Introducing Rashid Rida on Zionism

Anyone who follows pro-'Palestine' Islamic propaganda will recognzie in the excerpts below the source material for the virulent antisemitism, exaggerations and misrepresentations emanating from the Palestinian National Authgority official bodies as well as activists on behalf on 'Palestine'.

They originate from Rashid Rida.

Another scholar claims "As one of the most influential advocates of Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism, we shall argue, Riḍā’s critiques of Zionism and Jewish expansion in Palestine were part of his anti-colonial activities against the ‘Christian’ west." Nevertheless, he notes that Rida asserted as to Jewish goals, "allegedly, they schemed to possess Jerusalem and its neighbouring regions to establish their Kingdom of Israel and turn it into the Temple of Solomon, against the desire of Christians and Muslims (ʿAbduh and Riḍā [1328] 1910, V:139–140)."

He further quotes Rida "Under the title “King of the Jews, their Temple, their Messiah and the True Messiah,” Riḍā stated that the Jews arrogantly disobeyed their prophets, who regularly warned them against God’s punishment if they abandoned His commandments (Al-Manār 30/7: 546–556)."

And Rida becomes starkly clear in this excerpt:

One of Islam’s greatest manifestations, according to Riḍā, was the confirmation of glad tidings of Jesus as a prophet of God and not his son. In this reading, God entitled Muslims to inherit the Holy Land and to build the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the place of the destroyed temple in order to establish the worship of God alone. Riḍā repeated the traditional Muslim view that God placed those who believe in Jesus above the unbelievers (Qur’an Āl ʿImrān 3:55), but that He had struck the Jews with humiliation by making them lose their kingdom until the Day of Resurrection. The Jews, Riḍā said, would follow the Antichrist as their assumed king fighting under his banner in the Holy Land, but Muslims would finally achieve victory upon them and kill them, and the true Messiah would appear and reveal the truth by destroying the Antichrist (Al-Manār 30/7: 554).

And in this:

Muslims did not persecute the Jews but treated them with justice and mercy. He observed that the Jews started to permit each other to reside in Jerusalem around the western side of the wall of the Al-Aqsa Mosque (Al-Buraq), performing the rituals and sacrifices against the will of Muslims and Christians in the world. They had strong hope to multiply their numbers to own the Holy City and the rest of Palestine in preparation for the appearance of the Messiah again as the King of Israel (Al-Manār 30/5: 391). 

Rida also employed the term nakba already in early 1935:

A few months before Riḍā’s death, the Egyptian historian and religious scholar ʻAbd al-Wahhāb al-Najjār (1862–1941) gave a lecture at Jamʿiyyat al-Shubbān al-Muslimīn (Association of Young Muslim Men) in which he maintained that the Jewish Zionist presence in Palestine was to be like a short “summer cloud” that would clear up soon after a great shock, followed by the defeat of the Jews after the restoration of the kingdom of David and the appearance of the Messiah (Al-Manār 34/8: 607–612)...After the lecture, Riḍā stood up and disagreed with al-Najjār in his arguments. Instead of following this apocalyptic way of thinking, Riḍā requested Arabs and Muslims to “take admonition in the Jewish Zionist nakba (catastrophe) by means of the worldly affairs and social natural laws” (Al-Manār 34/8: 608). By this he urged his Muslim readers not to see the Jewish success on the basis of their religious zeal but due to their work to achieve their political goals. 

Rida "called upon Arab Christians and Arab Muslims, supported by other Muslims in the world, to get the benefit of uniting themselves against the growing power of the Jews. In his own words: The doctrine of the Jews in restoring the King of Israel by means of the Messiah is [39] a denial of the religion of Islam and a clear rejection of Christ Jesus, Son of Mary, may blessings and peace be upon him. It was, however, Christ with whom their prophets had preached, but they had denied him. It was also him who warned them against the ruin of their Temple of Solomon so that there would not remain any stone of it."

