Zara's Zionism

Here's are excerpts from an article entitled "My Journey Through Antisemitism to Supporting Israel" by Zara Shaen Albright, a Muslim-born British lady of Pakistani heritage who converted to her husband's Catholicism.

From a position fot antisemitism and hostility to the Jewish State she came to realise, thanks to an open-minded mother who encouraged her curiosity about the Shoah and matters Jewish, that her previous stance was unjustified.

 'For as long as I can remember, I grew up hearing some form of antisemitism. From hearing the casual “let’s go shoot some Jews” to being advised not to be open about my support in Eurovision for Israel, to being told that the holocaust was “Allah’s way of showing the Jews what would happen if Israel was formed”, to being told that I “look like a Jew with a big nose” as an insult, it became so normal to hear such sentiments, that they essentially became background noise....'

A visit to Israel proved seminal.

'Luckily, I ... was able to visit both Israel and Palestinian territories.... I able to see many holy sites that hold a lot of significance for me as an ex-Muslim-turned-Catholic-convert ... I was also able to explore the beauty of Israel’s culture, to hearing from Israeli settlers ... to seeing the Kibbutz where cute Winnie-the-Poo murals were painted on and inside bomb shelters so the children would not be afraid, to seeing the celebration of martyrdom in the refugee camps, and the expectations that awaited the little boys when they grew up, I changed from being neutral to being a Zionist, which, as it turns out, is the mere belief that Jewish people should be able to have a homeland....'

Regarding Muslim hostility to Israel Zara writes:

'Remember that Islam once had its own empire, and the existence of Israel is a reminder of the felt pain and anguish over such a great empire now only being a memory.

 Secondly, the formation of Israel is seen as something that was implemented by the British.... From the Suez crisis to the partition of India and Pakistan, the wounds from British imperialism are still fresh, and therefore the association between Israel and the British empire is again, a painful memory of the past.

 Also, bear in mind that many in Muslim communities don’t know anyone who’s Jewish. It’s much easier to have a fear of the other, and to build upon it, and exaggerate when it’s someone you’ve never had the chance to relate to....

 Finally, rather than being seen as a discriminatory mindset, the antisemitic feelings towards Israel and its Jewish citizens are often legitimized by the West. From protesting the Israeli embassy, to BDS to the antisemitism scandals in the Labour party, hatred of the Jews is given a green light by many in the political and cultural sphere....'

Zara's solution?

Read that and her entire article here

"One Foot in al-Andalus and Another in China"

Three weeks ago, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, since 2010 grand imam of Egypt's leading Islamic scholarly institution,  Al-Azhar, and portrayed as a voice of moderation, responded forcefully to a speech by Professor Mohamed Othman Elkhosht, president of Cairo University.

To quote the uploader and translator, Memri TV:

'Professor Mohamed Othman Elkhosht, the President of Cairo University, said at a January 28, 2020 conference that was streamed live on Al-Azhar University’s YouTube channel that the religious sciences are in a state of stagnation, and he criticized the fact that critical analysis, scientific analysis, and methodologies from the humanities and social sciences are not used in this field.

 He said that Islamic scholarship has failed to enter a new era and called for interdisciplinarity.

 Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, responded that shari’a law, Islamic jurisprudence, and the Islamic heritage that Professor Elkhosht criticized were the same things that united a bunch of warring Arab tribes that “couldn’t tell right from left” and enabled them to expand as far as Al-Andalus and China.

 Sheikh Al-Tayyeb also said that Islamic heritage barely plays a role in people’s lives today and that the Arab and Muslim identity is meaningless.

 He further argued that Western leaders such as Trump and Netanyahu make all the decisions for the Arab world, that the conflict between modernity and the Islamic heritage is made up by the West in order to hold the Muslim world back, and that there is an “accursed and vicious machine” directing the way people view Islam.'

Read Raymond Ibrahim on this topic here

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose ...

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

So observed the French wit Alphonse Karr in 1849.

Looking through a newspaper collection recently for something entirely unrelated to the Middle East, I spotted the following, and thought of that phrase, though on second thoughts maybe it's not so apt, given that certain trends in history roll on and gain momentum.

