All narratives are not equal

Palestinian Authority prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh met with members of Congress yesterday, and told them, "Israel is waging the war of the narrative, and are pushing the Jewish narrative to control Jerusalem and Palestine, denying the Islamic and Christian narrative, but we are proud of our narrative. The conflict is not a religious conflict, but a political conflict."

There are narratives - and there are lies. The last sentence proves that the Palestinian narrative is the lie, because the only reason he brought up the idea of it not being a religious conflict is because he wants to deny the Jewish religious and historical connection to Israel.

Palestinians make this into a religious conflict every day, by invoking the Al Aqsa Mosque as being under attack, for example. But they know that to a largely Christian audience, the Bible supports the Jewish view, so they want to downplay their own hijacking of Islam to inflate the importance of Al Aqsa and Jerusalem, which were roundly ignored by the Muslim world before Zionism.

There was an interesting article in Gulf newspaper Al Khaleej by Hafez Barghouti where he attacks the ideas that Palestine is not written in the Quran or Bible  and that Mohammed's night journey to the "farthest mosque" - "Al-Aqsa" - was not a miraculous flight on a winged steed to Jerusalem but an ordinary journey to a mosque in Arabia, to Taif or the Al-Ja'aranah Mosque near Mecca.

After a long paragraph trying to distract from the issue, Barghouti doesn't end up saying a word that supports Mohammed's supposed night journey to Jerusalem. As far as Palestine is concerned, he lamely says that the Bible mentions the "Land of the Philistines" hundreds of times, pretending that this means "Palestine."

The writer seems to realize that he really didn't debunk anything, and ends off saying, "What needs to be remedied is the hateful debate over the Internet between people here and there about trivial things or based on individual rumors or events..." Meaning, don't look too closely at the arguments of those who say that Palestine and Jerusalem are not mentioned in the Quran because it is a "trivial thing" and distracts from the real issue of trying to destroy the Jewish state, which is the single minded goal of Palestinianism.

To those on the Palestinian side, the narrative has nothing to do with truth. The narrative itself is meant to delegitimize the undeniable Jewish connection to the land. This is why their "narrative" includes the Khazar theory, the idea that the Jewish kingdoms only existed for a short time, that the Temples were not in Jerusalem if they ever existed at all, that archaelogy has not supported the existence of a Jewish people on the land, that history really begins in 1917 and Zionists are European colonialists.

No, it is not competing narratives. It is the truth versus antisemitic lies.

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