Here are more excerpts of another researcher:

A reading of Rida’s depictions of Jews as the embodiment of vices and the orchestrators of global-scale conspiracies is useful to the broader discussion on the proliferation of anti-Semitic ideas in the contemporary Arab world. Translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been available in Arabic since the mid-1920s, and by the late 1920s they were already incorporated as an argument against Zionism. Following the 1948 war, the Protocols proliferated as an explanation for the Arab defeat. However, Rida viewed Jews as the masters of anti-Christian and anti-Muslim conspiracies already at the turn of the century, with no experience of defeat in mind and no foundational hateful European textbook to guide him. It appears that he was acquainted, albeit not through primary sources, with French anti-Semitic expressions as well as with their refutations in France. Anti-Semitic allegations in Istanbul also did not escape him. Ironically and to a large measure, Rida’s developed anti-Semitism reads as accommodation of his original admiration of Jewish virtues with his realization that Zionism was a serious threat...

...Under the title “The Life of a Nation after Its Death: The Zionist Association of the Jews,” Rida revised his earliest impression of Jewish nationalism, and, always the journalist, flattered himself (without justification in this case), for having already written about the Zionist movement in 1898, “when no one else took notice of it.” His analysis failed to distinguish between Zionists and Jews, and disclosed that he was unaware that the movement had won the hearts of only a minority of Jews around the world....

...Apparently confusing, at least in part, Herzl (whose name was not mentioned in the entire article) with the British-Jewish author and Zionist leader Israel Zangwill (1864 – 1926), Rida wrote that Zangwill had recently negotiated the purchase of Jerusalem as well as predicted a massive Jewish return to Palestine and the transformation of the land by the people of Israel into a shining lighthouse in all fields – social, political, judicial, cultural, and agricultural. Rida went as far as positing that Zangwill was wrong in reprimanding the rich Jews for not donating to Zionism...

In 1903, Rida addressed the Jews again...He wrote that no people in the world demonstrated such communal unity and ethnic solidarity as the People of Israel (Sha‘b Isra’il); however, he added that the Jews tended to divert the resources of the nations among which they lived to their own benefit, and harmed themselves by their excessive egotism. This, he argued, was the reason for the persecution of the Jews and their expulsion by all the peoples and nations. Hinting at Jewish ungratefulness, he concluded that while they could find a safe haven only in the Ottoman Empire, they now sought to gain independence and renew their sovereignty in Palestine...

...On January 1908, following a long period of silence, Rida addressed Zionism again, although indirectly. In a Quran exegesis, he disputed the Jewish hope for a Messiah who would renew Jewish sovereignty. He also suggested that the Jews’ dispersion throughout the world, their lack of expertise in warfare and agriculture, and their focus on professions that required little effort, like charging interest-based loans, were impediments that would prevent the realization of their dream of renewed sovereignty. The weakness of the Jews, he argued, was a punishment from God for their infidelity. Only two years later, Rida changed his mind about the potential of Zionism...In December 1910, he presented the Zionist danger in even graver terms: should the Jews realize their plan to take over alAqsa, they would expel the Muslims and the Christians from the Holy Land...

...[In 1914 he wrote] that if Zionist ambitions were ever realized, they would not allow a single Muslim or Christian to remain in Palestine, as they believed that it belonged to the Israelites alone. Furthermore, the Promised Land that the Zionists sought to conquer was not what Muslims defined as Palestine; rather, according to Jewish scriptures and conventions, Palestine stretched to Syria and the Euphrates. Rida based his warning of the prospect of ethnic cleansing on the argument that in the book of Deuteronomy God ordered the Jews not to spare a single soul upon entering the land...

...in an appendix to a Quranic exegesis from 1924, he cautioned that the “Arabs of Palestine,” who were confronted by “two of the world’s strongest nations [the British and the Jews],” could only be saved if they united with the rest of the Arab peoples and tribes to defend Palestine as well as the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. Yet the underlying objective of this warning – in itself exceptional for his writing during the early 1920s – was not to call for action, but to denounce Sharif Hussein and his family and praise the Sa‘uds. Rida portrayed Hussein’s family as supporters of those who were seeking to implement the “satanic plan” to deprive the Palestinians of their land, i.e., the British and the Zionists. He cautioned the Palestinians against cooperating with the Sharifian family, explaining that while they could boast a distinguished lineage (as descendents of the Prophet Muhammad), they lacked knowledge and honesty...

