What Social Dysfunction COVID Hath Wrought!

"It [COVID-19 restrictions] brought a climate of fear."

"Now, I tell my staff when we close [at night], we lock the doors and we don't open for anyone."

Fouad Filali, owner, Le Senateur restaurant, Old Montreal

 

"Over the past 14 months, there are many things that have surprised me."

"Normally, it is a tourist and family sector and we intend to keep it that way."

Jean=Phillipe Rochette, spokesman, Old Port of Montreal

 

"Modified cars, fights, crazy driving, garbage everywhere, lots of people who use our front doors as toilets."

"It's a little discouraging having to warn my children to avoid pee puddles."

"When I go out for a walk, there are groups of drunk young guys making rude comments and you don't feel like they're going to react peacefully if you tell them off."

Carolyn Pinto Cellere, 15-year Old Montreal resident 

 

"This is what happens when you deprive people for so long and then you give everything back at the same time."

"We are all much more worried than before, we avoid going home alone because we witnessed several fights."

Nelsy Raoul, 28, server, Comptoir 400 restaurant, Old Montreal

People walk in the Old Port on a warm spring day in Montreal, Saturday, April 24, 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues in Canada and around the world. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

 Ms.Cellere, whose family has lived for a decade-and-a-half in Old Montreal, feels her neighbourhood was once the perfect place to live and raise a family even with the influx of tourists arriving every summer to look around the old City of Montreal. There was never an issue of safety and security. There was no all-night partying. All that has changed she says, with constant street partying ever since the bars closed as a result of COVID lockdown and restrictions imposed on non-essential businesses in an effort to control the rising rates of COVID transmission when Quebec was the hot-spot for infections in Canada.

And then the curfew that had been in effect since October of last year was lifted when the Quebec government announced on May 28 that restaurants would be reopened across the province. Ever since, videos have surfaced of violence linked to street parties in Old Montreal, posted to social media. Restaurant server Nelsy Raoul feels uncomfortable now, concerned over her safety at night when the restaurant she works at closes for the night.

The curfew at the Old Port remains in place, while it has been lifted elsewhere, until further notice. Carolyn Cellere see the situation of violent disturbances in the neighbourhood intensifying, and becoming more deeply entrenched in the neighbourhood, taking over residential streets. People are feeling increasingly unsafe, and some residents openly discuss leaving the neighbourhood, looking elsewhere for normalcy and peace and quiet.

 Fouad Filali misses the presence of families with children who once came to the historic district. They've been replaced by young people with a seeming tendency to violence and are known to obnoxiously harass women. Few tourist now show up in the iconic neighbourhood since the beginning of the pandemic leaving residents, business owners and workers with the distinct impression that the area is now dangerous, most particularly during the night. The  hope is that with the return of tourists, the disturbing element will retreat.

In September, the area saw a shootout, and in April rioters protesting against the curfew lit garbage fires around the neighbourhood, smashing store windows and fighting with police. Recently a man and a woman in their late teens were stabbed in altercations during an outdoor party celebrating the end of the curfew. The federal corporation that owns the Old Port of Montreal has imposed an overnight curfew.

Veronique Pascal recounts her impressions that though partying and loud noise have always reflected life in the district, all of the socially-disturbing activities of late have been exacerbated by the health crisis. "Old Montreal is normally fancy. We tell ourselves that we are protected by this feeling of luxury, but the pandemic changed everything."  

 

 

The Slavering PC Lynch Mob

David Starkey, author and historian

"Slavery was not genocide -- otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn Blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived."
"As for the idea that slavery is this kind of terrible disease that dare not speak its name, it only dare not speak its name ... because we settled it nearly 200 years ago."
"We don't normally go on about the fact that Roman Catholics once upon a time didn't have the vote and weren't allowed to have their own churches because we had Catholic emancipation."
"And do you know what -- we had Catholic emancipation at pretty much exactly the same time that we got rid of slavery in the 1830s. We don't go on about that because it's part of history, it's a question that's settled."
"And again there is no point in arguing against globalization or Western civilization - they are all products of it. We are all products of it."
"[The British Empire was] generally speaking, in most ways, actually fruitful."
Dr.David Starkey

Move on folks. The words of this intellectual and public figure -- no longer a celebrity in academic circles -- are a reflection of the truth, honestly spoken and honestly come by. Yet an expression of verity that breaks the eggshell of the shibboleth of recent adoption that the tragic suffering of Blacks throughout history is somehow unique to humankind, akin to a genocide, none of which is accurate, and which Dr. Starkey was quick to point out. Slavery has existed since time immemorial and slaves have not only been black, but white and any other colour of the spectrum of humanity.

There have indeed been periods in history when genocidal intent has been carried out in a mass slaughter of an ethnic-cultural-religious group with the intention of total annihilation in conformation with a racist ideology regarding them as vermin to be eradicated from the face of the Earth. During those years of institutionalized and carefully orchestrated violation of humanity, the targets were enslaved, tortured and methodically murdered. Six million in number, representing a significant mass proportion of their presence globally. That is genocide.

At a time in many Western civilizations when signs proliferated in the early- and mid-20th Centuries that "Jews, Blacks and Dogs" were not permitted entry, assaults on the dignity and humanity of people of such specific origins were widespread and supported both by the citizenry and the governments representing them. This kind of degradation of humanity was common and broadly accepted. To the present day, racist discrimination, oppression and deranged violence targets specific groups.

Black Lives Matter protesters in Hyde Park in June  Reuters

Dr. Starkey, for all his academic acclaim and reputation as a historian of the first order is also a plainspoken man; he does not cloak his utterances in the precious exclusionary language of academia; he speaks directly and plainly of what he knows, of historical precedents, giving his studied opinion based on reality, not the popularity of the most recent publicly-adopted issue designating it the flavour-of-the-moment, which crowds of people, eager to portray themselves as engaged progressives march sanctimoniously in favour of.

Rectifying the past to better reflect the outrage of the present over established customs and values long since abandoned in favour of more enlightened practises reflecting the public weal as humanity drew closer in the event of mass exoduses from countries where enslavement still persists, where violations of human rights are ongoing, where exploitation of human potential is rampant, where internecine and sectarian and tribal enmities cause explosions of violence and civil war. Refugees and emigrants stream into developed societies to add their dreams to national aspirations.

