ARABS AND JEWS IN THE MIDDLE EAST, A TRAGEDY OF ERRORS

By Rev. James Parks

Zionists are their worst propagandists, for they have failed to make the case for the justice of the Jewish claim in Palestine, writes the late, philosemitic James Parkes, a British theologian, in this irresistibly thought-provoking essay he published in 1969, Arabs and Jews in the Middle East: A Tragedy of Errors. If only there had been more of them - their presence was eroded by local lawlessness and misrule - Jews would have been viewed as naturally a part of the landscape as the Maronites in Lebanon. (I would add that the millenarian presence of Jews elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa serves to bolster their claims in the region as a whole.)

"Because this is written in 1967 and not in 1917 or 1947, it is useful to begin with the reminder that, through Arab action, the Jewish population of Israel is now more than half composed of middle-eastern Jews of whom the majority have never, in their three thousand years of recorded history,had any contact with Europe. They are, in fact, with the possible exception of the Copts, by far the oldest identifiable people of the whole Middle East. The Old Testament records their presence in Syria and the Lebanon; their exiles were carried away to what is now Iraq; they were founder members of the population of Alexandria; their traditions in the Yemen go back to the time of Solomon.

"They were little moved by the emergence of Zionism; for if the Arab population stagnated under Turkish misrule, it is not surprising that the Jewish and Christian minorities lived a still more stagnant life. But the anger aroused by the establishment of Israel, and the defeat of the Arab attempts to drive the Jews into the sea, made their positions in various ways impossible. To some extent they were penalised officially; certainly they were exposed to mob violence; their basic lack of rights and equality under Islam made their only recourse flight; and they came, many of them regretfully, to Israel. But they are there now, and are a political factor of
importance in the present situation. Moreover the Six Days' war has added a possible hundred thousand other Jews from North Africa, Egypt and other Arab countries to the total number of middle-eastern refugees.

"Nobody would be more surprised at this twist in the development of Israel than the original propounders of Zionism; for Arabs are quite right in saying that it was primarily European considerations which formed the impulse for Zionist propaganda and settlement in the years between 1917 and 1947.

"It was European Christian antisemitism which convinced Herzl that the Jewish people needed a home of their own. It was the antisemitism of Russia, Poland and then Nazi Germany, which sent tens of thousands of European Jews to Palestine in order to rebuild there a national home which they could enter, in the words of Churchill 'of right and not on sufferance'. And it is equally true that they thought of themselves as bringing the higher European civilisation to the backward areas of the Middle East. Alternatively they thought of themselves as the generation which was 'returning' to the Land of Israel after nearly two thousand years of exile, a thought which could not fail to be completely unconvincing to any but themselves. However romantic it may be, one cannot expect the world to accept such methods of bridging a gap of two thousand years, and ignoring what had happened in the meantime.

"But a real tragedy is that the Zionists were their own worst propagandists. They ignored not merely their strongest argument, but their real case. They were NOT bridging a gap of two thousand years. They were augmenting a Jewish population which had never ceased to exist in the country, and which survived largely because every successive Muslim ruler recognised that it had a right to be there. The Zionists ignored this vital relationship, probably because they were in opposition to the religious conservatism of eastern European Judaism, and simply saw the existing Jews of Palestine as exponents of the religious fanaticism they disliked. But,from the point of view of the Arab reaction, the real justification for the Zionist presence is that the Jewish population of Palestine has always been as large as could find the humblest means of existence in the Land of Israel.

"That the Jews were finally reduced to a ghetto existence in the four cities of Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron,was due entirely to local lawlessness and misrule. It had been for centuries unsafe for a Jew to live in a village, or even to travel freely about the country. This had nothing whatever to do with the treatment of Jews in Europe, of which in fact the local population was naturally ignorant.

"It is thus no fault of the Jews that their presence in Palestine has not been as visible as the Christian presence in the Lebanon. If it had been, then the Balfour Declaration might have aroused Arab argument and opposition, but it would never have aroused such anger and such an intolerable feeling of injustice.

"The real Jewish title deeds are the endurance of a continuous community in the country, which had a significance for the whole Jewish people such as has never been possessed by any other Jewish community, however rich and numerous.

"When Jewish autonomy was destroyed by the Romans in 70 and 135 A.D. the richest and most numerous Jewish community was in Alexandria. But it was not the Alexandrian Jews, but the little community of rabbis and their disciples in Jabne, south east of Jaffa, who evolved a Judaism which was independent of Temple and geographical unity, and which enabled Jews and Judaism to survive its long dispersion.

