File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2002/postcolonial.0203, message 168


From: "julian samuel" <jjsamuel-AT-vif.com>
Subject: Arab press?
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 10:51:16 -0800


Dear List members:

    Can anyone confirm the publication of the articles published in this?

(Edward Said writes for Al-Ahram)

Thanks,

Julian Samuel



from Canada's National Post

March 15, 2002


Blood libel, Arab-style


National Post

On March 25, 1144, a boy's body was found near Norwich, England. He was
recognized as William, a tanner's apprentice known to have fraternized with
Jews. A local woman, it was later claimed, had seen the Jews lacerate
William's head with thorns and crucify him. The boy's story is the
foundation of the blood libel, according to which Jews use the blood of
slaughtered Christian children to make the unleavened bread they
traditionally eat during Passover.

This vicious anti-Semitic myth was widely promoted in the Christian world
till well after the end of the Middle Ages. In Europe and Syria, it was
revived in the 19th century. Adolf Hitler cited the blood libel myth as a
justification for slaughtering Jews. In fact, he wanted to make a movie
about it. But Germany was conquered before the film could be produced.

Arab governments and newspapers are picking up where Hitler left off. On
Tuesday, the Middle East Media Research Institute, a non-profit media
organization that monitors the Arab media, reported an article in the Saudi
government-controlled daily newspaper Al-Riyadh about the Jewish holiday of
Purim. "During this holiday, the Jew must prepare very special pastries, the
filling of which is not only costly and rare -- it cannot be found at all on
the local and international markets," wrote Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of
Saudi Arabia's King Faysal University. "For this holiday, the Jewish people
must obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare the holiday
pastries.

"I would like to clarify that the Jews' spilling human blood to prepare
pastry for their holidays is a well-established fact," the author adds. "The
victim must be a mature adolescent who is, of course, a non-Jew -- that is,
a Christian or a Muslim. His blood is taken and dried into granules. The
cleric blends these granules into the pastry dough; they can also be saved
for the next holiday. In contrast, for the Passover slaughtering, about
which I intend to write one of these days, the blood of Christian and Muslim
children under the age of 10 must be used."

This article appeared in Al-Riyadh on March 10, three weeks after news was
first leaked of a Saudi peace proposal that would provide Israel with
"normal" relations in exchange for its withdrawal from the West Bank and
Gaza.

This is not an isolated example. A year ago, the Egyptian
government-controlled newspaper Al-Ahram published a full-page article
reporting the discovery of Palestinian child corpses drained of blood. "The
bestial drive to knead Passover matzahs with the blood of non-Jews is
[confirmed] in the records of the Palestinian police where there are many
recorded cases of the bodies of Arab children who had disappeared being
found, torn to pieces without a single drop of blood," the newspaper
reported. "The most reasonable explanation ... is that the blood was taken
to be kneaded into dough."

Al-Ahram has the largest circulation of any newspaper in Egypt. Its editor
is appointed by the president of Egypt.

The blood libel is also promoted enthusiastically in The Matzah of Zion, a
book written in 1983 by Syria's Defence Minister, Mustafa Tlass. In 1991,
Syria's delegate to the UN Commission on Human Rights urged members to read
the book so that they could appreciate the "historical reality of Zionist
racism."

We recite these examples not to mock Arabs for ignorant fantasies about the
Jews, whose nation flourishes economically and technologically in their
midst, but to provide background for readers to consider the next time a
Saudi sheik or some other Arab dictator offers "normal" relations with
Israel in exchange for sacrifices of Jewish security. Such relations are
impossible -- and they will remain so until Arab governments and
intellectuals stop nurturing venomous myths about the Jews designed to
direct the hatreds and fears of the Arab masses against an outside enemy
rather than against their domestic oppressors.










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