Edinburgh Evening News, 22 March 1902:

Wanatah [Indiana] Mirror, 25 January 1912:

Ibid.  Opening paragraphs in close-up:

Bedford [UK] Daily Mail, 4 June 1912 (is this what drives Viktor Orban?):

The Globe [UK], 28 November 1913):

Daily Mirror [UK], 2 June 1914

Cambridge [UK] Independent Press, 10 December 1915:

I'm sure there are a lot more where those came from.
 
Meanwhile, in the Middle East some things have stayed the same since the 7th century, as this fine article observes:

True peace requires addressing the deep sources of the conflict. Those lay with the Arab and Muslim reaction to the return of the Jewish people to powerful sovereignty in their ancient homeland. As far as Muslim theology and Arab practice were concerned, the Jews were non-believers, only to be tolerated, never as equals. They should have never been allowed to undermine Muslim rule over the lands, which the Jews claimed as their homeland, but the Arabs viewed as exclusively theirs since conquering them in the seventh century.

The return of the Jewish people to restored sovereignty in their ancient homeland, required Arabs and Muslims to accept that a people, whom they have for centuries treated as inferiors, worthy of contempt, were now claiming equality and exercising power in their midst.

This historical “Chutzpah” is what drove the Arab League to violently reject any kind of plan that would grant the Jewish people equal sovereignty over any part of “Muslim land”​, free from their control. This unnatural historical development, in Arab eyes, led Arab governments to take revenge and forcefully expel hundreds of thousands of Jews, living in their midst, often in communities predating the birth of Islam, just after the establishment of the State of Israel.

It is also the reason why Arab states kept the Arabs who were displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and their millions of descendants, ​ as perpetual “refugees” – to deprive the Jewish state of legitimacy and peace.  It is the reason that even after losing repeated military wars against the State of Israel, Arab countries have continued their diplomatic and economic war against it to this day. Even Jordan and Egypt, that have signed nominal peace agreements with Israel, have more of a ‘mutual non-attack’ agreements, rather than genuine peace.

The animosity to the concept of the Jewish sovereignty in the Arab Middle East is simply too big. This attitude towards the Jewish state is an Arab – and Muslim – issue, and not only a Palestinian one. The Palestinians have been at the forefront of this Arab and Muslim intolerance, but they are not its creators. They are the thin end of the wedge by which the Arab and Muslim world wages its war against a sovereign Jewish people.

If the word peace is ever to truly describe the situation between Israel and its neighbors, it requires the Arab and Muslim world to address the roots of their intolerance. It requires them to accept the Jews as their equals and as an indigenous people who have come home. This was always too large a task to be undertaken by the Palestinians. Only Arabs and Muslims together can legitimize a different theological interpretation of the Jewish presence in their midst: no longer inferiors and no longer foreigners. In doing so, they can enable and legitimize practical solutions in Jerusalem that accept the centrality of the city to the Jewish people, and to the manufactured problem of the “refugees”, by finally rehabilitating them and absorbing them as fellow Arabs...."

And as the Palestinian envoy to Iran, Salah Zawawi, reminds us in a recent interview on Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV:

"Our war is not only with this Zionist enemy. We are fighting a 100-year-old Western enterprise, which is ongoing. This enterprise does not target a part of Palestine, or even Palestine in its entirety. Its goal is to establish the Greater Israel, which would control disintegrated Arab and Islamic countries, and indeed, this is happening today in our Islamic world. ...This way, our enemy along with its defenders and masters, would complete their plan to turn us into servants, if not slaves, in this region, and to plunder our resources.

When they talk about the signing of the nuclear agreement and whatever, they are truly terrified. If Iran produces a nuclear bomb - and I pray to Allah that Iran will produce 1,000 nuclear bombs - it will not be directed against any Arab or Islamic country. It will be used to defend, at the very least, the Islamic republic and its principles."

Moreover, to quote a commenter on this article: 

Commenter:

"I have degrees in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic. I've spent more time than I care to recall studying Islam and its adherents. I've lectured Army and DIA personnel on Salafist terrorism.

Islam has never, ever been a 'byword for benign enlightenment.' It has always, from its triumph at Yathrib, been a religion of oppression, slavery, and war. That reformers occasionally exist does not rescue the faith from the weight of its history. And note that the reformers always fail.

Reason #1: Reform is bid'a (innovation), and bid'a is heresy, and willing heresy is apostasy, and Muslim apostates are put to death."