"When successive waves of Turkish and Mongol nomads invaded Mesopotamia, and destroyed the prosperity of the populous Jewish centres which descended from the Babylonian exiles, and which had produced the Talmud and its commentaries, it was in Galilee that a remnant of Jewish scholars performed the essential work of revising and standardising the text of the Bible itself, giving both the Jewish and Christian worlds a text which is that which we use today, and which provided the basis for much of the scholarship alike of Jews in the Muslim world and in Christian Europe.

"In 1492 and 1496 the richest medieval Jewish community,that of Spain and Portugal, was expelled under the influence of the Inquisition. Many of the fugitives took refuge in the Turkish empire, for Turkey was then at the height of her power and culture. But for the constant raids of the bedouin,Tiberias and all the area around it would have been settled by these refugees, for the Sultan had given Tiberias with a wide area and a generous autonomy to a Jewish favourite for just this purpose.

"As it was, the little town of Safed in the mountains of Galilee provided a safer Jewish refuge, and there not only was rabbinic Judaism given a new standardisation by Joseph Caro, but a new Jewish mysticism was evolved by Isaac Luria and his disciples which provided comfort and warmth to the Jewries of Russia and Poland during the succeeding centuries of persecution and oppression.

"Unlike the Jewish communities in other middle-eastern countries, this community in Palestine was constantly recruited by immigration from all parts of the Jewish world, eastern and western, for its permanent core was a community of students and old men concentrating on the study of sacred books, and with little opportunity for bringing up families and finding normal openings for earning a living.

"For many centuries it survived only because it enjoyed charitable contributions from all over the Jewish world. But it did survive, and, whenever opportunity offered, it is fascinating to see that automatically Jews in Palestine took advantage of it to dig their roots a little deeper. Safed was the home of scholars and mystics, but it found a solid economic basis for its life in the development of the weaving of woollen cloth for the markets of Palestine and Damascus. It was Jerusalem Jews who first took advantage of the improved security in the latter half of the nineteeth century to try and establish a basis for Jewish life in agriculture.

"Finally, in spite of all its difficulties and hindrances, and its unresolved conflict with the Arabs, it was the Jewry of the Mandate which was able to do most to rescue, and to re-create spiritually, the victims of Hitlerism and the second world war. Infinitely more numerous and powerful, the Jewry of America could do no more than provide the funds.

"It is in this chronicle of endurance that the justice of the Jewish claim is to be found, and, even if the Zionists foolishly ignored this aspect of Jewish history in their propaganda, it was this sense of a continuous Jewish relationship with the land of their origin as a people which moved the British to the issue of the Balfour Declaration.

"Moreover it is this continuous history which makes it legitimate to regard the present conflict not as something natural and inevitable, but as a temporary and unhappy interlude in a long story of co-operation which could be as profitable to both peoples and to the world in general in the future as it was before the stagnation of centuries of misrule destroyed it in the past."

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The myth of a distinctive "palestinian" culture

Hussein Ibish writes about a new book that describes the clothing styles that Arabs in Palestine used throughout the centuries, and he finds it terrifically important.

First, let's talk about the costumes:

Munayyer’s important new book demonstrates a number of very salient points with serious implications about the present and future for the Palestinian people. First, it shows that traditional and folkloric Palestinian costumes are distinctive from other Levantine ones. Within Palestinian society, in various areas and villages, the costumes have their own particular features, handed down largely from mother to daughter, over decades and indeed centuries. But there is still a distinctive Palestinian style, strongly connected to other Levantine traditional dress, with forms and patterns all their own.

I do not have the book, so I cannot say with certainty whether this is true or not. I can say that there were a few styles of clothing within Palestine; Wikipedia divides them up into northern Palestine, central Palestine, the coastal plane and the Bedouin. In order to prove that there was a distinctive "Palestinian" style one must prove that all of these styles had more commonality when compared to other Levantine clothing styles. Moreover, the similarities must be of the same amount that one would find similarities in the costumes of different areas of Syria or Arabia or Egypt.

To do this would require someone who is objective to look at the similarities and differences between costumes throughout history in the Middle East and find commonalities among the Palestinian Arab costumes that are provably different from the others. If they were fundamentally regional, they prove nothing.

To put it another way, it would be deceptive to say that the existence of jazz or creole cuisine or blue jeans proves that there is a distinctive American culture. These all started off as examples of regional culture, not national culture; they became "American" as they spread throughout the US.

If Palestinian Arab costumes remained regional, that is not evidence of a Palestinian national identity. It is simply evidence that different regions in the Levant had different cultural symbols. If the northern Palestinian costumes have more in common with the Lebanese costumes than with the coastal costumes, then the truth is the opposite of what Ibish is claiming.

But, as Ibish shows, Palestinian Arabs have been thirsting to prove that they had a distinctive culture for hundreds or thousands of years, and therefore it is - pretty much by his admission - impossible for such a work to be written without a political subtext:

[D]ocumenting that history and those traditions is not only a vital project of collective memory and an important academic task in itself, it is also a quintessentially political act. It is, above all, an act of passionate, dedicated and deeply meaningful resistance to the continued efforts at the negation of Palestinian identity and history.

This is Palestinian sumud, or steadfastness, at its finest. Beyond bluster, slogans and canned rhetoric, Munayyer’s volume has something deeply serious and meaningful to say about both the origins and the future of Palestinian national identity.

I've been spending a bit of time looking for specific Palestinian Arab culture, and every claim I've come across so far has been either Levantine - like falafel or the debka - or very specific to a town (like the soaps that Nablus was known for.)

By the way, Jewish women of Palestine also had their own distinctive clothing, especially Sephardic women. Would their dress be considered "Palestinian"? Does this book even research how the Jewish women of Palestine dressed? The inclusion or omission of that community would tell a lot about how objective the book it.

Ibish also makes a common mistake as he, like many Palestinian Arabs, like to misquote Golda Meir:

The days are long gone when Golda Meir’s infamous remark about the Palestinians is still taken seriously in the West. The onetime Israeli prime minister stated that “[t]here is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.” Yet there remains a hard-core contingent among Israelis and pro-Israel Westerners who persist in denying Palestinians their identity, history and heritage.

I have not yet found the original quote, which was supposedly written in The Sunday Times in 1969, but Wikiquote writes it this way:

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

There is nothing inaccurate about this quote. Certainly Ibish would be hard pressed to find that ordinary Arabs who lived in Palestine self-identified as "Palestinians" before 1920, and even more hard-pressed to find anyone who described themselves that way before Zionism existed. Today, arguably, there is a Palestinian Arab people who gained this identity because of their common misery at the hands of their Arab brethren, but Meir was referring to the Arabs of Palestine before Zionism.

In short, the attempts by Palestinian Arabs to construct a culture retroactively smacks of desperation. No one is arguing that there were no Arabs who lived in Palestine or even that some of them had distinctive dress or cuisine. The idea that there was a pan-Palestinian Arab culture that somehow fits roughly along the boundaries of Mandate Palestine that were drawn by the British is simply not true.

Deep down, Ibish knows this as well, just as he knows that the attempts to find such a culture are not based on finding the truth nearly as much as they are purely political.

Jerusalem Post: Syria’s crackdown

Alawites: Don't do to us what Muslims did to Jews

In so desperately and violently clinging to power, the behavior of the Alawite ruling minority conforms with perfect consistency to fears it has expressed for 75 years of what majority rule would mean for them.


"Damascus is at one and the same time the fount of modern Arab nationalism and the exhibit of its frustrations,” Henry Kissinger once observed. “Syrian history alternates achievement with catastrophe.”

Since mid-March, that alternation has cycled ever more rapidly, with the achievement of growing antiregime protests, inspired by the defiant examples of Egypt and Tunisia, being met with an increasingly catastrophic and draconian crackdown that has left at least 2,000 civilians dead.

Syrian President Bashar Assad, who inherited power from his father, Hafez, in 2000, tried at first to paint the protests as the result of conspiracy of foreign “saboteurs” fomented by the US and Israel. Then he tried concessions. He dismissed his cabinet on March 29 (though the new one included many members of the previous one) and lifted the emergency law (only to introduce an “anti-terrorism” law with similar provisions).

Foreign Minister Walid Moallem pledged Saturday that free parliamentary elections would be held by the end of the year.

But even such feeble concessions are rendered meaningless by the escalating violence perpetrated by the regime on its own citizens. Over the past 10 days, in the bloodiest assaults yet, Syrian security forces have tightened their siege on the city of Hama, a hub of the protests and site of a 1982 massacre at the hands of Hafez Assad’s troops. Now, the son’s forces are ringing the city with tanks, shelling neighborhoods, sending in snipers, and cutting off communication, food, water and medical aid. On Sunday, armed forces launched an assault on the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, killing dozens and causing thousands to flee.

The American response has seemed inconsistent, improvised, and insufficient. A week after protests erupted in Deraa, a Syrian city near the Jordanian border, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to Assad as a “reformer.”

There is mounting frustration among Syrian dissidents over the failure of the United States to call for Assad’s departure. Last Tuesday, Clinton met with USbased Syrian activists who demanded that President Barack Obama ask Assad to step down immediately.

She assured them that the US has “nothing invested in the continuation of a regime that must kill, imprison and torture its own citizens to maintain power.”

One reason for American hesitation is the fear of fullscale sectarian conflict erupting between a resentful Sunni majority (more than 70 percent of Syria’s population) and the ruling Alawite minority (about 12%).

The fear is not wholly unjustified. Assad and the other leaders responsible for the ongoing outrages – his brother Maher Assad, commander of the army’s feared Fourth Division, Defense Minister Ali Habib and Chief of Staff Gen. Dawoud Rajha – depend on the Alawite-dominated authoritarian structure.

In so desperately and violently clinging to power, the behavior of the Alawite ruling minority conforms with perfect consistency to fears it has expressed for 75 years of what majority rule would mean for them.

Understanding these fears helps to understand the present crisis.

In 1936, six Alawite notables sent a memorandum to French prime minister Leon Blum. To explain why they refused to be annexed to a Muslim Syria ruled by the Sunni majority who regarded them as infidels, they pointed to the treatment of Jews under Islam: “The condition of the Jews in Palestine is the strongest and most explicit evidence of the militancy of the Islamic issue vis-à-vis those who do not belong to Islam. These good Jews contributed to the Arabs with civilization and peace, scattered gold, and established prosperity in Palestine without harming anyone or taking anything by force, yet the Muslims declare holy war against them and never hesitated in slaughtering their women and children, despite the presence of England in Palestine and France in Syria.

“Therefore, a dark fate awaits the Jews and other minorities in case the Mandate is abolished and Muslim Syria is united with Muslim Palestine... the ultimate goal of the Muslim Arabs.”

One of the signatories of this remarkable appeal was none other than Sulayman Assad, father of Hafez and grandfather of Bashar.

The Persecution of Christians in the Middle East

See also: The Jihad Against the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Christians

The terrible violence in Oslo last month has brought the world's attention to the ravings of a madman and a murderer -- someone who was motivated to kill fellow Christians because he feels they had acquiesced to a takeover by Islam.

Our revulsion is appropriate -- this was the killing of innocent people in the name of religious and political hatred. However, when the roles are reversed, and Christians are in the minority and Muslims in the majority, are we equally upset by murder, intimidation and religious hatred?

Sadly, we don't appear to be. The world is standing silent as Christians living in Muslim-majority lands are killed, and their killers are venerated.

Today, Christians, regardless of affiliation, are being systematically harassed, persecuted, and murdered throughout the Middle East, the region of the globe from which Christianity first emerged. Churches have been bombed and those attending Christian services have been killed. Christian homes have been ransacked and cemeteries have been destroyed. Converts from Islam to Christianity are considered apostates and subject to severe punishment. In Iran, a man named Youcef Nadarkhani has been sentenced to hang for the state crime of converting from Islam to Christianity. His appeals for clemency to Iran's highest courts have been rejected.

The former President of Lebanon, Amin Gemayel has declared, "Massacres are taking place for no reason and without any justification against Christians. It is only because they are Christians." This can only be called religious cleansing on a vast scale.

Christians once represented significant populations in the Middle East; the Copts of Egypt, the Assyro-Chaldeans of Iraq, the Maronites of Lebanon, and the Southern Sudanese. Yet from the later part of the 20^th century until today, the indigenous Christians are becoming refugees in the face of Muslim violence and persecution.

Lebanon was once 60 percent Christian. Today there are only 1.5 million Lebanese Christians -- approximately a third of the country. In Palestinian-controlled Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, Christians were once 90 percent of the population, but are now a very small fraction of that. The Palestinian Authority that controls Bethlehem even banned the cross for sale as a souvenir for tourists. Samir Qumsieh, director of Al-Mahed Nativity TV in Bethlehem noted, "it is like saying that Jesus was never crucified."

Roughly only a third of all of Iraqi's Christians prior to the war remain. In 2010, Iraq's Christian leaders called off Christmas celebrations in the aftermath of a bloody assault on a major church. Chaldean Archbishop Louis Sako explained, "Nobody can ignore the threats...The situation of the Christians is bleak."

