Over our dead bodies

by Tariq Shadid – Hypocrisy runs worldwide; it is known as one of mankind’s ugliest traits. However, at some points in time, at certain locations, it takes such wildly ludicrous shapes that it turns human beings into caricatures of themselves. One such example can be found at the official Israeli response to the recent desecration of 15 Muslim gravestones at the Ma’man Illah cemetery in Jerusalem, also known as ‘the Mamilla cemetery’.

Israeli police arrested a 21-year old Jewish ‘extremist’ for spray-painting slogans like ‘Death to Arabs’ on the gravestones, vowing to ‘apprehend all those responsible’. Now check out the cynical reality: this same police force represents a government that, together with the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) has been engaged in a years-long policy of desecrating that very same Ma’man Illah cemetery by destroying huge portions of the cemetery and digging up hundreds of Muslim human remains. This is the first hypocrisy: a massive desecrator punishes petty desecrators like these crazed settlers, in order to be able to pretend to be protectors of sacred places.

This in itself is disgusting enough, but  it doesn’t end here. The Zionist state is involved in a double hypocrisy: the grounds of Ma’man Illah are being razed in order to clear the site for the SWC, to build a facility they call the “Center for Human Dignity – Museum of Tolerance”. Quite cynically, it looks like the Israeli government wants to murder ‘Tolerance’ first by razing and unearthing a sacred burial site of another religion, so that ‘Tolerance’ becomes  a thing of the past, and therefore deserving of a museum.

Double hypocrisy as a policy

This is not the only example of the psychopathic way that Zionism operates, with double hypocrisy as its central behavioral trait. When the Zionist state wanted a new building for the Yad Vashem museum of the Holocaust, they chose no other place than a site only 1.4 kilometers away from the remains of the razed village of Deir Yasin, whose inhabitants were massacred in 1948 as a warning to other Palestinians of the fate that would await them if they remained in their homes. The massacre of Deir Yasin is considered the most significant of Zionist massacres in the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians from their homeland.

In other words, in order to erase our Palestinian heritage and history, and force the world to forget, the Zionists deemed no place more fit for the remembrance of the historical massacre of their own people, than a site which plays a historical role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine from its inhabitants. Again, double hypocrisy: covering up the massacre you committed by turning it into a memorial site for the massacre you underwent.

When I wrote an article about this in 2005, which was published at the Palestine Chronicle shortly after the opening of the Yad Vashem museum, it unleashed a barrage of attacks upon my person. It received a vicious response from Zionist publicist Carol Gould, and was used against me in  an attempt at character assassination by Zionist organizations in the Netherlands. Despite these poisonous attacks, the truth must be said, and it is the Zionist state itself which is responsible for acting in such a psychopathic way, up to the highest levels of government.

Fool me once, fool me twice

Nevertheless, we should not forget that famous phrase: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”. For this also exposes the reproachable weakness of others, who do not adhere to Zionist ideology, but are all too quick to walk into their traps with their eyes wide open. The mildest example of this is the lack of protest or outrage at these lunatic attempts at erasing Muslim and Palestinian history from the land of Palestine. A more extreme form of accepting the unacceptable can be found among those worldwide who engage in normalization, and an excellent example of this can be found in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

There is an organization called the Jewish-Moroccan Network Amsterdam (JMNA), that was initiated in 2006 by the Amsterdam municipality in cooperation with representatives of the Moroccan community, and the CIDI (Centre of Information and Documentation Israel), which is the most active organization of Zionist propaganda in the Netherlands. JMNA is currently engaged in a project of making Dutch youths of Moroccan origin clean up an old and neglected Jewish cemetery together with Jewish youths, in the Zeeburg district of Amsterdam.

So far, the project itself seems innocent enough. In fact, it can be said that promoting understanding between religious communities of all religions should always be encouraged – which is definitely an honorable thing to do. A few questions can be asked, though. Are Jewish youths also involved within this framework in projects of supporting or maintaining Islamic buildings and sites, or are Moroccan youths effectively functioning as the clean-up crew for the Amsterdam Jews? I haven’t been able to find an example of this opposite, but that doesn’t mean these don’t exist. Is there adequate reciprocity? It is just a question, and a legitimate one I believe.

The main question however is this: why were Rabbi Evers, a notorious Zionist, and Haim Divon, the Israeli ambassador in the Netherlands, present at the official opening of this activity? Divon was even quoted in an article at a Jewish website in the Netherlands as having said at the joint cemetery clean-up: “this day is good for the reputation of my country “. And what does it mean when Fatima Elatik, representative of the city’s municipality of Moroccan origin, and board member of JMNA, is happily posing with these people in a picture, as if posing and associating with representatives of the Zionist government is a completely normal thing to do?

Normalization over our dead bodies

These people should be shown pictures of the desecration of Ma’man Illah cemetery, a desecration supported by the same officials that were present at the joint Moroccan-Jewish clean up of the Jewish cemetery in Amsterdam. If there is any sense of justice left in them, any sense of perspective in knowing what it is exactly that they are doing, they will not only abandon the politically hijacked project of cleaning up that cemetery, but instead dedicate their energy to firmly and publicly protesting against the desecration of the ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, that dates back to the 7th century.

They should understand that their acts of normalization with the state of Israel serve mainly to silence voices of protest against an ongoing Zionist policy of ethnic cleansing, land theft, and genocide. The overwhelming majority of Moroccans is extremely sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and attempting to coerce Moroccan youths into cleaning Jewish cemeteries in the presence of ZIonist officials is a form of normalization that is void of any innocence. These very same Moroccan youths have most likely never even heard of Ma’man Illah cemetery, and would undoubtedly be outraged if they would have known what is going on there while they themselves are removing the dirt from Jewish gravestones in Amsterdam.

Normalization projects like these should not be supported, but opposed, as long as the ZIonists continue their illegal, murderous, and destructive occupation. It is one thing to want to promote understanding between peoples of different religions and ethnic backgrounds. It is a completely different thing, to do this over our dead bodies.