And living in those present-day situations, opportunistic groups still favour revolutionary hatreds and chaos over secure societal normalcy. Bringing hate groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter  together with the Muslim Brotherhood to espouse change in an imperfect society that has offered them freedom and the potential to succeed in normalizing their own lives, to prosper and to meld with a society meant to embrace equality of opportunity and the recognition of how much we have in common.

For speaking his mind based on fact, not the fiction of victimhood and blame, Dr.Starkey is no longer academically associated with Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and Canterbury Christ Church University; no longer a visiting fellow at University of Buckingham, and Lancaster and Kent Universities have placed his honorary graduate status under review. His publisher cacnelled the release of Dr.Starkey's latest history books.

"He's been saying this stuff for years. It's only because of the work of #BlackLivesMatter that it's being taken more seriously Personally I believe he should lose his CBE (Commander of the British Empire) too", claimed an academic colleague, obviously in the progressive league, and without doubt green with jealousy and schadenfreude  of the now-destroyed popular reputation of Dr.Starkey in his so-recent heyday as an acclaimed debater, historian, author.

"It's just not acceptable what he said. With freedom of speech goes responsibility. It's not an absolute right, and you cannot thoughtlessly provoke and incite and inflame, particularly at such a sensitive time", commented Sir Anthony Seldon, Dr.Starkey's employer at the University of Buckingham. Unwittingly (perhaps as a reflection of his own witlessness) describing precisely what Black Lives Matter's campaign is promoting: incitement, inflaming attitudes, and indulging in violent chaos.

These academic institutions are quavering in fear lest they be labelled anti-Black racists.

"We cannot decolonize the curriculum, because you Black Lives Matter are wholly and entirely a product of white colonization."
"You are not culturally black Africans."
"You would die in seconds if you were dumped back in black Africa, you wouldn’t know how to cope."
"[The same white people who support the BLM movement were the people] who work themselves up into a lather about leaving the European Union."
"These are the people who tie themselves in knots despite the fact they have lots of money, live in big houses, drive big cars."
"They get wildly excited about extinction. It’s a form of upper class and middle class arrogant patronage."
Dr.David Starkey

David Starkey made the comments on YouTube channel Reasoned UK (Photo: Getty)

The Jews of Egypt

"If it wasn’t for [President Abdel Fattah] al-Sissi, this would have never been done. A lot of things have changed since he’s taken over."
"I have relatives who left to France, Italy and Israel and they would like to visit the synagogue now."
Yolande Mizrahi,  septuagenarian Jew born and raised in Alexandria

"This is recognition of Egypt’s Jews who were neglected for over sixty years."
"It is recognition that we have always been here and that we have contributed to a lot of things just like any other Egyptian."
"I'm very proud of what my country has done, and it symbolizes living together; today there is no difference between Egyptian Muslim , Christian and Egyptian Jew."
Magda Haroun, a leader of the dwindling Egyptian Jewish community, Cairo

People attend the opening of Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue in Alexandria, Egypt, Friday, Jan. 10, 2020, three years after the Egyptian government started the renovations of the synagogue originally built in 1354. (AP Photo/Hamada Elrasam)

During the pre- and post-Biblical era, Jews lived and prospered in Egypt, as an integral and equal part of the Egyptian population.
"From the time of the post-exilic prophets Judaism developed in three main streams, one flowing from Jerusalem, another from Babylon, the third from Egypt. Alexandria soon took precedence of existing settlements of Jews, and became a great centre of Jewish life. The first Ptolemy, to whom at the dismemberment of Alexander's empire Egypt had fallen, continued to the Jewish settlers the privileges of full citizenship which Alexander had granted them. He increased also the number of Jewish inhabitants, for following his conquest of Palestine (or Coele-Syria, as it was then called), he brought back to his capital a large number of Jewish families and settled thirty thousand Jewish soldiers in garrisons. For the next hundred years the Palestinian and Egyptian Jews were under the same rule, and for the most part the Ptolemies treated them well."
"Under their tolerant sway the Jewish community thrived, and became distinguished in the handicrafts as well as in commerce. Two of the five sections into which Alexandria was divided were almost exclusively occupied by them; these lay in the north-east along the shore and near the royal palace -- a favourable situation for the large commercial enterprises in which they were engaged."
"The Jews had full permission to carry on their religious observances, and besides many smaller places of worship, each marked by its surrounding plantation of trees, they built a great synagogue, of which it is said in the Talmud 'He who has not seen it has not seen the glory of Israel'. It was in the form of a basilica, with a double row of columns, and so vast that an official standing upon a platform had to wave his head-cloth or veil to inform the people at the back of the edifice when to say 'Amen' in response to the Reader. The congregation was seated according to trade-guilds, as was also customary during the Middle Ages; the goldsmiths, silversmiths, coppersmiths, and weavers had their own places, for the Alexandrian Jews seem to have partially adopted the Egyptian caste-system..."
Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria, Norman Bentwich, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1910

Guests visit the newly renovated Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue in the northwestern Egyptian city of Alexandria on January 10, 2020, on the day of its inauguration. (Khaled DESOUKI/AFP)

Alexandria's historic two-storey Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue was in parlous condition, having partially collapsed in 2006.The following year began restoration by the Egyptian Antiquities Department, preventing its total collapse.This is one of two remaining synagogues in Alexandria; many other have long since deteriorated with age and disuse and neglect in a city that once was host to 40,000 Jews up to 1940, descendants of Egyptian Jews who had lived there since antiquity.

This iteration of the synagogue dated only to 1881 to serve Alexandria's large and influential Jewish community. It boasted marble floors and marble, rose-coloured columns in its main hall. It stood on the very site of a much earlier synagogue, dating to 1354 a.d., to attest to its historical antecedents. Fully half of Egypt's Jewish community lived in Alexandria, a historical seat in Egypt of a portion of the Biblical diaspora.

The synagogue, now fully renovated, its opening ceremonies bringing a handful of Egyptian Jews to celebrate its resurrection together, in praise of Egypt's new warmer relationships with the State of  Israel, and the closer recognition of the role of Egyptian Jews in Alexandrian life. A small gathering of Jews, mostly elderly who had been born there and lived in the city all their lives, descendants of the original Jews who had made Alexandria their home.

When the State of Israel declared itself the reborn ancient Judea, its neighbours in the Middle East, the surrounding Arab Muslim states determined to eradicate its presence. Successive conflicts where various Arab states -- Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan sent expeditionary armies to destroy the fledgling nation. At the same time, Jews who had lived in Arab countries such as those, as well as Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya and others expelled their Jews, confiscating their property.

Coptic priests visit Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue. (Khaled DESOUKI/AFP

Ironically, non-Arab, Aryan Persia maintained friendly relations with Israel under the Pahlavi dynasty. Now the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have warmed relations with Israel under the regional threat of Persian ambitions to revisit its controlling past of the Middle East and it is from the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran that the existential threat to Israel emanates,

Egypt and Jordan have long since signed peace agreements with Israel, despite that the Jordanian and Egyptian public retain their distrust of and animosity toward the Jewish state. But it is Egypt, under the reign of former general and now president, Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, with whom accommodation has been made between the two countries in their common battle against Islamist fundamentalism and terrorist groups and militias. "If we have Jews, we will build [synagogues] for them", the president said in 2018.

And this is just what has occurred, with the reconstruction of the Maimonides Cairo synagogue which Egypt sponsored in the 2000s. Egypt, mostly emptied of its once-numerous Egyptian-Jewish population in the 1950s, thanks mostly to bloody pogroms under then-President Nasser, has seen many synagogues in Cairo, along with a large Jewish cemetery, go into decay. The restoration of these ancient relics of sites of worship are as much a symbol of Egypt's past as they are of the Jewish presence in Egypt.

Guests visit the newly renovated Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue in the northwestern Egyptian city of Alexandria on January 10, 2020, on the day of its inauguration. (Khaled DESOUKI/AFP)

The floor of the restored Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue has left open to public view the archaeological layers of history that lie beneath the edifice. Additional Egyptian Jews vacated Egypt, turning to Israel and migrating to the West in the wake of the 1956 Suez war after the launch of a military offensive against Egypt when Israel, France and Britain stopped Egypt from closing the Suez Canal to shipping traffic, and hostility from Egyptians toward its Jews was intensified.

Restoring Israeli Heritage Lands to Israel

"Today, I announce my intention, after the establishment of a new government, to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea."
"I believe we have a unique one-off opportunity to do something for which there is wide consensus to finally create secure, permanent borders for the state of Israel."
"We haven't had such an opportunity since the Six-Day War [in 1967] and I doubt we will have another opportunity in the next fifty years."
"I want to act on it immediately. Therefore I wanted to already bring it to the Knesset last week, [but] the attorney general said to me ‘you can’t because it is a transitional government'."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his plan, ahead of an election, on television on Tuesday   AFP

"The plan to apply sovereignty is not something that we thought about just recently. It was planned for months. But there were legal issues with doing anything before the elections. The attorney general said it cannot be done now due to legal constraints."
"The Americans were fully informed about what was going to be done. We knew what their response would be to the prime minister’s announcement. Everything was done in coordination."
Senior Israeli Government Official 

The Palestinian Authority can hardly claim that Israel failed to give it ample opportunity to assume a sovereign state of their own alongside that of Israel's. In the past when the PA and Israel dispatched delegates to bargain for peace which would lead to a two-state solution, there was hard bargaining, with Israel prepared to make sacrificial compromises and the Palestinians firmly sticking to their unaltered demands for 'right of return' and a capital in East Jerusalem.

Both are non-negotiable for Israel, since 'right of return' would result in an population imbalance; the original 700,000 Palestinians who fled when Israel was declared an official sanctioned state, and the 800,000 Jews who were exiled from the Arab countries they had lived in for hundreds to thousands of years, their properties confiscated, refugees who were absorbed by Israel, living alongside close to two million Palestinians currently who are citizens of Israel.

The original 700,000 have swelled through a high birth rate over generations to an estimated six million living in a global diaspora. Permitting them to return to Israel as 'returnees' would upset the population of a Jewish state turning it into a majority Arab state, at the very time when in the Arab states of the Middle East, no Jews are permitted to live. And nor would Jews be permitted to live in a sovereign Palestinian state were one ever to emerge out of the morass of rejections. That was made abundantly clear.

For rejection of peace offers and the formalization of a sovereign Palestinian state has been rejected time and again by the Palestinian Authority, even at times when all of their demands were being met. Their agenda has become crystal clear; the oft-phrased 'From Jordan to the Sea!' as code for the destruction of Israel, and Palestinian Arabs claiming the entire region that the United Nations offered as a Partition Plan, is the only solution to the impasse between the two that Palestinian authorities would ever assent to.

Now that Mr. Netanyahu has made it official, that Israel intends to annex the West Bank settlements and part of the Jordan Valley, all historically part of Judaic heritage, the outrage is palpable and threats are renewed. Fatah and Hamas have never made a secret of their plans to destroy Israel; a reality that Israel's critics in the European Union and elsewhere prefer to ignore; it is not they, after all, whose populations face constant threats of rocket bombardment, stabbings and shootings of civilians.

The fertile strip of land along the Jordan border comprises close to 30 percent of the West Bank, a sparsely populated geography where an estimated 65,000 Palestinians and 11,000 Jewish settlers live an uneasy co-existence. Israel has offered in the past to carve out an area within its own borders largely inhabited by Palestinians in exchange for a like amount of land where stand Israeli settlements, but that too was an offer discarded out of hand by the Palestinians.



That strip of the Jordan Valley was designated under the 1993 Oslo peace accords as "Area C"; under full Israeli control. The Jordan Valley is viewed as an important security buffer for Israel with the Arab world. Should a peace agreement with the Palestinians have succeeded, Israel would have had to maintain an element of military control for obvious reasons, even though the threat of future combined Arab armies converging on Israel as was done in the past appears remote.

This is not the first time that a similar interest was expressed of annexing parts of the West Bank. This time, however, there are detailed plans that are presented, to take the Lower Jordan Valley. "Diplomatic conditions have ripened", stated Mr. Netanyahu, for such a move to be announced. And those conditions of which he alludes have nothing whatever to do with discussions with the Palestinian Authority, but rather with the U.S. administration in Washington.

"[If Prime Minister Netanyahu proceeded with those plans] he will have buried any chance for peace for the next one hundred years. Israelis and the international community most stop this insanity", commented senior Palestinian official Saeb Erekat, as though what other response would be anticipated from this source in view of the fact that as an elite representative of the Palestinians this man never went out of his way to facilitate a peace agreement for that is not part of the official plan of the PA.

