re: jihad/weekend reading-hugh's is great!
Comments: Palestinians to US: Mind your own business (Note: Comments on articles are unmoderated, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Jihad Watch or Robert Spencer. Comments that are off-topic, offensive, slanderous, or otherwise annoying may be summarily deleted.)
So Erakat wants the US to "keep out of "internal Palestinian affairs"".
I agree. Entirely. Including the immediate cessation of the following (latest $$ figures I could find):
State Department Summarizes Assistance to Palestinian Authority
Regular and supplemental aid total more than $120 million in 2003
In response to a press query, the State Department provided a breakdown of regular and supplemental assistance to the Palestinian Authority from October 2002 to the present.
In addition, the U.S. gave $129 million in 2003 to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Put it in perspective: annually, each American chips in a greenback to support a corrupt, despotic, backward, Jew-hating, terrorist-affiliated dictatorship. To my Yank friends, I ask: "feel like you're getting your buck's worth?"
Posted by Earl at April 8, 2004 09:21 AM
*********************************************
Earl,
I certainly don't want any more of my tax dollars going to support corrupt Palstinians who only make themselves richer while making the world "guilty" over their sad plight. I also don't want to support the UN which has made so much of a mistake keeping the Palestinians as "refugees" for so long. Why weren't they resettled as every other group? Where are the killers of the 3 Americans who were murdered? Why is there so much fear over "upsetting" the Palestinians in Europe and the Canada as well as the US? Is it that their Jew-hatred is stronger or they are just afraid of who lives next door?
Posted by Marilyn at April 8, 2004 09:31 AM No kidding!! That's outrageous. Only Americans pay others to insult and vilify us. Drop them off the "welfare rolls."
The multibillionaire oils sheiks should be supporting their people anyway, creating industries and jobs. They are the one that have let down the peoples of the Middle East and other Muslim countries. It is time that they shoulder that responsibility.
It's an outrage that they haven't. Instead they are using their billions to fund Jihad-terrorism, the spread of Wahabbism, to "influence" American institutions, to fund university chairs, etc. And the American taxpayer is supporting their people while they prepare to cut our throats.
What's wrong with this picture!
Posted by epg at April 8, 2004 09:35 AM We should mind our own business. Which will include all financial aid to these street rats, and any interference by telling Israel to hold back.....turn Israel loose and let them finish this once and for all.
Posted by DCWatson at April 8, 2004 01:08 PM And at the same time they call for massive aid. Not one American dime should go to them EVER again. Let the money that goes for Jihad, their tithing, go to the Palestinians. The Muslim world uses our money to feed, clothe, build schools, hospitals, etc...while their tithing money goes to Jihad. Enough is enough.
Posted by TS at April 8, 2004 02:14 PM ************************************************ Palestinians Expect Large Aid Package http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040408/D81QIK180.html
Posted by TS at April 8, 2004 02:27 PM ************************************** All the hard work, all the bribes to diplomats and members of the media, all the subventions to public relations firms, all the enrolling in the Jihad against Israel even of "Christian" Muslims among the "Palestinian" Arabs such as Hanan Ashrawi, Naim Ateek, Archbishop Sabbagh, may now come to naught. After the 9/11 attacks, the refrain went forth from Muslim spokesmen: We Want You to Learn About Islam. There were open houses conducted by smiling imams at mosques. There were the usual appeals to the "common Abrahamic faiths," the treacly observation that "we, too, revere Jesus as a prophet" or "we are all monotheists" or "we eat kosher food on airlines when they don't carry halal" or some plaintive Rodney-Kingesque why-can't-we-all-get along sentiments, and even, le comble, "we Muslims are the new Jews."
Well, Infidels are doing exactly what they were asked to do -- Finding Out About Islam, but not exactly in the way that Muslims had in mind. No, we are no longer swallowing the sanitized version presented at Interfaith Dialogues and Open Houses at Mosques; the "dialogue-of-civilisations" boys, Prince Hassan and his ilk, are not going to have it as easy as they might once have expected; too much has happened, too many people now know, or are in the process of learning, too much. Too many non-Muslims have lived to tell the tale of life under Islam. Too many scholars are now following in the path of Bat Ye'or and studying the institution of dhimmitude. Scholarship of the past, of Schacht and Margoliouth, of Armand Abel and Bousquet, of K. S. Lal and Sita Ram Goel, of Arthur Jeffery and Snouck Hurgronje, is being rediscovered, collected, studied, and soon-to-be republished, available beyond the CD-Rom confines of the Index Islamicus. At MESA, the jig is up for the "creating-Palestinian-identity" boys -- Joel Beionin, Migdal and Kimmerling, the inimitable Rashid Khalidi, whose salary from rich Arabs has been nicely laundered through Columbia's good offices), not to mention the old Palestinian groupies who came from, or still plow the same field, back at St. Antony's College, Oxford -- why, one of them has even turned his attention, anti-imperialist to be sure, to a biography of Lord Cromer. Question authority, and those with doctorates, and named chairs? When it comes to Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, I'm afraid we really must -- sorry!
No, people are reading the Qur'an, not in the sanitized Sells version, but the full text, with explanatory notes (various translations can be compared online at www.usc.edu; you can also find the sahih recensions of hadith by al-Bukhari and Muslim). They are beginning to read, and understand the significance of, the hadith. They are beginning to study the sira, the Life of Muhammad, to see what this military leader, who married his favorite wife Aisha when she was six, but demurely waited until she was nine to consummate the marriage (which is why Khomeini's first act of legislation was to lower the marriageable age for women down to nine, was all about, including that little business of the 600 Jews beheaded at Khaibar. Not exactly a Christ-figure, I'm afraid.
They are noticing, these obstinate Infidels now engaged in study, that Al Qaeda is only the most mediagenic of many groups wishing to harm Infidels. They are beginning to notice that being a target of Muslim attack is not just an "American, Judeo-Christian thang" and that there are attacks on black Christians in Nigeria and Sudan, attacks on Asian Christians in Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Philippines, attacks on Hindus in Pakistan, Kashmir, and Bangladesh, attacks on Sikhs in Kashmir and India, attacks not only on the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, but on living Buddhist monks and villagers in southern Thailand -- and, well, you can fill up the page here with your own JihadWatch news.
The terrorism has nothing to do wtih poverty, Infidels have begun to notice. Bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri (whose great-uncle was Azzam Pasha, Secretary of the Arab League,the very same who in 1948 promised "the Jews" a "war of extermination" the likes of which would not have been seen since "the days of the Mongols" -- nice to see one family keeping up its tradition), Mohammad Atta, and many more of the instigators and ringleaders, are at least middle-class. The world-funder of the Jihad is also the one of the world's richest countries, where without moving a finger a native Saudi is entitled to a richly-endowed existence, and without the slightest effort on his part. Spoiled members of the Moroccan jeunesse doree have been implicated in the Madrid bombings; the data just keeps coming. And poor people, in non-Muslim countries, people in the Congo, or Bolivia, seem strangely not to plot, and execute, mass murders. Ideas matter; even extremely primitive and trivial ideas, having their origins in the seventh century.
Indeed, rich Muslims, or Muslims who live in the West and cannot deal with it, or enter into its perceived decadence and then experience almost a kind of post-coital revulsion (cf. Shakespeare's "past reason hunted, and past reason hated" etc.), and seek to regain their equanimity, or equilibrium, through a return to Islam, in all its strictness and totalitarian -rules, and to win Paradise by smiting the Infidels hip and thigh. Bin Laden once was a habitue of the fleshpots of Beirut; now he and Al-Zahawiri, beards, white dress, and walking-sticks, doing their obvious imitation of the Prophet and His Companions for their audience of hundreds of millions.
Despite the insistence of many (e.g. John Burns of the Times) Muslims are not really filled with a sense of "humiliation" in the Western sense. No one has humiliated them. Have the southern Sudanese, two million of whom have been killed by Arab Muslims, "humiliated" those Arab Muslims? Did the 200,000 Christian East Timorese who were killed "humiliate" the Muslims of Indonesia? Do the Christians killed in their churches and schools in Pakistan "humiliate" the Muslims? In what way, pray, are Muslims being "humiliated" by the the Thai monks, or the Hindu and Sikh villagers of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kashmir, India itself (where Muslim attacks are routine, and routinely not even reported outside of India itself). How has the United States, in ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein, and spending more than $150 billion so far to do so, "humiliated" Muslims? Did it "humiliate" Muslims when NATO bombed Serb forces? How did the United States "humiliate" in particular al-Sadr, whose father, uncles and brothers were killed by the very Saddam whom only the Americans managed to get rid of?
