A hoax...?

A story credited to the Pakistan Daily is making the rounds throughout the blogosphere:

Another Israeli spokeswoman, Tzipora Menache, stated that she was not worried about negative ramifications the Israeli onslaught on Gaza might have on the way the Obama administration would view Israel.

She said ‘You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can’t criticize Israel.”

Nobody has found a second source for this allegation. I've been unable to find any other trace of this Tzipora Menache.

The original story includes this equally inflammatory section:

The Israeli spokesman, Nachman Abramovic demonized Palestinian children stating "They may look young to you, but these people are terrorists at heart. Don’t look at their deceptively innocent faces, try to think of the demons inside each of them … I am absolutely certain these people would grow to be evil terrorists if we allowed them to grow… would you allow them to grow to kill your children or finish them off right now? … honost and moral people ought to differentiate between true humans and human animals. We do kill human animals and we do so unapologetically. Besides who in the West is in a position to lecture us on killing human animals. After all, whose hands are clean?"

Human animal mentioned by Abramovic refers to the Judaic religious belief that Jews are Gods chosen people; the elite and the pure-blooded, while all others (non-Jews, Goyims, gentiles) are animal souls incarnated into human bodies to serve the Jews. Killing a human animal is just a sport like hunting deer or birds.

Again, I can find no other accounts mentioning this Abramovic person.

The original story also carries this outrageous comment:

Israel’s former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu advocated carpet bombing of Gaza stating that "there is absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during massive military offensive on Gaza" (The Jerusalem Post, 30 May, 2007). His son Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu amplified his father’s genocidal call stating: "if they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand, then we must kill 10,000 and even a million"

This section is reasonably accurate. Eliyahu is a real person, and he and his son are indeed well-known in Israel for insisting that Jewish settlers remain in Gaza (a small strip of land which belongs to the Palestinians). The elder Eliyahu called for the carpet bombing of Gaza and argued that soldiers in the IDF should disobey orders if they are told to force Jewish settlers to leave Gaza. The Jerusalem Post piece is here.

This blog prints a quite different version of the Pakistan Daily story, containing the questioned material. I don't know which version of the story appeared first. The Pakistan Daily writers seem to have stitched together material from the internet, and thus may be the unwitting parrots of a hoax, and not the originators.

The assault on Gaza was horrifying enough; there is no need for the creation of hoax material. In fact, the concoction of an anti-Semitic forgery will only increase the paranoia of those Jews who believe that Hitler's heart beats within the chest of every gentile. As Norman Finkelstein has written:

Appropriating a Zionist tenet, the Holocaust framework cast Hitler's Final Solution as the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews. The Jews perished because all Gentiles, be it as perpetrators or as passive collaborators, wanted them dead. "The free and 'civilized' world," according to Wiesel, handed the Jews "over to the executioner. There were the killers—the murderers - and there were those who remained silent." The historical evidence for a murderous Gentile impulse is nil. Daniel Goldhagen's ponderous effort to prove one variant of this claim in Hitler's Willing Executioners barely rose to the comical. Its political utility, however, is considerable...

The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred has served both to justify the necessity of a Jewish state and to account for the hostility directed at Israel. The Jewish state is the only safeguard against the next (inevitable) outbreak of homicidal anti-Semitism; conversely, homicidal anti-Semitism is behind every attack or even defensive maneuver against the Jewish state. To account for criticism of Israel, fiction writer Cynthia Chick had a ready answer: "The world wants to wipe out the Jews...the world has always wanted to wipe out the Jews." If all the world wants the Jews dead, truly the wonder is that they are still alive — and, unlike much of humanity, not exactly starving.

This dogma has also conferred total license on Israel: Intent as the Gentiles always are on murdering Jews, Jews have every right to protect themselves, however they see fit. Whatever expedient Jews might resort to, even aggression and torture, constitutes legitimate self-defense. Deploring the "Holocaust lesson" of eternal Gentile hatred, Boas Evron observes that it "is really tantamount to a deliberate breeding of paranoia.... This mentality ... condones in advance any inhuman treatment of non-Jews, for the prevailing mythology is that 'all people collaborated with the Nazis in the destruction of Jewry,' hence everything is permissible to Jews in their relationship to other peoples."

In other words, every time someone concocts an anti-Semitic hoax, Jews in America will mutter "They're at it again" -- and they will redouble their support of Israel.

More than that: They will presume that anyone who tells an uncomfortable truth must be a hoaxer. If the Eliyahu quote, or some similar quote, proves embarrassing, one may simply deny the accuracy of the citation; anything one does not want to hear may be dismissed as just another anti-Semitic fabrication. I've run into this phenomenon on several occasions. I've even seen this passage from the Bible dismissed as inaccurate and "out of context." (It isn't.)

The verifiable record suffices, and we should stick to it. Hoaxing is counter-productive.

(Yes, I myself have been guilty of a leg-pull or two. But those pranks don't address truly serious issues, and I practice the evil art only on a certain date.)