By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
EGYPT’S newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was caught on tape about three years ago urging his followers to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. Not long after, the then-leader of the Muslim Brotherhood described Zionists as “bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians,” “warmongers” and “descendants of apes and pigs.”Read the whole thing here.
These remarks are disgusting, but they are neither shocking nor new. As a child growing up in a Muslim family, I constantly heard my mother, other relatives and neighbors wish for the death of Jews, who were considered our darkest enemy. Our religious tutors and the preachers in our mosques set aside extra time to pray for the destruction of Jews.
For far too long the pervasive Middle Eastern qualification of Jews as murderers and bloodsuckers was dismissed in the West as extreme views expressed by radical fringe groups. But they are not. In truth, those Muslims who think of Jews as friends and fellow human beings with a right to their own state are a minority, and are under intense pressure to change their minds.
All over the Middle East, hatred for Jews and Zionists can be found in textbooks for children as young as three, complete with illustrations of Jews with monster-like qualities. Mainstream educational television programs are consistently anti-Semitic. In songs, books, newspaper articles and blogs, Jews are variously compared to pigs, donkeys, rats and cockroaches, and also to vampires and a host of other imaginary creatures.
Jewish people have to be the only people on the planet who think that calling out racism against themselves is somehow racist, itself. The truth of the matter is that the Muslim Middle East is absolutely rampant with Nazi-level anti-Semitism and we need to be able to discuss it.
Thank G-d for apostates like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Discuss? No. Condemn. Righteously. Long, hard and loud. Shame on the left for leaving that job mostly to the right these days.
ReplyDeleteAnd y'know, Doodad, if someone like Stuart were still participating here he might say something like, "Please show me one example of a Jewish person claiming that calling out racism against Jews is racist."
DeleteThus seeking to make the thing just go POOF!
The fact of the matter, as you and I both know, anti-Jewish racism is a feature of political Islam, which is a movement promoted by Barack Obama.
The fact that very many Jewish people are afraid to call out the truly vicious anti-Jewish racism within the Muslim Middle East is evidenced by the fact that they simply do not do it.
Are there any diaries on dkos, or the progressive-left blogs, more generally, that call out that racism? No? Why the hell not?
We are a tiny minority on the planet with a long history of getting our asses kicked and, yet, if we dare to stand up for ourselves we are told by "progressive Zionists" that we are "racist."
That's how f****d up the conversation is on the left today.
One of the best meta explanations of all this is by Richard Landes here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theaugeanstables.com/2011/12/02/muslim-anti-semitism-israel-and-the-dynamics-of-self-destructive-scapegoating/
I highly recommend it.
Consider this little bit:
"This problem is everywhere. Even Jewish organizations designed to protect Jews from anti-Semitism spend much more of their time sponsoring inter-religious dialogues, opposing Islamism, and applauding human rights initiatives, than even discussing, much less mobilizing against Muslim Anti-Semitism. In the USA, the once legendary ADL has become a 20th century relic in the 21st century, still pursuing the nice, liberal policy of protecting everyone’s rights in the (dashed) hopes that others will come to their defense when they need it. A recent study shows that only 1.3% of the ADL’s 4269 press releases (1995-present) focused on Islamic extremism and another 1.3% on Arab anti-Semitism. Of the 57 press releases devoted to Islamic extremism, only 13, about .005 were issued in the ten years since September 11, 2001, precisely when the threat to Jews from Islamic extremism dramatically increased. (That’s almost as small as the percentage of Jews in the world, or the percentage of the Arab world “occupied” by Israel – .002.)"
Yes, progressives and others who never face this bigotry have no conception of what it feels like when someone calls for your extermination.
ReplyDeleteJews are not permitted to be victims, even as they are victimized by aggressive and illegal means by larger groups while many governments look the other way.
If someone wanted to commit genocide against progressives, and acted in furtherance, I suspect it might be easier to receive some empathy and support.
The Jews among them seem so afraid of disfavor that they are chilled into silence and acceptance.
The abusers are now the victims, and that says it all. It is good that Israel refused to participate in the UPR, which I think is a huge pulling back of the curtain.
As for Hirsi Ali, what more can be said than she is a true hero and worthy of admiration because she speaks a message that even progressives, inside, know is accurate, though scared to admit and be ostracized as a Muslim hater.
Speaking of the UN, this article by Anne Bayefsky is a must read:
Deletehttp://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=301408
As is her site:
http://www.eyeontheun.org/
oldschooltwentysix,
DeleteHere's the latest on the U.N.: Its Human Wrongs Council just came out in support of ethnic cleansing.
UN: Israel Must Withdraw From Judea, Samaria, on INN. The money quote: "Israel ... must immediately initiate a process of withdrawal of all settlers from the [occupied Palestinian territories.]" [Anti-Zionist denialist nomenclature for the Arab-Colonized Jewish Territories. —ZT]
Ethnic cleansing, the act of emptying a region of all members of a particular ethnos, is here presented as a good and moral course of action without which peace is impossible. And the Progressives told us it was the most heinous of crimes...
Me, I take the "what's good for the goose" approach: When given the response that booting people out is OK because "they're settlers, colonists stealing land," my reply is I fully agree, my only disagreement being about who the settler-colonists stealing land are here. Freshly-squeezed Zionist lemonade made out of the anti-Zionist lemon!
Total misreading of Article 49.
DeleteTotal reaffirmation why Israel need not cooperate with the HRC.
Zion,
Deletethe truth of the matter, of course, is that there is no reason, as I assume that you would agree, that Arabs should not be allowed to live in the Arab-Occupied Jewish territories.
They could even control a state in the area so long as they formally agreed to conclude hostilities with their Jewish neighbors and stopped teaching their children genocidal Jew hatred.
In any case, I like this a lot:
the Arab-Occupied Jewish territories.
Jeez, man, it's not my birthday.
:O)
Mike,
DeleteWe might have to disagree here. I have a doctrine, applying to nearly all nations in the entire world, not just to Arabs, an idea based on modern history, that it's never good to tempt fate by letting multiple nations live under the same political roof (=nation-state).
Let me elaborate. The religion of Judaism has the injunction that, while the Jews are in exile, they are to accept the law of the land as far as they can (up to the point of being told to leave their religion), and they are not to change things in the host state at any circumstance. This is the model of the guest nation that can really be trusted, and if some of our hosts have heaped abuse on us in the past, they're now tasting what it is like when a guest nation doesn't have such an injunction as the Jewish nation has—the Muslim colonists in Europe are a different type of pill for the Europeans to swallow.
But that's exactly the point that needs to be made: How many nations have an ideological foundation of being docile guests when residing under another nation's roof? Apart from the Jews, I can only think of the Druzes. In just about all other cases, an unassimilated guest nation will, sooner or later, rise up in prideful rebellion against the host state. "Better living conditions," as the proponents of multiculturalism (nation-mixing really) keep saying, won't appease them, because national pride can't be swapped for amenities such as first-world conditions. Note that this is in no way about race—I don't view the world through the prism of race and genetics, this is all about nations.
Even had there been no violent history between Jews and Arabs, still it wouldn't be a good idea to keep the Arabs in the ACJTs. Autonomy wouldn't appease them, any more than the bantustans in South Africa did. But I'm not comparing Israel to South Africa, because we Jews are like the blacks of SA, not like the whites, the indigenous, not the colonists. To the topic, I no longer trust even the Arabs in pre-1967 Israel; the pattern seen in Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, even Belgium where the Flemish and the Walloons hate each other's guts, is bound to recur with a vengeance here. To put it as simply as possible, I'm against playing with fire on the national-political level.
I'm not asking you to agree with me, I'm just explaining what makes me think the way I do. My line of thinking is jaded and cynical, but experience and learning from history tends to do this to people.
Doodad, thank you for this:
ReplyDeleteA recent study shows that only 1.3% of the ADL’s 4269 press releases (1995-present) focused on Islamic extremism and another 1.3% on Arab anti-Semitism. Of the 57 press releases devoted to Islamic extremism, only 13, about .005 were issued in the ten years since September 11, 2001, precisely when the threat to Jews from Islamic extremism dramatically increased.
I'm not really surprised because we're going through a process of realization over time. I didn't recognize the problem of political Islam, myself, until fairly recently.
The ADL is behind the curve, as are most diaspora Jews.
The American Jewish community will come to acknowledge this problem eventually, because it is quite possible that they will have no choice.
"the Arab-Occupied Jewish territories"
ReplyDeleteI like it.