Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
“The Jerusalem Clock is hidden in London today,” Fatah, the political movement behind the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, asserts in a post titled, “Jerusalem Stolen Clock”.
It goes on to claim that the British military ordered the clock tower dismantled. Then the “British moved the clock first to a new tower across from the municipality of Jerusalem, and transferred it to the British Museum in London, to become the famous British icon, ‘Big Ben’.”
How did Big Ben, which was built in 1859, become a Muslim clock tower from the 20th century?
There are some other slight differences between London’s Big Ben and the “stolen clock” such as the fact that Big Ben is 316 feet tall while the ‘Palestinian’ clock tower was only 42 feet.
But the story of the “Palestinian clock” is also the story of the entire myth of “Palestine”.
When you believe that the Jerusalem of King David and King Solomon was originally yours, you can just as easily believe that London’s Big Ben was originally the property of “Palestine”.
The “Palestinian clock” is as real as “Palestine”. The myth of a “Palestinian” people propounded by Fatah which has spent decades killing over it is also the story of the “Palestinian clock”.
There’s no more of a “Palestinian” people who were dispossessed by the Jews than Big Ben is a “Palestinian” clock stolen and passed off as London’s Big Ben. Both are fake history built out of resentments and garbled stories whose context has been lost, but whose hatreds remain real.
There were never any Palestinians. When the clock was built the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire, the last Caliphate until ISIS. The caliphates had settled it with Arab Muslim clans who dominated Christian refugees fleeing Muslim persecution, along with groups of other minorities from escaped slaves to gypsies, along with the indigenous Jewish population.
The Ottomans had become obsessed with clock towers as a symbol of their empire. But the Ottomans hadn’t invented them, they had adopted them from Europe, and planted them in major cities of the empire to create a common sense of time and belonging for their subjects.
Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the last real sultan of the empire, obsessively erected clock towers to show off how modern the Ottoman Empire was. But by then the Empire was anything but modern and Hamid’s clock tower craze was powered by his German allies. Kaiser Wilhelm II gave Hamid a batch of clocks at the turn of the century which the Turks put into clock towers.
The Ottoman Empire erected some of its clock towers in Israel. These clock towers utilized the talents and funds of the indigenous Jewish and the Arab Muslim settler population. The clock tower projects in Israel began in 1901 which is also the date when Wilhelm sent Hamid a whole bunch of clocks. One of these clock towers was stuck on Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate which Hamid had previously cut a hole in so that the Kaiser could enter Jerusalem in his tall plumed helmet.
The relationship between Germany and the Ottoman Empire destroyed the remnants of the “Sick Man of Europe” by dragging it into WWI and allowing the British to claim the region.
And the British decided to get rid of the eyesore of the Jaffa Gate Clock Tower by moving it.
The Jaffa Gate Clock Tower, built out of white limestone, would have looked nice in the town square of some British village. The British objection to it was that it was very European and didn’t belong with the biblical setting of the Jaffa Gate. They weren’t repressing a brilliant example of Islamic architecture, but a mediocre Islamic imitation of European architecture.
Critics at the time had called it “that damned German tower”.
Older Ottoman clock towers had been styled after minarets. The clock towers in Israel looked European. Paradoxically, the British got rid of the Jaffa Gate clock because it wasn’t “oriental” enough for their taste. They were trying to protect the traditional architectural character of the region only to be accused by the Muslim leaders in Jerusalem who saw the clock tower as a symbol of their accomplishment, of stealing their clock because its glory put Big Ben to shame.
There was no “Palestinian clock”. Just like there are no “Palestinians”.
The “Palestinian” clock likely used a German mechanism, was styled after European clock towers, and was a project of the Ottoman Empire. Not of any imaginary “Palestine”. Some saner “Palestinian” revisionist history diatribes shy away from claiming that Big Ben is the actual clock tower from Jaffa Gate due to the missing few hundred feet distingushing the two towers.
They claim that only the mechanism from the stolen “Palestinian clock” was used for Big Ben.
But the “Palestinian Clock” wasn’t some great triumph of Islamic science. It was most likely one of the Kaiser’s clocks. If the British had wanted a German clock mechanism, they would have bought it. And the Jaffa Clock Tower the Ottomans built in Jaffa (not to be confused with the Jaffa Gate one in Jerusalem) utilized the services of a Jewish clockmaker, Moritz Schoenberg.
Big Ben’s clock mechanism was genuinely revolutionary and the challenges of running giant clocks at hundreds of feet in freezing weather are very different than anything put together by the Ottomans for the modest clock towers plopped down for the Sultan’s 25th anniversary.
Transplanting the clock mechanism from the Jaffa Gate clock to Big Ben would be disastrous.
And yet the myth of the “Palestinian Clock”, the incredible work of genius that the British coveted so much that they turned it into Big Ben, nurtures a resentment built on a fake history.
“Palestine” is a German clock installed by the Ottoman Empire and transposed to Big Ben.
It’s the delusions of the former elite of a fallen Islamic empire passing down garbled resentments, spinning them into conspiracy theories, and building an identity around them. But when you research the claims they collapse into myths, legends, and fairy tales.
The “Palestinian” cause was built up by a few major Muslim ruling families in Jerusalem and Hebron not because they had lost a nation that never existed, but the status and power that came from being part of an occupying Islamic empire under which Jews were inferiors.
There was never a “Palestinian” nation or a people. There were influential clans, like the Husseini clan, whose members included Hitler’s Mufti and Yasser Arafat, who are not, despite their myths, descended from the Caananites let alone the Philistines, but came over from Egypt. Even after spending a generation trying to wipe out the indigenous Jewish population, when the revolution came and Israel won its independence, they were not driven out in a ‘Nakba’.
They left ahead of their invading Islamic armies that they expected to wipe out the Jewish population. And when that didn’t happen, they claimed to be an exiled “Palestinian” people.
Now their descendants recalling family legends have built up a story of a glorious Islamic clock that was stolen by the infidels and passed off as Big Ben. One day they’ll reclaim Big Ben and stick it on the Jaffa Gate again and take over all of Jerusalem. Meanwhile the Israelis have been caring for the remaining Ottoman clocks. The entire set, including the banished Jaffa Gate clock, have shown up on Israeli postage stamps. The Ottoman plaques with their praises of Allah have been left alone though other plaques praising G-d were sometimes added.
Where the Arab Islamic elites made it their practice to destroy and defile Jewish synagogues, cemeteries, and holy sites, the Israelis have preserved the legacy of Arab Islamic colonialism, along with the legacies of Greek, Roman, Crusader, and British colonial rule in Israel.
When the land actually belongs to you, there’s no need to revise and erase its history.
The “Palestine” myth compounds resentment with insecurity. The Ottoman Empire could be brutal and backward, but it accomplished something. All the Arab Islamic military colonists who built up dynasties under its shadow in backwaters like Israel have is someone else’s clock.
They traded their own shameful history as the camp followers of caliphates, pillagers and colonizers of someone else’s land, for an even more pathetic imaginary history as the “Palestinians”. They insist that as the “Palestinian” people, they are the true indigenous population of Israel even though they arrived there thousands of years after the fact.
Palestine was the name given by the Roman occupiers to Israel. The Romans associated the area with the Philistines: the sea peoples who had come from the Aegean to colonize it.
The “Palestinian” people have spent two generations claiming to be the original indigenous population because they’re using the name of a European people given to it by a European empire. Anyone that hopelessly ignorant might as well claim that Big Ben is part of “Palestine”.
When your entire history is fake, you can believe anything.
Scotia says
Big Ben is the bell, not the clock.
They cant even make shit up proper :p
mortimer says
Here is the story of the moved, then demolished Jaffa Gate Clock Tower in Jerusalem with before and after pictures.
https://www.bibleplaces.com/blog/2010/04/whereabouts-of-jaffa-gate-clock-tower/
Quote: Between the years 1907 and 1922, Jaffa Gate was home to an imposing 40-foot (13-m) clock tower.
The Ottoman authorities erected the tower in honor of one of the anniversaries of Abdul Hamid. Not all were impressed with the addition. G. K. Chesterton described the timepiece as “an unnaturally ugly clock, at the top of an ornamental tower, or a tower that was meant to be ornamental” (The New Jerusalem [1920]).
John Kealey says
Absolutely correct!
Buraq says
This is a Palestinian ‘wind up’, yeah? Clock ….. wind up. OK, I’ll get my coat now.
jirtu says
They got the name wrong. It was not the Big Ben. It was the Small Ben. Benjamin means “son of the left-handed”. For that reason, both Bens are always slow.
Princess says
As far as I know, Yamin as in Benjamin means right, not left.
JohnTheRevelator says
“When your entire history is fake, you can believe anything.”
“The Palestinians” is one of the greatest hoaxes still alive to this day. Muslims constantly use it as a bludgeon to punish Israel and western countries and obtain concessions, including billions of dollars of aid they don’t deserve.
It’s because people are not interested in the truth and they think they can solve problems by throwing money at it.
The same can be said of ‘Multiculturalism.’ This is also another hoax that foolishly and falsely claims all cultures are equal and all the immigrants are harmless, law-abiding and contribute to their host nation.
This idea does apply to immigrants like myself who are grateful to be living in a better country, but the reality is that there are thousands, perhaps millions of immigrants who come from hostile nations and pose a threat to the nations they immigrate to.
Western nations should be careful in deciding who’s allowed to enter their country and from which nations. Europe for example is finally waking up and realizing that it is a huge mistake to take people from Islamic countries and they are now paying the price for their gullibility.
Unfortunately realizing their mistake some Europeans for example swing to the far-right extreme and lump in good immigrants with the bad ones and want them all deported largely based on skin color, which leads to further conflict and strife. Had nations been more selective and wiser from the start, you could have a limited influx of immigrants that do integrate well and benefit your nation.
moqifen says
Arabs + 14 centuries of marrying your cousins ≠ genius
Mario says
The muslims invented that too.
Infidel says
I thought that it was a Sudanese kid that invented the clock some years ago. A whole media storm exposing him as somebody who just put together something available at Radio Shacks then resulted in his family relocating to the Emirates
Are the Palis further undermining this kid’s claim to have invented the clock? ?
gravenimage says
🙂
Westman says
?
Whoda thunk those boys in Silicon Valley invented the integrated circuit from some old Palestinian drawings that were stolen during WWI?
Did I just invent a new Palestinian myth by simply suggesting it? Say the magic words and voilà!
Clive Delmonte says
Mr Greenfield, it is a pleasure to read your work!
gravenimage says
+1
Keith O says
What’s really sad is that there are sheeple out in the world who are stupid enough to believe this crap and any other lies that are spewed forth from the mouths of these inbred mudslimes.
Next thing they will be claiming the Sydney harbor bridge was stolen from the desert somewhere.
Templer says
Give back palistine to the jew Islamic lieing peace’s off shit jerlusalim belongs to the chirstains and Jews not Muslims Big Ben belongs to the U.K. not lieing palistine do your bullshit ever stop
gravenimage says
‘Palestinians’ Want London to Give Back ‘Big Ben’
……………….
Grimly hilarious. The fact is that public clocks came *very* late to the Muslim world, and when the Sultan had one installed in Constantiniople–installed by Infidels, of course–pious Muslims violenty objected.
Eleanor says
Could we sell them a mock up of the Leaning Tower of Pisa with a clock at the top? They wouldn’t know the difference.
Yuri Andronovich Smirnoff says
Pisa? Hamas orders theirs with pepperoni ? and extra ? cheese! That’s the extent of their claims of intelligence.
mortimer says
I would like to hear from a real historian what happened to the actual clock donated by Kaiser Wilhelm.
gravenimage says
Here’s more on the story, Mortimer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Gate#Ottoman_clock_tower
Henry Schalk says
Brilliant, Daniel!
IanB says
“When your entire history is fake, you can believe anything” .
When your entire “religion” (cult of Islam) is fake, you can believe anything.
Islam abhors individual critical thinking because it is so vulnerable to such thought.
Islam collapses like a deck of cards when exposed to rational enquiry.
That is why Muslims have such idiotic ideas as Big Ben being “Palestinian”.
Also, they cannot resist any idea that seemingly proves the Muslims are superior to the infidels.
Hence the perfidious British had to steal their glorious, Islamic clock (actually German, but facts can never be allowed to negate Islamic supremacist dogma).
OLD GUY says
If you have a shitty past history I guess it makes sense to try and change history so you feel good abut yourself. Muslims/islam has a lot of history to change to make them look good, but that’s seems to be an acceptable method of islam and the liberal left.
Giacomo Latta says
Muslims don’t need a relatively accurate clock such as the one which is part of Big Ben. What they need is a sped-up clock that can spit out days quickly enough so that 365.25 of them are created in a real year. What they have now is a calendar more appropriate to Venus than Earth.
Lord Mandalore says
Amazing. Not a single word about the history of Palestine is true. And what’s not an outright falsehood is rooted in extremely poor logic. Bravo.