doesn’t claim to “literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a living.” As it happens, my dearest friends include both a Yemeni and a Moroccan Jew, and if Marc Lamont Hill ‘studied’ them, he could learn a lot.

But as it is, we can anticipate that Hill’s forthcoming “documentary” will document first and foremost why Hill has fans both among supposedly “progressive” anti-Israel activists and virulent Jew-haters like Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam and David Duke.

________________________________
[EoZ]: This article inspired me to look at some previous posts of mine about the history of how Jews lived in Morocco and Yemen. I tweeted this today:

Absurdly, @MarcLamontHill says "I literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a living" and he says they lived peacefully among Muslims.
Ali Bey al Abbasi was the pen name of a traveler who described the lives of Jews in Morocco in 1805 quite differently.

There are plenty of examples of contemporaneous studies of Jews in Morocco describing how they were humiliated, daily, by Muslims there.

And Morocco was one of the best places for Jews to live!
Here you can see several attacks against Jews in Yemen between 1908 and 1913.

Marc Lamont Hill is not a scholar. He wants to whitewash history, ,not describe it. 

This shows that his antipathy isn't against Zionists - but Jews.





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