The snippets below were written and published by the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project:
More than two years after the death of Osama bin Laden, concern about Islamic extremism remains widespread among Muslims from South Asia to the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa. Across 11 Muslim publics surveyed by the Pew Research Center, a median of 67% say they are somewhat or very concerned about Islamic extremism. In five countries – Pakistan, Jordan, Tunisia, Turkey and Indonesia – Muslim worries about extremism have increased in the past year.Well, that's certainly hopeful, although it must be noted that Arabs who live in Judea and Samaria and Gaza do not necessarily share this concern.
Widespread Muslim concern about Islamic extremism is generally coupled with rejection of suicide bombing and other forms of violence in the name of Islam. However, in some countries, substantial minorities of Muslims say attacks on civilians are at least sometimes justified to defend Islam from its enemies; in the Palestinian territories, a majority of Muslims hold this view.
The question is, what are we to make of these numbers? I would argue that we can say two things definitively. The first is that the majority of Arabs within Judea and Samaria and Gaza are something other than civilized. Excuse me, but when a majority of people within a specific place think that suicide bombing is just dandy than there is something seriously wrong with their culture.
It is a culture of death.
The second thing to note is the reluctance among so many westerners - particularly of the progressive variety - to condemn this culture of death for what it is. The truth is that many westerners blame the Jews in the Middle East for Arab attitudes because they believe those attitudes are grounded in "occupation." They might have a point accept for the fact that Arab citizens of Israel have more freedom, civil liberties, and financial well-being than Arabs anyplace else throughout that part of the world. Furthermore, Arabs in Judea and Samaria are almost entirely under the control of the Palestinian Authority and even they have it significantly better than their cousins throughout most of the rest of the Arab world.
The western left has got to stop blaming the Jews for the dysfunction of local Arab culture. It is not the fault of Jewish Israelis if Arabs in Judea and Samaria are enamored of a cult of death. Those people could be living free and prosperous lives if they had ever shown a significant inclination to accept the Jews in their midst, but they never did. Just as they did not in 1947 and 1948, so they have not since the middle of the 7th century and the reasons for that have to do with extremely hateful religious bigotry.
The only thing that has changed is that the Jews of the Middle East, after 1,300 years of abuse and persecution and dhimmitude, finally took their country back.
Good for them.
What I want to see is the Tibetans do likewise and the Kurds finally gain a measure of self-determination and self-defense.
Heck, maybe the Copts should carve out a little country for themselves within Egypt. Why not? If the world is so hell-bent on taking a giant chunk out of Israel in order to give it to the most brutal people on the planet, then why shouldn't the Copts have a state for themselves in Egypt?
Given the fact that they are being chased out of their own country and Egyptian Muslims are burning down their churches, they certainly deserve it more than do the so-called "Palestinians."
The Copts are a persecuted indigenous minority within Egypt. Maybe the Palestinian-Arabs should get their state sometime after the Copts get theirs.
It's not a culture of death. It's not a culture of anything. It's not a culture.
ReplyDeleteHey Mike. Here's a good article to bolster some of your themes.
Deletehttp://jewishrefugees.blogspot.ca/2013/09/placing-colonial-boot-on-arab-foot.html
Thanks Doodad,
Deleteand this is the first paragraph:
The post-colonial orthodoxy - that Arab Muslims cannot be colonisers - is being seriously challenged by the French historian Georges Bensoussan. Yes they can, he argues, and the Jews who lived under Muslim rule were the colonised. Lyn Julius explains in the Harif Clash of Cultures blog (Jerusalem Post):
Anyone who looks at the history of the Middle East can see immediately that the Jewish minority has lived under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperialism since the 7th century.
This has nothing to do with the Europeans - however heinous their behavior has sometimes been - but is purely something that the Islamic world must answer for.
Just as white America had to eventually face their responsibility for the fact of American slavery, as the New Social History well documents, so the Arab-Muslim world must step up and take responsibility for their brutality toward, and discrimination of, the Jewish minority in the Middle East.
For a Jew to suggest that it is "racist" for other Jews to point out the fact of Jewish persecution under Muslim rule, is to either validate or hide the fact of that persecution.
If we cannot stand up for ourselves, then no one else will.
And if we cannot face are own history of persecution on Jewish land - if we cannot speak to it - then we have no argument in the face of those who perpetually slander, demean, defame, and violently attack our friends and family in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, or Haifa.
Georges Bensoussan, threatens to stand the notion of 'Jewish colonialism' on its head: it is the Jews who lived under Muslim rule who were the true victims of colonialism.
His book, "Juifs en pays arabes: le grand deracinement 1850 - 1975 " published in 2012 in French, examines the reason why the Arab world was emptied of its Jews in barely a generation. Since most fled as refugees to the Jewish state from the Arab and Muslim world and now constitute at least half Israel's Jews, the question has huge implications for the Israel-Arab conflict.
For 40 some odd years, when I think of Palestine, I think of terrorism. You know the drill. These numbers do not surprise me.
ReplyDelete