Islamic Antisemitism: Czech President Checkmates The OIC

Two interesting ripostes by public figures from two different countries nearly 90 years apart just caught my eye online.

The first (for I'll go chronologically) is quoted by Eli E. Hertz of the Myths and Facts website in a new post aptly titled "So Much For Arab Nationality" and cited here:

“In 1926, Lord Plumer was appointed as the second High Commissioner of Palestine. The Arabs within the Mandate were infuriated when Plumer stood up for the Zionists’ national anthem Hatikva during ceremonies held in his honor when Plumer first visited Tel Aviv. When a delegation of Palestinian Arabs protested Plumer’s ‘Zionist bias,’ the High Commissioner asked the Arabs if he remained seated when their national anthem was played, ‘wouldn’t you regard my behavior as most unmannerly?’ Met by silence, Plumer asked: ‘By the way, have you got a national anthem?’  When the delegation replied with chagrin that they did not, he snapped back, “I think you had better get one as soon as possible.”

As Hertz notes in connection with the above incident:

"Rejection of Jewish nationalism from the 1920s attempted to prevent the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine  by violence and defiance of any form of Jewish political power; including any plans to share stewardship with Arabs which crystallized into the expression of Palestinianism. No other positive definition of an Arab-Palestinian people has surfaced.... But it took the Palestinians more than 60 years to heed Plumer’s advice."

The other interesting riposte comes from Czech president Miloš Zeman, whose under-reported outstanding speech on Israel's Independence Day, in the wake of the recent Brussels atrocity, regarding Islamic antisemitism and violence prompted an angry reaction from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Zeman (pictured) had observed that

"There are dozens of days of independence being celebrated every year in the Czech Republic. Some I may attend, others I cannot. There is one I can never miss, however: it’s the Israeli Independence Day"

 and went on to say,  inter alia:

'There was a hideous assassination in the flower of Europe in the heart of European Union in a Jewish museum in Brussels. I will not let myself being calmed down by the declaration that there are only tiny fringe groups behind it. On the contrary, I am convinced that this xenophobia, and let’s call it racism or antisemitism, emerges from the very essence of the ideology these groups subscribe to.

So let me quote one of their sacred texts to support this statement: “A tree says, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. A stone says, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” I would criticize those calling for the killing of Arabs, but I do not know of any movement calling for mass murdering of Arabs. However, I know of one anti-civilisation movement calling for the mass murder of Jews.

After all, one of the paragraphs of the statutes of Hamas says: “Kill every Jew you see.” Do we really want to pretend that this is an extreme viewpoint? Do we really want to be politically correct and say that everyone is nice and only a small group of extremists and fundamentalists is committing such crimes?'

The OIC demanded an apology.  But the courageous Miloš Zeman is standing his ground. To quote his spokesperson Jiří Ovčáček:

“President Zeman definitely does not intend to apologise. For the president would consider it blasphemy to apologise for the quotation of a sacred Islamic text.”

All praise for a European head of state who puts most of the rest of them to shame!

Not for nothing had he declared in his speech:

"There are states with whom we share the same values, such as the political horizon of free elections or a free market economy. However, no one threatens these states with wiping them off the map. No one fires at their border towns; no one wishes that their citizens would leave their country. There is a term, political correctness. This term I consider to be a euphemism for political cowardice. Therefore, let me not be cowardly."

Let us not forget, incidentally, that the Czechs were the most sympathetic of any Central European peoples towards the Jews during the dark twentieth-century interwar period.  Zeman seems a worthy successor to Beneš and Masaryk.