A commenter in response:

'Excellent post but, "And note that the reformers always fail." is not true. I think what you mean is that the peaceful ones always fail, which is true. When Islam was pacified by the influence and strength of Western culture it was denatured and mutated into something quite different. Now the reformists are trying to purge the Munafiqun (the hypocrites) from their community and purify the faith into one strong, tight fist with which to smash the infidels into submission... just as Abu Bakr (The Sword of Allah) did during the Apostasy Wars. Islam goes through these undulating waves of dilution (under the influence of kaffir civilisations) and then purification, by reformists trying to return to the original source material found in the Hadith and Quran; the terrorist organisations are simply the peak of the iceberg in a much larger movement in the Islamic world.

Sadly, the reformists are winning.'

Original Commenter:

"I don't disagree, but Khālid ibn al-Walīd was called Sword of Allah, not Abu Bakr."

David Littman's "Little Red Book": How Arab Theologians Depict Jews and Israel

In 1961 British-born David Littman, who later moved to Switzerland with his Egyptian-born wife Gisèle, undertook with her a covert mission in Morocco which led to over 500 Jewish children finding refuge in Israel.

Gisèle is well-known today under her pseudonym Bat Ye'or ("Daughter of the Nile"), having authored The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (1985) and Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis (2005).

With her husband David, she has been active in the World Organization for Jews in Arab Countries.

David Littman's important, illuminating text - known to some as his "little red book" - on the way Arab theologians depict Jews and Israel, is essential viewing, and available here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/51211757/Arab-Theologians-on-Jews-and-Israel-4th-Edition

See also the posts by Brian of London, whose input has made this E-Book possible, and who advises that hard copies will hopefully be out soon: http://www.israellycool.com/2011/04/11/arab-theologians-on-jews-israel/ and http://www.israellycool.com/2011/03/22/arab-theologians-on-jews-and-israel-settlement/

Elisabeth of Eurabia: An Austrian Rose among English Thorns?

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is clearly a woman who won’t walk on eggshells, even though she’s been prosecuted in her homeland, Austria, for “hate speech” following a report by an undercover reporter in a glossy magazine of a lecture on radical Islam that she gave. A diplomat’s daughter, who was in Tehran at the time of the 1979 Revolution, Ms Sabaditsch-Wolff has personal knowledge of life in the Middle East. She has worked as an English teacher and is the mother of a young daughter.

A self-declared feminist who fears for the future of Europe and the West if what she sees as the inexorable tide of islamification is not turned, on 7 December last year, in Tel Aviv, she addressed the conference of the Alliance of the European Freedom and National Parties in Israel, at the invitation of former MK Eliezer Cohen. More about that later.

Last Saturday, the very day, as it happened, on which David Cameron gave his address in Munich on the failure of “state multiculturalism”, an English Defence League rally took place in Luton, the birthplace of the movement. Some opponents of Cameron’s speech leapt at the chance to decry Cameron’s “insensitivity” and “bad timing” – as if the coincidence was his fault!

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff – who as far as I am aware has never been mentioned at all by the BBC, despite her prominence as “the Geert Wilders of Austria” – spoke to the assembled crowd. Whether the EDL is a gang of neo-Mosleyite bovver boys, as most if not all of the mainstream media insists it is – I know not, but Ms Sabaditsch-Wolff is an intelligent woman and a compelling speaker, who does not easily fit the “bovver boy” mould.

An Austrian rose among English thorns? You decide.

“I am very excited to be here in Israel,” she began, in her Tel Aviv speech that I mentioned above.

“The State of Israel is a modern incarnation of one of the ancient sources of today’s civilization. Our civilization — Western Civilization — traces its origins to the confluence of Judaic, Hellenic, and Roman cultures in what eventually became Christian Europe.

This civilization is now under siege, both from without, and especially from within.

I am here today to represent two defenders of our civilization, the Citizens’ Movement Pax Europa ... and ACT! for America....

Pax Europa is a European civil rights movement and a human rights organization. Our objectives are to protect not only the democratic, free, and secular rule of law in our country, but also to struggle for European culture based on the Judeo-Christian traditions and — especially — on the values of the Enlightenment. These are the values that are currently under threat throughout the nations of the West.

