Submitted by:
liberty44

---

---

Subscribe to this Author

---

Paste this code into your site to promote this story!
<a href="http://www.breakthematrix.com/Iraq-War/The-Father-of-Lies" onClick="document.images["breakTheMatrix"].src='http://www.breakthematrix.com/badge/badge.php?cid=17284';return false"><img name="breakTheMatrix" src="http://www.breakthematrix.com/badge/badge.php?cid=17284" border="0" /></a>

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/giraldi.php?articleid=13226

The first historian, the Ionian Greek Herodotus, known as the "father of history," has also been called the "father of lies" because of his reluctance to spoil a good story with the truth. Today the neoconservatives twist history to fit their political agenda. The National Review's house historian and Dick Cheney favorite Victor Davis Hanson has left academia and launched a new career as a pundit able to modify any historical event to accommodate the contemporary war on Islam and democracy promotion a.k.a. regime change. His muddle of the Peloponnesian War, in which he likens an "all-powerful" Athens to modern day America while conveniently forgetting that Athenian hubris lost the war to the unpleasant Spartans, is downright humorous. The Kagan brothers likewise wrap their support of the endless engagement in Iraq and a bellicose policy towards Iran into a historical framework, as if being able to name Napoleon's chief of staff while praising General David Petraeus somehow elevates the latter.

But compared to the Israelis, the American neocons are neophytes when it comes to reshaping the past. Israel has long funded major archaeological projects intended to emphasize the Jewish presence in Palestine while minimizing or even denying the presence of others in the region, an attempt to demonstrate that Jews have a historical legitimacy that Arab inhabitants lack. For years, Israel has had an official historical creation myth that it has promoted that alternately saw Palestine as largely depopulated in 1948 or voluntarily vacated by its Arab inhabitants. Golda Meir famously stated that there was no such thing as the Palestinians. It is only recently that Israeli historians have begun to describe how the Arabs were, in fact, subjected to a deliberate policy of terrorism by Israel's founders that drove them from their homes.

Read »

Created 17 weeks 6 days ago
Made popular 17 weeks 5 days ago