Sunday, August 30, 2009
Stop teaching lies to our kids! Reuters: Hamas accuses UN of plan to teach Gaza kids Holocaust 'lies'
Hamas condemned the United Nations Sunday, saying it planned to teach Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip about the Holocaust -- but the U.N. agency which runs schools in the enclave would not confirm any change.
Branding the Nazi genocide of the Jews "a lie invented by the Zionists," the Islamist movement which runs the Gaza Strip wrote in an open letter to a senior U.N. official that he should withdraw plans for a new history book in U.N. schools.
A spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which educates some 200,000 refugee children in Gaza, said the Holocaust was not on its current curriculum. He would not comment on Hamas's statement that it was about to change.
Palestinians resent the way world powers reacted to the Holocaust by supporting the establishment of Israel in 1948, a move that left half the Arab population of then British-ruled Palestine as refugees in Gaza, the West Bank and abroad...
From one form of denial and revision to another. The 1948 Partition Plan did NOT render half the Arab population homeless, it gave them yet another state. Arab rejectionism was and is the cause of the "refugee crisis," not the creation of Israel, and the issue of historical denial brought up in this article shows that they are going to continue to suffer self-inflicted wounds for some time. (And that includes the Palestinian Authority who's views on this are indistinguishable from Hamas'.)
Hamas said it believed UNRWA was about to start using a text for 13-year-olds that included a chapter on the Holocaust.
In an open letter to local UNRWA chief John Ging, the movement's Popular Committees for Refugees said: "We refuse to let our children study a lie invented by the Zionists."
UNRWA spokesman Adnan Abu Hasna said: "There is no mention of the Holocaust in the current syllabus." Asked if UNRWA planned to change that, he declined to comment...
...Hamas's official spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, said he did not want to discuss the history of the Holocaust but said:
"Regardless of the controversy, we oppose forcing the issue of the so-called Holocaust onto the syllabus, because it aims to reinforce acceptance of the occupation of Palestinian land."
If you can't accept the simple truths of history -- regardless of what lessons you may want to draw from them -- then you're not much of a partner for anything. How do you negotiate with people so steeped in their own hatred they bend reality to their own purposes? Wouldn't it be a positive thing if UNRWA were to actually teach a chapter on the Holocaust? Of course, they deny it.
When you write:
I assume you're also referring to Nakba denial, now enshrouded in Israeli law:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1101208.html
Of course not, one would have to be stupid to make such a comparison. Hamas denies that the events of the Holocaust even occurred, while the Israelis are debating observance of a political contrivance called "Nakba". To equate the two on any level is perverse.
Daoud, I acknowledge "the nakba" of Israelis (aka the sons of pig and monkeys) not being pushed into the sea by 1,400 million followers of "the religion of peace".
HAPPY NAKBA Daoud and may you and your friends personally know many many more nakbas!
"How do you negotiate with people so steeped in their own hatred they bend reality to their own purposes?"
Please, let's leave David out of this...
The Jewish "Nakba"
http://contentious-centrist.blogspot.com/2009/05/history-lesson-jewish-nakba-israeli.html
Daoud, you must be referring to the sequel, Naqba II, not Naqba I, the creation of the British Mandate for Palestine for the purpose of enabling the Jews to establish a country in their historic, national homeland. Naqba I was splitting Palestine (both sides of the Jordan, the East Bank know being known as Jordan), off from Syria. (The Turkish Ottoman Empire governed Palestine from Damascus). This great tragedy was replaced by Naqba II in 1948-9.
If you want to be honest -- fat chance of that! -- you'll remember that Arab leaders, including Palestinian Arab leaders, insisted that Palestinian Arabs were actually Syrians or just Arabs more broadly, that there was no such thing as a "Palestinian," that term being an invention of the Zionists and referring exclusively to them. Today's "Palestinian people," so-called, only emerged after repeated pan-Arab failures to push the Jews into the sea. Suppose for a moment that the Palestinian Jews living in the land of Israel not decided to call themselves Israelis after their hard-won independence, fighting a genocidal war launched against them by the massed Arab armies, but continued to call themselves Palestinians, it would be hard today for the Palestinian Arabs to call themselves Palestinians.
Check out what the Arab leaders told the Peel Commission in 1936 (1937?) or the UN, from 1948 to 1967.
Sol's rebuttal of your "Naqba denial" nonsense is all well and good, but I'll go farther and deny Naqba II in that most Arabs who left did so at the urging of Arab leaders for them to get out of the way for a few days while they massacred the Jews, that today's so-called refugees are not refugees by any reasonable definition of the term, that and even larger number of Jews were driven out of Arab and Muslim countries. Finally, of the millions of people displaced by war in the 1940s in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East, only one group has not been nationalized in their new location, that the so-called Palestinian refugees have been used as political pawns and been maintained in their special status as refugees, using a bogus definition that applies uniquely to them precisely to further Arab rejectionism, which is the real cause of all the conflict.
But if you refuse to accept the reality of the undeniable, incontrovertible facts of the Holocaust, what would be the surprise if your twisted alternate reality is dishonest about the history of Israel and today's version of the Palestinian narrative.
As Nappy clearly pointed out, there ALREADY is a two -state solution.
Namely Israel and Jordan.
hahah i love the fact that no ones wants to hear about the holocaust anymore but i do understand y though i wouldnt want to hear a bout it again
"hahah i love the fact that no ones wants to hear about the holocaust anymore"
This is the sentiment of a Palestinian advocate. He would like us to believe he cares about human rights and suffering.
Pity the Palestinians, that such are the people who speak for them.