Dhimmitude, Jihad, & That Imagined "Secular, Democratic State"

During the early 1970s the celebrated Tunisian-born French Jewish author and essayist Albert Memmi - who, I seem to remember, remarked in one of his early books "It is a tragedy to be born a Jew, just as it is a tragedy to be born a woman or a negro" - attended a colloquium in Paris organised by the newspaper Le Monde. Muammar Gaddafi was the main attraction, and Memmi had no hesitation in laying into him, asking him, inter alia:

"Is it enough to have been born an Arab to be entitled to everything and to have been born a Jew to have a right to nothing, except to be condemned to remain eternally second-class citizens, exposed to humiliation and periodic massacres? And if you seriously wanted to avoid our gathering together in that corner of land we call Israeli to renew a most ancient tradition, why have you pursued and hunted us down throughout all the regions where your [Islamic] writ runs?"

I found this anecdote in an article in the Jewish Chronicle (7 November 1975) by Marc Tsiboni, who unfortunately does not tell us what the Libyan dictator (whose own halachic Jewish status was already known, by the way, since Maariv had reported in 1972 that his mother was a Jewish woman from Benghazi who converted to Islam on marriage) replied.

Describing the "golden age" of Jewish-Muslim relations in twelfth-century Moorish Spain as a brief aberrant interlude, Tsiboni saw Maimonides' message to the Jews of Yemen in 1172 as typifying the situation:

"And as you know that no nation was more hostile to Israel than they [the Muslims], that no nation has sought such refinements of evil as they have to weaken, diminish and humiliate us."

Of course, Maimonides was writing before many of the horrors inflicted upon Jews in Christian Europe had occurred.  But Tsiboni noted that in his book Juifs et Arabs (1974) Memmi maintains that, the Holocaust excepted, there has been little difference between the treatment of Jews in Europe and in the Islamic world, exactions and pogroms being a feature of both, even in the twentieth century.

"Never, and I mean never," Memmi has remarked, "have the Jews lived in an Arab country otherwise as an underprivileged and insecure group, with the odd pogrom from time to time to keep them in place."

In Les Temps Modernes (1974) the Moroccan Muslim writer Said Ghalleb observes:

"...the worst insult one Moroccan can proffer another is to call him a Jew.  My childhood friends have remained Jew-haters.

They mask their virulent anti-semitism by maintaining that the State of Israel is the creation of Western imperialism... And the whole Hitlerite myth is cultivated among the popular classes.  There, Hitler's massacre of the Jews is acclaimed with delight.  They even believe that Hitler is not dead... and they await his arrival ... to deliver the Arabs of Israel."

A scene in Brussels

A large proportion of Muslims in Europe today are of Moroccan extraction, particularly in France and Belgium, countries in which violence towards and harassment of Jews has occurred for many years (although the BBC and its ilk scarcely report it).

Hungarian-born semitic scholar and educator Georges Vajda, of Paris, an expert on Islam, once said:

"It seems that no Muslim power, however 'liberal' it may like to think itself ... could depart from the line followed in the past and continued de facto in the present, and confer on the Jews anything but the historic status of 'protected persons,' patched up with ill-digested and unassimilated Western phraseology...

If there does in fact exist a path to a harmonious symbiosis between men of divergent convictions, only those who succeed in genuinely breaking with their past will be able to set out on it."

The antisemitism seen in Cairo, Tunisia, and Libya during the so-called Arab Spring reminds us that Vajda's words - though decades old - are still valid.

And of course we have only to search YouTube to see that the following indictment of Jews, by an antisemitic Islamist quoted by the scholar David Littman, is widely replicated:

"...the Jews, whose wickedness is incurable unless they are subdued by force.  No good is expected from them unless they live under the aegis of Islam."

All this does not bode at all well for the status and safety of Jews in that One State that Israel's Western leftist enemies envisage - it's what used to be called, by lefties such as the British Labour politician Peter Hain (when, in an earlier incarnation. he was the enfant terrible of the Liberal Party and as active a campaigner against Israel as he was against South Africa, even opposing the migration of Soviet Jews to the land of their ancestors) a "secular democratic state" of Palestine.

Which is of course why One State must never be allowed to happen.

By the way, as a bonus here's a guy who has answers to four pertinent questions. I don't think he'd claim to be an intellectual like those I've been discussing.  But he seems to know his onions.  At any rate, what he says isn't conducive to a good night's sleep...

 Skip him to sleep tight!