.... We are an independent, non-partisan movement. We clearly distance ourselves from all right-wing or left-wing extremists and all xenophobic movements. Our sole purpose is to champion the values and freedoms that form the cornerstone of our civilization. Pax Europa is the enemy of anyone who threatens those values and freedoms, and the friend of anyone who defends them.

ACT! for America is the largest national security movement in the United States.... We are committed to informed and coordinated civic action that will lead to public policies that promote America’s national security and the defense of American democratic values against the assault of radical Islam.

As an ACT! for America international chapter leader from Austria, I wanted you to know just how much a safe and secure Israel means to me and to Brigitte Gabriel, our organization’s Founder and President who was able to save her life by escaping into northern Israel from war torn Lebanon in 1982.

We value you immensely! We work and fight and pray for you. We support Israeli-made products. We are constantly promoting pro-Israel rallies in the West. We are in your corner and at your side every step of the way.

Thank G-d for Israel. Know that we will do anything in our power to love, respect and defend you. May G-d bless you!

.... Because Western Civilization has been in the ascendant for the last few centuries, there is a tendency to think that what we have built is the final state at which mankind has arrived — that we have reached, as Francis Fukuyama put it, “The End of History”.

This is hubris of the highest order, especially given all the indicators of the dangers currently faced by our civilization, both from without and from within. The signs may not always be obvious, but they are there, and they are growing in number.

The death of a civilization does not come only when sand dunes drift in over the rubble of a once-proud city. The end is not necessarily marked by an invasion of barbarian hordes, or the burning and looting of our homes and businesses.

A civilization can also die from within, when it forgets the core values that once made it great, when it stops believing in its own fundamental tenets.

The disappearance of civilizational self-confidence in Europe can perhaps be traced back to the unimaginable and pointless slaughter of the First World War, or to the Holocaust and other horrors of the Second World War, or to the ravages of seventy years of Communism, or to a societal enervation imposed on the continent by the socialist welfare state — or some combination of all of these.

Whatever the reason, European civilizational self-confidence is all but gone. This is why Multiculturalism has become the dominant ideology in Europe. This is why Europeans have imported millions of unassimilable foreigners. This is why we abase ourselves to the newcomers and accede to their every demand.

Islam is a threat to Europe because the heart of European civilization has already gone cold. If it were still beating, Islam would be of no more concern than it was a century ago, and millions of Muslim immigrants would not be among us.

Those of us who still love our civilization and what it stands for are on the front lines of a new war. People such as Geert Wilders and myself are on trial for speaking out in defense of our liberties and our democracy. Others have been silenced through intimidation, ostracism, and the threat of destitution.

The oligarchs who control the European Union are determined that there shall be no dissenting with their program of abolishing the peoples of Europe and replacing them with another.

This war is a quiet one. It does not involve guns and bombs and tanks and fighter jets. No corpses litter the battlefield.

But it is just as real, and at least as important as any previous war fought on European soil. On its success or failure depends the nature of the civilization that will reside in Europe over the next century — if, indeed, there will be any successor civilization at all.

And Israel is on the front lines of the very same war. Israel is surrounded by the barbarism and backwardness and destitution that awaits us all if we continue to surrender to the evil forces that would destroy Western Civilization. We have only to look at what has happened to Lebanon over the last fifty years to see the future that awaits a modern “multicultural” Europe.

And we only have to look a few kilometres to the south of this spot to see what Israel would be like if it were not inhabited by the Jews. A satellite photograph of the Gaza Strip reveals something telling: when you move a bit south from Ashkelon, or a bit west from Sderot, the rich and productive landscape of Israel abruptly ends and the vast wasteland of Gaza begins. This wasteland extends further south into Egypt, east into Jordan, and north into Lebanon.

Israel is an oasis of civilization in a desert of barbarism.

This is why Israel is so important to the struggle against the Great Jihad. Anyone who is committed to resisting Islamization will find in Israel a natural ally.

This is not a matter of Left and Right. Sharia has no respect for any of our political parties. It does not recognize the very foundation on which our diverse political structures rest.

Make no mistake about it: the fight against sharia is a fight to save civilization itself.

To discover the future of Europe and Israel if the door is not closed against expansionist Islam, examine what remains of Zoroastrian Persia, or Buddhist Afghanistan, or Christian Syria.

This is what awaits us if we do not act now. Our great civilization will be replaced by poverty and despotism and degradation.”

Here’s the video of that occasion: