Perhaps no better evidence of the often delusional, dangerous nature of a relatively novel “Palestinian” identity comes from Palestinian-American activist Omar Baddar and Rutgers University law professor Noura Erakat. This pair has not only recently promoted in a podcast the crazed theory that a vehicular jihadist attack at an Israeli checkpoint near Jerusalem was a car accident, but has made numerous perfervid statements about Palestinians on Twitter.
The niece of senior Palestinian Authority (PA) official Saeb Erekat, Erakat has vainly tried to whitewash her terrorist cousin Ahmed (or Ahmad, depending upon the Arabic transliteration) Erakat (Erekat). Israeli security cameras clearly recorded him on June 23 driving his car into Israeli border police manning a checkpoint, wounding one female officer, in what an earlier cellphone video by Ahmed indicated was a terrorist attack. Fearful that he would continue his attack, the police shot Ahmed during his subsequent rush from the crashed car, whereupon he died within minutes before an ambulance arrived.
Erakat tweeted that day that with her “baby cousin, Israeli cowards shot him multiple times, left him to bleed for 1.5 hours and blamed him for his death,” but various commentators in “vile attacks” rejected her unfounded accusations. Saeb condemned these people in Israel and elsewhere who lost their dignity, honour, ethics, who live in a web of lives. They lost any sense of truth and humanity.” Baddar’s former employer, Arab American Institute founder and Bernie Sanders supporter James Zogby, similarly tweeted on June 23 concerning Ahmed that “Israelis murdered him, then lied about it.”
Yet Erakat’s ravings about Ahmed should not conceal that she has few objections to terrorist violence, as the musings about “legitimate resistance” against Israelis in the podcast revealed. She had previously responded in an April 9 tweet to a social media posting with jokes about going on a “feda’i operation.” Such fedayeen (Arabic: “self-sacrficer”) have terrorized Israel since 1955.
Advocating violence against Israel is not surprising for Erakat, for she does not believe in any historic Jewish claims to an ancestral homeland justifying Israel’s right to exist. She bizarrely lectured on February 8 “journos: if someone calls the West Bank Judea and Samaria—they deny that #Palestinians even exist and is a racist argument.” Judea (where Jews derive their name) and Samaria are historic terms for Judaism’s heartland with roots in antiquity, just like Jerusalem or Galilee. By contrast, Jordan created the “West Bank” in 1950 from territory seized in Israel’s 1948 independence war from the former Palestine Mandate, created by the League of Nations after World War I for building a Jewish national home.
As Baddar showed in an August 3 tweet, he would likely dismiss such facts as the talk of “religious extremists.” Recent plans to apply Israel sovereignty to certain disputed territories in Judea and Samaria made him mock that “biblical truths” could “justify Israel’s land theft and apartheid.” Yet the Bible, whose historicity has received repeated confirmation from archeology, is merely one element among the overwhelming evidence that proves Jewish connections to this land.
Accordingly, Baddar et al. are indeed promoting antisemitism by demonizing “Israel’s theft of Palestinian land,” as his July 15 tweet accused. Jews with their legal claims to Judea and Samaria are not plundering some ancient Palestinian homeland, but have repeatedly sought to coexist with Arabs whose heritage in this region is far more modern than Israel. His critics do not “sink in smearing supporters of Palestinian rights & watering down the charge of anti-Semitism.”
Both Baddar and Erakat have made their warped Israel-hatreds into central elements of successful lives in the United States. While he grew up in Kuwait to Palestinian parents and came to America after the 1991 Gulf War, she is native to California. Like Erakat, Baddar will soon become the parent of an America-born child.
Erakat gave a worrisome indication in a May 15 tweet of what such children will be learning about Palestinian roots. While Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, some people, including her, have taken to marking on May 15 the probably 600,000 Arabs who fled what became Israel during its 1948 independence war. According to the Nakba myth, they did so because of ethnic cleansing and not Arab desires to avoid conflict zones during a projected quick destruction of Israel by invading Arab armies.
While other Americans would celebrate having arrived in America’s Promised Land, Erakat wants to incite among her offspring aggressive, revanchist desires. Rather than an American future, she emphasizes an idealized Palestinian past that never really existed and has long since vanished in modern Arab-Israeli history. Thus she would
teach my 6 year old daughter about the #Nakba today as more than the trauma of loss & exile, we planted seeds, put our hands in the dirt, & learned how a cactus can survive without water. We must love the land, mama. We must love the land.
Erakat only digs deeper into hate with anti-Israel conspiracy theories hardly better than medieval blood libels against Jews. On July 22 she tweeted that “Israel demolishes a drive thru #COVID19 testing center in Hebron,” an example of how “Zionism kills.” Contrary to the shocking, strange claims in the article she cited, Israeli authorities had actually destroyed a car dealership illegally built on land under Israeli control.
George Santayana’s proverb about forgetting history causing its repetition is well known, but even worse, individuals such as Baddar and Erakat are intent upon “remembering” a false Palestinian history. They incessantly retell tales of Palestinians who are always victims, never perpetrators, who have always fallen from mighty heights to modern misery under Zionism, and who have no hope other than someday “returning” to destroy Israel. Israel and the wider world can have no prosperous future with such Palestinians mired in an invented, self-debilitating past.
mortimer says
Both Baddar and Erakat are promoting racism, bigotry and genocide. Why do Erakat’s university directors not see it?
One duty of the university directors is to hold their staff accountable to standards of truthfulness and accuracy.
Erakat undermines the credibility of Rutgers by spreading malicious slander, something a teacher of law should not do.
Kesselman says
The Fakestinians can argue all they muster, but lies (taqqiya), fraud, false flag are all they come up with. Not a single true word escapes Erekat & co.s flubbed mouth.
mortimer says
‘Israel’s theft of Palestinian land’?
Who are the recipients of the deeds to the Ottoman villayets of Aleppo, Deir ez Zor or Beirut, of the sanjaks of Latkia, Tripoli, Beirut, Acre, Nablus, of the mutasarrifats of Mt.Lebanon and Jerusalem or the sanjaks of Hama, Homs, Damascus, Hawran, Ma’an?
It seems that the League of Nations made the decision to assign the administration of those areas to France and Great Britain with a view to establishing independent states out of them … mainly by drawing new lines on the map.
‘Western Palestine’ was not assigned for use by Arabs only. And the League of Nations did not make such a bequest to Arabs only in mandatory Western Palestine. It was for the use of both Jews and Arabs.
The claim of ‘theft of Palestinian land’ is seen to be a fabricated, fabulous claim without historical basis.
gravenimage says
‘Palestinian’ Twitter Fantasies
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Sick stuff.
golem3 says
Arabs have a problem with truth
US infidel says
Arabs are like their bullsheite religion full of lies and deceit. Had 2000 years worth of practice sorry bunch of boy lovers with dirty turbans