Biggest anti-Semitic slur of the year: “Palestine is the Holy Land”

Wiesenthal Center names top 10 anti-Semitic slurs
December 13, 2011
NEW YORK (JTA) – A comment by Mahmoud Abbas referring to Palestine as the “holy land” placed first in the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Top 10 Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic Slurs of 2011.

“I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him and the birthplace of Jesus Christ peace be upon him, to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people,” he said.

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That’s it? That’s the biggest, baddest anti-Semitic slur of the year?! Must have been a pretty quiet year for the ADL.

But wait a minute…just what the bleep is anti-Semitic about calling Palestine “the Holy Land” ?

Here is the Wiesenthal Center’s complete explanation:

Speaking to the world, Abbas omitted any reference to the Jewish people’s connection to the Holy Land. No reference to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, nor King David, King Solomon, or Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel.

What “Jewish people’s connection to the Holy Land?”  For that matter, what “Jewish people”? Israeli historian Schlomo Sand has demonstrated conclusively that “the Jewish people” is a mythical concept invented during the 19th century by Europeans. Before that, there was a (numerically relatively insignificant) Jewish religion, just like there were Christian and Islamic and Buddhist and Yoruba and other religions. (The numbers of Jews and Yoruba were more or less in the same ballpark – a handful of millions – whereas the numbers of Muslims and Christians numbered then in the hundreds of millions and today in the billions.)

Today, a Zionist sacred myth claims that there is a “Jewish people” with a special connection to the Holy Land, and the right to establish an ethnically-cleansed state there.

But only Zionists believe this myth. Others have other myths. (Note: Myths are sacred stories. To call a story “mythical” is to say that it is sacred, not that it is untrue.)

For Christians, the Holy Land is notable as the home of Jesus. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and others are important not in their own right, but as forerunners to Jesus. Therefore the true heirs of Middle Eastern monotheism and its holy places, especially Palestine, are the Christians.

For Muslims, all of the prophets – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the others, culminating in Jesus and Muhammad, peace upon all of them – are equally worthy: “We make no distinction between them” (Qur’an 2:285). Therefore, since Christians err in rejecting Muhammad, and Jews err in rejecting Jesus and Muhammad, the true heirs of Middle Eastern monotheism and its holy places are the Muslims. 

There are about four billion Middle Eastern Monotheists, i.e. spiritual descendants of Abraham, in the world. A little over two billion of them call themselves Christian. A little under two billion call themselves Muslim. Each of these groups sees itself as the rightful heir to Palestine and the rest of the Middle Eastern monotheistic tradition and its holy places.

Fewer than twenty million – that is, less than 1.5% of the total – call themselves Jewish. In other words, Judaism is a tiny, numerically insignificant minority sect within the monotheistic tradition. These are people who understand monotheism in a very peculiar way, a way that hardly anyone agrees with.

If we are to give each believer equal weight, the Holy Land ought to be split between Christians and Muslims, with Jews getting about 1.5% of it.

That, of course, is if we treat Christian, Muslim and Jewish beliefs equally.

But we can’t do that. If we do, we’ll be accused of anti-Semitism.

Because an anti-Semite is anybody who doesn’t believe in the peculiar mythology of that tiny minority of monotheists who call themselves Zionist Jews.

The Zionist Jews are the only monotheists who have the gall, the audacity, the pushiness, the lunatic chutzpah to declare that anyone who doesn’t buy into their mythology is a bigot. According to the Wiesenthal Center and other Jewish Supremicist organizations, anyone who holds to a different mythology, or who insists on treating the various mythologies and their adherents equally, must be a Jew-hating nazi.

Talk about self-absorption!

These people need to pull their heads out of their tushes and notice that the world is a whole lot bigger than their own innards.