Christianity Today
The Gaza hospital, prejudice, and lies
The alleged destruction of a Gaza hospital, and 500 casualties, turns out to be lie. But the lies behind this lie are rooted in history.
The Gaza Hospital Incident might be the match that starts a worldwide conflagration – or ushers in a false peacemaker. The modern Philistines who started the Fourth Arab-Israeli War couldn’t widen it by merely asking coreligionists to draw the moral. So they had to create a false casus belli – and getting rid of inconvenient sojourners was a special bonus. Or it would have been – except that the entire incident is a lie. And the continued promotion of that lie, goes hand-in-hand with historical revisionism, and not only by Muslims.
What we first heard about the Gaza Hospital
Yesterday evening, The Gateway Pundit reported, a missile struck the Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City. 500 people – hospital patients (including infants) and medical, nursing, and ancillary staff – supposedly died. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) assumed, and trumpeted, the worst:
The Israeli high command falsely assumed that the Israel Air Force had struck the hospital because someone suspected it harbored munitions or something of the kind. The Islamic Resistance Movement (Arabic Harakah al-Muqāwamah al-Islāmiyyah, abbreviated HAMAS), which is the Gazan Army, loves to do that. They love to use their own civilians as human shields, hiding munitions and tunnel portals in hospitals, schools – and mosques.
Then the Israel Defense Forces revealed video evidence of the innocence of the IAF in that affair.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, which are like Russia’s Wagner Private Military Company, fired a large brace of missiles at Tel Aviv and other points north. One of them, the IDF suggests, struck a target far short of the other targets.
Until recently, CNAV suspected thatPIJ programmed that one missile to strike a target within Gaza. Being Muslims, they would have two incentives to blow up that particular Gaza Hospital. First, its administration and medical staff were Christians – Baptist missionaries, in fact. Second, they could blame The Jews once again, and this time light the fuse that fizzled out before.
New evidence: the Gaza Hospital is still intact!
But now we have evidence that at least half the stories with which so many media have run, were lies. Even The Gateway Pundit let HAMAS “take” them – but no more. At noon today Jim Hoft followed up with new satellite images showing that the damage was much less than reported. A rocket did misfire – and hit the parking lot, not the building. (So it is not likely to have been a deliberate act.) Damage: a few cars burned out, a few roof tiles fallen onto a marquee, and a rocket impact crater. Casualties: zero.
Steve Bannon interviewed Alex Jones, who said much the same thing:
An hour later, Jim Hoft reported that Israel shared satellite images, showing an intact Gaza Hospital.
Yet HAMAS and their allies in the international media trumpeted the story of an Israeli war crime all night long. Some of them are still doing it.
Results
And this false-flag pseudo-operation – or non-operation – has had grim results. Mobs have stormed and burned United States Embassies in Ammon, Ankara, and Beirut. (The United States and Iran have had no embassies in the other’s countries since 1980.) Already the cries are sounding for yet another Day of Rage.
This brings to mind the third motive the Gazans might have for creating a lurid story out of a misfire. This latest war has divided the Christian community along lines of whether a given Christian likes Jews or not. Different eschatological interpretations (called hermeneutics in Christian scholarship, after the Greek word for interpretation) might inform these differences. “Covenantal” or “replacementist” theologians say that God is Finished with ethnic Israel; “dispensational” theologians do not. The Covenantals are out in force, proclaiming loudly the perfidy of “the Jews” and the “war crimes” of Israel. At least one apparent “covenantal” has already published a summary of Middle Eastern history – and Jewish Diaspora history – suggesting that no Christian has any reason to sympathize with anyone calling himself a Jew today.
Nor does this division limit itself to the right. As CNAV has treated more extensively elsewhere, the left is also dividing itself. Until today, 72 percent of Jews remaining in America have voted Democratic and supported leftist causes. This support extends itself also to institutions, especially institutions of higher education. The Fourth Arab-Israeli War has brought latent performance and wealth envy to the fore, and Jewish benefactors have taken notice.
Judging the Gaza Hospital as a case at law
If the enemies – on the left or right, Christian or Muslim – of Jews and the Jewish State want a trial of the facts of the Gaza Hospital Incident, let’s have one. CNAV suspects they don’t want such a trial, but want to condemn Israel without a trial. But a trial we should have, to reduce the confusion that is now rife about this case, and much else.
A criminal trial, including a war-criminal trial, often turns on credibility of the witnesses. In this case, Israel’s enemies said that Israel bombed the Gaza Hospital – deliberately, in order to kill Christians and “Palestinians.” Non-dispensational Christians have always held that modern Israel is an affront to Jesus Christ.
God, is through, with national Israel! It couldn’t be any clearer! And thank you for calling and sharing, and shall we take our next call, please? Welcome to Open Forum. Harold Camping, radio network head, producer, and talk-show host, now long deceased.
Muslims, who have historically spread their faith primarily by warfare, would naturally exploit that tendency. They also are the source of the instant accusation against Israel.
So are we to believe the Muslim side in this case? Why should we? As real history has shown, Islam did not spread into post-Roman “Palestine” (Palaestina) by polite missionary outreach. It spread through armed conquest. After that, the conquering general build a mosque and a monument on the Temple Mount, to rival the central mosque complex and Kaabah in Mecca. More to the point, successive Muslim generals imported Muslim populations into the region.
Furthermore, Muslim tradition explicitly teaches that it is acceptable to lie to advance the faith. We cannot now, therefore, accept their uncorroborated word uncritically, given their motives to misrepresent facts and events.
Other historical revisionism
But Muslims aren’t the only ones revising history. Once again, we see Christians doing the same – most likely in obedience to “covenantal” and “replacementist” theology.
Greg Reese is a case in point. He has gained a favorable reputation in conservative circles, mainly because he called out the COVID-19 vaccine scam. (So have many others, including CNAV contributor John Anthony of Sustainable Freedom Labs.) But yesterday he turned to Middle Eastern history, trying to denounce the State of Israel as illegitimate.
In his first paragraph he asserts that the name Israel in the Bible refers not to a geographical place, but to believers only. Actually it refers to both. It clearly means a place in the Old Testament, and Paul of Tarsus refers to Israel as a group. (See Romans chh. 9-11.) But John of Jerusalem, in his Revelation, clearly refers to a Land, and to the city of Jerusalem.
Sabbatai Zevi was not the first
Next he says, “… in the 17th century, Sabbatai Zevi was the first Jew to try and re-settle there.” Sabbatai Zevi was a real person – a false Messiah who drew far too large a following. And he did try to found a new Jewish settlement in 1666. (The Chabad organization has the dope on him, and it is not flattering.) But the first Jew? Really? The Crusaders, when they held Jerusalem, did not permit Jews to settle there. If they expelled Jews from Jerusalem, how could Sabbatai Zevi have been the first to resettle in Palestine? Furthermore, the Ottoman Empire, after defeating the Mamelukes in 1517, invited Spanish Jews to resettle in the land. This happened nearly 150 years before Sabbatai Zevi, according to MideastWeb.
We also have proof of a Greek Orthodox presence in the Holy Land. Twelve years ago, Israeli archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a Byzantine church in Acco. (That city was called Ptolemais in the Apostles’ day, and Acre from the Crusades to the Israel War for Independence.)
Reform Jews were not representative then and aren’t today
Next, Reese quotes the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, centerpiece of ultra-liberal Reform Judaism. But instead of crediting Reform Jews with that Platform, he represents it as speaking for all Jews, except only Zionists. Reform Judaism is modern Sadducaism. The Sadducees believed in neither resurrection nor angels nor spirits, as Paul of Tarsus testifies; neither do Reform Jews today. They represent perhaps 33 percent of Jews in America today – scarcely a majority. And very likely the Orthodox and Conservative Jews are “making their Way Up” (Hebrew aaliyah) – i.e., emigrating to Israel.
In his description of the Zionist movement and the reorganization of the Land of Israel, Reese does mention the Rothschilds. They did finance the purchase of the Land from Ottoman absentee landlords. But Reese says nothing about how those landlords laughed all the way to the bank. Like Sanballat in Nehemiah’s day, they said to one another, “What do these feeble Jews think they’re doing? They won’t last a year in that desert!” But Theodor Herzl and others pioneered desert reclamation – making the deserts bloom.
Nor does Reese say a word about Eliezer Itzhak Perelman – Eliezer Ben-Yehuda – the “Renovator of the Hebrew Language.” Today the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem carries on the work he began.
Of the true meaning of naqba, and the Khazar story
Next he represents the Israel War for Independence as a massacre of all who did not share the Zionist vision. In fact the nascent IDF offered the Arab residents of Jaffa (Yafo) the privilege of staying, if they would accept Jewish rule. But the Arab League, especially the Jordanians, said to them, “Come to our side of the line; we will win! And then you can live as Arabs under Arab rule!” The entire Arab population of Jaffa evacuated en masse. The IDF let them go, and Jews moved in.
But of course the Arabs lost the war, and called it naqba – the catastrophe. Greg Reese uses the word naqba to refer to an evacuation he says was forced – but was not. The Arabs would lose again, eighteen years later.
And so we come to Rabbinic Judaism, which, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, developed after Titus destroyed Herod’s Temple. That happened in 70 AD, of course. Chabad offers richer details, such as the origins and place of such writings as Midrash and Talmud. But Greg Reese ties it strictly to the apparent mass conversion of the Khazars, after the latter lost their empire that covers modern Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and small portions of Russian, Turkish and Iranian territory. The Khazars might – or might not – be the ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews. But the Jews who settled in ancient Judea/Palestine under the Ottomans were Sephardic Jews. They came from Spain, not modern Ukraine and other points east.
Final observations – and returning to the Gaza Hospital Incident
Furthermore the Zionists, especially Theodor Herzl and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, were mostly non-religious. For this reason, most rabbis scorned Ben-Yehuda’s quest to bring Hebrew, a liturgical language, into everyday use.
Finally, Reese mentions the Al-Aqsa (literally, Far Point) Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. These were part of General Abd al-Malik’s project to turn Jerusalem into an alternative to Mecca and make himself the new Prophet. The only reason Muslims accept them today is to spite the Jews, a grudge they hold because Muhammad held it.
So now we see the others having a motive to exploit the Gaza Hospital Incident for their own agenda. That conservatives should resurrect the antisemitism of medieval Europe (and, sadly, of William Shakespeare) is doubly tragic. And it is no more excusable than is the antisemitism of half the left – the half now calling Jews “colonizers.”
A willingness to distort history, thoroughly impeaches the anti-Israel side. That was reason enough to accept the accidental or false-flag interpretation of the Gaza Hospital Incident. Physical evidence, revealing the incident to be a wild exaggeration if not a complete fabrication, clinches it.
Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.
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