A few days ago Aussie Dave (re)highlighted the case of the Israel hating children’s book with it’s cutesy pictures calling for the destruction of Israel. The mysterious (and now world famous) Mosssad Twitter account shared the post:
This tweet even made it into Ha’aretz’s list of top 11 funniest tweets by The Mossad.
The tweet points out the very well known fact that the Arabic language completely lacks the sound of the English letter “P”. In Hebrew we have the letter “פ” (“pay”) which is most definitely the same as the sound of the English letter “P”. Latin has a P and so does Greek (ever heard of Pi?).
Someone called Nathan Lean, a self proclaimed expert in Islamophobia no less, and the author of an entire book on this made up construct “The Islamophobia Industry” came out with this “genius” reply:
https://twitter.com/nathanlean/status/933380135696392195
Oh boy, where to start. Fortunately another contributor to Israellycool set him straight:
Here’s the chain:
- Plisthtim – Hebrew – invaders from the sea, the Philistines from the bible.
- Palæstina – Latin version of the Hebrew
- Palestine – English version of the Latin
- Filasteen – Arabic version of the English and, of course, lacking the P because non-indigenous language Arabic hasn’t got that sound in it!
Which is exactly correct. The Arabs only call this land “Filasteen” because they literally can’t pronounce the name they chose to give themselves as recently as the early 60’s.
And what is so revealing is that this author of an entire book on so-called “Islamophobia” (which should be spelled Islamofauxbia) is so completely and utterly ignorant and even prepared to demonstrate it in public.
Nathan Lean has a book out next year entitled “Understanding Islam and the West”: I can only imagine how full of nonsense that can be. In addition to Islam and Islamophobia, Nathan Lean also presents himself as an expert on Israel. This is a pretty good take down of him by Andrew Harrod at JihadWatch:
Lean also presents himself as an authority on Israel, a country that draws his consistent scorn, irrespective of how much the ancestral Jewish homeland is “integral to the identity” of Jews. He crudely caricatures Jewish national liberation under Zionism as an “ideology which asserts that a certain group of people have the ‘right’ to a certain tract of land, and can thus expel all others.” “You’re damn right I’m condemning Zionism,” he forthrightly tweets, and claims that the radical Linda “Nothing is creepier than Zionism” Sarsour “is a champion of human rights. Zionism is bad.” He not surprisingly calls Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the “leader of an apartheid project,” although Lean qualifies this by saying that this slander does not apply to Natanyahu’s “entire country. The Occupied Territories, for sure, though.”
Against charges that his demonizing double standards applied to the Jewish state are anti-Semitic, Lean offers the usual lame defense that “criticizing Israeli policy does not make one ‘anti-Semitic.’” “I have no love of or hate for Israel. Its government, and their discriminatory policies, ethnic cleansing, segregation, etc., I abhor,” he elaborates. By contrast, he flagrantly dismisses longstanding Israeli security concerns such as the Jewish state’s demographic suicide under a Palestinian “right of return.” “There is nothing to suggest that a right of Palestinian return would ‘destroy’ Israel. That’s conjecture based on fear,” he tweets, blatantly disregarding facts. His hyperbolic fears tweeted to me encompass only Palestinians: “Well if it was up to you, Palestinians would all be exterminated with no claim to any land or territory. Typical Nazi.”
And people take this guy seriously?