Rocket strikes from Gaza into Israel merit returns by the IDF to Gaza

As for the other senior official to comment publicly, representing the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hanan Ashrawi, with no affection for the presence of a Jewish state where she believes there should be none; her interpretation was that the Israeli leader was set to impose a "greater Israel on all of historical Palestine and [carry[ out an ethnic cleansing agenda". Historical Palestine was Jewish, never Arab, and as far as an ethnic cleansing agenda, it is the PA, not Israel that excludes Jews from Arab territory while Arabs have a secure place as citizens in Israel.

The penchant to turn things completely in reverse is a typically Arab conceit, but this never appears to have troubled Arab Palestinians. "All bets are off. Dangerous aggression. Perpetual conflict", she wrote on her Twitter account. As though the situation on the ground was ever anything other than perpetual conflict, the dangerous aggression emanating from violent Palestinians on whom no bets could ever be taken that the PA would fail to reward them handsomely for killing Jews.

United In Grief

"[Three-day-old Amiad Ish-Ran had] managed to unite the nation of Israel [like few others had done before him]."
"You brought so much light. And with all the light that you brought [Amiad Yisrael] we will extinguish their darkness."
Rafael Ish-Ran, grandfather, Jerusalem

A funeral was held in Israel for the child of Amichai and Shira Ish-Ran, who were injured in a drive-by shooting on Sunday. The baby died after being delivered prematurely. (Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

"They were normal people standing at a bus stop."
"Brand new, young couple, have their own little place, they're renting -- everything you would think of for a nice, normal, young family to be."
"And then it all got destroyed by this terrorist."
Jordan Charness, Montreal lawyer

Wedding Day

Nothing normal, however. They were Jews. Jews living in Israel. Dual citizens; Canadian-Israeli. Targets. Normalization is not viewed favourably by the Palestinian Authority. Normalization means accepting the presence of a Jewish state in an Islamic geography. Islamic theology has it that land consecrated to Islam must never fall to another religion; it is forbidden by Sharia law. Palestinians who sell land to Jews can receive the death penalty. More likelier extra-judicial penalties of immediate death, bypassing and dispensing with the annoying interference of a trial.

The presence of Jews in territory that Palestinian Arabs claim as their own although they also claim the territory on which Israel has been established as their own -- represents an enormous abnormality. One that must be 'resisted' as a hateful 'occupation' of Palestinian heritage. The ancient biblical presence of Judea and the Israelite thousands of years of residence in a geography whose history is chronicled through many sources, both biblical and chronologically historical of the time becomes meaningless and expendable in Palestinian claims of pre-historically occupying the land.

Palestinians throw rocks as Israeli soldiers conduct a search for suspects of a shooting attack in the West Bank City of Ramallah, Monday, Dec. 10, 2018. (Majdi Mohammed/The Associated Press)

Before the Almighty revealed the final scriptures of sacred instruction to the faithful, antedating Jewish regional history, it was all consecrated to Islam. Jews, according to Arab Palestinian authorities, have always been illegal occupiers, millennia distant to the present. So when 30-week-pregnant Shira Ish-Ran with her hisband Amichai waited at a bus stop outside a the West Bank settlement of Ofra along with a group of other Jews it was only logical that they be ambushed by gunmen opening fire at them from a moving vehicle.

The gathered crowd of Jews scattered immediately; recognition of an impending atrocity comes easily to these people who have experienced so many of these killing sprees either personally or through the personal accounts of friends and family, for everyone has mourned those deaths and the survivors' recoveries have become legendary. When the 23-year-old rabbinical student Amichai looked back to see his wife on the ground, he leaped to shield her from the rain of bullets.

Shot three times in the leg, his wife, 21-year-old teacher-in-waiting, shot in the back. They survived, hospitalized, sedated, undergoing surgeries and a gradual recovery. Their son was delivered by Cesarean section with the hope he would live, and he did, for three days. Their baby, wrapped in a prayer shawl, surrounded by family, was last seen by his parents from their hospital beds, then was buried at Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem.

The baby Amiad Yisrael was murdered by 29-year-old Palestinian Salah Barghouti a member of the terrorist group Hamas. Salah Barghouti was taught from the time he was an infant -- through school curricula, through plays and television, through the 'normal' life of Palestinians incited to hate Jews and to pledge their futures to the 'liberation' of Palestine from the unworthy hands of Jews -- to become a martyr in jihad, to restore Palestine in its entirety, that 'Palestine' that was always associated with Jews called Palestinians. Now he has become one such martyr.

Amichai Ish-Ran's brother, a member of the IDF, watched live via surveillance footage as the shooting occurred, reacting by sending emergency personnel urgently to the scene. "He didn't know it was his brother, because it's not that detailed a camera", explained Montreal lawyer Charness, both young men's Canadian uncle.

Shira and Amichai Ish-Ran (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg)

"During the three days our baby lived, he united us —secular, religious, ultra-Orthodox, right and left wing, who came to support us. I'm proud to be part of this nation,"

To Adolph, With Love and Respect

"We will not allow the rest of the world to dictate what we do with our bell."
"It's a monument of history. We shouldn't forget that history or pretend it didn't happen."
"That is why the bell should stay."
Herxheim Mayor Georg Welker, 72, former village pastor

A view of a bell inside the Protestant Church of St. James in Herxheim am Berg, Germany, on June 12. (Ronald Wittek/EPA)

"We're talking about a bell that was hung during National Socialism and is dedicated to a mass murderer."
"Our whole postwar identity in Germany is built on a break from that history."
Markus Krauss, village metal worker, Herxheim, Germany

"We did spring cleaning. Not only the village cleaned, but also the bell. Of pigeon dung, of the filth of the National Socialists, who still threatened after 80 years to divide the village population, and hopefully also of the dirt that might have been thrown off about Schweringen."
"Schweringen is a village of clear, decent, intellectual, cosmopolitan citizens, and they will not simply stand by as the villagers are planning a split."
"In this hope, and as Christians for freedom, we have freed this bell from the signs of a time of guilt and abuse."
Unknown Schweringen activists' note

Parishioners in Herxheim were alarmed to find they had been married or had baptised children under the "Hitler bell" Getty Images

A tale of two German villagers, though many more than just these two appear latterly to have re-discovered that their village church hosted a bell dedicated to Nazi Germany and its fascist Fuhrer, Adolph Hitler who led their country into instigating a world war by invading neighbouring countries in Europe with the intention of birthing a new world order overseen by the superior intellect and proud physiognomy of Aryan warriors who undertook, while they were at it, the systematic and determined annihilation of European Jewry.

After having admitted that the heated discussions in the village community revolving around Schweringen's Nazi bell that posed an "unprecedented challenge to the people in the church", Community Pastor Jann-Axel Hellwege also stated that the church was now in the process of assessing whether the damage that ensued when a vigilante group of citizens broke into the church tower to use an angle grinder to remove the swastika on the bell, had affected the bell's sound qualities -- and whether to take legal action.

An estimated two dozen towns in Germany -- when news of the "Hitler bell" discovered to still exist in Herxheim became national news -- checked their own bells to discover swastikas on them. Those towns wasted little time in expeditiously ridding themselves of the bells. But not in Schweringen in northern Germany, where town council prevaricated, and finally a group of townspeople took covert action to grind away the Nazi insignia. And not in Herxheim am Berg in the southwestern wine country of Germany.

Where, in 1934 the town's National Socialist mayor in his hilltop village of 780 people hung a bell with the inscription "Everything for the Fatherland -- Adolf Hitler", beside the swastika. One of the parishioners, retired music teacher Sigrid Peters who played the organ in the church, discovered the church bell's existence and protested that the bell hung inside the yellow church tower, with a rickety wooden staircase leading to it, be removed and destroyed.

"People have been getting married under the swastika and they didn't even know it", she said furiously. "It can’t happen that a baby is baptized and a bell with the words ‘Everything for the Fatherland’ is chiming." When she made her discovery, and refused to play the organ until the bell was removed, it quickly became public knowledge all over Germany where Jewish organizations demanded the bell be removed. The response of the local church council was to temporarily ban it from ringing, while the regional church body offered to provide a replacement.

The response in Herxheim to its new state of notoriety with its "Hitler bell", was divisive. Ms. Peters has been called a "traitor", and in defiance the local pizzeria has been receiving orders from some of the town's good citizens for "Nazi pizza". Many village residents want to retain the bell, despite the fact that for the past year their village has been mockingly dubbed the "Nazi village". Mayor Welker, elected a year ago on the promise to keep the bell, plans to place a plaque on the church wall to explain the bell's history. 

"For me, it is incomprehensible that such a bell was ever stuck in a church."
"I have even less understanding that there are obviously still people who hold a positive attitude toward this bell."
Josef Schuster, president, Central Council of Jews in Germany

“When we talk about the name Adolf Hitler, it will forever be associated first and foremost with the persecution of the Jews and the time of the war."
"But when you talk about these things, you have to see the whole picture, and say, yes, there were atrocities, but there were also things [Hitler] introduced which we still use today."
Herxheim am Berg’s former mayor, Roland Becker   Heil Hitler!

Israel, the Nation State of the Jewish People

Israelis wave Israeli flags as they parade around Jerusalem's Old City on May 24, 2017 to commemorate Jerusalem Day, marking the reunification of the city following the Six-Day War of 1967. (AFP PHOTO / Menahem KAHANA)

"The main problem with the bill is not what is in it but what is missing from it – which is that Israel is democratic and committed to the full equality for all its citizens."
"When the democratic component is missing, rather than strengthen Israel as a Jewish state, it provides ammunition to the enemies of Zionism who want to harm Israel’s right to self-determination."
"There is a real struggle over the soul of Israeli democracy. There has been major success in diluting problematic legislation."
"[The practical impact of the bill was currently merely] symbolic and educational. [It] won’t have immediate concrete implications."
IDI (Israel Democracy Institute) President Yohanan Plesner

"Building a Jewish homeland — through sovereignty, through culture, and through settlement — has always been the core purpose of the country."
"The bottom line is that Israel is the Jewish State, and this law tells us what that means, just as other Basic Laws tell us what goes into its democratic foundations."
David Hazony, founding editor, The Tower magazine

"We are enshrining this important bill into a law today to prevent even the slightest thought, let alone attempt, to transform Israel to a country of all its citizens."
"When I listened attentively to the Joint List MKs, it was impossible to miss their clear words: 'We, the Arabs, will win, we are in our homeland, we were here before you and we’ll be here after you'." "This Basic Law is the clear-cut answer to those who think that and it is clear: You were not here before us and you will not be here after us."
Avi Dichter, Likud party Knesset member, bill sponsor

"A hundred and twenty-two years after [the founder of modern Zionism Theodore] Herzl made his vision known, with this law we determined the founding principle of our existence."
"Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people, and respects the rights of all of its citizens."
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu says the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state   AFP

The land of Israel, the country was established with a sound view to recognizing a return of the Jewish people from exodus imposed upon them by the inexorable forces of territorial domination in its ancient history. Banished from the land that give Judaism its presence and purpose, the following millennia were not kind to the existence of Jews who struggled over the ages in various points of the geographic compass to endure the isolation, assaults, hostility and deadly attacks hurled against them by a world unwilling to accommodate their existence.

Jews had never, over the thousands of years that distanced them from their heritage and memory of their homeland, forgotten where they came from. Return was forever in mind, its yearning a healing mindset for those who suffered humiliation, rejection and violence, the hope always there that return was possible and when achieved it would represent salvation from slander, recrimination, threats and mass murder. The price paid before return was deemed possible by the world at large was horribly steep; six million lives for the assent to return to Zion.

Even then, the supreme world body that gave its assent,  divided the land once totally dedicated to the presence of Israelites, offering a slice to be returned, after a majority portion was allotted to Hashemites whom the British Mandate mollified with TransJordan after their ouster from Arabia when it was handed over to the Saudis. The Palestinian settlers on the land, offered an even portion to Israel's refused, fused to the fixation that the entire area was theirs alone. That fixation has never deviated; their continued refusal to recognize a Jewish state in the midst of Arab and Muslim tribal majorities still speaks to their goal.

