Posted on 12/17/2005 2:23:50 PM PST by fallujah-nuker
Ahmadinejad and Islamic Judeophobia
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared in Mecca last Wednesday that people in the West “insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces, and they insist on it to the extent that if anyone proves something contrary to that they condemn that person and throw them in jail.” (He was alluding to British historian David Irving, who was recently arrested in Austria for “Holocaust denial.”) “Although we don’t accept this claim,” Ahmadinejad went on, “if we suppose it is true,” then the Europeans should not compensate Jews by giving them Jerusalem, they should give some of their provinces in Europe—like in Germany, Austria or other countries—to the Zionists, and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You offer part of Europe and we will support it. Why do they insist on imposing themselves on other powers and creating a tumor so there is always tension and conflict?
Ahmadinejad’s remarks came six weeks after he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and accused those who “have invented a myth that Jews were massacred” of placing this myth “above God, religions and the prophets.” Both statements were almost universally condemned by politicians and commentators, especially in Europe and North America. Such condemnation was largely absent in the Islamic world, however, and it was absent for two reasons. First of all, what he had to say is what most Muslims think, but prefer not to admit to their Western interlocutors. Secondly, any condemnation would be potentially suicidal for those making it, as it would look like supporting Israel against a fellow Muslim leader. At the moderate end of the Arab political spectrum, Jordan’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Hassan Abu Nimah, criticized Western leaders for their “hysterical” reaction to Ahmadinejad’s words. At the more radical end, Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, praised the Iranian leader at a press conference: “It seems that the president’s words did not find favor with regional and international leaders. But despite this, the Muslim public supported Iran on this issue in the past and will also support it in the future. The Iranian government’s position on Palestine fills Muslim hearts with pride.”
There should be no doubt which view is closer to the “street.” Ahmadinejad’s words express a “popular consensus from Cairo to Baghdad, from Ramallah to Karachi,” he is “producing rhetoric that Arab potentates . . . cannot; otherwise they would lose precious American protection in the form of investment/aid dollars and/or weapons sales.”
The roots of Muslim Judeophobia are deep, and they antedate the problem of Israel-Palestine by some 13 centuries. The Muslims’ hatred of Jews harks back to the career of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad. “Antisemitism” may sound illogical, as both Jews and Arabs, the founders of Islam, are supposedly of the same or racially similar Semitic stock. The semantic confusion is the result of the invention of the term “antisemitism” in the 19th century to give anti-Jewish sentiment a “scientific” veneer. It was never meant to place all Semitic peoples in the same category. Ever since, it has denoted, and was meant to denote, different types and degrees of animosity toward the Jews, and modern antisemitism has found a perfect fit in the Arab world when the drastic deterioration in its relations with the Jews occurred in the 20th century, resulting from the conflicting claims over Palestine. Inherent religious animosity was fully coupled with anti-Jewish attitudes on ethnic and geopolitical grounds, but the religious and political aspects of that struggle were as inseparable in the early seventh century as they are today.
In the early days of his prophetic career, in Mecca before the Hijra, Muhammad had hoped to be accepted as God’s Messenger by the Jews. He hoped to win them over by ordering his followers to turn in the direction of Jerusalem during prayer and adopting the Jewish Day of Atonement, Ashura, as the Muslim holy day. He seems to have underestimated the allegiance of Arabian Jews to their scriptures, however, as well as the effect that the many discrepancies between Muhammad’s Koranic pronouncements and the Jewish tradition would have on them. Muhammad’s superficial, secondhand knowledge of the tradition made it impossible for him to argue on par with the learned merchants of Medina. The result of the Jews’ refusal to give up their ancient faith in favor of the claims of a poorly educated Arab refugee was that Muhammad’s earlier, favorable pronouncements about the Jews evolved into an implacably hostile position. The perceived slight, as was customary with him, turned into rage.
To de-Judify his teaching, Muhammad duly embellished the story of Ishmael, Abraham’s elder son, born of his concubine Hagar, to suit his political and prophetic needs. Abraham himself, according to Muhammad, “was not a Jew, neither a Christian; but he was a Muslim and one pure of faith; certainly he was never of the idolators.” (Kuran, 3:60) After Isaac was born, Sarah asked Abraham to banish Hagar and Ishmael. They were left in the valley of Mecca, Muhammad’s story goes, where Allah looked after them. Allah also comforted Abraham by telling him that Ishmael, too, would be the father of a great nation. When Abraham eventually visited Ishmael, they jointly built the Kabah, the first temple of Allah. Ishmael had become father of the Arabs, who are the sons of Abraham no less than the Jews through Isaac. Muhammad’s earlier, favorable pronouncements about the Jews evolved into an implacably hostile position. “Verily, Allah teaches us, and we believe It,” Muhammad declared, “that for a Muslim to kill a Jew, or for him to be killed by a Jew, ensures him an immediate entry into paradise and into the august presence of Allah.” A contemporary Muslim scholar summarizes the result in a chillingly euphemistic account: the final result of the struggle was “the disappearance of these Jewish communities from Arabia proper”
This “disappearance” was not a spontaneous phenomenon but a precursor of all other “final solutions.” It was the result of what would be known in our own time as ethnic cleansing and genocide. The first stage consisted of individual murders of Jews; the second entailed the expulsion of two tribes from Medina (626 AD); the third was completed with the slaughter of one remaining tribe, Banu Qurayzah (627). Muhammad offered the men conversion to Islam as an alternative to death; upon their refusal, up to 900 were decapitated at the ditch, in front of their women and children. “Truly the judgment of Allah was pronounced on high” was Muhammad’s elated comment and Allah allegedly added a few words of his own: “And He has caused to descend from their strongholds the Jews that assisted them. And he struck terror into their hearts. Some you slaughtered and some you took prisoner.” (Kuran, 33:10-27) The widowed or orphaned Jewish women were subsequently raped; Muhammad chose as his concubine one Raihana Bint Amr, whose father and husband were both slaughtered before her eyes only hours earlier; but such treatment had already been sanctioned by prophetic revelation.
Muhammad’s Endloesung was accompanied by dozens of suitably grim “revelations” in the Koran. The Jews have drawn on themselves wrath upon wrath, and their just reward in the form of “disgracing torment” yet awaits them. (Kuran, 2:88-90) They break covenants, “and you will not cease to discover deceit in them.” Allah “caused you [Muslims] to inherit their lands, and their houses, and their riches, and a land which you had not trodden before. (Kuran, 33:26-27) The Jews are cowards: “If they fight, they will show you their backs.” They are doomed to “humiliating agony.” (7:167) Allah has put “enmity and hatred amongst them till the Day of Resurrection.” (5:64) Even when they seem united, their hearts are divided. (59:14) They are cursed by Allah, who transformed them into monkeys and swine. (5:60) Indignity is put over them wherever they may be because they transgress beyond bounds. They cling greedily to this life, even if it is humiliating and villainous. (3:112)
In the centuries after Muhammad, there have been periods when the Jews were able to live in relative peace under Islamic rule, but their position was never secure. They were generally viewed with contempt by their Muslim neighbors, and their survival was always predicated on their abject subordination and degradation to them. Mass murders of Jewish dhimmis (“protected people”) started in Morocco as early as the eighth century, where Idris I wiped out whole communities. A century later, Baghdad’s Caliph al-Mutawakkil (847-861) designated a yellow badge for Jews, setting a precedent that would be followed centuries later in Nazi Germany, and synagogues were destroyed throughout Mesopotamia in 854-859. On the other side of the Muslim empire, on December 30, 1066, Joseph HaNagid, the Jewish vizier of Granada, was crucified by an Arab mob that proceeded to raze the Jewish quarter of the city and slaughter its 5,000 inhabitants. And those were the most civilized Muslims in history, in Baghdad, at the peak of one alleged Islamic “golden age,” and in Spain, at the peak of another. The situation of Jews in Arab lands reached a low point in the 19th century.
With the emergence of Zionism, the Islamic world faced a “Jewish problem” for the first time since Muhammad. This time, Muslims faced it from a position of obvious political, military, and economic weakness. By contrast, for the first time since the destruction of the temple, the Jews were poised to reestablish a polity that would be territorial as well as spiritual and cultural. It was a rude awakening for the Umma, after the phenomenal success of the earlier centuries, to find itself, by the early 20th century, on what looked like the losing side of history. The many weaknesses produced the sense that something had gone terribly wrong, but it did not result in creative self-examination. The question never was “What have we done?” but always “What have they done to us?” The Mongols and Western imperialists have all had their share of blame apportioned, but, in the 1930s, the Jews became most prominent among those who were to blame. Hitler’s Germany sensed this and made a concerted and successful effort to plant “modern” antisemitism in the Arab world, where the struggle for Palestine facilitated the acceptance of the antisemitic interpretation of history. In addition, Nazism and Islam shared a quest for world dominance, demand for the total subordination of the free will of the individual, belief in the abolishment of the nation-state in favor of a “higher” community (in
Islam, the “Umma”; in Nazism, the Volksgemeinschaft), and belief in undemocratic governance by a divine leader (an Islamic caliph; the German Fuehrer). The complete denial of the legitimacy of Jewish existence was the central point of contact, however.
There is a wishful myth in circulation among liberals that Islam accords respect to all people of the Book, i.e. Christians and Jews. While Islam indeed accords them a higher standing than it does polytheists such as Hindus (notwithstanding the question of whether Hinduism properly understood is truly polytheistic) or African animists, this hardly amounts to “respect.” Only Muslims can attain salvation. Jews’ and Christians’ refusal to acknowledge Muhammad as the messenger of Allah dooms them to unbelief and eternal suffering after death. Christians are mortal sinners because of their belief in the divinity of Christ, their condemnation is irrevocable, “and the Fire will be their abode.”
When Ahmadinejad called Israel a tumor on the Islamic soil that ought to be “wiped off the map” he was reflecting a mainstream Muslim position that was initially articulated in the 1940s by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who also headed the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine. In May 1941, the mufti declared Jihad against Britain and made his way to Berlin. He met Hitler in November 1941 and announced that the Arabs and Muslims were Germany’s natural friends and allies. He conducted radio propaganda and set up anti-British espionage and fifth-column networks in the Middle East. Thanks to his recruiting work, tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, Kosovo Albanians, Crimean Tartars, http://stosstruppen39-45.tripod.com/id10.html Chechens, and others joined SS volunteer units that were to become famous for their savagery.
Even before the Wannsee Conference (January 1942), the “modern” wave of Middle Eastern pogroms had started. In 1941, during Shavuot, 180 Jews were murdered in Baghdad. Six years later, the Syrian delegate at the United Nations, Faris el-Khouri, warned: “Unless the Palestine problem is settled, we shall have difficulty in protecting and safeguarding the Jews in the Arab world.” This was a self-fulfilling prophecy: Over 1,000 Jews were killed in the ensuing anti-Jewish rioting in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen, triggering the mass exodus of Jews from all Arab countries. In the early 1940s, there were close to a million Jews throughout the Arab world. There are only a few thousand left today, mainly elderly. It is a relatively little known fact that the number of Jews displaced from the Arab world in the aftermath of the creation of Israel exceeds that of Palestinians expelled by the Israelis.
The contemporary heirs to the Nazi view of Judentum are not skinheads and Aryan Nation fans. They are Muslim teachers, religious leaders, and mainstream intellectuals. Quite apart from the ups and downs of the “peace process” in the Middle East, quite apart from the current posture of the government of Israel, the crude way they demonize Jews as such is startling. The most prominent daily newspaper in the Arab world, Al-Ahram, thus reflected on “What exactly do the Jews want?” in June 2001: “Israel is today populated by people who are not descendants of the Children of Israel, but rather a mixture of slaves, Aryans and the remnants of the Khazars, and they are not Semites . . . people without an identity, whose only purpose is blackmails, theft and control over property and land, with the assistance of the Western countries.” The second-most-influential Egyptian daily, Al-Akhbar, went further on April 18, 2001: “Our thanks go to the late Hitler who wrought, in advance, the vengeance of the Palestinians upon the most despicable villains on the face of the earth. However, we rebuke Hitler for the fact that the vengeance was insufficient.” Such sentiments are circulated in the mainstream media and internalized by the opinion-making elite throughout the Muslim world.