No, it is not "humiliation" that the Muslims, including the PLO or P.A., suffer from: it is something else altogether -- not a sense of humiliation but a sense of being thwarted. They are being thwarted, at times, in the conduct of their Jihad. They feel it is wrong for others to oppose this, and of course it is wrong for Infidels to think that Muslims do not necessarily have the right to eliminate all non-Muslim states withiin what they see as the dar al-Islam. Muslims feel they are being thwarted, not humiliated (though "humiliated" is the term of choice, for obvious reasons) when Christians in northern Nigeria, or the Moluccas, or southern Sudan, refuse to convert, or at least submit, to the dictates of Islam as embodied in the Shari'a, or of Muslims. They feel thwarted, not humiliated, when Europeans show a glimmer of wariness about the effect of large and growing Muslim populations, and begin hinting at legislation to regulate those populations that give no sign of loyalty to the nation-state, or to the ideals, and the wellbeing, of the Infidels among whom they have come to live, and where they insist on pushing constantly for the expression of a separate Muslim identity, the establishment of shari'a to supplant the civil code for Muslims, the expansion of Muslim political power to promote specifically Muslim ends. It is not "humiliation" but the desire not to have the endless demands of Jihad thwarted, that underlies Muslim rage. The inculcated hostility toward Infidels is everywhere in Qur'an and hadith. One wonders if those who report from Iraq, or from Israel, or from Pakistan or Afghanistan,actually study the most essential subject -- the tenets of Islam -- before they arrive. Perhaps they just show up, notebook and laptop at the ready, thinking they will pick up what they need to know just as they would in Cleveland, or Albany, or London. This complacency is clearly not justified.
Infidels will not accept the self-assured statements of academic "experts" many of whom, they rightly sense, are apologists for Islam. Someone who writes on Islam, but scants the JIhad, or mocks attention to dhimmitude, already should raise an eyebrow. The evidence is simply too great that there is something in Islamic teachings that explains both the fact, and specific targets, of Muslim terrorism, that help to explain the many examples of Muslim hysteria and hate (where else, except in Cairo, or Ramallah, or Baghdad, or a city somewhere in the Muslim world, has one ever seen mobs akin to that in Fallujah, ripping apart the American corpses?). And study of Islam makes it clear that "terrorism" is only one of the many instruments of Jihad. Even in Europe there is alarm, and new understanding. Jean-Paul Charnay on the shari'a, Anne-Marie Delcambre on L'Islam des interdits, the seductively-named Oriana Fallaci's La Forza del ragione, are among the new books that come to mind. Bat Ye'or's Eurabia should have a significant effect. The EU's rulng class, so deeply implicated by its quisling quelling of any dissent to the Euro-Arab Dialogue, has much to answer for, and eventually, the people in whose name that class claims to act will become too uncomfortable too worried about the demographic problem, to allow those people to continue to make policy. That preening poseur Dominique de Villepin, was born in the 1950s in Sale, Morocco, just across from Rabat, and he sometimes gives the impression that he believes having spent the first 203 years of his life in Morocco has made him an expert on Islam. With such people, anything is possible.
Unfortunately for him, for Solana, for Chris Patten, for Romano Prodi, all of whom are in up their necks in apologetics and solidarity with the "Palestinian people," the evidence that the Arab siege of Israel is a Jihad, and not a limited "nationalist" struggle, keeps piling up One would have to be a complete fool now, to see Islam mainly as a religion. In fact, its origins are to be sought in the geopolitical situation of the seventh-century Arabs. It used to be believed that the warrior's faith of Islam accompanied the Arabs on their razzias outside the peninsula. But the evidence for the non-Hijazi origins of Islam, outside Arabia altogether -- philological, archeological, numismatic -- is growing. No longer are Western scholars of Islam willing to accept, without critical examination, the received Muslim version of the origins of Islam. In the same manner, they are now writing the history of dhimmitude themselves, not by limiting themselves to Muslim records (such as they are)but by the records of dhimmis themselves (as Gointein used the records of the Cairo Geniza for A Mediterranean Society) and of Western observers (chiefly visitors and diplomats)to study the history of dhimmitude -- as Bat Ye'or has so brillliantly done, virtually alone, without any academic post or support. Islam, unlike all other religions, seems from the beginning to have been a fighting faith deliberately concocted to appeal to conquered peoples who were far more numerous, wealthy, and civilized than their conquerors. Those conquered were now presented with an ideology, a belief-system, a "religion," that justified, and promoted, conquest. And after successful Jihad, the institution of dhimmi was formally elaborated -- teased-out from the Qur'an, and the hadith, and the shari'a which was the child of both. As dhimmis, the "people of the Book" (who were those first conquered) were allowed to survive, but only in a state of humiliation, degredation, and permanent insecurity. Over time conditions would be so difficult that, naturally, there would be more and more people converting to Islam. Hence the slow asphyxiation, over a long period, of Judaism and Christianity (and then of Zoroastrianism as well). This was all worked out and set down, and put into practice, from the very early days. And the status of dhimmis from the seventh century to the twentieth, from India to Spain, remained remarkably similiar, in time and space, whenever and wherever Muslims ruled without undue interference or pressure from non-Muslims.
Islam was fashioned from bits of pre-Islamic Arab lore from the time of the Jahilliya, together with bits and pieces of Judaism and Christianity, the religions of conquered Mesopotamia, Syria, Judea (a/k/a in the Christian world as "Palestine"), North Africa. From conquered Persia, bits of Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism -- Good and Evil being replaced, in Islam, by the categories of "Muslim" and "non-Muslim" -- were part of the mix.
And this is what Infidels are now beginning to comreprehend: that the word "religion" is entirely inadequate to describe Islam. They are studying Jihad. They are studying dhimmitude. They are reading the testimonies of ex-Muslims such as Ibn Warraq. They are beginning to understand that it is impossible, according to the tenets of Islam, for Muslims to make a permanent peace treaty with any Infidel state (such as Israel). Policymakers still need to become even dimly aware that all that effort put in recent decades into Arab-Israeli negotiations, all those smiles and handshakes on all those lawns, mean -- are required to mean, for Muslims -- nothing. But if one would have to be a fool to still believe in the significance of such treaties, a great many people in and out of Washington are proving equal to that task.
And the hypertrophied attention paid to the Jihad against Israel, still thinly-disguised as a non-Jihad by the Muslims (instead, as a fight for the "legitimate rights" of the "Palestinian people" -- i.e. a Jihad decked out, tarted up, tittivated, in the political rhetoric most calculated to appeal to Western audiences) muddies the understanding of the many other instances of Jihad, and also of the instruments of Jihad beyond the purely military.
Under cover of the obsessive attention paid to Israel and its (non-existent) outrages, tens of millions of Muslims have entered, without opposition or even notice, the Bilad al-kufr,where they are reproducing at rates that rival the way kudzu vines are driving out the native species in the swamps and woodlands of the American south), spreading da'wa to the economically and psychically marginal members of Infidel societies, and posing a security headache, or perhaps nightmare, that can only get worse, and that is extremely expensive for Infidels to monitor and control. Mosques and madrasas are being built in the very centers of what Muslims see as Western Christendom -- Paris, London, Rome. They are almost entirely funded from the Middle East, from Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., and Kuwait. These are seen not as houses of worship but as Muslim beachheads, and army posts for the Army of Allah, a classic fifth column that is now deeply (and believes itself permanently) established, all over Western Europe. The failure of Europe's leaders to protect Europe's indigenous population, and its civilization, from those who are hostile to it, is at least as great as it was in the 1930s, possibly even greater). Europeans must now pretend to contemplate with equanimity, or skepticism, the possibility of conquest, through demography and da'wa, of the Lands of the Infidels, the Bilad al-kufr, by Islam. Just how do they propose to prevent this, in twenty or thirty or forty years?
It is clear that vital to Islam is the insistence that Islam MUST cover the globe, that the dar al-Islam must swallow up the dar al-harb; if military means are not available, all other instruments are to be employed. Loyalty to the umma al-islamiyya, even or perhaps especially among Muslims in the West, trumps all other loyalties -- indeed, for Muslims, no other loyalty is permissible.
Given the triumphalism inherent in the supremacist ideology of Islam, any further concessions to the recently-invented (post-1967 war) "Palestinian people" will only whet, not sate, the Arab Muslim appetite to go in for the kill. There are only two metaphors for Israel in the Arab press, television, and mind: Israel as a dagger, pushed into the beating heart of Araby, or Israel as a metastasizing cancer. Now if you have a knife in your heart, you do not take it out only part way, but pull it out altogether. And if you have cancer, you do not surgically remove only part of it -- you must remove all of it, precisley to avoid having it re-appear. Those metaphors are keys to the Arab Muslim view of Israel. A two-state "solution" is actually a problem, for by contemplating a further reduction in Israel's size, such a "two-state solution" not only ignores what a Jihad is, and what the ultimate, unwavering goals of Islam are (a few months ago, in the Boston Globe, Richard Pipes took Wolfowitz to task, rightly, for being an arms analyst who knew nothing about the influence of culture, and ideology, on the behavior of peoples -- far from being hard-headed, Wolfowitz is not nearly hard-headed enough). Nor to many of the grand panjandrums of the media, some of them remarkably stupid and ignorant, give any signs of understanding Islam. Think of the daily pablum, or mental panem quotidianem, sloshed into our bowls every morning by the likes of Tom Friedman, full of his platitudes and shallow plongitudes. A fool is bad enough, but a fool with a mighty megaphone...
No need to waste one's time carefully parsing the differences between Hamas, Hezbollah, and the supposedly "secdular" Al-Aksa Martyrs' Brigade ("Al-Aksa"? "Martyrs' Brigade"(a a un gout of something just a little --- shall we say, Islamic?). They are all one in the Jihad. They do not differ a whit in their intentions toward the Infidel state of Israel. Who cares who claims responsibility for this or that.
One must understand that Jihad, to spread Islam all over the world, has never ceased to remain a goal of Islam. What changed, a few decades ago, is not the ideology, but the wherewithal: the money of OPEC. And what also changed, and forever, was the technology which allowed the penetration, into backwaters and sleepy villages, where Islam was recalled only as a few prayers and wudu, of an Islam like that which Khomeini spreaad in his videotapes recorded in Neauphle-le-Chateau: an Islam that could rouse the millions to the idea of a Mahdi (Al-Sadr in Najaf), or to a universal caliphate (Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan). That goal remains the same,whatever the local expressions of it may be.
With the P.A., the goal is to weaken, and ultimately end, the Infidel sovereignty of Isarel. In Kashmir, it is to win back territory deemd of most immediate need -- the rest of India can come at a later date. In the southern Philippines, and the southern Sudan, and southern Thailand, it is to extend Muslim rule, whether by defying a non-Muslim nation-state, or suppressing the desire for local power by non-Muslims. And everywhere there is already Muslim power, and there remain non-Muslims, the campaign to enforce dhimmitude can be seen. The burning of 2,300 churches in Indonesia in 2003 (with hardly a story in the Western press), the killings of Christians in Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, post-Saddam Iraq, Lebanon, to impose the shari'a in northern Nigeria, are all parts of the dhimmitude that, with Jihad, makes up the Muslim system for dealing with non-Muslims. The host of disabilities, financial, political, social, legal, placed on non-Muslims in lands subjugated by Islam, are never forgotten, and abandoned only when outside forces demand it (as with the Tanzimat Reforms of 1839 in the Ottoman Empire, which had to continually be presssed by the European powers). Muslims wish to remind Christians (few Jews left, of course) of their inferior status. And not only Christians: the persecution and murder of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, Kashmir, and of Hindus in Bangladesh, are part of the same attitude, and tenets. The blowing-up of the Bamiyan Buddhas (the last examples of vast quantities of Buddhist statuary, temples, and other artifacts, destroyed over time by the Muslims of Afghnistan and India), the murders of Buddhists in southern Thailand, remind us that Christians, Jews, and Hindus are not the only victims. The 600,000 Chinese killed in Indonesia in the 1960s were described for the world as "Communist sympathizers"; this was uncritically accepted in the West. In fact, those ethnic Chinese were killed for being non-Muslims -- Confucians and Christians -- by Muslim mobs and soldiers.
So by all means let Hamas join the P.A. It should help to clear Infidel minds, to undo decades of PLO propaganda. It was farcical ever to dwell on the "secular" nature of Arafat. Like Nasser or Saddam Hussein, Arafat's secularism did not mean he would not use Islam, not appeal to Islam, not rely on the basic mental substratum of Islam for his atmospherics, attitudes, aggression. No, in that respect they are all Muslims. What one means in affixing the term "secularist" to Nasser, or Saddam Hussein, or to Arafat, is that none of them would brook political rivals coming from within the religious establishment. This made sense. For Nasser, "secularism" allowed him to impose his stratokleptocracy (a thieving army) and to weaken his only serious political rival, the Muslim Brotherhood. For Saddam Hussein (and for the Assad father and son, who as Alawites -- with their cult of Mariam, or Mary, worship, are not-strictly--halal Muslims, they will never be accepted as fully orthodox Muslims) living in a country where the majority of Muslims were of a different sect (in Syria, Sunni rather than suspect Alwawite, in Iraq, Shi'a rather than Sunni), it was entirely natural for him, a tribal thug who for his personal ends adopted the fascistic Arab nationalism that had been constructed as an alternative to Islam itself, the product mainly of Damascene Christian Arabs (Michel Aflaq is usually given credit -- born a Christian, he thought Ba'athism would give the Christians a possible role; on his deathbed, however, he "reverted" to Islam -- a deathbed reversion) Had he emphasized Islam, this would have been troublesome, for the majority of Iraqi Muslims were Shi'a, and the only major source of opposition.
And why do we associate "secularism" with Arafat, who bade farewell to that "martyr" Sheik Yassin, and whose airwaves and press are full of Muslim imagery and refernces? Why does the "secular" Arafat make constant reference to the Treaty of al-Hudabiyya? It makes sense. When you are trying to present the Jihad against Israel as something else, trying to de-emphasize, for what once seemed to be the powerful Western world (when Arafat first took over from Shukairy, one still had to worry about Western, Christian opinion); Muslim infiltration, through agents of influence, of such institutions as the U.N., or the institutions and media of the incipient E.U., was still in its infancy). And there were still a considerable number of Christian Arabs among the "Palestinians"--far better to enroll them in the cause, than to scare themn off by waving the green flag of Islam prematurely. So the "Palestinian people" were invented; their age-old "tilling of the soil for thousands of years" became the standard narrative (great fun for Arafat the Egyptian, and requiring for its success only total amnesia on the part of both the outside world, and the Israelis themselves, and both dutifully complied). Et voila: now we have that "struggle "between two tiny peoples..blah blah blah." The "Palestinian people," who, in the tens of thousands of pages of U.N. records before 1967, are never mentioned, not even once -- not by the non-Arabs, and not by the Arabs, came into existence. Leftist professors with PLO leanings like to write about the "construction of Palestinian identity." Oh, they constructed it all right, and how. Pseudo-ancient folk songs (shades of Chatterton!), and of course ancient "Palestinian" folk dances and fairy tales. It was great. During more conventional wars, we know, secret agents for one side aere sometimes outfitted, by the service for which they are wroking, with complete false identities, false pasts. But the PLO and its minions went one better: they created a whole people, and outfitted that whole people with a complete false past. False historically, demographically, archeologically, tragico-comico-well, I'll leave the rest of the adverbs here up to Polonius, if you remember your Hamlet.
Forgotten were the actual demographic facts. Forgotten was the fact that when Abdel-Malik was defeated, thousands of his troops from Algeria ended up in --- the various vilayets, and one sanjak, that made up Palestine! And so did tens of thousands of those Balkan Muslims, stranded under Christian rule as the Ottoman Empire receded, who were kindly plucked up wholesale, for example after the 1877 Bulgarian Wars, by the Ottoman Porte and deposited, safely, in what was rightly seen as the emptiest inhabitable part of the Ottoman Empire --- Palestine! And on and on. But no matter how many times Israeli and other scholars go through the tedious, exhausting process of actually examining the demographic history of that area, no matter how many myths are exposed, it really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter from the antisemites, because they don't care. It doesn't matter to the Europeans, because they want to appease the Arabs, coute que coute. And it doesn't matter to the Muslims themselves, because for them it is irrelevant if there were 50,000 people in "Palestine" (and plenty of them being Circassians, Turks, Europeans, etc.) in 1820, or 2,000, or fifty million. People don't matter (except to the Israelis trying to make their case, so patiently, so soberly, so utterly ineffectively). What matters is that the land, was once part of the Dar al-Islam: Dar al-Islam quondam, Dar al-Islamque futurus).
Christian Arabs came in very handy in disguising the Jihad against Israel. Unlike the cohesive, and until recently self-assured Maronites of Lebanon, the Palestinian Christians were simply Arabs, many of them recent arrivals in the area, drawn by the economic opportunities ironically supplied by the Zionist pioneers. They were deeply dhimmified. Hence, they were quite willing to parrot, and push, the Muslim agenda in order, as they perceived it, to save their own skins. Like Ba'athism, the "Palestinian cause" is a way for Christian Arabs, permanently insecure among the Muslims, to curry favor and, they hope, ensure their survival. (Note: the Christian population of the West Bank has by now plummeted to about 2% of the total population of "Palestinians"; apparently the strategy of supporting the Jihad hasn't worked out as Hanan Ashrawi, Naim Ateek, Archbishop Sabbagh would have hoped -- the churches are emptying out).
Inclusion of Hamas in the P.A. cannot possibly make things worse for Israel, and might make things better. It will help some non-Muslims come to their senses, not least in Israel, and certainly in the United States, which remains more hard-headed than Israel. It signifies no change either in goals, or even in tactics, of Arab Muslims. They will continue to do whatever they can do, whatever they can get away with, whatever works.