The State of Israel has a majority Jewish population, diluted with the presence of Arabs, Christians, Druze, Kurds and others all of whom share citizenship and equal rights. The Palestinian Authority has made it quite clear that not only would they never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, nor would they ever permit the presence of a single Jew living among them within a proposed sovereign Palestinian state. Yet there are elected Arab members of the Israeli Knesset who in concert act in opposition to Jewish interests in a Jewish land that offers equality rights to all.

Israel remains a nation spurned by those whose values, culture and politics it shares in Europe who, despite Palestinian terrorism inflicted on Jews throughout the past 70 years view Israel as an 'occupier' for its forced position of military defence against a neighbouring population invested in its destruction. The move by the government of Israel to finally install formally into state law the prevailing reality that Israel is a Jewish state -- was meant to be one and has always been one that accepted within its borders a pluralist presence -- alters nothing.

The reality is that Jewishness reflects the purpose of the state. Its language is Hebrew, though it gives special considerate status to Arabic spoken by close to 20% of its population. Terrorist attacks by Palestinians against Israeli Jews accompanied the original declaration of Israel's re-founding in 1948, and the focus on 'resistance' of the 'occupation' has never deviated; threats and attacks continue, from rockets fired across from Gaza, to infiltration by Arabs into Jewish settlements to murder Jews -- to the PA authorities inciting the populace to violence and rewarding them for their efforts.

Jews have been existentially challenged for thousands of years, and those challenges continue without abatement. What better way to respond than to declare themselves in final possession of their ancestral geography from which they will never more be evacuated under violent force? Despised simply because of their ethnic origins and religious devotion, customs and traditions, the world has always been an unfriendly place for Jews. Now, back in their homeland, the world, both close by and at a distance, continues to view Jews and Israel with cynical skepticism.

At home, within themselves, psychologically secure, Israelis long accustomed to their role as strangers in the outside world, are not strangers in their inner world. Israel's ethnonationalistic existence is sound and reflective of its existential need. A quote from the nation's foundational text reflecting the United Nations' General Assembly recognition of Israel "is irrevocable. This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State".

So it is. So be it.

The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence. (photo credit: Ilan Ben Zion/Times of Israel staff)

 

Israel's Righteously Unblemished Critics

"[The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] rejects and disapproves] of the new State of Israel proclaiming Israel a "Jewish" state by legislation which contradicts international law]."
"[The international community should] confront such a law and or other Israeli attempts, aimed at perpetuating racial discrimination against the Palestinian people."
Saudi Foreign Ministry 

"[The new law is] racist [it] enshrines the racism of this entity [Israel] through an apartheid system that goes beyond the former apartheid system in South Africa."
"This Israeli law would not have been issued without the unlimited support provided by successive U.S. administrations to this rogue entity. [The Trump administration’s recent relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem] came as a green light [for Israel] to pursue its aggressive policy and racism."
Syrian Foreign Ministry

"[Adoption of the law] reflected the regime of racism and discrimination against the Palestinian people."
"[Israel clearly means to obliterate the Palestinians'] national identity and depriv[ing] them of their legitimate civil and human rights on their occupied homeland."
GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] secretary general Abdullatif al-Zayani

Israeli flag.. (photo credit: REUTERS)

Amazingly, unpredictably, there are others in the Arab world of diplomatic niceties who politely and vehemently feel threatened that a clearly Jewish state which freely celebrates its home-coming in the re-establishment of its heritage lands as a place of comfort, security and haven for persecuted Jews worldwide, finally asserting its preeminent position as the only country in the world where being Jewish is not a reason to fear being yet again persecuted, oppressed, threatened and violated adamantly presents itself in legal terms, as Jewish.

The chorus of Arab condemnation of the new Israeli legislation that now enshrines the country as "the national home of the Jewish people", has sung its outrage in a choir including the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, comprised of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Israel, must be feeling utterly devastated, disappointed, outcast and alone; its neighbours, in a totally new move will surely now exclude the Jewish state from the friendly and civil relations that prevail among all countries in the Middle East.

How can Israel possibly live with this rejection and the loss of comradely relations between it and its Middle East neighbours? Possibly if it explains that the thousands of years of Jewish yearning to return to its ancient homeland, to escape the recurring deadly hostility that Jews have been subjected to; culminating from endless pogroms, humiliations, expulsions, scorn, and victimization, Jews have felt worn out from being forced to find a place for themselves where no country would accept them.

Turning as a bright alternative to the ageless pledge to one day return to Zion, they did, after the world extracted an exorbitantly horrendous price, tasking the Angel of Death to hover over the Jews
of Europe while they were tormented and vilified, ghettoized and anguished in preparation for mass annihilation as the ultimate assault and insult to the existence of that people collectively refusing to vanish from the face of the Earth.

Proclamation of Nationhood is read by Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.   Frank Scherschel—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

In the State of Israel, which considers itself the final refuge for Jewish life, non-Jews were welcome to remain, and they did. Arabs constitute 17.5% of the eight million population, with the Jewish presence estimated at over six million, hosting as well Druze, Kurds, Armenians, Africans and Bedouin among others such as European Christians. Hebrew will now legally represent the only official language of the Jewish state; Arabic downgraded to special status.

Saudi Arabia guards its citizenship, awarding it to Saudis exclusively; it recognizes no religion other than Islam, and its concern for the welfare of Palestinians has not excited it toward offering either haven nor citizenship to them. It considers the Shiite sect of Islam false and results in accusations of a heretical nature, leading to violent enmity. The conflicts that result from sectarian hatred and violence creates gross destabilization, military assaults, mass murder of civilians, starvation, deprivation, refugees.

Syria's Shiite regime has waged an unrelenting war against its sectarian majority population, viewing them as 'terrorists' for the unsupportable crime of protesting against the unjust treatment meted out to them by their dictator-president Bashar al-Assad. Millions of Sunni Syrians have become both internally displaced and external refugees, crowding for safety from the regime into Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt, flooding Europe for asylum.

Iran has mustered the strength in numbers of the minority Shiites, supporting their armed militias, creating non-state militias as terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, with an agenda focused solely on the destruction of the State of Israel, with a side-issue of promoting Shiism over Sunni Islam, with all the attendant fury of accusations, venom and threats that accompany a power struggle of one over the other, each reaching to attain the coveted status of ultimate power.

Israel, seeking to live in peace and security in its ancient homeland, cradled in a geography that once held disparate indigenous populations, all of which jockeyed endlessly for territory, has brought modernity and democracy to the Middle East in a geography to which both were foreign in a world stilled in the amber of quaint medievalism and backwardness. Viewing Israel as an usurping intruder, the Arab world shudders at the progress and civility Israel represents, challenging the brutality and ignorance that suffuses their culture.

After an Arab air raid, bodies of dead Jews lie in the rubble along the Tel Aviv waterfront.
Frank Scherschel—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

The Credibility Gap

"This [Israel] is a colonial enterprises that has nothing to do with Jewishness."
"The Jews were used as a tool under the concept of the promised land -- call it whatever you want. Everything has been made up."
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas

"Where is the Palestinian Answer Sadat?
"If President Abbas demonstrates he can be that type of leader, we would welcome it. His recent actions demonstrate the total opposite."
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley

"Contrary to popular myths, [Patrice Lumumba University] released from its walls not too many successful politicians -- about a dozen future ministers and only two future leaders of their countries." "[In addition to a president of Guyana, Abbas], who graduated from the law faculty."
2010 article from Ria Novosti, Russian state-owned news agency

"I don’t think it [intelligence revelations that Mahmoud Abbas was once a KGB agent] will affect his standing, such as it is, among the Palestinian public."
"Russia is not that controversial for Palestinians to begin with. He’s at the end of his career anyway. People are already talking about successors and what comes next. And if suddenly tomorrow there was a breakthrough in the peace process, I doubt this would have any bearing whatsoever."
"He would still be the head of the PLO and president of the Palestinian Authority."
Khaled Elgindy, fellow, Brookings Institution's Center for Middle East Policy

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the United Nations on Sept. 30, 2015. (Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images)

It has long been known that the PA's President Abbas had, in the early 1980s, written a doctoral thesis while attending Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, titled "The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and the Zionist Movement", implicating Zionism with a collaboration with Nazi Germany, acquiescing in the Holocaust to help in promoting international sympathy for the Jewish extermination plight, to foster support for the goal of recognizing a Jewish state to be established in the Middle East.

This typical suspension of belief in the authenticity of the Nazi Final Solution seeking to obliterate a Jewish presence from Europe -- and presumably, with a German victory in World War II, further abroad -- represents the kind of currency prevalent in Arab and Muslim society. Jewish groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center characterized Abbas's thesis for the historical garbage that it represented. Later, when Abbas wanted to portray himself as a 'moderate', to ingratiate himself with the world community, he repudiated some of his own fanciful hypotheses.

He has since, however, re-adjusted and re-invented his re-write of history and in a hysterical tirade against the United States and Israel, reiterated his contention that the Jews have no historical connection to the holy land, that a Judaic heritage never existed, that Jerusalem was never in Jewish hands, that King Solomon never built the original Temple of Solomon in the Old City, that all of Judaism's most sacred symbols are really Palestinian in origin. In so doing, succeeding in persuading UNESCO to agree.

As for the reports of his activities as a spy for the Soviet secret police; he had the code name of "Krotov" (Mole), working out of a Russian security agency in Damascus in the 1980s, under Mikhail Bogdanov, based at that time in Damascus, and now Russia's special envoy to the Middle East, according to two researchers from the Truman Research Institute at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, authenticated by documents smuggled out of the country by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin.


This is the man who blandly asserts his dedication to peace when speaking to the West, and who agitates  unceasingly for "resistance" to the "occupation" by any and all means necessary to avoid "normalization" with Israel, when addressing Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority's complicity in inciting Palestinians to deadly violence against their neighbours has resulted in ongoing lethal attacks killing both Israeli Jews and their attackers; the attackers achieving martyrdom.

Martyrdom equates with heroism and commemorations heralding the courage of those who never hesitate to sacrifice their lives, impelling others to follow suit. The Palestinian Authority follows up with monthly payments to the families of the martyrs; those who survive and are imprisoned also receive generous stipends in recognition of their courage on behalf of the Palestinian cause. A cause geared to destroy Israel's presence entirely so that a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean can replace it.

Fully forty percent of the PA budget is set aside for the support of lifetime stipends to the families of terrorists, living or dead. Playgrounds, schools, public buildings and boulevards are named in honour of the martyrs. While the media controlled by Fatah for the PA, does its bit to encourage violence against Israels, even as successful attacks are praised in news reports from PA television and print media. On social media sites incitements to act out the scenarios recommended by Mahmoud Abbas; spilling precious Arab blood on the Temple Mount is required to ensure that Jewish feet will not desecrate Muslim sites.

The PA's President's discredited conspiracy theories have been finally revealed in public, reflected in the Trump administration's demands that Abbas negotiate in good faith or risk losing all American funding for Palestinian programs. The terms of engagement between the U.S. and the nascent Palestinian state have been transformed. Highlightng the reality of the PA funding terror, unapologetically stating it is the honourable thing to do, and nothing will dissuade them from it.

Mahmoud Abbas, for a leader dedicated to advancing the cause of the Palestinian people has somehow managed to enrich himself with a fortune that he admits to being $100-million, but is reputed to be more than $1.5-billion through years of siphoning off funding from the international community meant to provide for the Palestinian population in their presentation as refugees. Generations of refugee status which somehow the PA has never managed to transform into a thriving community of self-reliant and prosperous people ready for a state of their own.

The "Impudent" U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and the Statesmanlike Senior Palestinian Representative

"President Abbas declared the landmark Oslo Peace Accords dead. He rejected any American role in peace talks. He insulted the American President. He called for suspending recognition of Israel. He invoked an ugly and fictional past, reaching back to the 17th century to paint Israel as a colonialist project engineered by European powers."
"A speech that indulges in outrageous and discredited conspiracy theories is not the speech of a person with the courage and the will to seek peace."
"I ask here today, where is the Palestinian King Hussein? Where is the Palestinian Anwar Sadat. If President Abbas demonstrates he can be that type of leader, we would welcome it. His recent actions demonstrate the total opposite."
Nikki Haley, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations

US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley speaks during a UN Security Council meeting on the Middle East on December 18, 2017, at UN Headquarters in New York. (AFP Photo/Kena Betancur)

