BBC claims that Gaza is being "slowly eaten up by more and more Israeli settlements"

BBC claims that Gaza is being "slowly eaten up by more and more Israeli settlements"
.......................

What complete and absolute crap.

Israel completely withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and forced all her citizens to leave.

There *are no Israeli settlements whatsoever in Gaza*. The whole of Gaza is Judenrein.

Was this just rank ignorance on Shirley Williams' part? Was she confusing Gaza with the "West Bank"?

Even there this assertion would be crap, but at least there is an Israeli presence there—or is it just an utter, knowing lie on her part?

Impossible to know, since ignorance and bias are both rife in the MSM...

Most Israelis do NOT support settlement building. Nor do they support the Haredim--who are the ones building the settlements, but refuse to serve in the IDF, or even recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli State, not to mention attacking foreign investors and 'immodestly'-dressed people and gays:

http://www.haaretz.com/news/haredim-police-clash-at-fresh-jerusalem-rally-against-intel-plant-1.3726

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=3b4_1337706142

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4180414,00.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8sWsSJfDzY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay7XQTc89KE

These nutbars are as toxic and dangerous a fringe element as the region's Islamists. But they control Israeli politics, thanks to the country's proportional voting system. This makes it impossible for any stable government to form that doesn't have the support of fruitcakes like Shas. And this means continued Haredi exemptions from the IDF and taxes, as well as a green light for settlement construction.

Gaza is honeycombed with scrappy Haredi anti-Zionist draft-doger settlements, that the IDF is obligated to defend. And ultra-orthodox fundamentalist delusions ignore the reality that the majority of Gaza's population is Arab. In the West, there is no reason we should be supporting this. The settlements have to go. And Israelis desperately need to get the Haredi monkey off their backs. The only way to do this is to dump proportional representation.

Long, long time ago, before I came, when I was a boy my grandfather said Americans are very, very brave, but now I am perplexed by general American indifference about losing the freedom of speech, which not found anywhere else.

What has happened to America?

The BBC, like Islam, relies upon lies to sustain itself.

Orwellian.

Not that that would be a bad thing, if it were only true...

At least Israelis would make improvements.

These awful people, that is Mr. Bedford and Ms. Williams, are irate that Palestinians would lose an inch of ground back to Jews in a historically Jewish land, but ask them how they feel about ancient English towns being ethnically cleansed and Islamized, and they will call you a racist for even asking.

Call it newspeak and reverse intelligence.

Gaza was Greco-Roman Byzantine Christian, and Jewish, for *centuries* before it was Arabised and Islamised by violent conquest and the imposition of the seven hells of dhimmitude upon its non-Muslim inhabitants.

Here, from Ion L Idriess' The Desert Column, is a description of something awesomely beautiful that Aussie soldiers, digging a foxhole on top of a hill in the course of the 1917 campaign against the Turkish Muslims, stumbled upon.

Idriess writes on August 31st 1917, beyond Rafa, at Marakeb Beach.

“Padre Maitland-Woods [chaplain to the Australian troops, and a keen archaeologist - dda] has had the time of his life.

"Some fragments of mosaic were found on top of a hill.

'With careful digging, the floor of a Christian Chapel was uncovered, done in beautifully patterned mosaic of coloured marbles.

'A Greek inscription said it had been built in the 622nd year after the Roman foundation of the City of Gaza. The Roman Era began in 61 BC, which gives the date of the chapel as 561 AD [that is, during the time of Justinian - dda]

'The chapel stood on the road from Jerusalem to Egypt. In beautiful mosaic is written: “I am the True Vine. Ye are the branches”.

'The “True Vine” issues from a green amphora of brilliant colours centring a red marble cross, a bright green glory shining from it.

'A cage with a bird symbolizes the Holy Spirit.

'On either side is a hare escaping from a hound (the soul escaping from temptation).

'Around the centre are tigers, lions, flamingos and peacocks in vivid colours doing homage to the central chalice. It is now called “the Shellal Mosaic”.

(The Australian Dictionary of Biography gives the following information: “[Maitland-Woods, 1864-1927] learned of the discovery—made on 17 April 1917 by troops engaged at Shellal in the second battle of Gaza—of an exquisite church-floor mosaic.