...until mid-1920...he noted, in an objective manner, that the Jews considered Palestine as their sacred, ancestral land, but neither debated that claim nor insisted that Palestine was a Muslim land that must never be conceded to the Jews as such. That changed in 1924, but in a way that was far from affirming that Muslims were the rightful owners of the land or would eventually have the upper hand against the Zionists. In a Quranic exegesis, Rida suggested in an almost even-handed manner that God had promised the land to both the Israelite sons of Abraham and to the Arab sons of Abraham, who had also been promised additional lands. The promises were kept for both Israelites and Arabs when they acted righteously, but when they sinned they were punished and the land was taken from them...

...Already in October 1928, only days after the tensions over the Wailing Wall began, Rida portrayed events in Palestine as a struggle between Judaism and Islam, as well as between Britain and Islam. In this struggle, the British were assisting the Jews as part of Britains’s “ambitious” and uncharacteristically illconceived plan to subordinate the Arab nation and impose British rule on the Arabian Peninsula and the three holiest shrines – in Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. In this struggle, the ultimate goal of the Jews was the destruction of al-Aqsa, the third holiest shrine in Islam, and its replacement with a new Jewish temple...

...Rida elaborated [in December 1929] on the prophecies of a Muslim victory over the Jews, reiterating that those were more reliable than the Jewish prophets’ prophecies of Jewish victory. He mentioned the prophecy that the Jews would give fanatic loyalty to the Dajal, a false Messiah, fight against Muslims and Christians in Palestine and other lands, and be defeated, as well as the Prophet’s words, narrated by ‘Abdullah b. ‘Umar: “I heard Allah’s Messenger saying, ‘The Jews will fight with you, and you will be given victory over them so that a stone will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me, kill him!’”...Zionism, he argued, was a striking example of Western moral corruption, because in Palestine the English had done something they had not done anywhere else: they had created a new people based on the ingathering of a rabble from all corners of the earth, allowing the rabble to usurp the land of another people and to exploit and discriminate against the population in a historically unprecedented way. Thus, for the first time, in late 1929, the Jews were denied in Rida’s journal not only a right to Palestine, but also the right to be considered a nation.

^

Such Nice, Cultured and Civilized People

From an Islamists' Facebook album of Jews visiting the Temple Mount:

Note the comment (red arrow).

Such nice, cultured and civilized people.

^

Wicked Witches of the Waqf III

Some of my readers may be uncomfortable with these WWW posts (I; II).

Well, the actions by these mobilized females, paid/subsidized to "learn" on the Temple Mount and then act in a provocative manner to incite, while lying about "fallen" and "stepped on" and "kicked" Qurans, besides their current evil, have also, I discovered, an historic precedent.

This is from the HaTzefirah newspaper of May 16, 1911, 102 years ago:-

The story tells of a visit to the Western Wall and the highlighted section informs us that Muslim women were busy bothering the Jewish devotees there, interfering with their prayers.  They were preparing a coffin while the Arab children were making faces and cursing the Jews, all the while running inbetween those gathered at the wall.

Nothing new, it seems, in Eretz-Yisrael.

^

Quiz on Apes and Pigs

Borrowed from Ruth King at OUTPOST:

EVOLUTION OF HATRED 

Question: Who said that Jews are descended from apes and pigs?

a. Bashar Al Assad of Syria
 
b. The Moslem Brotherhood


c. President Morsi of Egypt
 
d. Charles Darwin


e. Al-Azhar Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the highest-ranking cleric in the Sunni Muslim world

f. Saudi sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, imam and preacher at the Al-Haraam mosque – the most important mosque in Mecca

g. Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, PA official and imam of the Sheikh Ijlin mosque in Gaza City.

h. Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah

i. Salim ‘Azzouz, columnist for the Al-Ahrar Egyptian opposition daily, affiliated with the religious Liberal Party

j. British-Palestinian Muslim cleric Haitham al-Haddad

k. The Koran

Answer: All of the above except for D.

^

What's Not New at the New York Times?

This is not a comedy routine:

Question:

Is there an editorialdecisuion taken at the New York Times not to report on anti-semitism when it comes from Islamists?

Answer:

...the New York Times' conspiracies theories are usually wrong and what people think of as orders from the top is really incompetence from below...you make a great point, you know, part of that is that anti-Semitism from Islamists becomes sort of 'not news', it's very much 'dog-bites-man'...what's new here?...that might be one answer to your question but it's a very interesting point..."

That exchange I received from David Gerstman and was between Prof. Jeffrey Herf and New York Times reporter, Scott Shane, why his newspaper fails to report on the antisemitism of the Muslim Brotherhood. (h/t Challah Hu Akbar).

^

Islamic Antisemitism?

You convinced that Arabs, who are Semites, can't be antisemitic?

Fine, then let's call them Jew-haters, judeophobic, whatever, after reading this:-

I said: By God, young Egyptians who fight lions cannot fight the Jews? Can't they devour the Jews? How many millions of our young men are ready to fight lions... I mean, Jews. [...]

"I address them on behalf of 85 million Egyptians, whose hearts beat with hatred for the Jews, and with the knowledge of what the Jews did to us and of how Allah warned us about them...

"I tell them that the battle is bound to come, Allah be praised. The Prophet Muhammad, whose words are divinely inspired, said: 'Judgment Day will come when the Muslims fight the Jews.' That means that the Muslims will be the ones who engage [in fighting]. It's not just any battle. He said: 'The Muslims will fight the Jews, and the stones and the trees will say: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Even the stones and the trees hate them. The battle is bound to come. [...]

"Jews will be Jews, guys. The Jews of today are the Jews of Khaybar, who tried to poison the Prophet Muhammad. They are the Jews of Banu Nadhir, who tried to kill the Prophet Muhammad. They are the Jews of Banu Qaynuqa', who tried to lift up a Muslim woman's dress. Jews will be Jews. We know what you are like, you Jews, and we know your hatred toward the religion of Allah, toward the servants of Allah, and toward the Muslims worldwide.

"You will be vanquished, Allah willing...Today, 92% of the world's film industry is in your hands, 90% of the world's famous actors are Jews, and 90% of the giant news networks, like CNN, are in Jewish hands. [...]

"Oh nation of Muhammad...It is either a war with the Jews or a war with Allah. Allah says that the entire nation could be replaced if it is not prepared to sacrifice its blood for the sake of Palestine. [...]

"My message to all the Jews is that the battle is bound to come and you will be vanquished...we follow - the moment [Muhammed] signed the Hudaybiyya Treaty with Mecca, the first thing he did after the battle with the Quraysh tribe, only 20 days after signing the Hudaybiyya Treaty, he took his army and attacked Khaybar.

"Why, oh Messenger of Allah? Because these Jews are a cancer. These Jews are a catastrophe. There is not a catastrophe in the world that is not the handiwork of the Jews. These Jews are a cancer in the body of planet Earth, and if permitted, it will spread and infect the entire body. Getting rid of these Jews is a must."

^

Nazi Mufti - And Shame on Today's Pal. Supporters

Following my earlier post this week on the Grand Mufti of Mandate Palestine and his Nazi connections, here is from a review by Norman Goda (University of Florida) of Klaus Gensicke's The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years, 1941-1945. Edgware: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010:-

...scholars and journalists have asked whether there exists a link between Nazi thinking on the Jewish question and current discourse in the Arab/Muslim world on Jews and on Western modernity. These questions are of great importance. Current “anti-Zionist” rhetoric is said to center on anticolonial narratives, which carry moral authority with many on the political left in Europe and in formerly colonized regions. But this moral authority would vanish should the roots of anti-Israel thinking be shown to have its roots in Nazism.

...a key piece to the puzzle is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948. In 1941 the mufti, having triggered failed revolts against the British in both Palestine and Iraq, gravitated to Berlin, where for four years he tried to tighten bonds between Nazi Germany and the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East. After Germany’s defeat he fled to Paris, then Cairo, then Beirut, while styling himself as a nationalist and anti-imperialist. Was the mufti’s policy in Berlin simply a question of anti-British pragmatism? Or was he the missing link between the Nazis’ war against the Jews and more extreme forms of Muslim antisemitism today? And whom did the mufti ultimately speak for in the Middle East?

