The Fables of Saeb Erakat

Few have mastered the art of dissimilitude more than long time Palestinian Arab spokesman, Saeb Erakat

By Victor Sharpe  Thursday, August 22, 2013

I wrote an article once titled: Lies, Damned lies, and Palestinian Propaganda in Descending Order. That title paraphrased 19th century British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli’s aphorism: Lies, damned lies, and statistics in descending order.

Few have mastered the art of dissimilitude more than long time Palestinian Arab spokesman, Saeb Erakat, who continues to be taken seriously by the ever gullible western media.

Now, according to a report by Elad Benari in the August 21,2013 edition of Israel National News, Erakat has baldly stated that, “the U.S. had assured the PA in writing that talks would recognize the indefensible pre-1967 borders (they are in reality the armistice lines) as the basis of a Palestinian state, would deal with all core issues (Jerusalem, refugees, borders, security and water), would take place within six to nine months, and would not allow for any interim solutions before a final status agreement is signed.”

Mr. Benari added that, “… If true, Erekat’s comments in the interview mark the first time since the talks restarted that any of the sides reveals the American guarantees it received in order to return to the negotiating table. No Israeli officials have confirmed or denied Erekat’s remarks.”

Tragically for the Jewish state, Erakat’s statement may indeed this time contain a grain of truth. If so the Obama Administration has committed a perilous act against Israel and flouts the very meaning of U.N. Resolution 242.

Nevertheless, Erakat is a skilled negotiator with the innate knowledge of successful haggling that would do credit in any Arab bazaar. He will, without doubt, have no trouble in out maneuvering the left leaning Israeli negotiator, Tzippi Livni, who has no love for the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria. It will be a contest between a shark and a minnow.

True to form, I remember when Erakat chose The Guardian newspaper, one of Britain’s most left leaning and anti-Israel dailies, to let fly a howler back in December, 2010.

According to Erakat’s Op-Ed in The Guardian, he claimed there are now well over seven million Palestinian Arab refugees. This is seven times the number of Arabs who foolishly left their homes in 1948 when ordered to do so by the corrupt Arab League, while at the same time seven Arab armies were invading the fledgling and re-born Jewish state with the intention of committing genocide against its Jewish citizens.

The Arab leaders often accuse Israel of committing a “holocaust” against the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. At the same time, they inflate the numbers of these same Arabs in an almost precipitous and distorted bell curve. If only the Jewish victims of the real Holocaust would have suffered in such a fashion, there would not have been six million dead but — using Erakat’s bizarre mathematics — some forty million additional Jewish souls alive today.

That is the extent of the lies, damned lies, and “statistics” that people like Erakat routinely spew. The tragedy is that so many in the West are ever willing to swallow such garbage. But let’s look at Erakat’s career as a propagandist.

Erakat’s career as a propagandist—Jenin

This is the man who bamboozled the world on CNN in April 2002 by baldly stating that Israel had, “massacred at least 500 people in Jenin and that women and children were missing.”

This outrageous lie was effectively dismissed by Colin Powell himself and its falsehood subsequently confirmed by the UN, which went on to report that 56 Arabs were killed (34 of them armed combatants) in fighting by the IDF against Palestinian Arab terror squads infesting the Arab city. This is the city from which some 28 suicide bombers had infiltrated the Jewish state, perpetrating atrocities against hundreds of Israeli civilians during the previous 18 months. Erakat knew his words were false, but he also knew the effectiveness of the “big lie”
and the damage was done.

No Arab civilians were missing. However, many of the 22 civilians killed were used as human shields by the Arab terrorists — in itself an Arab war crime that remains unpunished.

Erakat’s outright lie was hardly challenged, nor his credibility dented. After all, he has made a perverse career of half-truths, mistruths and spectacular falsehoods over several decades while acting as a Palestinian spokesman and negotiator in what is called the, “peace process.”

In an article by Bret Stephens titled Liar, liar in December 2002, published in the Jerusalem Post, it was pointed out that up to that date, “Erakat has had no less than 11,382 citations in the English language press since 1988” — a veritable Niagara Falls of falsehoods that have done so much to poison the minds of countless readers against Israel. Since then the torrent of Erakat whoppers has washed away any sense of historical accuracy.

Here are a few of the many deliberate lies Mr. Erakat has uttered:

Erakat has often claimed to the Western world and through its media that, “Palestinians are committed to two equal states for two peoples.” Sounds nice to western ears, but facts tell a very different story.

Well over 60% of Arabs calling themselves Palestinians reject outright such an Erakat claim. And Mahmoud Abbas himself, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, rejects utterly any willingness to accept Israel as a Jewish state. Erakat can provide no evidence that he or his cronies seek peace, while Israel can show three peace offers in the past decade. But, according to the current Palestinian narrative and effectively conveyed by Erakat, the fault for the absence of negotiations or peace lies with Israel.

Erakat claims repeatedly that Israeli villages in Judea and Samaria, which Erakat describes in the anti-Israel nomenclature as “settlements in the West Bank,” cover 42% of the disputed territory when in fact they control barely 5% of the ancestral and biblical Jewish heartland.

Bret Stephens pointed out in his December, 2002 article that, Erakat says “settlers” are stealing Palestinian water resources. Yet almost all “settlers” are linked to the central Israeli water grid and do not use local wells.” What is fact is that the Arabs pollute the scant water resources and aquifer within Judea and Samaria and the very term, Palestinian water resources, is to implicitly pre-judge whose land it truly is.

He also mentioned that, “Erekat says Israel plans to deprive Palestinians of everything but “an insignificant presence in Jerusalem.” Yet at Camp David, much of east Jerusalem was theirs for the taking. They refused it.”

Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, proved that telling a big lie over and over again ensured that most people would come to believe it. However, Saeb Erakat also proves that if you tell a multitude of small lies over and over again, a multitude of people will believe them without question.

Erakat’s career has been just such a monument to dissimilitude. Sadly, there are many people anxious and willing to accept any nonsense uttered by such a master of deceits.

According to Israel National News, Saeb Erakat has criticized Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for mentioning the Jewish people’s historic ties to Jerusalem as described in the Bible.

He accused the prime minister of, “using religion to incite hatred and fear.” Biblical references it seems are now considered hate mongering by the Islamic world. The Jewish Bible refers to Jerusalem and Zion, terms which are synonymous, 850 times.

The Christian Bible refers to them some 154 times. The Koran does not refer to Jerusalem at all. Instead the Koran commands Muslims to: “… fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.” Koran 9:5. Propaganda and lies are a stratagem of war and Mr. Erakat knows all too well how to wage it.

3,000 year old Jewish ties to Jerusalem

Erakat has often sought to dismiss the inextricable 3,000 year old Jewish ties to Jerusalem and has claimed that Jewish heritage on the Temple Mount, the site of the two ancient Jewish Temples, are a threat to Islam.

The neighborhoods illegally occupied by the Jordanian regime from 1948 to 1967 are now claimed by the Palestinian Authority as the future capital of a PA state. They include the Old City, the City of David and the Temple Mount. But Jewish residents of these very neighborhoods were expelled from them by the British officered Jordanian Arab Legion in 1948.

Erakat has stated several times that, “East Jerusalem cannot continue to be occupied if there is to be peace.” This too will be believed by many in the international corridors of power and the media, even as they know in their heart of hearts that if Jerusalem was again divided — like Berlin once was — there still will never be peace from the Arabs.

Saeb Erakat will continue to obfuscate and dissemble in his inimitable fashion, ever hiding the empirical fact that the Muslim world will never accept a Jewish state however much of its biblical and ancestral patrimony it gives away in pursuit of peace. Erakat well knows that even if Israel shrank to one downtown city block in Tel Aviv its existence would still be a provocation to the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians and they would wage endless war against it.

The one truth that Erakat will always hide is that the Palestinian Arab leadership will never accept a “two state solution.” They want no Jewish state side by side with their Arab and Muslim state.

Indeed, they ultimately want one state stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the borders of Iraq — that is an Islamic state, including the present day Kingdom of Jordan, in which neither Jews nor Hashemites will be permitted to remain.

This entity will inevitably become a Hamas controlled state willingly tied to the baleful influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran and a junior partner of the Muslim Brotherhood — an extension of Islamist and jihadist influence on the very doorstep of Europe and a bridgehead for the dreamed of worldwide Islamic Caliphate.

Meanwhile, there is Erakat today at the heart of the fraudulent “peace talks” spinning his web of deceit yet again.

© Victor Sharpe