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Not only an invented people, but a badly invented people

by Mojambo ( 147 Comments › )
Filed under Fatah, Gaza, Hamas, Islamic hypocrisy, Islamic Invasion, Israel, Middle East, Palestinians, Syria at December 12th, 2011 - 2:00 pm

The Knish gives his take on the whole kerfuffle regarding Gingrich’s truthful comment that the Palestinians are an invented people. What Gingrich said is actually true and George Stephananpolous could not question the veracity of that statement. When Sirhan Sirhan (who came to America form the West Bank) was identified, he was correctly referred to as a Jordanian immigrant.

by Daniel Greenfield

In the post-news environment, media no longer exists to report, it exists to disseminate glib talking points that sound good at first, but don’t stand up to examination. Fact checks, one of the latest media gimmicks, have become another vector for disseminating talking points. So have media blogs which began repeating the same ridiculous thing over and over again.

Take the response to Gingrich’s accurate statement that the Palestinian Arabs are an invented people. Aside from all the hysterical “sky is falling” nonsense, is the comparison between the Americans as an invented people and the Palestinian Arabs.

[…..]
Americans are not a self-invented people, they are a self-evolved people. The American revolution was a struggle between a colony and the mother country that ended in a break and the creation of a new country that still used the language and much of the culture of the mother country, but at the same time the colonies had been slowly evolving their own unique identity.

The “Palestinian” Arabs on the other hand are an invented people, and not even a self-invented people. That dubious honor fell to some comrades in Moscow and the Arab nations who found it convenient to have terrorist militias that could launch attacks across the border, supposedly on their own initiative, but in reality answering to them.

Their whole claim to a state is the bizarre insistence that they are the region’s original inhabitants who were driven out by the actual original inhabitants, the Jews. When they are actually the descendants of the Muslim conquerors who drove out or subjugated the native inhabitants. It’s as if George Washington had not only put on an Indian costume but began claiming that his ancestors were there for thousands of years before the Cherokees drove them out.

Palestinian identity is just so much gibberish. The official definition of that identity encompasses only those parts of the Palestine Mandate which Israel holds today.

The people who live on the parts of the Palestine Mandate that were turned into the Kingdom of Jordan in 1921 are not Palestinians. There is no call to incorporate them into a Palestinian state. The people who lived in the parts of Israel that were captured by Jordan and Egypt in 1948 weren’t Palestinians, and there was no call to turn the land that today comprises the so-called “Occupied Territories” into a state. But in 1967 when Israel liberated those areas– only then did they magically turn into Palestinians.

How is anyone supposed to take this nonsense seriously?

[……]

When the Jews rebuilt their country, they did not call it Palestine, that was the name used by European powers. They called it Israel. The local Arabs who had come with the wave of conquests that toppled Byzantine rule had no such history and no name for themselves. Instead they took the Latin name used by the European powers and began pretending that it was some ancient tribal identity, rather than a regional name that was used by the European powers to describe local Jews and Arabs.

Even Arab place names invariably lack historicity. The Arab name for Jerusalem is Al-Quds or the holy city. It’s a little like calling New York, Big City and pretending that it means you saw it first, when it actually means that you saw it last and are piggybacking on its existing identity.

The Arabic for Hebron is a translation of the Hebrew. The same goes for Bethlehem. Ah but what about Nablus? The Jews may call it Shechem, but the Arabs have a unique name for it. Surely Nablus is part of the great and ancient Palestinian heritage. Not a chance. Nablus isn’t Arabic, it’s the Arabic mispronunciation of Neapolis, which if you happen to know Latin means “New City”.

Nablus has the same relationship to Neapolis, as Filistin does to Palestine, it’s the Arabic mispronunciation of the Latin. The name “Nablus” is every bit as regionally authentic as Naples, in Italy or Florida, which has the same meaning.

But what of the “Occupied Territories”? The Jews call them Judea and Samaria. The Arabs call them ad-difa’a al-gharbiya or the West Bank. Nothing says ancient history like bluntly descriptive names. But what of Ramallah, capital of the Palestinian Authority, that at least is an Arabic name. And that’s true. It is an Arabic name. A name almost as ancient as the city which dates back to the 16th century when a group of Christian Arabs crossed over from what is today Jordan fleeing Muslim persecution. Under Jordanian rule, Ramallah was overrun by Muslims and today it has a Muslim majority.

When the capital of your ancient people was founded by Christians from the other side of the river in the 16th century, and it wasn’t actually your capital until the bygone days of the 1990’s, and it only became your capital because you drove off its residents in the 1950’s, then your ancient civilization has a problem. It doesn’t actually exist.

The Arabs are not indigenous, they are colonizers who overran the land in tribal groups. There is no Palestinian people. For that matter there isn’t a Jordanian people or an Egyptian people. Just clans living behind one set of colonial borders drawn by European mapmakers in the 20th century. Those clans moved back and forth. Prosperous families lived like feudal lords. There was no common culture or national identity.

[…..]

The Al-Husaynis are no different than the House of Saud or the Al-Thanis of Qatar, they are ruling clans pretending to be a nation. The Palestinian Authority is for the most part a coalition of prominent clans, some of the same clans who refused to deal with the Jewish inhabitants and tried to drive them out instead.

If the Palestinian Authority was willing to be honest, it would call itself Husseinstin instead of Filistin, but since its entire claim to the land derives from a supposed ancient history, in which time they did not get around to thinking of a name for themselves, or creating a single government until the ancient days of the 1990’s, calling themselves the Husseinstinians wouldn’t have worked.

The Hashemite ruling family, also Saudi expats, may call their country the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, but they keep the “Jordan” part in there all the same, because it creates the illusion of antiquity. But Jordan is at least the river. What is Palestine? It’s the foreign name for a region that was meant to be a subsidiary of Syria. And the PLO began life as a Syrian front group, with its original chairman, who had represented Syrian in the UN, asserting that there was no such place as Palestine.

This bloody circus has been going on for way too long. Enough that the Arab states and the local clan leaders have managed to turn out generations of children committed to killing in the name of a mythical identity for a state that they don’t really want. The call for a Palestinian state was a cynical ploy for destroying Israel.

It’s why the negotiations never go anywhere, they’re not meant to go anywhere. The players aren’t free agents, they answer to their masters, and they can’t function without them. Hamas is running around like a chicken without a head, because it’s afraid of losing its Syrian backing. The Fatah leaders of the PA are even more incoherent, their ploy to threaten to unilaterally create a state has fizzled, and now they’re threatening to turn over rule to Israel if they don’t get what they want.

Self-government was the baseline for the American Revolution, but the Palestinian Authority can’t even manage that. Its budget consists of foreign aid. Its entire economy runs on money given to it by the rest of the world. It has an entire UN agency to cater to it. And despite being the biggest welfare state on the planet, it’s still completely incapable of taking care of itself.

Gingrich is right that the “Palestinians” are an invented people, but they’re a badly invented people. The Big Lie technique has turned their existence into an established fact, but the only basis for it is the repetition of the same lie. Orwell said that “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Gingrich’s statement was a revolutionary act and no matter how the media might pillory him for it, as long as people continue to challenge the universal deceit of the press, then the revolution can continue.

Read the rest – A badly invented people

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Posted in Fatah, Gaza, Hamas, Islamic hypocrisy, Islamic Invasion, Israel, Middle East, Palestinians, Syria | 147 Comments »

Say no to Mohammad and to Howard Gutman

by Mojambo ( 103 Comments › )
Filed under Dhimmitude, Islamic Supremacism, Islamic Terrorism, Israel at December 8th, 2011 - 5:00 pm

Who is responsible for Muslim violence? As the Knish points out – apparently Muslims are never responsible for their own  actions. Until the Islamic world is held to higher standards, they will never be modernized.

by Daniel Greenfield

Who is responsible for Muslim violence? Anyone but Muslims. When Howard W. Gutman, Obama’s ambassador to Belgium, told his audience that Jews should be accepting responsibility for the violence practiced on them by Muslims, because it’s their own damn fault for insisting on having a Jewish state, the State Department wasn’t willing to stand behind his words, but neither did it disavow him.

Imagine for a moment if Howard W. Gutman had adjusted his red hipster glasses and told his audience that Muslims should take responsibility for Islamic terrorism.  Hillary would have personally fired him, after yelling at him for a good thirty minutes, and Obama would have issued an apology to the Muslim world. Every newspaper column on both sides of the Atlantic would have spent the better part of the week denouncing Islamophobia and clucking over how mainstream intolerance has become.

The idea that Jews should take responsibility for the Muslim violence directed at them is mainstream, but the notion that Muslims should be taking responsibility for Islamic terrorism, even to the extent of condemning it is still one of those No-Go Zones. But is it more of a stretch to suggest that people should take responsibility for their own violence or for the violence directed at them?

[…….]

When Americans die, it’s blowback. When Muslims die, it’s more imperialistic warmongering by the running dog lackeys of the new world order

When Americans die, it’s blowback. When Muslims die, it’s more imperialistic warmongering by the running dog lackeys of the new world order. Muslims are responsible for nothing. We are to blame for everything. For what we do and for what they do.

Muslims are never told that a domestic policy discriminating against women and minorities, and a foreign policy based on supporting terrorists and then lying about it, might be causing them some blowback. Blowback is only for the CIA or the Mossad, it’s never for the ISI or the Mukhbarats (who as we all know are pawns of the CIA and the Mossad anyway).

To the far left and the far right, Muslims are our abused stepchildren. If they act out, then it’s because we didn’t treat them the right way. If we had, then we would have peaceful relations with them in accordance with the philosophies of progressive globalism or free market isolationism or platonian psychorealism.

Instead of treating Muslim civilizations as separate societies with their own concerns and priorities apart from us, Western liberals view Muslims as mirrors of their own society, identifying their anger as a symptom of some fault within ourselves. It never occurs to them that Muslim terrorism isn’t a knee-jerk response, it’s an affirmative action carried out to promote the spread of their way of life. That it’s a quasi-religious act with deep roots in Islamic history long predating the modern Western state.

The breadth of Islamic imperialism makes European imperialism look small and silly

The breadth of Islamic imperialism makes European imperialism look small and silly. Muslims ruled over major portions of Africa, Asia and the Middle East in places that Europeans rarely ventured for centuries. Islam conquered and held on to far more territory than Alexander or Rome, only the British Empire came anywhere close to its scope and did not manage to rule for a fraction of the time or convert as much of the native populace.

Talking about Islamic imperialism as if it were some sort of reflex reaction to Western support for the Shah or arms sales to Israel is so hopelessly stupid that it beggars belief, particularly when historians assert such a ridiculously narrow view of history. We might as well pretend that China is expanding its reach because it’s angry over the Opium War or jet fighter sales to Taiwan.

Expansionism is a natural imperative of civilizations. Empires or the splintered leftovers of empires strive to reconstitute their glory days. The failure to understand that Muslims are more than the bastards of that brief window of European colonialism, they are the scattered and divided pieces of a religious civilization aspiring to a renewal of empire or caliphate is behind every stupid opinion on Islam.

Refusing to acknowledge that Muslims are responsible for their own violence is a refusal to accept that they have their own agenda

Refusing to acknowledge that Muslims are responsible for their own violence is a refusal to accept that they have their own agenda, an agenda that has little to do with the transnational imperatives of building a fairer world through secular international law. It’s a refusal to treat them like people.

Treating them like abused children who have to be cadged into attending international therapy sessions with us is stupid and destructive. The Muslim world is destructive enough without being infantilized further. And the left has taken up the white man’s burden in another form, treating the rest of the world as if it can’t move on until the West atones for its sins.

The Muslim world has a booming population, a surplus birth rate, concentrations of wealth and a lot of spare weapons… and it’s doing what comes naturally with those things, invading other countries with lower birth rates and trying to take them over. That has been the pattern of human civilizations long before the ivory tower and the academic text. It is sheer arrogance to imagine that it would change because the descendants of Richard the Lionheart, Philip II and Leopold V decided to practice war no more, except for humanitarian reasons.

Who is responsible for all that? They are. Muslims are not robots or steel balls in a pinball machine, acts of violence, whether by individuals or entire countries are premeditated and have specific objectives. The bygone left insisted that a mugging was a reflex response to class distinctions, not a voluntary action by a living, breathing human being. Now it acts as if Muslim terrorism is a reflex to another Jewish family moving into a house in Israel or some fellow torching a Koran.

This pernicious nonsense robs us of our rights to life and property in the name of appeasement, and it robs Muslims of something even more precious, their own personhood. Muslims, like the rest of us, are moral actors, with the power to make choices and to accept their consequences. Every time the left acts as if Muslims don’t have that ability, as if they are fuses that we light, they deny that Muslims are moral actors, rather than inert substances that are being acted upon.

[……]

It is not enough to condemn terrorism. It is more important to assign responsibility to the actors and to discuss their motives.

It is not enough to condemn terrorism. It is more important to assign responsibility to the actors and to discuss their motives. Anger alone does not make for a war. Resentment may fuel rebellions, but it doesn’t extend to conquests. Nazi Germany wasn’t simply angry over the aftermath of WWI, its leaders headed up an oligarchy that began by looting the Jews and then set out to loot all of Europe. The Soviet Union wasn’t driven by class warfare or ideology alone, but by power and greed.

If all the theorists unknotted their keffiyahs for a moment and actually thought about what the Muslim world has to gain from Muslim violence, then they might actually have something rational to contribute to the conversation. Instead we get impassioned lectures on justice and dogmatic interpretations of what justice is.

When Howard Gutman justifies the beating of an 18-year-old Jewish girl in Belgium by pointing to the settlements, it never seems to occur to him that the reason her attackers beat her is because they could. Because they wanted to beat someone. Her Jewish identity only meant that she was fair game, as Jews have been fair game for violence in the Muslim world for over a thousand years. It did not originate the violence, it only channeled it in a socially acceptable manner. Socially acceptable in the Muslim world and in the Obama Administration.

[……]

We are responsible. Not for the violence, but for tolerating it. Bomb me once, shame on you. Bomb me three hundred times, shame on me. Not only do we tolerate Muslim violence, but we excuse it and we buy into the narrative of our attackers which they use to justify their actions. Instead of taking on the responsibility of ending their violence, we take on the responsibility for causing it, and thereby, in the manner of the bullied with the bully, perpetuate the violence.

Only Muslims can end their violence at the source, but we can end it on the receiving end. We can’t stop them from abusing women in their own country or minorities or animals, but we can stop them from abusing us. We can reject their narrative and stand up to their violence. We can say no to Mohammed and Gutman

Read the rest – Who is responsible for Muslim violence?

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Posted in Dhimmitude, Islamic Supremacism, Islamic Terrorism, Israel | 103 Comments »

Barry, Leon and Howard tell us what they really think

by Mojambo ( 113 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Egypt, Hamas, Islamic Supremacism, Israel, Palestinians, Turkey at December 6th, 2011 - 8:30 am

The Knish gives his take on the anti-Israel statements coming from the self proclaimed  “most pro Israel administration” ever – and yes Leon Panetta does look like your least favorite type of accountant.  I did not know that Howard Gutman was once a lawyer for a former member  the Weather Underground. I guess Bill Ayers recommended him.  Also let us not forget Hillary Clinton’s ridiculous comparison of Israel with Iran – then we can come to the conclusion that these are not rogue elements but a calculated campaign of deligitimization. The only thing we can do is just vote these fools out even if it means holding our noses.

Via Boker Tov, Boulder

When in the space of a few days the secretary of state compares Israel to Iran, the secretary of defense criticizes Israel’s diplomacy, and a high profile ambassador blames Israel for anti-Semitism, it means a memo from higher up has gone out.

 — Rick Richman

by Daniel Greenfield

Leon Panetta, fresh from a stint as CIA director and off to his new job as Secretary of Defense, did his best to  butch up in the usual way of DC hacks “daringly” delivering the same utterances that have been current in the capital for generations.

When Panetta, the man who looks like everyone’s least favorite accountant or funeral director, showed up at the Saban Forum, he butched up by shouting that Israel needs to “get to the damn table” and negotiate with the Palestinian Arab terrorists.

What table? Which terrorists? Those questions didn’t bother Panetta, who after years of being wedgied by Biden and having his pants pulled down by James L. Jones had finally discovered the thrill of being a bully. Or as David Igantius at the Washington Post puts it, “He liked the “just get to the damn table” line so much that he repeated it, for good measure.” Which is a common phenomenon among five year olds who say a bad word for the first time. It’s a little more pathetic when it’s being done by the Secretary of Defense.

Not done for the day, Panetta went out to lay out the rest of his “Blame Israel” peace plan, suggesting that it was up to Israel to mend fences with Egypt and Turkey. It’s hard to say whether the former CIA director is familiar with anything that happened in Egypt this week, but he might have noticed that the big winners in the election down there were the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis.

It’s always a good idea to mend fences when the people on the other side of the fence want to establish a demented theocracy and kill you, but the fence mending is going to have to be a unilateral project and the fences are going to be really high and thick with missile launchers on top.

Turkey, currently occupying parts of Cyprus and Kurdistan, and purging its domestic opposition, is a more likely target for fence mending because of the lack of fences. It’s strictly naval warfare over there. Rick Perry complained that he couldn’t be expected to build a fence on the Rio Grande, and is Israel really supposed to mend fences on the Med with bankrupt Islamists upset that they haven’t gassed their quota of Kurds this week?

According to Panetta, Egypt and Turkey share an interest in regional stability. The missing letter that the former CIA director is looking for is a “d”. Shared. Egypt shared an interest in regional stability before it was taken over by an apocalyptic cult after its government was pushed to the side by Leon’s boss in the Oval Office in between two rounds of golf and a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.

Turkey has a compelling interest in regional stability. Its plan for regional stability is called reviving the Ottoman Empire, but with more mosques. This doesn’t worry Panetta who thinks that no empire based around ornate furniture and peaceful religions can be a bad thing.

But Panetta isn’t as stupid as he looks. Shouting about Israel needing to get back to the “damn table” and maybe bring him a “damn ottoman” so he can put his feet up, isn’t really about Israel, it’s about the new Secretary of Defense giving the Saudis a shout out to remind that this administration still has their back. Sure Chas Freeman didn’t get to draw up the National Intelligence Estimate, but Leon will run out and get them a Hookah any time they want it.
[……]
At this point in time an American defense official ranting that Israel needs to get back to the table, some table with somebody, is the equivalent of the Coca Cola company putting Santa on their soda bottles in December. Everyone knows it’s coming and no one pays much attention to it.

The “Get back to the damn table” policy is the product of senility. It’s half a dozen administrations pounding the table and shouting, “Get me my medication,” and “Bring me my apple juice” and “Get back to the damn table and sign a peace agreement with one of the terrorist groups and this time make it stick somehow, we don’t care how.”

As Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld talked about the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. For Secretary of Defense/CIA Director/Official White House Dog Groomer, Leon Panetta, everything is an unknown unknown, except for the received wisdom of his old bosses back in the Clinton Administration. When in doubt scream that everything would be better if the Israelis just got back to the table.

Make some gestures, Panetta urged. Do a little dance, sing some showtunes, apologizing for your soldiers, your national defense policy and anything else you can think of. “If the gestures are rebuked, the world will see those rebukes for what they are — and Israel’s moral standing will grow even higher. And that is why Israel should pursue them,”

Which world does Panetta mean exactly? The Muslim world, which has this black book that is filled with the names of Mohammed’s favorite slave girls and six year olds, and a whole lot in there about killing Jews, isn’t likely to be won over with gestures, whether they are in American Appeasement Sign Language or New York Cabbie, though the latter would at least be more honest.

[…….]

Not to be outdone, Howard W. Gutman, this nation’s ambassador to Belgium joined in the chorus explaining that some types of anti-semitism were more justified than others.

Gutman, the former lawyer for a member of the Weather Underground, certainly knows which way the wind is blowing in Europe. Buggenhout, a Belgian municipality that no ambassador had wanted to visit before because of the embarrassing name, actually put up a plaque commemorating his visit there. But you don’t get to be the man dubbed “the most popular ambassador in Belgium” by not bashing Israel.

But give the Gut some credit, he knows how to warm up a crowd. Before launching into a diatribe about the Jews, he told his audience, and I quote, “If you are new to Belgium, the frites, chocolate, beer and mussels  are terrific and have only the oval waffles called Liege waffles, put no toppings on them, and get them straight from the waffle iron.” With fantastic material like this, you can see why Howie had to fall back on the classics.

After the Liege waffles and the chocolate beer, the Honorable Howard W. Gutman explained that there were two kinds of Anti-Semitism. There is the unambiguously bad kind.

“There is and has long been some amount of anti-Semitism, of hatred and violence against Jews, from a small sector of the population who hate others who may be different or perceived to be different, largely for the sake of hating.  Those anti-Semites are people who hate not only Jews, but Muslims, gays, gypsies, and likely any who can be described as minorities or different.”

This kind of Anti-Semitism is of course never practiced by Muslims, unless Muslims are capable of hating themselves for being different from themselves. It’s practiced by people who hate Jews, Muslims, gays, gypsies and ambassadors who wear stupid glasses. Crazy irrational racists whose bigotry can’t be accounted for. And then there’s the other kind.

[…….]

“It is a tension and perhaps hatred largely born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian Territories and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuing Israeli-Palestinian problem. ”

Does it ever enter Howard W Gutman’s mind that possibly there are people in those neighboring Arab states or among Muslims who hate people for being different, or is that a superpower only possessed by Western Europeans? History would suggest otherwise, but Gutman didn’t get this far by being a historian, he got it by raising money for the post-American man in the White House.

Gutman goes on to explain that this kind of Anti-Semitism is really a very subtle and complex nuanced thing. For example he explains, that Muslims cheer him whenever he goes, which means they can’t be Anti-Semitic. Clearly it’s just Israel that they hate, not Howard W. Gutman. And the Gut warns against “lumping the problem with past instances of anti-Jewish beliefs and actions or those that exist today among minority haters under a uniform banner of “anti-Semitism.”

Which is to say that when a Jewish child is punched in the face by a Belgian accompanied by a shout of “Dirty Jew”, then it’s Anti-Semitism– but when he’s punched in the face by a Muslim with a shout of “Ibtach Al-Yahood” then it’s one of those complex problems that we shouldn’t lump under a uniform banner of Anti-Semitism. We should just take our lumps and accept the blame for a thousand years of Islamic Anti-Semitism which began when Mohammed got on his flying horse and traveled through time to visit modern day Gaza.

According to Gutman, every time a settlement goes up in Israel, a Jewish child gets punched in the face, and the only people who can make it stop are Israeli leaders.

Anyone who finds this noxious patter familiar might remember it from one of Soros’ speeches or from 1930’s rhetoric. Or Gutman might just default to the patron saint of socialism’s suggestion, “A careful study of anti-Semitism, prejudice and accusations might be of great value to many Jews, who do not adequately realize the irritation they inflict.” But H.G. Wells was closer to saying what he meant than Gutman is.

[…….]

But as Gutman’s repulsive speechifying reminds us that it’s not the color of Obama’s skin or his middle name that’s at issue. You can be named Howard W. Gutman and still be the worst of enemy to Israel and the Jewish community.

Gutman’s remarks, coming right after Barack Hussein Obama had made some gestures to try and reassure nervous Jews that he doesn’t intend to nuke Israel this term, can’t be too helpful. But the Gutmans and the Soroses and Sabans greet this sort of thing with enthusiasm. Finally someone is telling those damn Jews to go back to the table. And then under it. Because someone has to be the ottoman for the new Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate. Someone has to be willing to bow down and accommodate the feet of Islam.

Make a gesture. Take your lumps. But don’t you dare bomb Iran or stay away too long from the table. If you do, the next time a synagogue is burned, you only have yourselves to blame. And don’t even think of not voting for Barack Hussein Obama, just think if you don’t vote for him, Leon Panetta and Howard W. Gutman will be out of a job.

Read the rest – At the table with Barry, Leon, and Howard

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Posted in Barack Obama, Egypt, Hamas, Islamic Supremacism, Israel, Palestinians, Turkey | 113 Comments »

Why the surprise over Muslim Anti-Semitism being a key component of the Arab Spring ?

by Mojambo ( 109 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Dhimmitude, Egypt, Islamic Supremacism, Islamists, Israel, Jihad, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Turkey at December 4th, 2011 - 4:00 pm

Islamic anti-Semitism long predated the  founding of the State of Israel. One of the biggest insults Muslims hurl at their leaders when they tire of them are that they are really Jews! I recall in 1970 a Jordanian Army newspaper after routing the PLO in September claiming that Arafat was actually Jewish. When Lara Logan was sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square her attackers cried out that she was a Jew. The old Arab battle cry  “Itbach al-Yahud” (Slaughter the Jews!) still resonates in Gaza, Ramallah, Cairo, and even Baghdad. In Turkey the Islamists are now saying that  the founder of the secular Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was Jewish too. This inherent anti-Semitism makes it highly unlikely that any peace deals will be nothing more then temporary truces, something that pseudo-experts Thomas Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg have not fully absorbed.

by Daniel Greenfield

Western columnists eager to bestow their blessing on the democratic impulses of the Arab Spring are troubled by its darker side, the bigotry, the sexual violence and religious fanaticism. Rather than admit that they may have gotten the Arab Spring wrong, they look at its dark side as an external factor, rather than an internal one.

Case in point, Jeffrey Goldberg’s recitation of Anti-Semitism in the Arab Spring leads to the same baffled attempts to understand. “On the surface this makes no sense: Arabs are rising up against Arabs, so what does this have to do with the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”?” he asks.

The question isn’t all that baffling if you look back at the historical context of the Protocols which emerged from the poison pens of two secret police agents of two different countries seeking ways to stifle reform by associating their opponents with a vast Jewish conspiracy. It took place in a century where the left and the right spent a good deal of time accusing each other of working for the Jews. That century gave way to the next one where they stopped writing essays and began running death camps.

The Muslim world is still backward enough to be besotted with the worst lunacy of the period, the Masonic conspiracy is an article of faith for most Islamists, right up there with the Koran, Mein Kampf is a bestseller and Fascism and Communism are admired in a way that horrifies the Eurocrats who visit from time to time. Grand conspiracy theories explain everything and everyone is assumed to have a complex secret agenda.

But those aren’t the sources of the Anti-Semitism in the Arab Spring. Nor is Israel. The fundamental error that is made over and over again is to assume that Muslim attitudes toward the Jews emerge out of politics rather than theology. While Israel certainly looms large in the Muslim imagination, the image of the Jews as the nemesis of Islam is of ancient theological provenance dating back to Mohammed’s efforts to ethnically cleanse the region of non-Muslim minorities.

When Arab Spring mobs paint the Star of David on pictures of dictators or call them Jews, they are using an old insult. To call someone a “Jew” in the Arab world is the equivalent of calling him a dog. There is no special racial slur needed, “Jew” is already enough.

Arab Muslims have been calling people they don’t like “Jews” long before the modern State of Israel

The reason for this isn’t Israel or Gaza or Lebanon—it’s that Jews were a minority in the Muslim world. While the Islamists and the Arab Nationalists, along with their Western useful idiots, insist on spreading their revisionist history of a golden age of tolerance and brotherhood that ended abruptly in 1948, the truth is that being a minority in the Arab Muslim world was dangerous and degrading. And long after the Muslim world has been emptied of Jews, “Yahood” still remains an insult.

When Thomas Friedman heard that a nickname for many American soldiers in Iraq was “The Jews”, in his usual clueless fashion he wrote up an extended column about Sharon, Israel and the peace process. But Friedman missed the point. Arab Muslims have been calling people they don’t like “Jews” long before the modern State of Israel.

But in a conspiracy rich environment, “Yahood” is also often meant a literal accusation that someone actually is a Jew. Forcible and the occasional voluntary conversion of Jews to Islam created its own paranoid obsession with “Secret Jews” in the Muslim world. And some forcibly converted Jewish communities such as the “Jedid Al-Islam” did remain secretly Jewish while pretending outwardly to be Muslim. This is a special obsession in Turkey where the conversion of cult members known as the Donmeh led to accusations that the Young Turk movement was a Jewish conspiracy.

The prototype for the accusations that the dictators are Jewish was the light-skinned and blue-eyed Kemal Ataturk. His supposed Jewishness remains a special obsession for Turkish Islamists, albeit one that is still illegal for them to articulate. That obsession also spells out the difference between the United States and the Muslim world. If it were to be discovered that George Washington had a Jewish father, it wouldn’t delegitimize the United States. But Muslim states are still based on ethnic or religious grounds. And the best way to undermine Ataturk’s attempt to drag Turkey into the modern age is to not merely claim that Ataturk wasn’t a Turk and an enemy of Islam (both true)… but that he was a Jew.

The utility of accusing Ataturk of being a Jew is obvious. It’s a charge that bypasses the need to attack his ideas or debate their legitimacy. Once he is a Jew then it is a given that he was part of a vast conspiracy and that everything he did was wrong. “Jew” is not only shorthand for dog, it’s also shorthand for enemy.

If accusing Ataturk of being Jewish doesn’t seem that crazy, try the Saudi royal family whom the Lebanese Minister of the Environment accused of secretly being the Jewish tribe that had been ethnically cleansed by Mohammed. From the standpoint of Islamic theology this makes perfect sense. It recycles the ancient Jewish enemy into a current foe.

No matter how rabidly Anti-Semitic a Muslim leader may be, he cannot escape the possibility that sooner or later someone will accuse him of being a secret Jew

Hate the Wahhabis? Then just go ahead and claim that Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab’s grandfather wasn’t really Suleyman but Shullman. What about Mubarak? He must have had a Jewish mother. Gaddafi’s mother being a Jew is now a common belief in Libya. Those wonderful democratic Syrian protesters are shouting, “Alawi Jews” referring to the Alawi quasi-Shiite minority sect that rules the country. Even Ahmadinejad got hammered with accusations that he was a Jew.

No matter how rabidly Anti-Semitic a Muslim leader may be, he cannot escape the possibility that sooner or later someone will accuse him of being a secret Jew. If the Saudis and Ahmadinejad aren’t safe, then no one is.

[…..]

Tyranny is a vague idea. The Jews are a very specific idea. Tyranny means illegitimate rule, but what makes it illegitimate? The Arab Spring activists will answer that it is undemocratic. Why is it undemocratic, because it fails to represent the majority. And how do they prove that the tyrant fails to represent the majority? By claiming that he really works for the Jews.

It’s a fairly simple formula that isn’t limited to the Muslim world. The left leaned heavily on it to charge that the Iraq War was illegitimate because it was a project of the Jews. Tomes on the Israel lobby attack foreign policy not on its merits, but on “Jewishness”. And it’s no coincidence that of all the Democratic senators who voted for the war, the one ruthlessly targeted for destruction by the left was Joe Lieberman.

Goldberg suggests that, “The Arab Spring should liberate people not only from oppressive rulers, but also from self-destructive and delusional patterns of belief.” Having conceded that the Arab Spring is rotten with Anti-Semitism, his proposal is that the Arab Spring should liberate the Arab Spring from being the Arab Spring. And perhaps Goldberg should try to lift himself up by his own belt. That will work just as well.

All Arab and Muslim movements are founded on “self-destructive and delusional patterns of belief”. Take those away and you’re left with some spicy food and curious architecture. All of them also pretend to unify the people around a common identity and in opposition to outside forces that seek to undermine that identity.

From the time of Mohammed onward, the Jews have played the role of the “outside force” that is out to undermine Arab and Muslim unity. When Arab leaders tell Western diplomats that Israel is the source of regional instability, that is what they mean. In Islamic terms they are charging the Jews with “Fitna” and Western diplomats and journalists strip away the theology from the accusation and pretend that it’s a serious policy statement.

The Sunni Muslim world still believes that it can form a secure common identity if only it could get rid of Israel, and then the Christians, Shiites, Alawis and all the other “outside forces” who are a barrier to the harmonious brotherhood of the Ummah. That combination of theology and politics is what drives the Anti-Semitism of the Muslim world and of its theological and nationalist movements including its latest one.

There is no reason to be surprised by Anti-Semitism in the Arab Spring. The Muslim Middle East has failed to break with the poisonous religious and ethnic politics of the past. The Arab Spring is a continuation of those same toxic politics under the banner of democracy. The fragility of Arab and Muslim identity, its insecurity and instability, the unworkability of its structure, always requires enemies to serve as a focus and shoulder the blame. And in every season, spring, summer, winter or fall, that group has been the Jews.

Read the rest – Muslim anti-Semitism and the Arab Spring

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Posted in Anti-semitism, Dhimmitude, Egypt, Islamic Supremacism, Islamists, Israel, Jihad, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians, Turkey | 109 Comments »

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