Fantastic to recall that Clinton's most frequent visitor was Arafat, or to realize that the U.N. spends fully 1/3 of its total time on the matter of "Palestine." But before anyone begins to prate again about negotiations and treaties every Infidel involved, beginning with those in Washington who have never heard of, much less taken seriously, the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya, should at least read Majid Khadduri's Law of War and Peace in Islam, and then ask themselves: Will a treaty, made with Infidels, which Muslims are not merely allowed but required, to breach at the earliest possible opportunity, help to promote peace? Will it not, in fact, have the opposite effect -- by rendering Israel more self-evidently weak, will not any agreement make it more likley that Arab leaders, even if they wished to stay out of war (King Hussein in June 1967) be placed, with an Israel visibly reduced to what seems a state of hopeless vulnerability,in a position of not being able to resist the hate and hysteria of mobs demanding that they go to war, those mobs to be found everywhere in the Arab and Muslim world, in Cairo, Amman, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Karachi, Teherean, Ramallah, Falluja, or Najaf?
The only thing keeping the peace now between Egypt and Israel is what is keeping the peace between Syria and Egypt. Not a peace treaty, not those lCamp David Accords which Jimmy ("I'm sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust")Carter and Brzezinski inflicted on the hapless, hopelessly trusting (and un-mediagenic) Begin, not that agreement by which the Israelis surrendered, for the second time, the entire Sinai, with three airfields, oilwells, amd tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure and with priceless strategic depth (there would be no smuggling of arms into Gaza today, had Israel kept the Sinai, or a circumjacent sliver of it, then), all in exchange for solemn commitments by Egypt, every single one of which Egypt has broken, again and again. And all this without a syllable of protest from the United States, the very party that arranged and hammered out the deal, in all its hideous worthlessness.
America, one hopes, will at last read Mubarak the riot act when he arrives next week, and cut off all military, and indeed other aid, to Egypt. Because if you are not with us against the Jihad, to quote someone, then you are for the Jihad. The United States is under no obligation to continue to support Egypt, in any way. Egypt has already received, since Camp David, more than $60 billion in military and economic aid. "What need one" of those dollars -- as Regan said to Goneril about the size of King Lear's retinue. Why should we give any Muslim country foreign aid raised from Infidel taxpayers? Have we won over Egypt with that $60 billion, or is Egypt one of the world centers of antisemitism and anti-Americanism? We don't have to win Muslim "hearts and minds." Can't be done. We have to change Muslim behavior, and that requires an end to being a patsy, mere putty in their pyramidic (Al-Ahramic) hands.
Let the countries of Islam no longer be propped up by Western funds. Let them attain to the condition that Turkey attained, and that so alarmed Ataturk, and caused him to constrain Islam, with one carefully-crafted bit of anti-Islamic legislation after another. Islam must be seen by its own adherents, as Ataturk saw, to have failed, politically, economically, intellectually.
If the non-Muslim world persists in delaying, or preventing outright, the recognition of that failure, by Muslims themselves (and also by non-Muslims who might, amazingly, be tempted by da'wa to convert -- there are plenty of the psychicdally marginal among us, looking for a home, and a Total Explanation of the Universe, helpfully supplied by Islam) it will be working against itself, in maddening and dangerous fashion. It will be helping the Jihad against it.
The ideology of Jihad never went away. It was there in Biafra. It was there during the Moplah Insurrection in 1921; in Xinjiang and the Gobi Desert in 1930. Jihad erupts wherever, and whenever, it has the wherewithal to erupt. OPEC money gave it that wherewithal, and on a global scale. In 1973 there began the OPEC-induced, greatest transfer of wealth in human history, which helps to fund the Jihad. Stop the aid, start the Manhattan Project, work not to make Muslims rich but to understand that the causes of their failures, of their distempers, lie in Islam itself. No foreign aid, less money to fund the Jihad.
And instead of giving Egypt military aid (unless those planes and tanks will be deliberately sabotaged, capable of being telecontrolled) like the computer items sold to the Soviet Union), Egypt, like all Muslim states, should be prevented from acquiring any major weaponry. There should be no more ground invasions of Muslim countries; ideally, it will be unnecessary if we throttle their weapons programs and weapons procurement. "We have the Gatling-gun, and they have not." Let it stay that way.
And if Mubarak is bad enough, what about the Muslim Brotherhood boys waiting in the wings? What about a freelance group, into whose hands American or other Western weaponry foolishly allowed to Mubarak's regime, could fall -- by accident or design? Forget about the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations-Project in Iraq. Keep them as poorly armed as possible, stop all Muslim migration (and reverse it), and forget about risking American soldiers'lives on the Sisyphean and fool's errand of bringing "democracy." Let a dozen Ataturks bloom, leaders who realize that Islam is not the solution (as al-Sadr, Bin Laden, and a cast of millions thinks) to Muslim woes; Islam is the problem. And get Europeans to recognize, and take measures to reverse, the demographic conquest from within.
The mask which was supposed to disguise the Jihad against Israel, and the intended imposition of dhimmi status on those Jews who for some reason were not killed or sent again into exile (since 1920 the Arabs of Palestine have been calling for re-imposition of the shari'a), has slipped. No Fixodent will put it back. Jews under a "bi-national" state (of which the late unlamented Edward Said used to prate) would yet again be assigned the status that Jews in Arab countries long endured, just as Copts do in Egypt, or the Christians in Iraq today. Whether it was the outright slave-status of Yemeni Jews (see the articles of R.S. Sarjeant, himself a quasi-apologist for Islam), the poverty of the Moroccan or Tripolitanian Jews, or even the relative prosperity, for a few decades under late-Ottoman, British, and early-Hashemite rule, of the Jews of Baghdad -- a prosperity-punctuated-by-pogrom (e.g. the Farhud, or Pogrom, of June 1-2, 1941) -- it amounts to the same thing. Humiliation, degredation, insecurity for all non-Muslims. That is what links Al-Qaeda to Laskar Jihad, Jaish-e-Toiba, Abu Sayyaf, Lashkar Jihad, Gemaaa Islamiyya, Jemaa Islamiyya, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and all the others that are such sinister fun to list.
The difference between Hamas and the P.A. is like that between the "extremist" Muslim spokesmen and the "moderates" -- the "extremissts" tell the truth about the teachings of Islam, and have considerable, indeed overwhelming, textual authority, in Qur'an and hadith and the sira, or life of Muhammad, on their side; it is the "moderates" so ill-defined and ill-analyzed, who -- out of embarrassment, filial piety, or prompted by something else(taqiyya, kitman, deliberate religiously-sanctioned deception) who have almost no textual authority on their side, and are, to the degree that they abjure the Jihad, and dhimmitude, incomplete or bad Muslims.
The goals of the P.A. have always been the same as those of Hamas. It will be fascinating to see if those who dole out the American and European largesse to the P.A. will be willing to continue; Western Infidel taxpayers are now clearly supporting one aspect of the world-wide Jihad -- the one which has for decades been wearing its increasingly threadbare disguise of a nationalist "liberation" struggle, just enough of a disguise, apparently, to continue to satisfy the extremely modest demands of Eurabian donors.
Europeans seemingly incapable of recognizing the Jihad, of understanding Islam or the demographic threat to their own societies, just perhaps will find the diseased sympathies evoked in them by that alliterative and meretricious phrase, the "plight of the Palestinian people" no longer quite so forthcoming. Hamas or Hezbollah or Al-Aksa Martyr's Brigade, Arafat or Shukairy, it scarcely matters -- they are all in the same boat, from Abu Sayyaf in the distant Moro Islands, to the preachers at the Finsbury Mosque, to the Lackawanna Five, to Mike Hawash of Intel and Portland, Oregon. Alas, so are we.
Posted by Hugh at April 8, 2004 02:55 PM ************************************************ Hugh.....you are awesome......damn.....I mean it...you're posts are great....
Does anyone else in the photo attached to this story think the guy looks like he smelled something terrible, like Arafat maybe?
Posted by DCWatson at April 8, 2004 03:28 PM Hugh, great post. Both eloquent and intelligent. Bravo!
Posted by Hal at April 8, 2004 03:48 PM ************************************************ Hugh..i've bookmarked your post..a good thing i've taken the Evelyn Woodhead speed reading course though.. Loved it!!
Posted by willy seaweed at April 8, 2004 05:38 PM I'm impressed, Hugh. I hope this is not your Magnum Opus- keep posting!
E
Posted by Earl at April 8, 2004 06:43 PM *********************************************** Thanks Hugh. I've copied your document to my word processor so I can print it out and read and share with others.
Posted by Marilyn at April 8, 2004 08:36 PM Hugh - You have no idea the good that you are doing by providing us with thesee "crash courses." Many of my friends and colleagues see those of us that have researched this topic using the alternative materials that are found on the web as monons, as we rely on the "questionable and unsubstantiated" materials that are taken from the web. (The web is a wild and wooly place filled with weirdos, questionable hyperbolic data. One can also make the same argument about some of the materials found in libraries.)
I plan to present your argument to a few of my more "learned" friends and colleagues that often looked down their noses at some of the other more "common" articles that I have given them, hoping to give them something more "appropriate as reading materials to match their exalted academic titles." (Some of them are rather too proud of their PHDs to bother with little ol' me! What on earth could I teach, or in this case, show them?)
Thank you again. Please continue to instruct and inform.