...[the Mufti] endorsed Nazism’s war against the Jews on ideological grounds, and contributed where he could to the Jews’ destruction...Husseini adopted an uncompromising antisemitism that viewed Jews not just as Western interlopers in Palestine and not just as religious infidels, but as an existential threat as per the modern European antisemitic tradition...Husseini argued to German interlocutors that, “Current Jewish influence on economics and politics is injurious all over and has to be combated” (p. 29). Living in exile in Baghdad after his failure in Palestine, he further demanded the expropriation of the 135,000 Jews there--who were hardly part of the European Zionist movement--and he instigated the pogrom that eventually erupted in Baghdad after the failed anti-British revolt in 1941.

Most crucial is the mufti’s period in Berlin from 1941 to the end of the war...When he met personally with Hitler in November 1941, Nazi propaganda on the Jews had been clear for two decades, and the Germans, with local help, had been killing Jews in the Soviet Union for four months.

Here indeed was the crucial link between the mufti and the Nazis. Unable to agree on Middle Eastern geopolitics, they could agree that Jews controlled the governments in Moscow, London, and Washington, and that murder was a desirable policy by which to eradicate Jews from the Middle East. The mufti was pleased to broadcast this message to the Arab world through the use of German radio facilities, and the Germans were pleased to have him do so, particularly after June 1942 when it looked as though the Afrika Korps, with an attached SS murder squad, would break through British defenses. As late as December 1942, with the Allies having taken the offensive in North Africa, Husseini, on the opening of the new Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, proclaimed that “the Holy Koran ... is full of evidence of Jewish lack of character and their insidious lying and deceitful conduct” and that the Jews “will always remain a divisive element in the world ... committed to devising schemes, provoking wars, and playing people off against one another” (p. 108). As scholars have pointed out, the tone and content of Arab propaganda from Berlin, speaking as it did of Jewish global conspiracies, has much in common with extreme Arab narratives today.

...regardless of the mufti’s frustrations with Hitler, the Jews remained his existential enemy. In spring 1943 when gas chambers in Poland murdered Jews from all over Europe, the mufti engaged in quiet diplomacy with the Romanian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian governments, urging them not to allow a few thousand Jewish children to travel to Palestine as was then being discussed in London. The Jews would be better off, the mufti said, in Poland where the Germans could keep an eye on them. Husseini enjoyed a close relationship with Heinrich Himmler and knew what awaited deported Jews...he worked to ensure that as many Jews were killed as possible. In the meantime he tried to fuse Islam with Nazism, creating seven new “pillars” that included the thesis that, “In the struggle against Jewry, Islam and National Socialism come very close to one another” (p. 149).

...“The Mufti,” concludes Gensicke, “bore much of the blame for the naqba,” by which the attack on Israel in 1948 created throngs of Arab refugees (p. 189)...Yassir Arafat was among Husseini’s mourners when he died in exile in 1974, and he referred to Husseini as “our hero” as late as 2002 (p. 203). And as Gensicke shows in this important book, the mufti threw a long shadow as a precursor to the Arab and Muslim factions who reject all compromise with Jews in the Middle East and whose brand of antisemitism borrows much from the Western traditions that they otherwise despise.

And to all the progressives, the radicals, the anti-colonialists, the liberals, Jews and otherwise, shame on you for not realizing what was --- and what is in great part --- the local Arab principled opposition to Jewish nationalism, Zionism, in the territory of the historic Jewish homeland.

P.S.

It continues:

Sheik Nayef Najjaj Al-Ajami of Kuwait: Servants of Allah, let us be aware that our struggle with the Jews is one of faith, identity, and existence. Read the Koran, where Allah says: “Never will the Jews or the Christians be satisfied with you until you follow their creed,” so that you may know what the Jews conceal within their hearts.

Read what Allah says: “Strongest among men in enmity to the believers you will find the Jews and the polytheists,” so that you may know the magnitude of their enmity towards the Muslims, and their hatred towards the followers of the Prophet Muhammad. These people...

