Arab columnists still try to discredit their political enemies by associating them with Jews

A UAE-based columnist from Egypt-based Al Shorouk News, Yousef Al Hassan,  is upset at Turkish president Tayip Erdogan's bombing of parts of Syria and Iraq.

He is so upset that he won't mention Erdogan's name, instead referring to him as the "new Ottoman sultan" and complaining about how he is interfering in Arab affairs.

To buttress his anti-Turkish comments, the bulk of the article starts this way:

Under the policies of the ancestors of the new Ottoman Sultan, the first seeds of Israeli settlement were planted, and the nucleus of the Zionist movement and its legendary dream were formed by facilitating the emigration of Jewish communities residing in Turkey and Europe to Palestine. Sultan Abdul Majid gave these groups the first Palestinian lands in the middle of the nineteenth century, in Jerusalem. During the reign of Sultan Abdul Aziz, the Jews were given land to establish the first "agricultural" settlement, near Jaffa.

It is a false narrative which some say about Sultan Abdul Hamid that he said  "Palestine is not for sale!"  and that he tried to prevent Jewish migrations to Palestine! However, his practical policies, documented in his dealings with Herzl and European banks owned by wealthy Jewish families such as the Rothschild family, did not prevent these current settlement migrations, but increased under his reign. The first waves of Jewish immigrants formed the basic demographic and geographic base of the Israeli entity, A few decades, the same Sultan who gave a privilege and Ottoman "Permana" allowance to the Jewish communities to establish and settle in Palestine and issued legislation that responds to its wishes and plans that were not hidden from the subjects of the Ottoman state Arabs and Muslims, especially the Palestinians.

The meetings of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the frequent meetings of the Turkish deal with the leaders of the Zionist movement in Europe, so that the Sultan undertakes to facilitate Jewish migrations to Palestine in return for Herzl and the Rothschild Bank in London to provide funds to the Sultanate and the Sultan to save the Turkish state budget and recruiting Jews to work to make large investments in Turkey.

In the era of the late ancestors of the new Ottoman Sultan, the Jewish communities were told: "Enter this country, as businessmen and money, be friends, and then you can do what you want." In the sense that they can get what they want in Palestine, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, during his reign until 1909, the number of Jews multiplied several times, and the Sultan did not respond to calls from Arabs and Palestinians to close the gates of Jewish immigration to Palestine.

The ancestors of the new Ottoman Sultan were not entrusted with Palestine, but were also in agreement with the Zionist plans to colonize Palestine, obliterate Arab history, strip the Palestinians of their past and their rights, and invent the so-called ancient Israel.

It goes on from there. Most of his points are ahistorical. (Herzl met with the Sultan but, according to him, the meeting was unsuccessful.)

His main argument against Erdogan's actions today is that the Ottomans didn't prevent Jews from moving to their historic homeland, thereby associating him somehow with the early Zionists.

The only way the argument makes sense is if one assumes that the audience is thoroughly antisemitic.

To be fair, there is less of this sort of thing in Arab media in recent years, but there is still plenty of such overt Jew-hatred, associating one's enemies with Jews as a means to discredit them in the Arab mind.

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