An Ancient Spoon stirs Mischief against Israel

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An ostensibly minor incident a few days ago has provided devastating evidence of the brainwashed malevolence within the Biden administration towards not just Israel but the Jewish people.  In a ceremony at the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in Bethlehem, the Department of Homeland Security’s investigative arm delivered to the Palestinian Authority a 2,700-year-old spoon dating from the Assyrian empire.

The Assyrians, an ancient people that first emerged around 2000 BCE in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), developed a vast empire that included much of the Middle East, including Egypt, Babylonia, Israel and Cyprus. It finally collapsed around 600 BCE. The spoon, which is thought to have been used to load incense onto fires during rites dedicated to the Assyrian gods and the dead, was seized from the Jewish-American billionaire Michael Steinhardt as part of a criminal probe in New York. In a deal he struck to avoid prosecution, Steinhardt agreed in 2021 to turn over $70 million worth of stolen antiquities that the authorities claim were illegally acquired in Israel.

Ivan J. Arvelo, a special agent in charge of U.S. Homeland Security Investigations in New York, described the transfer of the spoon to the PA as “the historic repatriation” of the artefact. In a similar effusive vein, George Noll, head of the US Office of Palestinian Affairs, called the spoon “an example of Palestinian cultural patrimony”.  Another DHS official, Jeff Brannigan, declared, “This repatriation is representative of HSI’s commitment to ensuring the storied heritages of peoples around the world through the preservation and protection of cultural artefacts.”

This is all utter garbage. It was not an act of repatriation, because the spoon never belonged to the “cultural patrimony” or “storied heritage” of a Palestinian people. There was no “Palestinian people” in antiquity.  The “Palestinian people” didn’t exist at all until it was invented in the 1960s in a strategy to destroy Israel cooked up by Yasser Arafat, the Egyptian-born head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, in cahoots with the Soviet Union.

During the 1920s and 1930s, many of the Arabs who were the 20th-century ancestors of today’s “Palestinians” poured into what is now Israel and the disputed territories from neighbouring Arab states in pursuit of the prosperity they believed would result from the return of the Jews to their ancestral Jewish homeland.  Despite this, the “Palestinians” have gone to laughable lengths to assert that they were the original inhabitants of the land. For example, they have claimed to be descended from the Philistines — who were in fact ancient Greeks.

So why is the US, which claims to be Israel’s staunch ally, giving credence to a false Palestinian identity created to write the Jews out of their own history?  The Biden administration’s sympathy with the Palestinians is well documented. It has persistently refused to call them to account for their murderous aggression and incitement. It continues to fund them regardless of their “pay-for-slay” rewards to terrorists’ families. It forces Israel to undermine its own security in pursuit of a “two-state solution” that the Palestinian Arabs have refused for almost a century.

But what the Assyrian spoon transfer reveals is that the Palestinian Big Lie is being promoted as truth by none other than the Department of Homeland Security, which was created after 9/11 to protect America against terrorist attacks. Far from being a key link in the chain of western security, the DHS has internalised the fiction about Palestinian identity that is promoted as a principal weapon in the war of extermination against Israel — and is in turn the flag behind which march the Islamist foes of the west.

Noll said of the spoon transfer, “This is a historic moment between the American and Palestinian people and a demonstration of our belief in the power of cultural exchanges in building mutual understanding, respect and partnership.”  It was certainly a historic moment. What it demonstrated, however, was that the Biden administration is a far more profound foe of Israel and the Jews than most people have yet realised.

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