'With the aid of expert advice and materials from Cairo, he supervised the removal and packing of the damaged mosaic which was later mounted in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

http://cas.awm.gov.au/item/ART40979

http://www.awm.gov.au/blog/2008/01/09/the-shellal-mosaic/

'Professor A. D. Trendall later dated the Shellal mosaic to A.D. 561-62 and assessed it as being worthy of 'a place of honour in the history of Byzantine art'.” It is still in the Australian War Memorial today – and, sadly, it is safer there than in its original location) - dda

Back to Idriess:.

‘Well, old diary, I hope I’ve got the description right. An enthusiastic En Zed gave it to me.

'But there’s a joke in it. They dug deeper and came on a tomb containing a skeleton. The enthusiastic padre immediately sent a message to the Base Records Office, Cairo: ‘Have found the bones of a saint.” A wire came back: “Can find no record of this man. Send full name, number, and regiment and identity disk of Trooper Saint”.'

As for the Jewish history of Gaza:

In Gaza in 508 AD there was a large Jewish community; 508 is the estimated date of a ruined synagogue found there by archaeologists.

Circa AD 600 there was a large Jewish community in Gaza, keeping vineyards and making wine.

During this period (pagan Roman and then [Christian] Byzantine) the population in the cities and farmlands was overwhelmingly NON-‘Arab’.

It consisted of Aramaic-speaking indigenous Jews and Samaritans, together with Aramaic-speaking Christians, some of Jewish ancestry, some (of Gentile origin) from lands to the north or north-west; and Greco-Roman Christians [not ethnically Jewish or Aramaic] who settled in the Holy Land during the Byzantine period.

The only ‘Arabs’ were Bedouins raiding and thieving along the borderlands to the east and south.

In AD 614 there may have been 150 000 Jews in at least 43 different settlements in the land of Israel, called 'Palestine' by the Christians who thus perpetuated the pagan Roman renaming of the land in AD 135.

After the Muslim invasion ca 634 - which was marked by sack, rape, pillage and mass murder from one end of the land to the other - there *still* remained Jews in the Land, and specifically, in and around Gaza.

They were there in 636; around AD 700 the Masoretic scribe Rabbi Moshea, lived in Gaza city.

In AD 1000 Rabbi Ephraim of Gaza City was also chief rabbi of Cairo. It’s estimated that in AD 1000 there may have been 300 000 Jews in ‘Palestine’ (as it was known to Western and Eastern Christendom; the Muslims did not normally use this term).

Ca 1300s – Jews from **Gaza**, Ramle and Safed were used as guides by pilgrims, according to Jacques of Verona.

In the 1480s there was a Jewish community in Gaza. In 1481 an Italian Jewish pilgrim, Meshulam of Volterra, visited the Holy Land and recorded that there were 50 or 60 Jewish families in Gaza, who worked as artisans and wine-makers.

In 1516 a Jewish community was recorded in Gaza: it had a yeshiva and a bet din; they were artisans and farmers. In 1546 there were 90 Jewish families in Gaza (even after the Turkish Muslims had conducted a violent pogrom in 1517).

In 1600 the Chief Rabbi of Gaza, Israel Najara, d. 1625, composes the famous “Sabbath Hymn”, Yah ribon olam.

I don't know what the story is for the 1700s-1800s.

But in 1900 there were 1900 about 50 Jewish families living in Gaza.

In 1914-1917 the Turks evicted 2000 Jews from Gaza; after the British victory these people returned.

They were driven out by mob violence in 1929, after Arabs [that is, Arab Muslims - dda] killed 150 people. In 1917 the Turks also drove out 8000 Jews from Tel Aviv. **Many Jews who were in ‘Palestine’ in 1914, were forced to flee during the war; many went to Egypt (from which, of course, *all* Jews were driven out in the 1930s through 1950s/ 1960s].

NOTE: It is probable that, had the British not defeated the Turkish Muslims in the Holy Land in 1917, the Jews – both the new Zionist returnees from the 'European' diaspora, and also those who had already come to Israel in preceding centuries from parts of dar al Islam, fleeing persecutions, pogroms and forced conversions, and the oldest communities going right back to Byzantine pre-Islamic times – might all have been slaughtered or deported by the Turkish Muslims. The Turkish Muslims had already massacred nearly a million Armenian Christians and a great many of the Greek Christian minority, and in Lebanon they had deliberately created a famine in which two-fifths of the population – mostly Maronite Christian and Druze – died while thousands fled.

Turkish Muslim ‘toleration’ throughout the entire Ottoman period from 1517 to 1917 was not quite as tolerant as people suppose. Under their rule neither Christians nor Jews were ever completely safe – they could always suddenly find themselves subject to all manner of cruelties.

