Palestinian Authority Ambassador invents history, claims that "Palestine and its people are mentioned more than 250 times" in Bible

Jihad Watch

This is naked historical revisionism. The "Palestinians" of today have no ethnic or national connection whatsoever with the Philistines of the Bible. From the indispensable "Myths and Facts" site:

Palestinian Arabs cast themselves as a native people in “Palestine” – like the Aborigines in Australia or Native Americans in America. They portray the Jews as European imperialists and colonizers. This is simply untrue.Until the Jews began returning to the Land of Israel in increasing numbers from the late 19th century to the turn of the 20th, the area called Palestine was a God-forsaken backwash that belonged to the Ottoman Empire, based in Turkey.
The land’s fragile ecology had been laid waste in the wake of the Arabs’ 7th-century conquest. In 1799, the population was at it lowest and estimated to be no more than 250,000 to 300,000 inhabitants in all the land.
At the turn of the 20th century, the Arab population west of the Jordan River (today, Israel and the West Bank) was about half a million inhabitants and east of the Jordan River perhaps 200,000....
Family names of many Palestinians attest to their non-Palestinian origins. Just as Jews bear names like Berliner, Warsaw and Toledano, modern phone books in the Territories are filled with families named Elmisri (Egyptian), Chalabi (Syrian), Mugrabi (North Africa). Even George Habash – the arch-terrorist and head of Black September – bears a name with origins in Abyssinia or Ethiopia, Habash in both Arabic and Hebrew.

Here is the obverse of this endeavor: "PA ambassador to India: 'Palestine and its people are mentioned more than 250 times' in the Bible," from Al-Hayat Al-Jadida via Palestinian Media Watch, December 19, 2011 (thanks to David):

...The ambassador spoke about the statements by the candidate in the American Republican Party primaries, Newt Gingrich, against our people, in describing this people as 'invented'. He [Sadeq] said that this ignoring of the existence of the Palestinian people and its rights reflects logic which mocks intelligence, culture, and the Bible itself, in which Palestine and its people are mentioned more than 250 times."

Posted by Robert on January 1, 2012 6:31 AM