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Israel's supernatural rats chase away Jerusalem's Arabs

by tikun | July 24, 2008 at 02:58 pm | 212 views | 4 comments

Palestinian Media Watch: by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook

The Palestinian Authority has come up with yet another wild accusation about Israel. Two PA newspapers - one directly controlled by the office of PA President Mahmoud Abbas - are accusing Israel of releasing rats with supernatural qualities to chase away the Arab residents of Jerusalem.
According to the PA papers, the Israeli-Jerusalem rat is:

1. Immune to rat poison;
2. Aggressive and larger than usual;
3. Unafraid of cats and able to scare them away;
4. Highly fertile -- female rat gives birth to 140 babies a year, four times the normal average;
5. Highly selective -- Jewish residents of Jerusalem apparently are not affected by these rats.

Israel's goal, the libelous PA articles accuse, is "to turn the residents' life into a living hell, forcing them to leave." Interestingly, the articles do not mention how the rats are trained to differentiate between Jewish and Arab residents of Jerusalem.
The following are the two stories:

"...one of the most amazing things that we've read during this month is that [Israeli] settlers have been bringing chests filled with rats and releasing them in the Old City's [Arab] neighborhoods; they breed and have become a major curse... the [Arab] residents' efforts to counter this infestation have failed, especially since cats run away from these rats because of their size and ferocity... All of the conventional efforts to kill them have not succeeded, because they seem to be immune to poison and they breed in the sewers. It is known that this female rat gives birth seven times a year, each time giving birth to 20 babies; which compels Jerusalem's [Arabs] today to face the dangers of settlement and the infestation of rats..." [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, controlled by the office of Mahmoud Abbas, July 18, 2008]

"Large numbers of [Israeli] settlers have been bringing huge cages full of rats and releasing them onto the streets and alleys of the Old City [Jerusalem]...in order to turn the [Arab] residents' life into a living hell, forcing then to leave..." [Al-Ayyam, July 17, 2008]

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Caoimhin1

at 14:59 on July 24th, 2008

good stuff:

tikun, I like this story. It's good stuff.

Jarrett Martineau

at 15:04 on July 24th, 2008

Thanks for the post. Your headline would be much clearer and easier to read if you simplified it to:

"Israel's supernatural rats chase away Jerusalem's Arabs".

Please consider amending it accordingly.

tikun

at 15:16 on July 24th, 2008

Thanks Jarrett. Done. It makes more sense. Less confusing.

tikun

at 09:19 on July 25th, 2008

By Tsvi Bisk, response:

And the origins of the "Star of David" are from Hindu India and have nothing to do with Judaism – so what? The Jews have adapted it as their national symbol; the Moslems have adopted the crescent as the symbol of their faith and when Norwegians and Swedes look at their flag they do not see a symbol of the North Star, they see a cross – certainly the non-Swedes and non-Norwegians in these countries see a cross. You yourself state this symbol was co-opted by Christianity and has thus become a cross.

All this misses the point – all are the symbols of their respective cultures and only the Jews are expected to deracinate themselves and get rid of their symbol. And by the way why would a Nordic symbol be any less "racist" than a cross when substantial portions of modern Scandinavian populations are of non-Nordic origin? It is still the same principle – the cultural symbol of the majority ethnic groups "imposed" on minorities.