One year ago, in Iskenderun, Turkey, the head of the Catholic Church in Turkey, Bishop Luigi Padovese, was repeatedly stabbed and then decapitated by his driver, Murat Altun, who shouted, "I killed the Great Satan. Allahu Akhbar." His murder garnered little outrage.

In Saudi Arabia, a Muslim nation that is making major investments in technology and higher education, a nation that purports to be America's ally, it is still a crime to hold private religious ceremonies for any faith other than Islam. It is even illegal to own Christian or other non-Muslim religious items. Violators have been sent to prison and deported.

We in the West tend to gloss over these incidents, but we should not be so dismissive. The treatment of religious minorities - or any minorities - often tells us a great deal about the majority. If Islamic majorities hear no moral outrage and receive no resistance when they harass Christians, why stop the incitement and intolerance?

The mainline Christian churches are surprisingly unalarmed by this persecution. Many U.S. and U.K. churches are more focused on boycotting and divesting from Israel, which is odd since Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population is growing in number.

There is only one historical metaphor for today's Middle East Christians: The Jews of Europe in the decades prior to the Holocaust. Like today's Christians, the Jews of Europe were a minority, once thriving and at peace with their neighbors. But they, too, were subject to discrimination by state authorities and orchestrated violence. Those who left Europe as refugees were the lucky ones; those left behind became victims of genocide.

The lesson we learn is a simple one: If we do not protect the freedom of conscience in all societies, the dark hatred of religious bigotry is sure to inflict damage on an unimaginable scale. We are seeing that today in the Middle East, in its earliest forms. And so it falls to our political and religious leaders to make clear their moral outrage, and to stand up not only to rogue terrorists but to despotic governments who have brought murder and pain into the homes of those who have chosen to pursue their alternative expressions of faith.

How did Jerusalem come to be so holy to Moslems? or: Why and when was the myth of al-Aqsa created?

When the Prophet Mohammad established Islam, he introduced a minimum of innovations. He employed the hallowed personages, historic legends and sacred sites of Judaism and Christianity, and even paganism, by Islamizing them. Thus, according to Islam, Abraham was the first Moslem and Jesus and St. John (the sons of Miriam, sister of Moses and Aron) were prophets and guardians of the second heaven. Many Biblical legends ("asatir al-awwalin"), which were familiar to the pagan Arabs before the dawn of Islam, underwent an Islamic conversion, and the Koran as well as the Hadith (the Islamic oral tradition), are replete with them.

Islamization was practiced on places as well as persons: Mecca and the holy stone - al-Ka'bah - were holy sites of the pre-Islamic pagan Arabs. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and the Great Mosque of Istanbul were erected on the sites of Christian-Byzantine churches - two of the better known examples of how Islam treats sanctuaries of other faiths.
Jerusalem, too, underwent the process of Islamization: at first Muhammad attempted to convince the Jews near Medina to join his young community, and, by way of persuasion, established the direction of prayer (kiblah) to be to the north, towards Jerusalem, in keeping with Jewish practice; but after he failed in this attempt he turned against the Jews, killed many of them, and directed the kiblah southward, towards Mecca.

Muhammad's abandonment of Jerusalem explains the fact that this city is not mentioned even once in the Koran. After Palestine was occupied by the Moslems, its capital was Ramlah, 30 miles to the west of Jerusalem, signifying that Jerusalem meant nothing to them.
Islam rediscovered Jerusalem 50 years after Mohammad's death. In 682 CE, 'Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr rebelled against the Islamic rulers in Damascus, conquered Mecca and prevented pilgrims from reaching Mecca for the Hajj. 'Abd al-Malik, the Umayyad Calif, needed an alternative site for the pilgrimage and settled on Jerusalem which was then under his control. In order to justify this choice, a verse from the Koran was chosen (17,1 = sura 17, verse 1) which states (trans. by Majid Fakhri):
"Glory to Him who caused His servant to travel by night from the Sacred Mosque to the Farthest Mosque, whose precincts We have blessed, in order to show him some of Our Signs, He is indeed the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing."

The meaning ascribed to this verse (see the commentary in al-Jallalayn) is that "the furthest mosque" (al-masgid al-aqsa) is in Jerusalem and that Mohammad was conveyed there one night (although at that time the journey took three days by camel), on the back of al-Buraq, a magical horse with the head of a woman, wings of an eagle, the tail of a peacock, and hoofs reaching to the horizon. He tethered the horse to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount and from there ascended to the seventh heaven together with the angel Gabriel. On his way he met the prophets of other religions who are the guardians of heaven: Adam, Jesus, St. John, Joseph, Idris (=Seth?), Aaron, Moses and Abraham who accompanied him on his way to Allah and who accepted him as their master. Thus Islam tries to gain legitimacy over other, older religions, by creating a scene in which the former prophets agree to Mohammad's mastery, thus making him Khatam al-Anbiya' ("the Seal of the Prophets").

