Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Amira Hass Ignores Centuries Of Muslims Stoning Jews and Defends It As A Birthright

In 2001, she [Amira Hass] was found guilty in court of libel for presenting a false account of Hebron Jews kicking, spitting on and dancing around the corpse of a Palestinian shot by border police. Unfortunately for Hass, closed circuit television footage and a police investigation exposed her story as a lie, and she was ordered to pay 250,000 NIS in damages to the Jewish community.
CAMERA, Amira Hass Spouts Vitriol on the CBC, June 29, 2011



Leave it to Amira Hass and her special brand of sloppy journalism to promote her claim that throwing stones at Jews has now attained the level of an Arab "birthright" and "metaphor of resistance." In her article The inner syntax of Palestinian stone-throwing, published by Haaretz (also known for its shoddy reporting: see CAMERA for a long list of Haaretz errors), Hass writes:

Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance. Persecution of stone-throwers, including 8-year-old children, is an inseparable part − though it’s not always spelled out − of the job requirements of the foreign ruler, no less than shooting, torture, land theft, restrictions on movement, and the unequal distribution of water sources.

...Often hurling stones is borne of boredom, excessive hormones, mimicry, boastfulness and competition. But in the inner syntax of the relationship between the occupier and the occupied, stone-throwing is the adjective attached to the subject of “We’ve had enough of you, occupiers.”
This is not reporting.
Amira Hass is merely using her article as a platform to promote her own anti-Israel ideology.

In fact, Muslims actually have a long history of stoning Jews that predates the re-establishment of the state of Israel, when the Arabs played host to Jews.
  • In 1955, S. D. Goitein, in his book Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts Through the Ages, wrote:
    In former times--and in remote places even today--it was common for Muslim schoolboys to stone Jews. When the Turks conquered Yemen in 1872, an envoy was sent from the Chief Rabbi of Istanbul to inquire what grievance the Yemenite Jews had against their neighbors. It is indicative that the first thing of which they complained was this molestation by the schoolboys. But when the Turkish Governor asked an assembly of notables to stop this nuisance,there arose an old doctor of Muslim law and explained that this stone-throwing at Jews was an age-old custom (in Arabic 'Ada) and therefore it was unlawful to forbid it. [p. 76, emphasis added]
  • In Eight years in Asia and Africa from 1846-1855, Israel Joseph Benjamin includes among the multiple indignities regularly suffered by Jews at the hands of the Muslims of Persia:
    Under the pretext of their being unclean, they are treated with the greatest severity, and should they enter a street, inhabited by Mussulmans, they are pelted by the boys and mob with stones and dirt.[p 212]
Andrew Bostom gives other examples in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History:
  • The British Jerusalem Consul, James Finn, reported in 1858 about the dangers faced by Jews in then-Palestine:
    [July 8, 1858]…in consequence of a series of disgusting insults offered to Jews and Jewesses in Hebron, I obtained such orders as I could from the Pasha’s agent in this city…Finding these not answer entirely as might be desired, I repaired to the neighborhood of Hebron myself—and found the whole government of that important and turbulent district being administered by a very old Bashi Bozuk officer as the ton governor; and a military Boluk Bashi with five starved and ragged Bashi Bozuk man as soldiers—The rural district is left entirely to peasant Sheikhs, with one responsible over the rest. The streets of the town were paraded by fanatic Dervishes—and during my stay there a Jewish house was forcibly entered by night, iron bars of the window broken, and heavy stones thrown by invisible hands at every person approaching the place to afford help. One of the Members of the Council affirmed that they were not obliged to obey orders from the Pasha’s deputy—and another declared his right derived from time immemorial in his family, to enter Jewish houses, and take toll or contributions any time without giving account. [p 89]
  • In a report in March 1912, L. Benoudiz, a teacher at the AIU Boys’ school in Marrakesh wrote:
    the unfortunate Jews were the playthings of their tyrannical neighbours. The latter forced them to endure a thousand humiliations, when they passed by, such as throwing their skull-caps to the ground or filling it with urine and returning it them. After which the Arabs spat in their faces, threw stones at them or forced them to perform humiliating acts. Those who tried to defend themselves were knocked about without pity. Inured to the worst treatment, the poor Jews accepted with pious resignation all the repressive acts which their dangerous neighbours made them endure. In a word, the age for the Galut had been a period of suffering and endless torments for our unhappy brethren.[p 544]
  • Bostom quotes from Robert Satloff's book, Among the Righteous -- Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands, where Satloff tells the story of Yehuda Chachmon, who lived under Italian rule in Benghazi, Libya, during WWII and wrote about Arab street gangs:
    “Arabs would throw oranges, tomatoes, stones at us,” he said. “Every Jew would hide in his house after five in the evening. The houses were closed [i.e., locked up] with bars and you could not leave until the morning.’” [p 153]
  • Bostom quotes Satloff further about Arabs during the Holocaust, such as the Arab guards in Saharan internment camps. Jews who were imprisoned in the southern Morocco camps of ‘Ain al-Ourak and Foum Deflah
    …were subjected to the tombeau, French for “tomb,” a method of punishment in which camp overseers ordered prisoners to dig holes in the ground two meters long, fifty centimeters wide and thirty five centimeters deep and to lie in these faux graves for weeks on end. They stayed there day and night, exposed to blistering summer heat that could rise more than 120 degrees F and frigid winter nights that could dip to below freezing. They lay in their own waste, surviving only on bread and water. The slightest movement by prisoners would trigger, in the words of one witness, “a rain of stones or blows from rifles” from camp guards.[p 153]
Amira Hass's defense of Arabs throwing stones is nothing more than another false account of reality.
The only Arab birthright to throwing stones is in the context of their ongoing Antisemitic persecution of Jews.

As if Arab attacks on innocent civilians could ever be properly construed as 'resistance'.

-----
If you found this post interesting or informative, please it below. Thanks!

Technorati Tag: and .

No comments: