Ehud Ya'ari: Not Just Anti-Semitic Lies! No possibility of making peace with
the Jews
Ehud Ya'ari The Jerusalem Report December 16, 2002

The essence of the message is that there is no possibility of making peace
with the Jews

"Horseman without a horse," the Egyptian TV hit series being broadcast by 14
Arab TV networks, is not the only anti-Semitic production to be galloping
across the screens each evening this Ramadan. For viewers looking for more
than the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" can offer, there’s no shortage of
alternatives. Anti-Semitism has become the last word in the Arab
entertainment industry.

Al-Manar, the Hizballah TV station broadcast from Lebanon, features Dr.
Ghazi Hussein, a veteran salaried PLO lackey and a former adviser to the
late Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad. Hussein sits in the studio and
knowledgeably defines the typical characteristics of the Jew, including
"lying, treachery and greed" and goes on at length to describe Jewish
baseness. The program, incidentally, is called "The Spider’s House," a
reference to the remark by Hizballah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah that
Israel is doomed to fall apart like a spider’s web. The program’s promo
includes video clips promising that "Israel will be obliterated," with
appropriate images for illustration.

Syrian TV is running the dramatic locally produced series, "The Collapse of
Legends." Its central premise is that there is no archeological evidence to
support the stories of the Old Testament; that the Torah we hold holy is
nothing but one big forgery made up by rabbis; that it has no connection
with the Ten Commandments, but is rather a fabrication of history designed
to give the Jews a claim to the Land of Israel. So in the dramatized serial,
a group of Syrian archeologists sets out on a campaign to expose a group of
Zionists who have infiltrated their party with the aim of tampering with the
ancient antiquities at the famous archeological site of Ebla, in order to
give some scientific basis to the forged scripture.

And in case you were worrying, Arafat is not being left behind. Palestinian
TV is broadcasting a series of documentaries with one single objective: to
disprove the "myth" that any Jewish Temple ever stood in Jerusalem, and to
present any historical reference to that claim as an act of deception. The
message is that the Jews have no business in the Holy City.

And as most of our readers will already know (see pages 28-31 of this
magazine), the Egyptian series "Horseman without a Horse" is reviving the
"Protocols," albeit in a dreadful, painfully slow-paced production with
laughable acting. The Jews in the series look like they’ve jumped straight
out of Der Sturmer and behave like devil’s advocates, scheming, sowing
corruption and generally encapsulating all that is ugly about humanity.

The inevitable conclusion is that significant numbers, though by no means
all, of the young generation of Arab artists, a stratum that usually
represents liberal trends and openness, have volunteered their services to
sharpen and stylize the message that up until now has been promoted by
fundamentalist movements such as Hamas. The essence of the message is that
there is no possibility of making peace with the Jews -- not because of any
political argument or clash over territory, but because that nation is a
priori unfit to be counted among the human race. The Jewish religion is one
big, ongoing lie, and Jewish history is the fruit of a consistent distortion
of the past. Furthermore, the Jewish people present a future threat to the
rest of the world.

For some time now I, along with a few colleagues who lend their ears day by
day to the voices coming from the other side, have been asking ourselves:
Where is this campaign leading? After all, this is not about withdrawing
from the territories or granting Palestinian refugees the "right of return."
Rather, it is a far-reaching, dangerous rationale laying the ground for the
justification of a mass exile of Jews from Israel -- "ethnic cleansing" in
contemporary terms -- and even beyond that, it is gradually building a case
for justifying genocide!

At the forefront, of course, are the Muslim holy men and clerics whose
poisonous fatwas flood the Internet. According to them, the Jews, by their
very nature, corrupt their environment, are "prophet killers" and are the
"sons of pigs and monkeys." They point out that there is a promise in
Islamic tradition that the stone behind which the Jews seek refuge on
Judgment Day will break its silence to give them up.

It is not the approval to fight against Israel that is being sought here,
but rather the religious authority and "moral" basis for much more than
that. Sure, there are more than a few Arab intellectuals raising their
voices in protest against such declarations. But no number of nicely written
articles can counterbalance the effect of a dramatic, well-promoted,
prime-time TV series screened right after the break-fast meal.