Fateh: London's Big Ben is "a Palestinian clock"
A Fateh website says that Big Ben is actually "a Palestinian clock". Reporter: Story is garbled, clock is European and Ottoman – not "Palestinian"
את ה"ידיעה" גילה העיתונאי החוקר דניאל גרינפלד
אשר מציין
fake history built out of resentments and garbled stories:
When the clock was built the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans had become obsessed with clock towers, they adopted them from Europe, and planted them in major cities to create a common sense of time.
Sultan Abdul Hamid II erected clock towers to show how modern the Ottoman Empire was. Hamid's clock tower craze was powered by his German allies. Kaiser Wilhelm II gave Hamid a batch of clocks at the turn of the century which the Turks put into clock towers.
The Ottoman Empire erected some of its clock towers in Israel. The clock tower projects in Israel began in 1901 which is also the date when Wilhelm sent Hamid a whole bunch of clocks. One of these clock towers
The clock was styled after European clock towers, likely used a German mechanism, and was a project of the Ottoman Empire. Not of any imaginary "Palestine".
Some "Palestinian" history shy away from claiming that Big Ben is the actual clock tower from Jaffa Gate due to the missing few hundred feet distingushing the two towers. Big Ben is 316 feet tall while the 'Palestinian' clock tower was only 42 feet. They claim that only the mechanism from the stolen "Palestinian clock" was used for Big Ben. But the "Palestinian Clock" wasn't some great triumph of Islamic science. It was most likely one of the Kaiser's clocks. If the British had wanted a German clock mechanism, they would have bought it. And the Jaffa Clock Tower the Ottomans built in Jaffa (not to be confused with the Jaffa Gate one in Jerusalem) utilized the services of a Jewish clockmaker, Moritz Schoenberg.
The Jaffa Gate Clock Tower, built out of white limestone, would have looked nice in the town square of some British village. The British objection to it was that it didn't belong with the biblical setting of the Jaffa Gate. They weren't repressing a brilliant example of Islamic architecture, but a mediocre Islamic imitation of European architecture. Older Ottoman clock towers had been styled after minarets. The clock towers in Israel looked European. Paradoxically, the British got rid of the Jaffa Gate clock because they were trying to protect the traditional architectural character of the region -- only to be accused by Muslim leaders of stealing their clock.
Big Ben's clock mechanism was genuinely revolutionary and the challenges of running giant clocks at hundreds of feet in freezing weather are very different than anything put together by the Ottomans for the modest clock towers plopped down for the Sultan's 25th anniversary. Transplanting the clock mechanism from the Jaffa Gate clock to Big Ben would be disastrous.
And the myth of the "Palestinian" incredible work of genius that the British coveted so much that they turned it into Big Ben, nurtures resentment built on fake history.