Not surprisingly, this miraculous account contradicts a number of the tenets of Islam: How can a living man of flesh and blood ascend to heaven? How can a mythical creature carry a mortal to a real destination? Questions such as these have caused orthodox Moslem thinkers to conclude that the nocturnal journey was a dream of Mohammad's. The journey and the ascent serves Islam to "go one better" than the Bible: Moses "only" went up to Mt. Sinai, in the middle of nowhere, and drew close to heaven, whereas Mohammad went all the way up to Allah, and from Jerusalem itself.

What are the difficulties with the belief that the al-Aqsa mosque described in Islamic tradition is located in Jerusalem? For one, the people of Mecca, who knew Muhammad well, did not believe this story. Only Abu Bakr, (later the first Calif), believed him and thus was called al-Siddiq ("the believer"). The second difficulty is that Islamic tradition tells us that al-Aqsa mosque is near Mecca on the Arabian peninsula. This was unequivocally stated in "Kitab al-Maghazi" (Oxford UP, 1966, vol. 3, pp. 958-9), a book by the Moslem historian and geographer al-Waqidi.

According to al-Waqidi, there were two "masjeds" (places of prayer) in al-Gi'ranah, a village between Mecca and Ta'if, one was "the closer mosque" (al-masjid al-adana) and the other was "the further mosque" (al-masjid al-aqsa), and Muhammad would pray there when he went out of town. This description by al-Waqidi which is supported by a chain of authorities (isnad), was not "convenient" for the Islamic propaganda of the 7th century. In order to establish a basis for the awareness of the "holiness" of Jerusalem in Islam, the Califs of the Ummayad dynasty invented many "traditions" upholding the value of Jerusalem (known as "fadha'il bayt al-Maqdis"), which would justify pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the faithful Moslems. Thus was al-Masjid al-Aqsa "transported" to Jerusalem. It should be noted that Saladin also adopted the myth of al-Aqsa and those "traditions" in order to recruit and inflame the Moslem warriors against the Crusaders in the 12th century.

Another aim of the Islamization of Jerusalem was to undermine the legitimacy of the older religions, Judaism and Christianity, which consider Jerusalem to be a holy city. Islam is presented as the only legitimate religion, destined to replace the other two, because they had changed and distorted the Word of God, each in its turn. (ghyyarou wa-baddalou. On the alleged forgeries of the Holy Scriptures, made by Jews and Christians, see the third chapter of: M. J. Kister, "haddithu 'an bani isra'il wa-la haraja", IOS 2 (1972), pp. 215-239. Kister quotes dozens of Islamic sources).

Though Judaism and Christianity can exist side by side in Jerusalem, Islam regards both of them as betrayals of Allah and his teachings, and has always done, and will continue to do, all in its power to expel both of them from this city. It is interesting to note that this expulsion is retroactive: The Islamic broadcasters of the Palestinian radio stations consistently make it a point to claim that the Jews never had a temple on the Temple Mount and certainly not two temples. (Where, then, according to them, did Jesus preach?)

Arafat, himself a secular person (ask the Hamas!), is doing today exactly what the Califs of the Umayyad dynasty did 1300 years ago: he is marshaling the holiness of Jerusalem to serve his political ends. He must not give control of Jerusalem over to the Jews since according to Islam they are impure and the wrath of Allah is upon them (al-maghdhoub 'alayhim; Koran 1,7, see al-Jalalayn and other commentaries; note that verse numbers may differ slightly in the various editions of the Koran). The Jews are the sons of monkeys and pigs (5,60). (For the idea that Jews are related to pigs and monkeys see, for example, Musnad al-Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal, (Beirut 1969) vol. 3, p. 241. See also pages 348, 395, 397, 421, and vol. 6, p. 135.) The Jews are those who distorted the holy writings which were revealed to them (2,73; 3,72) and denied God's signs (3,63). Since they violated the covenant with their God (4,154), He cursed them (5,16) and they are forever the inheritors of hell (3,112). So how can Arafat abandon Jerusalem to the Jews?