"Nikki Haley needs to shut up and realize that the Palestinian leadership is not the problem. Instead, the problem is the Israeli occupation and the policies it continues to pursue. I’m not saying that we don’t make mistakes; every society and every government makes mistakes."
"[The goal of Israel and the United States is to] undermine the Palestinian national project. American and Israeli officials are saying that any Palestinian leader who insists on East Jerusalem becoming the capital of Palestine and is committed to the right of return, in accordance with United Nations resolution 194, should be removed from power and replaced."
"She called for overthrowing the democratically elected Palestinian president. This is the president who led the peace process and promoted the principle of the two-state solution. Now this [US] ambassador is accusing him of lacking courage, and is calling for replacing him. The Palestinian people are loyal to their martyrs, prisoners, wounded, struggles, steadfastness, and heroism. This is the reality. The Palestinians are the only ones who are entitled to hold their leaders accountable."
"The Palestinian leadership has told the Americans and Israelis that, even after 1,000 years, they will not find any Palestinian who will collaborate with their scheme. We will take Trump’s decision [to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel] to the International Court of Justice and we will seek membership in more international agencies."
"We don’t seek a confrontation or a fight with the US administration. On the contrary — they are the ones taking several steps. The US administration is itself saying that it’s not an honest broker in the peace process. Therefore, we are seeking, together with international parties, to convene an international conference for peace."
PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat

PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat in his Ramallah office, November 23, 2015. (AFP/Abbas Momani)

Palestinians have been incited by their Palestinian Authority leaders over the decades to resist any calls for 'normalization' with Israel which might lead to diminished tensions. When matters become too calm, intifadas are urged, to remind Israel and the Jews living there that their time is numbered according to the Palestinian calendar. It is a schedule spoken in Arabic. In English another schedule entirely appears; one of a wish for the two solitudes to be reconciled to the reality of two separate and sovereign nations.

In the Palestinian playbook, however, there is but one geography, from the river to the sea, the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, and maps produced for PA television and school curricula show that the geography is absent the State of Israel; only the entire area marked "Palestine" is honoured as the reality yet to be re-established. Short-circuiting 'peacekeeping' talks by appealing directly to the United Nations and its various arms, firmly held in the control of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and its Unaligned coterie, ensure a sympathetic hearing to the Palestinians' plaints.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has reviled the United States, spoken with utter contempt of the financial lifeline of billions it has received in the past 70 years to keep Palestinian 'refugees' afloat and their leaders in secret affluence, maligned the President of the United States, slandered Jews and Israel, but this is his right as a duly, democratically elected leader, even if subsequent elections after the expiration of his mandate have been long overdue, somewhat reducing the legitimacy of his authority.

It is typical of the Palestinians that they have the right through divine entitlement to bellicosely threaten repercussions, to express vengeful hatred of others, yet recoil in injured innocence when their utterings are reciprocated. Erekat knows very well that the agenda being pursued by the Palestinian Authority, after persuading the European community that they seek peace, and abhor violence when the Arab conspiracy of linked national military forces were unable to destroy Israel, has become more subtly in line with the goal of destroying Israel through sheer force of numbers.

Numbers of refugees, to succeed where the numbers of armies deployed failed to. The original 700,000 Palestinians who fled as 'refugees' from a 1948 theatre of war that guaranteed them a swift return on the ashes of nascent Israel have since bloomed into an estimated five million successors whose 'right of return' would overwhelm Jewish majority status in Israel, rendering the Jewish State non-functional to its original purpose; as a homeland-haven for world Jewry on the geography of its original, ancient heritage.

A heritage that includes the exalted, sacred presence of the ruins of the Temples of Solomon, the original, destroyed by Assyrians, and its ancient replacement destroyed by Imperial Rome, each leading to expulsions and a diaspora. The most sacred sites in Judaism, not merely symbolic, but the heart and soul of the nation. Not only have the Palestinians co-opted the term "Palestinian" whose authentic meaning was descriptive of the original Jews living in the territory, but also Judaism's saints and iconic historical sites commemorating Judaic events and notables.

The immense Temple of Solomon seated atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is symbolic of the never-ending story of Jewish persecution. Over the ruins of the second Temple were built Islamic structures, the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque, the elevation named by Arabs the Noble Sanctuary from whence the Prophet Mohammad was said to have ascended on a horse, up to heaven. When east Jerusalem was illegally occupied by Jordan, its Jewish residents were killed or exiled. No Jews were permitted entry.

Now, the PA insists there is no Judaic history nor heritage presence there, despite the ancient presence of the Western Wall which is all that is left of the Temple, and where Jews come to pray. Palestinians will not permit Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, and their occasional presence there becomes the occasion for threats, shouted insults, rock-throwing and other incidents of vandalism and violence against their presence. The PA's Mahmoud Abbas speaks of Jewish feet 'defiling' the Noble Sanctuary, inciting Palestinians to attack and to kill Jews.

It is these vicious attacks against Jewish men, women and children causing death by Palestinians urged to mount such deadly attacks that the Palestinian Authority honours by speaking of "martyrs" deserving of hero status, of having streets, buildings and squares named in their honour, teaching impressionable children that they too, can grow to become martyrs, and insisting that it is their right and sacred obligation to guarantee generous pay-outs to the families of "martyrs", the "wounded" and the "imprisoned" out of funds derived from international sources for the upkeep of the Palestinians.

Insisting that East Jerusalem, the seat of Israel's original capital in antiquity three thousand years ago, for which more than ample archaeological and scriptural evidence exists, is really the birthright of Arab Palestinians, the PA succeeded in persuading UNESCO to recognize all Judaic historical sites and icons as those of historical Palestinians, when the original Palestinians were Jews, in the process transferring them by UNESCO decree to the proud heritage of Arabs.

That recognition has aided the Palestinian Authority's entitlement claims to Jerusalem as a Palestinian state capital, leaving the Jewish presence and historical claims of legitimacy in a state of reality being trumped by political chicanery. The entitlements expressed by Palestinian Arabs know no bounds, including the claims by Mahmoud Abbas of a Jewish conspiracy to make the world believe that Jews ever lived in the Middle East, much less that their Prophets, including Christ, was a Jew.

They suffer, en masse, from a monumental psychological disorder that in Yiddish is called 'chutzpah' portraying themselves as victims of Jewish aggression, helpless and miserable under the heel of a Jewish conspiracy to commit genocide against an entire people, by another people who claimed they were victims of mass extermination by a fascist regime held in high regard by Palestinians in the 1940s, to the present day.