Delicious

Not food.

A reminisce:

He had in fact recently written an article for the Guardian which troubled me very much, in which he wrote:

Zionism and Islamism are both political perversions of ancient Abrahamic faiths of Judaism and Islam... Prior to the Holocaust, Zionism was a pariah movement among Europe's Jewish communities. Rabbis chastised Zionists for abusing religion and religious identity. And yet, with the inhumane onslaught against European Jews in the 1940s, Zionism gained acceptance and respectability.

I asked him whether the reason he had written this article was similarly to fend off the taunt of ‘Zionist’. ‘Of course’, he said. He was, he said, on the point of encouraging more defections from Hizb ut Tahrir and could not afford to allow anything to jeopardise this delicate mission. So he had written this article mainly as a tactical ploy to deflect the charge that he was a ‘Zionist’ stooge.

‘But’, he added, ‘it was not altogether wrong. There is a core of truth in what I wrote’.

I was appalled to hear this. Cynical, tactical use of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist bigotry to save his own skin was bad enough. But for him to believe that Zionism really was a perversion of Judaism suggested to me that, even though he had renounced the jihad, he was still in the grip of the poisonous Muslim delusions about Israel and the Jewish people.

So it was I who suggested we should meet, in order to discuss this. He enthusiastically agreed; he made plain he had no quarrel with my position on Islam. He appeared keen to strike up a friendly relationship, and wanted to know more about my views on Israel and Zionism which were clearly a point of contention between us. So we met in a cafe, chosen at his request to be in an out of the way place where he would run no risk of being seen with me by anyone who could use this against him.

I gave him a quick history of the Jews and their ancient relationship with the land of Israel, explaining to him the symbiotic relationship between the people, the religion and the land. I ran through the development of political Zionism in the 19^th century, the decision by the world community after World War One that the Jews had an unchallengeable and unique right to the land of Palestine where their ancient national home should be reconstructed, and the subsequent attempt by the Arabs to frustrate this aim, the actual cause of some nine decades of conflict in the Middle East.

He was – at times, literally – open-mouthed at all of this. He had clearly never been told any of it before. It threw him. He cavilled at parts of it, not because he had any contrary information but because, he said, he just ‘couldn’t believe it’. But there was one thing I said to which he responded with enthusiasm.

I remarked how amazing it was that the anti-Israel ‘progressive’ Left supported ethnic cleansing in the putative state of Palestine through their core demand that the Israeli settlers had to be removed from that territory. After all, there was in principle no reason why the settlers couldn’t just be left there and become citizens of a state of Palestine whose boundaries could simply be drawn around them. This was impossible, however, because the Palestinian position was that no Jews could be citizens of Palestine – a racist position supported by the ‘anti-racist’ Left.

‘You are absolutely right!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a brilliant point! Why don’t you make it more vigorously?’

That was Melanie Phillips on Ed Husain.

Read it all.