Ahmadinejad’s histrionics remind us of the need to be aware of the historical record of political Islam and to harbor no illusions about its ultimate ambitions today. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was on to something real when he declared, in December 1992, that his country’s “struggle against murderous Islamic terror is also meant to awaken the world, which is lying in slumber.” We should be no less aware, however, that a common problem of global Jihad is sometimes used by Israel as a cover for policies that facilitate its growth. When neoconservative propagandists suggest that America should go to war with Iran in the name of fighting terrorism—“Had we seen the war for what it was, we would not have started with Iraq, but with Iran, the mother of modern Islamic terrorism”—it is time to call their bluff and say “enough.”
As I point out in the soon-to-be-published collection of essays on the Middle East conflict by a group of Chronicles editors and contributors (Peace in the Promised Land—A Realist Scenario, Rockford, IL: Chronicles Press, 2006), the development of a coherent anti-jihadist strategy in Washington should go hand-in-hand with demystifying the relationship between America and Israel, redefining it in terms of mutual interests devoid of metaphysical or emotional mists:
The American interest demands the destruction of global jihad in all its forms and the continued existence of the state of Israel, but both these imperatives are based on geopolitical rather than emotional, moral, or scriptural grounds. Among reasonable people of good will, the concept of “land for peace” is still fundamentally valid. It needs to be rethought in Washington more fairly and evenhandedly than before.
May be of interest?
Maybe the Chronicles editors, instead of the author, inserted the last paragraphs.
Trifkovic has, in effect, joined the Ustaše Party and the religion that indoctrinated the people of that Party against his own and against the Jews who were also massacred by the Ustaše.
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Why does this Ahmadinejad guy remind me of 1939 Europe? Could it be the similarity of his words to that time period's tyrant? Could it be Europe's appeasement strategy towards despots that hasn't changed since the beginning of the twentieth century? Could it be the world wide war we fight now against a like ideology?
Strange how history constantly repeats itself, isn't it?
5.56mm
It's not clear to me that appeasement, circa 2005, is a solely Euro phenomenon. The ideology is the same, the victims however will not be confined to Jews, gypsies and political malcontents.
OH GIVE ME A BREAK! This is Catholicism's fault somehow?
And, BTW, it was a European anomaly in particular.
Here's a little of the background information on that. It's a timeline with links--very easy and interesting read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anti-Semitism
The religion that supposedly inspired the Ustase, according to some, was Catholicism. It's way more complex than that. The Croats were Catholic, by and large, and some Catholic laity and clerics participated in the evil of this party (committing mortal sin, and thereby, forfeiting their religion/priesthood).
bump 4 l8r
And I'm guessing the Muslims probably helped out?
You'll find much more information about them behind the following link. Wikipedia is not my favorite information source (often too many omissions, and I tend to look for source documents), but it will do in this case.
Ustaše
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ustase
"Ustaše held that Bosnian Muslims are Muslim Croats. Unlike Orthodox Serbs, Muslims were not persecuted by them and a few joined in the Nazi and Ustaše forces as part of Waffen-SS divisions SS Handschar in Muslim Bosnia (led by Amin al-Husayni) and SS Kama adviced by Edmund Glaise von Horstenau (the representative of the German military in Croatia) and led by Colonel Ivan Markulj, who was later replaced by Colonel Viktor Pavicic. Lt-Col. Marko Mesic commanded the artillery section. The state even transferred a former museum in Zagreb to be used as a mosque."
Looks like my guess was correct.
Trifkovic understand Islam, but does not want to fight it. He wishes to appease it.
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