Brothers and sisters, you should read history books, so you my know the history of this people, and so you may know that the Jews of the past were evil, and the Jews of today are even worse.

They are ungrateful, they distort the word [of Allah], the worshippers of the golden calf, the slayers of the prophets, the enemies of the divine prophecies, the scum of mankind, who incurred the curse and wrath of Allah, and whom Allah transformed into apes and pigs and into taghut worshippers. ("Taghut" means anything people worship besides Allah)

^

Calling Someone "Jewish" Turns A Mob Murderous

Here's the follow-up to my earlier mention of the Logan rape interview:

She said that two to three hundred pairs of hands, one after the other, grabbed at her breasts, crotch and behind, and kept raping her non-stop from the back and the front. The mob had torn off all her clothing and the more she screamed the more excited they became. When someone yelled that she was an “Israeli, a Jew,” the frenzied mob turned murderous. They continued to beat her with flagpoles and sticks. They tried to tear her apart, limb from limb. They were tearing her muscles in every direction. They tried to tear her scalp off her skull. They were inside her everywhere. She believed that not only was she going to die but that she would die a long, slow, torturous death.  This went on for 25 minutes.

Think about that.

(k/t = Phylis Chesler)


UPDATE  I

Saw the interview (here) and at 4:10, the interviewer does mention that the crowd called out she was Israeli, a Jew and that was like a match to gasoline.

But Lara doesn't say that on camera in her words.  Why?

Why did they edit that out?


UPDATE II

She also caught it.
^

Jew-Hatred By Muslims in France

My high school French is nearly inadequate so Elliot Green provided me with a translation of this anti-semitic Muslim perpetrated incident:

...c'est une jeune femme de confession juive qui portait plainte après avoir été agressée dans une grande surface de Toulouse. La victime affirme avoir été prise à partie par deux adolescents qui lui reprochaient d'acheter de la nourriture pendant le jeûne. La jeune femme aurait alors fait valoir qu'elle était de confession juive, ce qui n'aurait fait que redoubler la colère de ses agresseurs, lesquels, après l'avoir traitée de "sale juive", l'auraient frappée à la tête, la faisant lourdement chuter. Un vigile a assisté à la scène sans intervenir. Interrogé par les enquêteurs sur les raisons de sa passivité, l'homme a expliqué qu'il respectait le ramadan et qu'il était donc pressé de partir pour pouvoir s'alimenter, dès le coucher du soleil.

which is basically:

a woman was shopping in a supermarket in Toulouse. Two "adolescents" scolded her that she should not be buying food on Ramadan during the fast [whereas Muslims in Jerusalem do buy food during the day during Ramadan]. But it was a case of mistaken identity. Apparently they had thought that she was Muslim. The woman told them that she was Jewish. The article in Le Point goes on to say that her statement that she was Jewish "only redoubled the anger of her attackers." They called her "dirty Jewess" [sale Juive], hit her on the head, causing her to fall down. Worse yet, a supermarket guard wtinessed the attack and did nothing to help the woman. He explained that he respected Ramadan and was in a hurry to leave so that he could eat at sundown

- - -

An Imam Antisemitic? Really?

Antisemitic Rant Causes Red Faces at Islamic Confab

...an imam at a major Muslim conference gave an incendiary speech in which he said Jews were to blame for the Holocaust.

The speech came during the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, which was attended by rabbis who have been trying to build closer relations between Muslims and Jews.

At one of the conference’s 70 sessions, Warith Deen Umar, a New York imam, spoke critically of Jews, saying that the Holocaust happened to the Jews “because they were serially disobedient to Allah.” He also said that a small handful of Jews around President Obama “control the world.” ISNA immediately condemned the tenor of the comments. This was enough for some of the Jewish figures in attendance, but not enough for the Jewish terrorism hunter who brought the comments to light.

...Steve Emerson, head of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and a skeptic when it comes to close ties between Jewish groups and the major American Muslim organizations.
Emerson has argued that ISNA and other Muslim groups are not as moderate as Jewish groups would like to believe. It was Emerson’s project that released a record and transcript of Umar’s comments, and he immediately rejected ISNA’s apology.

“I think they have fooled the Jewish groups,” Emerson told the Forward. “They haven’t changed.”

Wait, it gets better:

But Rabbi Marc Schneier, president and founder of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding and a keynote speaker at the ISNA convention, said that Islamic groups are too often condemned based on extreme outliers.

“When you have 99.999% of the people saying good things and one person saying other things, you shouldn’t magnify the words of that one person,” Schneier said. “It is time for the Emersons of the world to understand that the process has begun and that while there may be bumps on the road, the process has begun.”

Emerson shot back that “Rabbi Schneier is involved in legitimization of extreme Islamist groups for years. He wouldn’t tell a good group from a bad one, even if he got hit on his head by jihad.”

35 Years Later

Between 1975-1977, I was the emissary to the Betar Zionist Youth Movement in the UK. In 1976, after establishing my credentials, I was invited by Ella Bar-Ilan, WZO Representative to the University Students Unit, to submit an idea for a lecture tour of campuses.

I was then reading A.G. Horon and Yonatan Ratosh, the two leading intellectuals of the Canaanite Movement. I suggested a talk that would be entitled "Arab Nationalism in the Middle East" and would make the point that it isn't the fault of Israel, Zionism or Jews that Arabs hate us so but that basically, they hate and oppress and butcher and subjugate all non-Arab and non-Muslim minorities.

There was one incident when I spoke at Birmingham University. My name was listed as "Y. Medad" and, as it turned out, the audience of some 200 was mostly Muslim waiting to hear someone they presumed was named Youseff Medad. That they were shocked when I walked in with a kippah on my head is a British understatement.

I mentioned the Copts in Egypt, the Berbers in North Africa, the Alawis, the Assyrians and the Christian Sudanese and more. I had a whole list. Just at that time the Muslims were bombing the hell out of the Christians in Sudan but the audience refused to believe me.

Anyway, I recalled that when someone (BPO) sent me an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg (here) and I spotted this:

Goldberg:...The question of Israel is the question of what happens to all minorities in the Middle East. The Arab Muslim Middle East has 300 million people. It has a very hard time treating Coptic Christians with equality, treating Maronites in Lebanon with equality, treating Southern Sudanese in an equal way, treating Kurds in an equal way, and dealing with Jews – not only in their national expression, but even as minorities within their own countries. There was never a golden era for Jews who lived in Arab countries. It wasn’t as bad as living in Poland, but that’s no great shakes.
MJT: You have talked to Hamas people. Should the Israelis or Americans talk to them?
Goldberg: I don’t know what they’d get out of it.
MJT: What did you get out of it when you did it?
Goldberg: A first-hand understanding of how they think. People in the United States find it hard to understand how people in Hamas and Hezbollah think. It’s alien. It’s alien to us. The feverish racism and conspiracy mongering, the obscurantism, the apocalyptic thinking – we can’t relate to that. Every so often, there’s an eruption of that in a place like Waco, Texas, but we’re not talking about 90 people in a compound. We’re talking about whole societies that are captive to this kind of absurdity.
So it’s very important – and you know this better than almost anyone – to go over there yourself and tape it, get it down on paper, and say “this is what they actually say.”

Thirty-five years later, Goldberg gets it and expresses it.

And while we're reading Goldberg, here's some more:

Goldberg:...And going back to the destruction of Israel – Arabs are misreading history if they believe Israel is a temporary phenomenon. Nothing like this has ever happened in history. A dead tribe came back and seized the land it had, and did so after a devastating tragedy. Jews are also good at waiting, apparently. They’re a small group, but there’s a survival impulse that’s embedded in many Jews, and certainly in the Jews of Israel today. It says: “You want to wait? We’ll wait, too.” Jews were an ancient people already when Mohammad appeared on the Arabian peninsula.

I wonder all the time if two people just like us will be having the same conversation a hundred years from now. “Well, what do you think? Will Israel make it?”

MJT: It’s possible.

Goldberg: Anything’s possible. Anyone who acts like they’ve figured out the entire Middle East doesn’t know anything.

MJT: Yeah. It’s a humbling place.

Goldberg: People who tell you they understand and know the answer? Demagogues. They’re either idiots or demagogues. Nobody can understand this. You can’t apply rationality to it either.

This is why I’m negative about the intentions of Palestinians. If their goal were statehood, they could have had statehood. Therefore, you have to give serious credence to the idea that their goal is not statehood, that it’s more important to rid the Arab world of Jewish nationalism than it is to have a Palestinian state that would improve the lives of individual Palestinians now.

MJT: Lots of them say that explicitly. They aren’t demanding a state in the West Bank and Gaza. They want to liberate all of Palestine, so to speak, “from the river to the sea.”

Goldberg: But just because they want that doesn’t mean it can happen.

MJT: Right. But it’s clear that some of them want the whole thing and won’t accept a state in the West Bank and Gaza. From their point of view, it’s like Israel being offered Tel Aviv and the beach. It isn’t enough.

Goldberg: Ben-Gurion was smart. He took what they offered him and hoped for better. He hoped for Arab mistakes that would allow him to get more territory. The Arabs provided the mistakes, and he took the territory...

...And the long strategy of some Arabs is impervious to short term interventions. Short of packing up Palestinians and bussing them to Egypt, the impulse to defeat the Jews will remain there.

The reason American minds can’t really grasp the Middle East is because our minds are trained for concepts that are at variance with the mindset of Middle Eastern fundamentalists – and by that I mean both Muslims and Jews. The importance of today, the importance of pleasure, the importance of compromise, the importance of pragmatism, the relative unimportance of land. We have a house, we sell it, and then we move to another house. We don’t build our houses on top of our fathers’ houses.

Islamic Antisemitism's German Roots

From Jeffrey Goldberg's book review article on JIHAD AND JEW-HATRED: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. By Matthias Küntzel. Translated by Colin Meade. 180 pp. Telos Press:-

...German scholar Matthias Küntzel tells us this is a mistake. He takes anti-Semitism, and in particular its most potent current strain, Muslim anti-Semitism, very seriously indeed. His bracing, even startling, book, “Jihad and Jew-Hatred” (translated by Colin Meade), reminds us that it is perilous to ignore idiotic ideas if these idiotic ideas are broadly, and fervently, believed...Hezbollah officials employ language that shamelessly echoes Nazi propaganda, describing Jews as parasites and tumors and prescribing the murder of Jews as a kind of chemotherapy.

The question is not only why, of course, but how: how did these ideas, especially those that portray Jews as all-powerful, work their way into modern-day Islamist discourse? The notion of the Jew as malevolently omnipotent is not a traditional Muslim notion. Jews do not come off well in the Koran — they connive and scheme and reject the message of the Prophet Muhammad — but they are shown to be, above all else, defeated. Muhammad, we read, conquered the Jews in battle and set them wandering...

Obviously, then, these modern-day ideas about Jewish power were imported from Europe, and Küntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The story of the mufti is a familiar one: he was the leader of the Arabs in Palestine, and Palestine’s leading anti-Jewish agitator. He eventually embraced the Nazis and spent most of the war in Berlin, recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the SS and agitating for the harshest possible measures against Jews. Küntzel writes that the mufti became upset with Himmler in 1943, when he sought to trade 5,000 Jewish children for 20,000 German prisoners. Himmler came around to the mufti’s thinking, and the children were gassed.

Hassan al-Banna did not embrace Nazism in the same uncomplicated manner, but through the 1930s, his movement, aided by the Germans, led the drive against not only political Zionism but Jews in general. “This burgeoning Islamist movement was subsidized with German funds,” Küntzel writes...

...Küntzel marshals impressive evidence to back his case, but he sometimes oversimplifies...Still, Küntzel is right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East, and he is right to be shocked. His invaluable contribution, in fact, is his capacity to be shocked, by the rhetoric of hate and by its consequences. The former Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi once told me that “the question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans.” The Jews, he said, deserved their punishment. Küntzel argues that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.

And a great graphic there:-



And here's the first chapter.