The Palestinian media these days are full of messages of Jihad, calling to broaden the national-political war between Israel and the Palestinians into a religious-Islamic war between the Jews and the Moslems. READ THEIR LIPS: for them Christianity is no better than Judaism, since both "forfeited" their right to rule over Jerusalem. Only Islam - Din al-Haqq ("the Religion of Truth") has this right, and forever. (shaykh 'Ikrima Sabri, the mufti of Jerusalem, in Friday's khutbah 4 weeks ago, "Sawt falastin", the PA official radio).

Since the holiness of Jerusalem to Islam has always been, and still is no more than a politically motivated holiness, Arafat would be putting his political head on the block should he give it up. Must Judaism and Christianity defer to myths related in Islamic texts or envisioned in Mohammad's dreams, long after Jerusalem was established as the ancient, true center of these two religions which preceded Islam? Should UN forces be sent to the Middle East just because Arafat decided to recycle the political problems of the Umayyads 1250 years after the curtain came down on their role in history?

Something Rotten in Norway

more:
http://zalmi.blogspot.com/2011/07/utoya-not-so-innocent-youth-camp.html

Anders Breivik’s attack on the youth camp of the Norwegian Labour Party​ has its most obvious precedent in the Maalot Massacre​ when Palestinian Muslim gunmen attacked an Israeli elementary school, taking over a hundred children hostage, and then using automatic weapons to kill as many of them as they could. But the link between Maalot and Utoya is more than casual. The Workers Youth League which ran the camp had a long history of supporting the same kind of terrorists who had perpetrated the Maalot Massacre.

Lars Gule, is the Secretary General of the Norwegian Humanist Association, and a defender of Muslims having the right to discriminate against women and gays. (The two are not a contradiction in Norway.) He was the leader of the Workers Youth League at the University of Bergen– and a DFLP terrorist.

The DFLP were the perpetrators of the Maalot Massacre. And two years after that attack, Lars Gule was trained by the DFLP and dispatched to Israel via Norway with explosives hidden in the covers of his books.

“The Suspect had made ​​it known to his employers that he wanted to take human life… to strengthen Palestinian fighting spirit and morale,” Norwegian police records noted.

None of this impeded Gule’s career in any way. He went on to the University of Bergen and served as the head of the Workers Youth League, the organization that was targeted in the Utoya attack. Today he is a prominent figure on the left.

How can we make sense of this? Glenn Beck​ compared the Workers Youth League camp to a Hitler Youth camp. He was close, but not entirely right. The roots of the Workers Youth League are actually Communist.

Norway’s Labour Party was a member of the Communist International. The Workers Youth League was formed by the merger of the Left Communist Youth League and the Socialist Youth League of Norway. We often use “Communist” as a pejorative– but in this case the Utoya camp, literally was a Communist youth camp.

The day before the massacre, Norwegian Foreign Minister Gahre-Store visited the camp and was greeted with banners calling for a boycott of Israel, and Gahre-Store responded with an Anti-Israel speech to cheers from the campers. There is something ominous about such indoctrination of hate. It is not quite on the level of the Hitler Youth, but neither is it a world apart.

In the 1930′s, Germans were encouraged to blame their problems on the Jews. In this decade, Norwegians are encouraged to blame their problems on the Jews. There are few children of workers at the Workers Youth League camp. They are for the most part the children of the party, the sons and daughters of bureaucrats and party leaders, training the next generation to perpetrate the Labour Party state.

Breivik came from that same background. The son of the left wing elite. And if his parents’ marriage had not collapsed, with the young boy allotting a share of the blame to the Labour Party, he would likely have a comfortable spot in the socialist state. Breivik may have turned against his roots, but the idea that terroristic violence is a legitimate solution is one that he could have easily picked up on the left.

Gahre-Store may have been greeted with a banner calling for the boycott of Israel, but he would never have been greeted with one calling for a boycott of terrorists. And indeed if there is an Islamist terrorist group that Gahre-Store doesn’t support, it’s hard to find. Gahre-Store had called for negotiating with Al-Shahaab in Somalia, an Al-Qaeda offshoot, he spoke with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal and called for a reconciliation with the Taliban.

Nor is the Workers Youth League call for the destruction of Israel a recent one. In the 70′s, the movement was already pushing for a One State Solution. The man who led the organization then went on to become the country’s Foreign Minister playing a key role in the Oslo Accords that turned Israel into a free fire zone for the terrorist allies of the League and the Labour Party.

Media commentators have made a great deal of Breivik’s radicalization, but despite his death toll, his radicalization seems to be an isolated event in comparison to the magnitude of radicalization at Utoya. If Breivik’s violence and bigotry is to be condemned– shouldn’t the species of violence and bigotry at Utoya be condemned as well?

The left can hold up Utoya as an example, but there are a legion of counterexamples. Nor the least of which is Lars Gule​, traveling with explosives in his backpack, on a journey that took him from DFLP terrorist to Workers Youth League leader.

And behind that is the larger string of DFLP and Fatah atrocities. And that of other terrorist groups around the world. The Utoya attack cannot be viewed as an isolated event. It must be seen within the context of support for terrorism as a valid tactic. An idea that goes back to the Marxist roots of the Labour Party and which is embodied in its political support for terrorism. And its manifest hostility to the victims of terrorism.

Breivik and Lars Gule had their common origins in a country dominated by a political left which sees violence as a legitimate tool of political change, while dehumanizing its victims. Norway’s ambassador to Israel carefully distinguished between the Utoya attack and the terrorist attacks on Israelis. The latter would go away if Israel just followed Gahre-Store’s example and negotiated with Hamas.

But what Norway’s political elite failed to grasp is that the genie of terrorism cannot be kept in a lamp, to emerge only at your command. Once you legitimize terrorism as a tool of political change, you lose the ability to determine who will make use of it. Breivik followed the example of Lars Gule, that of the Marxist terrorists, whose intellectual legacy is the black tar that seeps through the painted walls of Norwegian foreign policy.

The hatred and terrorist collaboration on display at Utoya was the symptom of a larger disease. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Marcellus proclaims in Hamlet. It’s equally rotten in Norway.

Breivik was one expression of that rottenness. But there are many others. Like Lars Gule, and his vision of a secular atheism living side by side with bigoted Islamism. Or Gahre-Store following in the footsteps of countless left wing foreign ministers by opening Norway’s doors to every Islamist terrorist group out there. Or the children being groomed to become the future leaders of Norway taught to hate as fervently as their Fatah associates.

Spanish idyll myth spread by 19th c. British Jews

http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com

The court of the Lions at the Alhambra palace in Granada

The idealised golden age of Jewish-Muslim coexistence in medieval Spain is dealt another blow - from an unlikely quarter. Writing in the leading daily Svenska Dagbladet, Inger Enkvist, a Swedish university professor of Spanish, says that new research is ending the politicisation of Spanish historiography (with thanks: Torbjorn):

Spanish historiography has often been characterized by myths and propaganda. Now new research offers a different picture from the one previously presented, including of the Franco regime and the years leading up to the Civil War.

In short, history is used intensively as a political argument in the Spanish daily debate mainly by regional nationalists in "office" in their region and in the Zapatero regime. Large financial contributions have been made to such historical representations that support ideological interests. Politicization is so intense that the historians who have a scientific orientation often avoid studying key issues in order to not get into trouble if they come up with the "wrong" results.

Historians show a lack of honesty in relation to their subject by disseminating rough, distorted versions and a lack of moral courage vis-a-vis their community by not daring to point out how history is misused. Entire areas of Spanish history have thus become taboo. In the very recent past, other research both from within and outside Spain has been able to filter through.

Some breakthroughs have been made, for example in the scientific study of the Muslim period after 711 and the Second Republic 1931-1936. The breakthrough in the case of the Muslim period is associated with new forms of cooperation. Specialists in Spanish history had been working with experts in the Middle East and North Africa, with Arabists and Islamologists, and the result is that the idyllic picture of conditions in Muslim Spain that is usually conveyed cannot be substantiated except in isolated cases. This (myth) can be traced to the Jewish circles in Britain* in the mid-1800s who, by claiming that Jews were treated better in other cultures wanted to pressure the British government to relax restrictions. (...)

Stanley G. Payne, an American historian, (..) is currently one the most respected experts in the field. (..) He researches the idea of ​​multicultural coexistence in Spain during Muslim rule, but finds no evidence of this. He also stresses that Spaniards later had major problems with Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean. It is not very well known that probably as many as 150,000 Spaniards (mainly during the 16th and 17th centuries) were sent as slaves to North Africa or kidnapped for ransom. The danger from pirates did not disappear until the early 1800s after a British effort to curb them.

Inger Enkvist is a professor of Spanish at Lund University.

Read article in full (Swedish)

*This theory is not new. One of the leading writers on Islamic history, Bernard Lewis, believes the golden age in Spain is a myth - Jews were persecuted by both Muslims and Christians: 'Belief in it was a result more than a cause of Jewish sympathy for Islam. The myth was invented by Jews in nineteenth-century Europe as a reproach to Christians ­ and taken up by Muslims in our own time as a reproach to Jews.' - ed