From the Greeks to Turtle Island:Palestine and the Invention of the White Man 

This article discusses the historical relationship between the European colonization of Bilad alSham (Fertile Crescent) and the beginning of the formation of European identity, European colonialism in the Americas and the invention of the white man’s identity, and how Zionist colonization in Palestine represents the pinnacle of this path and the merging of history with the present.

Since the beginning of the history of the relationship between the peoples of Europe and Bilad alSham, this relationship has been governed by two foundations: the occupation and plundering of wealth from Bilad alSham on the one hand, and the colonization and distortion of Shami (Semitic) culture on the other hand. We see this in the relationship of the Greeks and Romans with Sham, where the gods of the Canaanites (Palmyrenes, Nabateans, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Babylonians, Carthaginians and Pharaohs) and their epic stories were distorted and colonized by the Greeks and Romans to create their own theology and myths. Likewise, the Canaanite alphabet was colonized to form the Greek and Roman alphabets. This European tendency to colonize and transform the culture of others, or the obsession with assuming the identity of Shami peoples and colonizing their cultural heritage from the moment the identity of civilization began to form in Europe, can be traced in all the pivotal events in the history of our relationship as Shamis with the peoples of Europe. It is possible to understand, from sociological point of view, that the emergence and succession of monotheistic religions was a reaction to the European colonization of theology: after the colonization of the land and theology of the Canaanites, the monotheistic thought of the Shami peoples and our Prophet Abraham was born. When the Abrahamic experiment did not succeed, Judaism and our Prophet Moses were born. When the Jewish ruling class collaborated with the Roman occupation and Judaism became the religion of a large part of the Romans, Christianity and our Prophet Jesus were born. When the Romans colonized the Christian religion and moved the center of theology from Jerusalem to the Vatican, Islam and our Prophet Muhammad were born and succeeded in uniting Shami peoples and liberating them from European colonialism.


In the Crusader invasions, the Europeans returned to trying to strengthen the position of Sham in the imagination of national identity, in an attempt to create a comprehensive identity for their peoples with heterogeneous languages, cultures, and traditions. Here it is important to remember that the Catholic Pope was the one who sanctified and blessed the rule of kings in Europe, claiming that the royal families are descendants of the first Christians and the disciples of our Prophet Jesus and his missionaries. Therefore, when the Pope announced the fatwa authorizing the Crusader invasions, he said that the Promised Land must be liberated by its rightful owners, that is, the kings of Europe, the descendants of the first Christians, from the clutches of the infidel Arab invaders, and this will lead to the return of the Messiah and the coming of Armageddon. For your information, the first victims of the Crusaders were the Christian Shamis because they were Orthodox or belonged to local churches that did not recognize the sanctity of the Pope. There is no need to go into detail about how all the flimsy arguments that the Crusaders invented for killing and colonization were repeated by the Jewsaders (meaning the Zionists and not the Jews).


After the failure of the Crusader occupation in Bilad alSham, their attention turned to Andalusia, and thus they cleansed this land of Arabic and Muslim peoples . The moment of the fall of Andalusia is the link between the history of the relationship of Bilad alSham and its peoples with the history of Turtle Island and its peoples. It should be noted that Turtle Island is the common name among the peoples of North America for this continent before European colonization because of the shape of its map. After the Europeans invaded and seized Andalusia, they plundered Andalusian universities and libraries. They learned that the earth was spherical, so they decided to circumvent the Arabs to reach India without crossing Arab lands. They enslaved Muslim sailors who knew how to use the astrolabe and track the stars in navigation, and they were on board Columbus’s ships that arrived at Turtle Island.


Here, after six thousand years of Europeans trying to adopt the Shami identity and their frustration due to the living Shami resistance, the Europeans found themselves facing peoples who were not aware of Shami heritage and its history. To facilitate colonization and genocide, as the Spanish and Portuguese kings requested, the Pope issued the “Terra Nullius” fatwa, declaring that the land of Turtle Island is a “land without people,” meaning that the Indigenous peoples are not human beings but animals. The first colonists said that Turtle Island was the Promised Land and Paradise on Earth, and that the Europeans were God’s chosen people. It is noteworthy that these racist myths will be repeatedly used by the Zionists in the twentieth century, meaning that there is no intellectual creativity in Zionist propaganda. Even some of the English European colonists who belong to the Brown Church, who broke off from the Anglican Church and fled from the oppression of the King of Britain, said this torment and this sacrifice gave them the right to the Promised Land and colonization. They called themselves “pilgrims” and exterminated the Indigenous peoples of the earth. Then they invented “Thanksgiving” where they thank God for helping them steal and kill. Isn’t that what the Zionists said, that they escaped the Holocaust, and that gives them the right to kill and steal, and now Holocaust Memorial Day is nothing but a Zionist Thanksgiving?


In the midst of this stage and the distance from the Shami peoples who were disturbing the attempt to assume their identity and form the unifying identity of the European peoples, the Europeans found themselves without an opponent that could disturb the formation of their myths. Here, on Turtle Island, the Europeans found themselves gathered to kill an enemy who looked nothing like them. Here the formation of the “white man” began to fight the “red Indian.” Here, after the extermination of the Indigenous peoples, the Europeans enslaved the peoples of Africa, erasing their various customs and languages, and melting them down to create the “black man.” Here on Turtle Island, the smelting of the “white man” began in the colonial furnace, first by bringing together the Protestant Germanic peoples, the English, Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians. Then, after the occupation of Louisiana and Quebec by the English, the French people began to be absorbed into the imagination of whiteness, but other European peoples were not to be absorbed into it yet. Only after World War II, and only after the moment when the United States occupied all the Germanic and Latin peoples as well as Greece, were these peoples accepted into the invented “white man” identity.


But the distance of the colonies in Turtle Island from Palestine, did not cure the European obsession with assuming the identity of the colonized peoples and plundering their customs and cultural heritage. For example, the word Canada is from the language of the Haudenosaunee people, known colloquially as the Mohawk people, the correct pronunciation of the word “Kanata” means my village. When the colonizer says that he is Canadian, he is saying that he is the original from the village, and the Indigenous peoples are the sintruders to the village. The same is true of the name of the former French colony, Quebec. The word is from the language of the Algonquin people and it means the place where the river narrows, and this makes it synonymous with Deir ezZor in Syria. The French colonizer defining himself as Quebecois is a declaration that he is the owner of the land and the Algonquin people are foreigners. We see this trend repeated in South Africa, wher the Dutch colonists called themselves “Afrikaner,” meaning no one other than them was a true African. Of course, the path of identity impersonation culminated, and this historical episode that began in the Bilad alSham six thousand years ago was completed, when Jewish European colonizers said t they were the authentic Shamis (Semites), that the Shami Palestinians were invaders and beggars, and that the resistance of the people of Bilad alSham to Zionism was anti-Shami (anti-Semitic).


Legalization of colonialism and ethnic cleansing: Apartheid as a registered trademark of Anglo colonialism


In the last two decades, the term “apartheid” has been frequently used to describe the system of government in colonized Palestine. Unfortunately, the term and this word from the language of the colonizer in South Africa have become widespread to the point of entering the consciousness and the language of the street in the Arab world and the Palestinian people. However, there is little understanding of the history of this term outside its South African dimension. But before diving into this history, the reader must know that each European colonial regime had different characteristics to its dealings with the colonized peoples. When the Spanish met with the Indigenous peoples, they deliberately killed every man, boy, or pregnant woman, and then allowed the soldiers to rape and impregnate all the women and girls. To the point that studies of the genes of the Indigenous peoples in the areas colonized by the Spanish show that the trace of the original Y chromosome from these peoples completely disappeared except with People who live in remote areas high in the mountains or deep in the forests.


As for the French colonists, they chose at the beginning of their colonization of “Canada” to send men without women and to prohibit lords and officers from marrying or reproducing with Indigenous peoples while allowing soldiers to rape Indigenous women but not to give birth to them in order to maintain the purity of blood as they would say. This law caused a major problem for French colonialism and made the demographic battle difficult. Many soldiers were escaping from the military barracks, intermarrying with the natives, and not returning to the colonies, and the lords and officers began to get restless.


Here, a famous Patrona (female pimp) in Paris known as “Madame Bourgeois” found an opportunity for business, as orphanages and the streets were crowded with stray girls and women. She visited the King of France and urged him to announce a royal decree transforming all homeless girls and women in orphan homes into Wards of the king, without individual rights. This legal definition was used to describe Indigenous peoples or enslaved peoples, and she requested that all these enslaved females be sent to what is now known as Quebec under her command in a house she will build in Montreal where she will educate them, raise them, and prepare them to be righteous wives that guarantee the purity of blood and offspring. The king agreed and enslaved the females in France, calling them “the king’s daughters.” He sent the first loaded ship to Quebec, and when the ship arrived at the first port, they found that all the females on board the ship were pregnant, as the ship’s captain had raped them all. The city refused to let the women off the ship, as they were defective goods since they were supposed to breed with the lords and officers. The captain continued on his way and not one city would accept the women, so he docked his ship on a deserted land and built a village just for himself and his descendants. This incident led to the king ordering military escort for women on board the following ships, and threatening to execute any ship captain who had any pregnant females on board at arrival. (On a side note, the escape of French soldiers and their intermarriage with the Cree people gave birth to an invented identity in Canada, which is the Métis, who demand rights equal to those of Indigenous peoples and even try to obtain lands that are the right of Indigenous Nations who still preserve their language and culture.)


In 1663, Madame Bourgeois built her house on the island of Montreal and called it the House of Saint Gabriel. It is considered the oldest non-military building of European colonists in the Americas that is still standing, and it is now a museum that glorifies the Patrona and her enslaved women as the mothers who built the Quebecois nation and their rape as feminist liberation. On the 350th anniversary of the voyage of the first ship, France and Quebec re-enacted the voyage. A Tall-ship similar to the original was built, loaded with women, and sent from Paris to the old port of Montreal, where a popular reception was held. When the women disembarked in their historical dress, they were carried on the back of a horse-drawn goods cart, piled like sheep, and crowds stood there on all the sidewalks of the streets between the Port and the House of Saint Gabriel, they applauded the mothers of their nation like buffoons!


As for the English, in their colonization, they chose the complete ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous peoples and carried their women with them from the beginning. Here on the eastern coast of Turtle Island, in the year 1763, after the English won their war with the French and took control of the French colonies, Quebec and Louisiana, and since the English army was exhausted and had won the war only because of the alliance of the Indigenous peoples with it against the French, the king made a royal declaration known as “ King George’s Proclamation,” which was an order not to extend the lands of the original thirteen colonies in eastern America westward and to consider the Indigenous peoples who had allied themselves with England as equal citizens with the right to their land, and it criminalized the settlement of any of their lands without their consent or selling the land. King George’s Proclamation is considered the origin of the chain of all Common Law in all current and former colonies of England in regards to the rights of Indigenous peoples on all continents.

But King George’s Proclamation did not please the colonists in the thirteen colonies, and it was in fact the main reason for the outbreak of the American Revolution less than two years later in the year 1765, and not the circulating myth about the right of representation in the British Parliament for the colonists in America. The king angered the colonists when he legalized the humanity of Indigenous peoples and their rights to ownership of the land, thereby tying the hands of the colonists who built their economy and made their living from plunder, theft, banditry, piracy, slavery, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder. It should be noted that the fall of the French colonies into the hands of the English in 1763, and the crowding of the streets in France with poor people and criminals whose only way out of poverty or imprisonment was to go to the colonies, where they had the right to kill, plunder, and enrich themselves from colonialism, was the real reason for the French Revolution in 1789. And on the other hand, the ignition of the revolution of the “Black” enslaved people of Haiti in 1791 in the midst of the French Revolution, which was France’s last significant colony in the Americas, led to the resurgence of colonial fervor in France and the success of Napoleon in ascending to power and then reviving colonialism by attacking all of France’s surroundings and restoring some of the colonies.


To return to the subject of English exclusivity in the legalization of colonialism, after Napoleon sold the Mississippi River Basin, which was known as Louisiana, to the United States, the defeat of Mexico and its loss of California, and then the English surrender of Oregon; the occupation of the continental shelf was completed, all Indigenous peoples fell under the command of the United States regime. As Indigenous Nations became geographically cut off from the world and ways of support, financing and armament; the ruling group devoted themselves to the art of cleansing them mentally and physically. Since, in the eyes of the ruling regime, Indigenous peoples no longer had the ability to represent a strategic threat, they decided to legalize and regulate colonialism and ethnic cleansing.


Because the “white man” saw himself as the pinnacle of civilization, he liked to cover all the rubbish of his actions with the most beautiful names that meant the complete opposite of what he was doing, i.e. euphemisms such as calling the invasion of Iraq, stealing all of its resources and antiquities, and killing a million and a half million people “Operation Enduring Freedom”. When the first of these laws was written in the year 1851 in the United States, they called it the “Indian Appropriations Act,” which is a law that defined Indigenous peoples as minors, and to protect them from the malice of the settlers they will be considered the property of the state, and they will be transferred to areas far from the colonies, and prohibited from moving outside the “reservations,” their children will be placed under the command of the church, which would be responsible for raising them and preparing them for assimilation. The colonial regime claimed this law protected the Indians while their lands were handed over to the colonists.


The American “Indian Appropriations Act” (1851) and its success were met with admiration in all the English settlements, and in less than two decades the colonists in Australia copied it and called it the “Aboriginal Protection Act” (1869), meaning they increased in hypocrisy more than their American brothers and openly recognized the theft of land as a protection for the Indigenous peoples. Canada was not far behind, as it wrote the “Indian Act” (1876), in which Indigenous peoples were prohibited from leaving reservations and communicating with their relatives without a permit from the federal police. Between 1876 and 1993, Canada kidnapped nearly half a million Indigenous children and imprisoned them in church schools far from their families, where they were tortured if they spoke their mother tongue. They were either given to families of European colonialists or killed and buried in church yards without their families knowing. After World War II and the emergence of international conventions prohibiting settlement and supporting the rights of colonized peoples to liberation, the South African government decided to urgently copy the experience of legalizing colonialism, so it sent a delegation to Canada to study the “Indian Act” and visited the reserves, and upon its return the government issued the “Apartheid Act” (1948), and then built reserves and called them “Bantustans.”

Finally, in the Zionist colony established by the British in Palestine; after occupying all of the land in 1967 and the Palestinians learning the lesson from the Nakba that they would not be allowed to return if they escaped under fire and thus remained steadfast on their land, the Zionist found himself in possession of a million Palestinians under his command. Thus Zionists visit both Canada and South Africa to reproduce the legalization of colonialism. Accordingly, the “Village Associations Law” (1978) was written, whereby Palestinian villages became reservations from which Palestinians were prohibited from leaving without a military permit, and all lands in their vicinity were nationalized so that settlement could begin in them. For your information, the Village Associations Law was the main reason for the outbreak of the 1982 uprising after revolutionary resistance leaders won the elections and the Zionists refused to acknowledge the results. Zionists re-attempted to codify colonialism in the “Oslo Accords” (1993) in what was called “autonomy,” and as we know, this attempt also failed after the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000. Unfortunately, after Hezbollah’s victory over the Zionists in 2000, vassal Arabict regimes quickly presented another formula to legalize colonialism and apartheid on behalf of the Zionists to give the proposal legitimacy; and it was called the “Arab Peace Initiative” (2002), in which the Arabic countries recognize the legitimacy of the usurping entity in exchange for strangling the Palestinian people in autonomous reservations. Unfortunately for the Arabic peoples, this degeneracy of collaboration with the colonizer is unparalleled in any of the annals of colonialism on any continent on this planet.


Brain-washing and eugenics: the mental and physical colonization of Indigenous peoples


The most difficult task facing the colonizer after defeating the Indigenous peoples, if he does not completely ethnically cleanse them, is how to rule them with the least costs and the least resistance. Therefore, we see that the English colonialists developed two methods to help them control the remnants of Indigenous peoples: “negative eugenics” and “brain-washing.” For your information, positive eugenics is the science of gene purification, and is usually used to screen for diseases and deformities in order to pluck them before marriage, reproduction, and/or childbirth. It is noteworthy that the Nazis followed this science in their racist thought to the utmost extreme, so they planned to kill every disabled or unwanted person to purify their race of impurities as they said. In the case of negative eugenics, the goal of purification is to weaken the genes in the target group.


At the beginning of the occupation process, the colonizer focuses on killing the elite of the Indigenous people, including leaders, thinkers, activists, scholars, and artists, along with the largest number of their relatives and descendants, and if he can, then cutting off their bloodlines completely. Although scientists disagree on what is the main factor in human formation: nature or nurture, meaning are the offspring of creative people the way they are because of genes or because of their upbringing? If an entire family is wiped out, there will be no one to remember its history or find in it a source of excellence and inspiration, and simultaneously the creative genes will not be transmitted to the next generation. That is to say, negative eugenics is not concerned with philosophical discussion as much as it is concerned with the result on the ground of the colonial reality. Of course, there is no need to detail how negative eugenics was used on Indigenous peoples, Iraq, and now in Gaza, but it is necessary to draw attention to the fact that the Holocaust in Gaza represents the highest level of development in negative eugenics because Zionists used the artificial intelligence program “Lavender” to track the elite of the Palestinian society in Gaza, academics, doctors, scientists, journalists, artists, athletes, politicians, and mujahideen, gave the order to the program to kill them only when they returned to their homes and were with their families in order to ensure the complete annihilation of their descendants, and because of that, entire families were erased from the national register.


Finally, with regard to the physical weakening of colonized peoples, the English were the first to use biological warfare in the history of humanity. After they were unable to defeat the peoples of the central region of Turtle Island (the Prairies) in the field of war, they launched biological warfare against them with two tools: first, through trade in clothing or blankets exposed to germs and diseases to which Indigenous peoples had no immunity, such as measles. Second, by destroying any factor in nature that could give Indigenous peoples any self-sufficiency. For example, the governments in Canada and America announced rewards for anyone who kills the bison, a wild cow that Indigenous peoples hunted and fed from, and made them invulnerable to siege and starvation as a weapon of war. It was only when the colonists killed millions of bison that they reached the brink of extinction, and that led to a famine that forced most of the peoples to surrender. As we see today, the American colonizer deliberately poisoned the island between the two rivers (Aljazeera flood plains between Tigris and Euphrates rivers) and deprived the people of Bilad alSham of the bounty of the land that gave them immunity against occupation for centuries. Colonizers turned the Fertile Crescent into a scorched earth from which millions are escaping, and those who remain in the land are exposed to disease due to radiation and pollution, and even the genes of their descendants are weakened and deformed.

 Of course, a lot has been written about mental colonization, brain-washing and the power of the media in this field. But in fact, the first experiments in mental colonization and brain-washing were in the field of Indigenous children education in what were called residential schools affiliated with churches. Then the federal police isolated the reservations, and through oppression and the threat of imprisonment, kidnapped children from their families under the pretext of education, the children were sent to these schools hundreds of kilometers away from their reservations, where they live as prisoners for nine months of the year. In these residential schools, children were beaten, tortured, raped, and killed if they spoke their mothertongue or followed any of their cultural or religious traditions, to the point that the first history of using electricity as a torture tool by attaching it to genitals, as happened in the Abu Ghraib camp in Iraq under the administration of the American occupation, was in the torture of Indigenous children in Canada due to their lack of knowledge of the English language when they were kidnapped and their use of their native language in school. The last residential school in Canada was closed not so long ago in 1993.


Of course the colonizers transferred this experience to Bilad alSham, and there is no need for details as the numbers of Western schools in the region are clear to every sane person. But I will leave you with a funny piece of information, the American missionary Sarah Smith, who was one of the most successful directors of residential schools for Indigenous children and skilled at “killing the Indian within the child,” traveled to Lebanon in 1835 and built a residential school for girls in Beirut and called it the “American School for Girls.” Her main concern was “liberating Arab women” from the tyranny of their society, so much so that the first magazine published by the school was “Vails Up!,” and now this school is known as: The Lebanese American University (LAU) and has graduated generations!

Laith Marouf is an award-winning journalist and political commentator, working in media since 1999. He regularly appears on television and radio, including Radio Sputink, Press TV, Al Mayadeen. He has also published with independent media such as Electronic Intifada, Mint Press, and more. Previously, Laith worked as the Executive Director of Community-University Television (CUTV) and developed its award-winning Quebec Spring live broadcasts embedded within the student movement (2010-13). Laith launched and hosted “Under the Olive Tree” the Palestinian community radio show airing on CKUT 90.3 FM in Montreal and CFRC 101.9 FM in Kingston (2005-10). He won the “Best Special Programming” award at the NCRA for his work on a 12-hour radio marathon with stations from Palestine, England, Canada, and the United States that commemorated the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Radio Free Palestine, 2008).