(CAMERA-UK) Adam Levick - An article in The Times on May 26 criticized comments by Richard Lyle, a member of the Scottish Parliament, who called the Palestinian "Nakba" a "self-inflicted tragedy, which must, after all these years, be finally resolved by peaceful means and discussions between the parties involved." After quoting pro-Palestinian activists who labeled Lyle's comments as "racist," The Times political editor Kieran Andrews claims: "Historians argue that [the 1948 war] was largely driven by Israeli aggression, including rape and torture, and to a much lesser degree by local Palestinian authorities urging people to flee." However, The Times editor doesn't provide the names of historians who made such a risible claim. Let's remember that the 1948 war was fought by Israel to fend off Arab campaigns to annihilate the Jewish state immediately after its birth - a mere three years after one out of every three Jews on the planet were murdered in the Holocaust. Their objective wasn't to adjust the borders, but another genocide. As the Arab League's secretary-general warned, the war against the Jews would be "a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades." To refer to Jews' efforts to defend themselves from annihilation as Jewish aggression represents a moral and historical inversion of the highest order. Historian Benny Morris has demonstrated that there was no Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinian Arabs, and that most Palestinians who fled did so to escape the fighting or because Arab leaders ordered them to do so. "Had the Israelis committed systematic ethnic cleansing," he argued, "there would not be 1.4 million Arabs in Israel today." The ugly caricature of Israeli Jews and egregious distortion of the Arab-Israeli War presented to The Times' readers represents another example of crude Palestinian propaganda being disguised as serious journalism.
2020-05-26 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive