David G. Littman in FrontPage writes on Arafat's canny appropriation of Christ and Christianity to serve his agenda — in line with the larger appropriation of the dhimmis' religious and cultural heritage by their masters: traditional Islamic theology presents Judaism and Christianity as we know them today as manmade corruptions of the original Islam that was preached by Moses and Jesus.
In the past 2,000 years there have been numerous descriptions of Jesus of Nazareth, but the image of an Arab Jesus – “the first Palestinian fedayin who carried his sword” – as depicted by Yasir Arafat at a sideshow of the United Nations in 1983 was probably the most grotesque. Present at his first press conference at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on September 2, 1983, I heard the words from the UN simultaneous English interpretation of his spoken Arabic:“We were under Roman imperialism. We sent a Palestinian fisherman, called St. Peter, to Rome. He not only occupied Rome, but also won the hearts of the people. We know how to resist imperialism and occupation. Jesus Christ was the first Palestinian fedayin who carried his sword along the path on which the Palestinians today carry their Cross.”1
There was a full house, but no one expressed either shock or disbelief, nor was there any later protestation from representatives of the Holy See or the World Council of Churches, even after my letter quoting his words was published in three Swiss newspapers.2 Yet few could ignore the historic fact that it was in 135 – 100 years after the death of Jesus – that the Roman Emperor Hadrian re-conquered Judea, changing its official name from Judea to Palestina. ( “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod…” Matthew 2:1)
It was not the first nor the last time that Arafat, and others, would steal the symbol of Jesus, transforming the Jews of Judea into ‘Arab Palestinians,’ inhabitants of ancient ‘Palestine.’ According to Greek Catholic Archbishop François Abu Mokh, when Arafat was received by Pope Jean Paul II two weeks later, on September 15, 1983, he told the pope that he felt at home in the Vatican, seat of the successors to St. Peter, “the first Palestinian exile.”3 And Arafat repeated his ‘Jesus / ‘Super-fedayin’ story to columnist Flora Lewis six months later in Paris.4
This theme of Jesus and ‘Palestine’ became a constant in the framework of Palestinolatry. Bat Ye’or has explained this well, showing how – after the Second Vatican Council and the Nostra Aetate Declaration (1965) – the recycling of Christian religious symbols in the Arab-Muslim war on Israel was carried out at the instigation of Arab clergymen. The Christological themes of Palestinianism developed, based on the traditional Judeophobic schemas of the crucifixion, and were introduced via the Arab Churches and the Euro-Arab current. The Arab Palestinian Churches transfigured the Arab Palestinian terrorist into a Christ-like image. In the long tradition of Syrian-Palestinian Christianity, the assassinations of Jews was thus hallowed.”5
This was expressed as early as 1970 by Bishop Georges Khodr, the Metropolitan of Byblos and Mount Lebanon, when he stated in a Paris lecture:
You know what place Christian symbols occupy in contemporary Arab poetry, particularly that of the Palestinian resistance. It is not for me to tell the Muslims what force the evangelical ferment would contribute to the Arab cause (…) On June 5, 1967 I chose Arabness because on that day I saw that Jesus of Nazareth had become a Palestinian refugee” 6
In 1974 – after a formal complaint – Geneva’s authorities banned the entry and display of Arafat-Fatah posters representing Jesus nailed to a Star of David, with the caption “Palestine.”
Read it all.
This is par for the course. Having no culture, history or achievements of their own, the Arabs twisted Judeo-Christian theology and invented islam, making arabs the "chosen people."
It is no surprise that Yasser Arafat continued the dubious tradition of stealing other peoples' faiths/traditions/icons and recycling them to suit his purposes. What is remarkable is that there was actual condemnation from a Western organization.
Rewriting history again, all those called palestinians were JEWS. Remember the JEWS? The people that the muslims have an unreasonable hatred for. Islam needs to stick to it's own heroes, muhammed and allah, leave Abraham through Jesus and all biblical figures to the Christians and Jews.
A copy of this should be placed in the hands of each and every Christian at church or Sunday school. This might by a catalyst to open the eyes of those "tolerant Christians" that believe that Christianity and Islam can co-exist as they are Abrahamic religions. Then let the explanations about Islam and Islamism begin as they have never before!
The rewriting of history -- the "Palestinian" Jesus, practically strapping on his suicide-belt to be a shahid for The Cause -- is nothing new in Islam. For the belief-system is clearly a mishmash of bits and pieces of both Old and New Testament, imperfectly or confusedly put together, along with a substratum of pre-Islamic Arab lore from the time of the Jahiliyyah (Ignorance). Far better, when small groups of primitive people conquer far larger, wealthier, more settled, and much more advanced populations of Christians and Jews, to present them not with a brand-new faith, but with the "Truth" that is somewhat recognizable to them, containing many elements that will be familiar, and claiming to have the original, uncreated, and tiptop best and only true version of that which they have a distorted, imperfect, and alas -- false -- version.
When IBM tries to win customers from Apple, it does not praise Apple, but denounces it. Thus in Islam, it was necessary to both appropriate all of the prophets, and sites, and even some of the doctrines, of the two prior-in-time (as property-law instructors like to say) monotheisms, and also to say terrible things about Christians and Jews. Unfortunately, the literalism of Islam, the close connection of Islam with a geopolitical program, the inability to shed the aggressive doctrine of Jihad or the equally aggressive institution of dhimmitude, puts Islam on a collision course not with America, nor with the West, but with the entire non-Muslim world. And there seems to be no possiblity, given what is in the immutable texts of Qur'an and hadith and sira, to get around it, no matter how often CAIR promotes "Sharing Ramadan" campaigns. All the chicken-and-pita spreads from here to Jeddah won't hide, for ever, the reality of the belief-system that is Islam.
Islam has practiced cultural appropriation from its very inception to make it more palitable to potential converts. Daniel Pipes wrote a good article on the competing historic claims to Jerusalem about two years ago that is a real eye-opener that quite clearly paints the Muslims as the territorially-aggressive, manipulative Johnny-come-latelys that they are.
even monty python in "life of brian" was unable to conjure up such bizarreness
Next up: Buddha the Mujahid!
Yasir Arafat thought Jesus a revolutionary terrorist, too? Big, fat hairy deal. It's only part of the casual blasphemy that's been eating the guts out of Western civilization since Thomas Jefferson played cut-and-paste with the Gospels.
Arafat's "Jesus" is appropriated from the Leftist theologians of the 1960's, who tried to turn Jesus into a Jewish Zealot guerrilla against the Romans. They got the Jewish part right ("D'o", as Homer Simpson would say--read page 1 of the New Testament), and everything else wrong. It's merely one more attempt to make a "Jesus" with whom the Zeitgeist can feel at home--rather than allowing ourselves to be made over in His image.
I shudder for Arafat's soul.
Kepha1:
Arafart, murdering theif that he was, has/had no soul. May he experience eternity, if there is one, appropriately. According to Bernard Lewis, Islamic theology holds that those who kill unarmed non-combatants are not martyrs, and they are condemned to spend eternity dying again and again in the manner in which they put others to death.