(I apologise for an absence of links, this timeline has been pieced together by me from a number of different sources, including James Parkes' magisterial history of 'Palestine').

But in any case: Gaza, or Gaza and its district, have a documented (in texts, and in archaeology) Jewish and Christian history that pre-dates Islamisation, and that continued - clinging on by teeth and toenails - through the greater part of the period of the Muslim imperium.

Right now, the Gaza Strip is pristinely Judenrein, and is damn near Christenrein as well - I think the total number of Christians left in the place, as de facto dhimmis, well and truly cowed by the circumambient Muslims (who could kill them out of hand anytime they pleased), numbers a few thousand.

But let it be stated that it was not always so; and it has only *become* so, because of Islam, Islam, Islam.

This is one time when I wish the BBCs claims were true.
Israel should never have left Gaza.
Let them go back and throw the squatters out.
Gaza is Jewish land and should be returned to it's rightful owners.

Unfortunately, it's not only Aunty Beeb or British politico has-beens who spread bullshit about Israel: take this gentleman who thinks that Israel is a "terrorist state". His 9 to 5 is Prime Minister of Turkey.

"Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan accused Israel of carrying out terrorism in Gaza:

“Those who associate Islam with terrorism close their eyes in the face of mass killing of Muslims, turn their heads from the massacre of children in Gaza,” Erdogan told a conference of the Eurasian Islamic Council in Istanbul.

“For this reason, I say that Israel is a terrorist state, and its acts are terrorist acts,” he said.

Turkey is being fast tracked into the EU. Quality move from Brussels there.

This is how an old English female groupie of the Islamic terrorists lies. In my Old Country, the Soviet Union, I was an anti-Communist, and I thought that the Soviet propagandists were liars. But these pro-"Palestinian" activists here in the US, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand make the Soviet propagandists look like honest kindergarteners. They lie even worse than their Muslim masters do. Indeed, these repugnations of the human race among us make even KGB officers look like gentlemen.

Ruslan Tokhchukov, EnragedSince1999.

BBC=British BULLSHIT Corporation

Would anyone who gets off on bashing YGM76700 1. Please tell me if you favor a 2 state solution.
2. Do you think that everyone who does favor 2 state solution is a jew hating, leftard, Islam apologist ?
3. If you do favor a 2 state solution how do you propose to bring it about?

@dumbledor,
In your opinion the people in Israel are less informed about Palestinians/ Islam/ local history than you. I find that hard to believe.

Do you live in Israel? Perhaps you could explain why you make such an accusation about the low level of awareness of the Israeli public compared to yours and what it is that they are in denial of with regard to their Palestinian neighbors.

Shirley Williams is 82, and it's a bit embarrassing to hear her going gaga live, on the radio. She's certainly no friend of Israel but appears to have got her garbled vision of the West Bank mixed up with her mental picture of Gaza in this particular case.
More chilling, was the question from a member of the public (cleared in advance by the BBC, who clearly felt it was a worthwhile question)asking if Israel deserves a future.As someone on an English blog asked: where are they broadcasting their next programme from: Wannsee?

The current Likud administration and a majority of Israelis favor a 2 state solution. Inasmuch as Dumbledore thinks people who favor a 2 state solution are, if not outright anti-semites, either uninformed about Islam or in denial I was curious why Dumbledor thinks that the majority of Israelis are either uninformed or in denial.

I think the Israeli public would be pretty well informed and realistic about the nature of Islam and their Palestinian neighbors having been in a constant state of conflict with them since the birth of the nation. I find it difficult to believe that the majority of Israelis are uninformed or in denial. That's precisely why I asked Dumbledor to explain how she arrives at her belief that this is so. Maybe she lives in Israel or has extensive experience so as to have some insight into the mindset of the average Israeli citizen. I'm still interested to hear her explanation.

Graven believes there is "no mystery" about why the majority of Israelis are in denial leaving us to surmise that like a person whistling in the dark, most of the Israeli public simply don't want to admit the difficult situation in which they find themselves, i.e., living in the midst of so many Muslims. Hmm. I disagree. While I would understand if you told me the majority of Americans were ignorant or in denial with regard to the nature of Islamic ideology I do not believe that is the case with the Israeli public.

Nevertheless,the fact remains that most Israelis do favor a 2 state solution. Why would this be so? Could it be they do not regard the Hamas mentality as representative of the majority of Palestinians?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-20/seven-truths-about-israel-hamas-and-violence.html

Settlements, I aint got to show you no stinking settlements. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqomZQMZQCQ