Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish..
The dominant theme of the Islamophile foreign policy narrative is that America’s troubles with Islamic terrorism and the violent instability of the Middle-East somehow derive from our excessive closeness to the Jewish State. In this narrative, which is prevalent among diplomats, journalists and assorted talking heads who are neither but pretend to be both, the terrorists are really just critics of our foreign policy. Except instead of penning smarmy New York Times columns like Thomas Friedman or Nick Kristoff, they plant bombs and ram planes into buildings not for the greater glory of Allah, but to prove the theses of Adlai Stevenson III and Zbignew Brzezinski.
The trouble with this is that it fails to reflect any reality other than the one in the stifling craniums of the opinionators. The foreign policy dolts have been complaining about the Zionist menace long before there was a special relationship between the United States and Israel. Back then the British Foreign Office thought that the Empire could govern the region through a passel of puppet kings and princes. They carved up Israel, turning most of the land over to an expat bunch of Saudi royals, trained the Hashemite Kingdom’s Legion into the second best military in the region and commanded them in the assault on Jerusalem against a handful of Israeli farm boys and Ghetto fighters fresh off the boat.
What did the Empire get in return for all its Islamophilia? Less than ten years later it was forced to turn to those same farm boys and their sons after the Woolrich educated King Farouk I went into exile in Rome and General Nasser began to be unfavorably compared to Hitler by leading British politicians for his designs on the Suez Canal.
Fairly soon the monarchies were all gone, except for those under direct American protection, and those kings and princes have been some of the leading financiers of Islamic terrorism making them a very bsd bargain.
In the Islamophile version of history, the Israeli Lobby “bought up” congress and terrorizes any politician who doesn’t salute the Blue and White. In the actual history the relationship emerged because the reflex Anti-Western sentiments of the Muslim world left Western powers with few options.
The so-called “Special Relationship” did not develop until growing Soviet influence among the receptive Arab Muslim nations of the Middle-East created the need for a counterbalance. Israel has been that balance, the uncomfortable option held in reserve for when the Muslim allies of the United States, Britain and France inevitably turn on them. And to assert otherwise is to put the cart before the horse and the present before the past.
Had that relationship been the work of a nefarious Jewish lobby then it is rather odd that it has deepened even as the numbers and influence of American Jews have declined along with their commitment to the Jewish State. Somewhere between a third and a quarter of American Jews, among them some of the wealthiest, famous and best educated of the bunch, consider Israel an embarrassment and wish it would go away. They pour small fortunes into liberal lobbies that urge politicians to oppose Israel.
But what does this relationship consist of exactly? American troops don’t fight for Israel the way that they have for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Lebanese governments. The military aid exists for much the same reason that unnecessary bases and Pentagon cost overruns do as part of the complicated relationship between defense contractors and local congressmen looking to subsidize industries in their districts.
The far more important part of the relationship, that of moral support hardly exists. Most Americans do support Israel in its conflict with Islamic expansionism, which is more than can be said for American leaders. Israel has hardly ever been in a war without receiving stern warnings from Washington to immediately seek a truce, regardless of who began the war or what’s at stake.
Critics of Israel harp on America’s failure to act as an “honest broker” in that country’s negotiations with Islamic terrorists, by which they mean that we haven’t pushed Israel all the way under the bus. But how much more room is there under the bus? Arafat’s Palestinian Authority has never been held to a single one of its commitments, while Israel has been held to countless commitments it never even made. To gauge how far the negotiations have drifted and in whose direction, a process that began with Israel not negotiating directly with terrorists and signing on only to an autonomous territory within its borders, has now reached the point where the Vice President of the United States throws a fit because a housing permit was granted for houses in Jerusalem while he was in Israeli airspace.
It goes without saying that no Muslim ally of the United States is treated in such a shoddy way. Turkey, which genuinely and indisputably occupies Cyprus, could build mosques out of piles of Cypriot corpses and Biden would only smile and remark on the fascinating Eastern architecture. When Turkey’s Thug in Chief threatened to ethnically cleanse the Armenians a second time if they didn’t stop complaining about the first time at a joint press conference with the Prime Minister of Britain, the good fellow pretended to find something very interesting on the ceiling at that moment.
The Saudis can slowly behead a woman accused of witchcraft and win a long round of applause from diplomats, but when Israel grants a house permit in its own capital, one of the oldest cities in the world which fashionable Islamophiles now call a settlement, then all hell breaks loose.
Is this really anyone’s idea of a special relationship?
The truth of the matter is that this is a relationship built primarily on Muslim intransigence. Rather than Israel trapping the United States into a relationship that alienates the Muslim world, it is the Muslim world’s alienation from the West that made the relationship both possible and necessary.
Israel has not poisoned the West’s relationship with the Muslim world. It is the native and reflexive hostility of the Muslim world which did that. The Islamophile apologists for a failed foreign policy would rather jauntily don their keffiyahs and meet for coffee in Cairo with the next up and coming revolutionary, while blaming America’s relationship with Israel for the regional violence and hostility, rather than admit that a century of playing Lawrence of Arabia has only left behind two types of Muslim countries. Open enemies and covert enemies.
The problem is a structural one. Muslim Westaphobia is a hatred that predates the United States or the current foreign policy arrangements of its leaders. It is a civilizational conflict that cannot be settled with a convenient scapegoat or addressed solely in terms of the foreign policy of the last century, which is hardly more than a minute in a struggle defined by over a thousand years of acrimony.
Israel makes for a convenient scapegoat. A colonial scapegoat to tick the checkboxes of the left, never mind that its people are the indigenous inhabitants and the Muslim terrorists are the settlers and conquerors who have more in common with Francisco Pizarro than they do with Chief Joseph. But the attacks on Israel as the source of the sore spot are expedient rather than meaningful. It isn’t about Israel or Mubarak or reports that somewhere an American soldier in a latrine flushed a Koran or any of the other spurious scapegoats of Muslim violence.
The structural animosity between Islam and the West must be addressed and it cannot be addressed so long as the Nazi ambassador is allowed to answer every question about his country’s actions by pontificating about the Sudetenland north of Jerusalem. The relationship between Israel and the West is not the cause of the conflict between Islam and the West, it is the unacknowledged Western response to it.
BO wrote:
No. Ron Paul was raised in a Lutheran Church, raised his kids in an Episcopalian Church but left because of an issue. They now attend the First Baptist Church in Lake Jackson. After Vatican II the Anglicans (and I think the Episcopalians) and Lutherans (as well as the Methodists and Presbyterians) submitted themselves by agreement to the Pope and are all now Roman Catholics. Baptists are not Beast worshippers as the others are but in practice do many Catholic things such as Sunday worship of the Sun God, Christmas worship of Tammuz on his birthday, Easter, worship of Ashtar, etc. and not Jewish feasts. Source.
Your wish is my command; it’s done
— though it may be in moderation for a spell.
Sunni vs Shia–Arab conflict with Israel–Islamophilia–The
beat goes on and on and will continue as the mindset of The Middle
East continues to push it’s global agenda. I submit for your discussion
a cause for this mindset and why it will continue and be misunderstood
by most. It comes from The Highest Authority–Almighty God. Go to Genesis
16:11-12 and study the violent and restless nature God gave to Ishmael and
his descendants. God has not cancelled his prophecy to Ishmael. You see it
played every day. The brutality and barbaric behavior of Muhammads Islam only
intensified after his Koran in 610AD. Muhammad is a descendant of Ishmael.
Of course, if you don’t accept The Bible as God’s Word you’ll reject this.
dweller: Psssst! You are needed over here.
My Dear SallyCircleJerk:
When you’re prepared to provide us with the “public record” supporting the “facts” to which you allude, I’ll certainly be delighted to have a look at it.
It’s overwhelmingly military aid, Darling — and wouldn’t be the least little bit necessary, were it not for the megabillions in profits we make from SELLING massive quantities of state-of-the-art munitions to Israel’s ENEMIES.
Tell you what, I’ll offer you a proposition:
YOU work on getting the State & Defense Depts to quit selling the heavy-duty hardware to the Arabs, and WE’LL work on getting Israel removed from the “Foreign Aid” rolls. Do we have a deal?
PUT up, or SHUT up.
Again, Madame Jerk, for this choice little morsel of what is unmistakably wishful thinking, do you have stats & sources ? — or just more bile & bluster?
Of course. Why shouldn’t they have praised those “invasions?”
US politicians act — overall — in accordance with the perceived support or opposition that a particular policy has with the general American citizenry
— and the citizenry perceived those two ‘invasions’ as thoroughly warranted, and long-overdue. (Which they were, bigtime.)
Your quarrel isn’t with US politicians.
Your quarrel is with the (very un-Jewish) American Electorate.
TFB, Jerk.
Paul wrote:
Ah, but they have been that stupid. Watch A Woman Rides the Beast by Prof. Walter Veith as he shows what has been and is going in from RCC, Freemason and U.N. documents. He has many DVDs in this series online, all on Catholicism and the NWO. I think this is the one on point although “The Man Behind The Mask” (205) and “The Secret Behind Secret Societies” (211) are important as well.
Sorry Sally, check the facts: Prior to 9-11 Al Quaeda’s reason was american bases and adventures in muslim countries. After the bombing of Afghanistan and the left in the west, and arab apologists in the Gulf,started this myth Al Quaeda also took up the story. Investigate and check the timelines.
That is a theory put forth by Jack Chick, in his Evangelical missionary comics. I find it ridiculous. Islam came out of the pre-Islamic Paganism of Arabia. Al-lat was mentioned as a South Arabian God by Herodotus, in his history.
This had disasterous consequences. Catholicism has faults, but it has a root in Judeao Christianity, and whatever its faults, it is to be preferred over Islam.
Does it? You should read some histories of the black slave trade. It seems to have been started by Islam. It was unknown or very reduced in the West until the Muslims introduced it to Spain during their conquest. When you add in the millions of Blacks who were killed or castrated, and the hundreds of millions of women who have been sexually mutilated – for honor’s sake – for millenia, long before Europeans picked up slavery, and long after Europeans stopped Slavery, then you have to ask, “Who has more blood?” We don’t know how many millions of blacks were slaughtered in Africa over the millenia. How many Hindus were killed, Buddists …
A lot of Muslim outrages are unknown to historians.
Here is one that was common knowledge at one point. The reason Columbus went to the New World was because Islam had blockaded all trade with the East. The only way left was to sail West.
Historan John J. O’Neill attributes the Dark Ages to Islamic predation on the seas. (Click Here)
When you add that in, the damage done for 1,000+ years, Islam may have more blood.
The West goes on sputs of violence but then quiets down. Islam is slow but consistent.
Add in the millions of Christians taken as slaves to be Jannisarries over the centuries.
That’s some interesting history about anti-Catholicism in Germany WWI. But let us not forget that Germany did not start WWI. It was started by the Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire in a crusade against Serbian Orthodox Serbs. Germany was drawn in by treaties and if Protestant Germans wanted to be suspicious of Catholic officers in such an enmeshment, they would be well advised to do so, just as we should be suspicious, both in Europe and the US, of the predominantly Catholic leadership that is popping up like mushrooms in response to advancing Islam. Protestant affection for Islam is another story, but sounds very much like fools among the Serbian Orthodox who voiced similar sentiments. It usually wound up with expressions like, “Better to submit to Islam than the Catholic Church”. No doubt it was lack of experience with one over the other.
The relation between the Catholic Church and Islam deserves more attention. Catholicism is older than Islam and has more blood on its hands. And where Islam’s evils have been committed to scripture for everyone to see, the evil of Catholicism lies in doctrine that is too clever to do something so stupid as to commit itself to print. It is not hard to imagine that Islam itself is the result of the hand of Rome in the Middle East.
Nay, a ROMAN CATHOLIC FREEMASON Southerner in a white sheet!
Go easy on the dissertations.
Unfortunately fools vote. Isn’t that why we have Obama or was it simply birth certificate fraud and voter fraud?
Reading Sally’s misbegotten rant should act as an eye-opener to those Jews who think that their support of Obama will let them off the hook some day. The purveyors of anti-semitism, both on the left and the right (though if one reads Ron Paul’s writings closely he is far more a creature of the left than the Right) have only one aim– the destruction of Jewery. The definition of a fool is a person who acts against his own best interests in the belief that this will bring him success in the real world. We Jews still have a lot of such fools in our midst.
Daniel Greenfield is one of my favorite authors. I don’t know that Israpundit is profited in any way by posting the rantings of an antisemitic fool who follows Ron Paul, a Southerner in a white sheet. We get antisemitism and leftist lies daily through almost every source including the MSM, so why should they appear here?
I almost didn’t let this through because you write like you know everything, yet any student of these matters, knows you know nothing.
You are an antisemite and an ignoramus but I repeat myself.
Well, Israel does get more foreign aid than any country, and Zionist extremist Jewish billionaires like Shelly Adelson do contribute more money to both parties of Congress than other faction. Most sensible people do know that 9/11 was blowback for U.S. support for Israel, and no U.S. politician did anything but praise Israel’s invasion of Gaza and invasion of Lebanon. Every candidate running for President except for Ron Paul says they’ll bomb Iran tomorrow, Okay, Obama hasn’t said it, but he’s petrified to say no, don’t do it to Bibi because every member of Congress except for Ron Paul takes lots of money from Zionist Jews. Them’s the facts, they’re public record so this entire article is one big circle jerk.
The issue is not black and white.
Basically, by 1890, Islam was on its death bed. It was dying.
But European rivalries and later American-Russian rivalries propped it up.
When the Muslims started slaughtering Maronite Christians in the 1860s, the British supported the Druze over the French-supported Maronites in Lebanon rather than let the French have an edge in the area. British Protestants could not stand that French Catholics might have influence in Lebanon. Later, Muslim persecution became so severe against Maronite Christians that the Europeans in general had to warn the Turks to back off. But none would give Lebanon her Independence, even when the Maronties begged for a military intervention. The upshot is that the Maronites fled in the millions to the USA, and South America (which has about 10 million Maronites), and the Mideast slowly was de-Christianized.
The Crimean War was fought against Russia by Britain and France to prevent Russia from fully and completely destroying the Turkish Caliphate, because Britain did not want the Czar controlling the Bosporous and Dardenelles. Oh! But it was okay for Britain to control Gibraltar and later the Suez. …. Rank Hypocrisy.
Westerners got killed, Russia was beaten, and the Islamic Empire escaped. A complete destruction of the Caliphate was forestalled, so that Britain might have a monopoly on naval chokepoints.
But the Worst, the Absolute Worst, was the Arabphilia of the Germans. In 1898 the Kaiser, in order to upset the British – who were just as guilty of Islamophilia – proclaimed himself the protector of Muslims throughout the world (Click here), going so far as to proclaim that were he NOT Christian, he would be a Muslim.
The same Kaiser who sought to win the Turks as allies would not give heed to Herzl when Herzl asked for his support.
This same “Christian” Kaiser, who was so fond of Islam, was an anti-Catholic bigot. He minimized Catholic Germans in his officer corp which is why Germany lost WWI. A shortage of officers during the initial months of the war prevented the Germany Army from a complete victory at the Marne. Had he promoted more Catholics, this would not have happened. He was fond of anti-Catholic literature, though 1/3 of Germany was Catholic. This same Kaiser however could proclaim his admiration for Islam.
A brief window of opportunity was given to the West in the 19th century to absolutely eradicate Islam as a political, and possibly, a religious force.
The Russians and later the French both had ample opportunity to destroy the Caliphate; but the British and Germans prevented them.
But the West squandered it in petty national rivalries.
Only Churchill seems to have realized the threat of an awakening Islam and warned about it.
To get a full sense of this, Napoleon, NOT THE BRITISH, was the first one to offer the Jews a state of their own. (Click here),
But when Napoleon had to escape in 1799, and the British captured his papers, they hid the proclamation for fear that Jewry would support France. It had to be reconstructed from other sources and newspapers.
Again, rivalries prevented Islam from being hammered.
During the Reformation, the Protestants of the Netherlands worked out a deal with the Turks rather than present a united Christian front with the Catholics. Denominational rivalry. The Catholics who had the Turk on their frontiers did not have such a luxury. They knew better.
By the time of WWI, Islam was a complete basket case.
But WWI gave the Germans the chance to whisper in the ears of the Turkish Sultan, “Proclaim a Holy War,” while the British did the same to Faisel.
But even then, after WWI, Islam was broken.
The Treaty of Sevres gave Constantinople back to its original owners, the Greeks. Two-thirds of Turkey were denominated to foreign protectorate status.
But when Ataturk fought, the British, French and Italians, who could easily have destroyed him in the 1920s ran away.
Meanwhile Soviet Russia (which alas, was run by a heavily ethnic Jewish Politburo, the idiocy was not all Christian) gave aid to the Turk. And so the Caliphate survived.
It is against this miasma of defeat that the Muslim Brotherhood arose in 1928.
Israel, to their mind, was the final insult of Western imperialism.
What the Muslims never realized, and the West certainly, was that the problem was not imperialism, which would have eradicated political Islam, but the problem was Western rivalry and idiocy.
1) Would it have killed Britain to let the Czar destroy Turkey in 1853 and take Constantinople? After all, wasn’t the Eastern Christian Orthodox Czar a better possessor of Orthodoxy Christianity’s Constantinople than the Muslim Turk?
2) Would it have killed the British to let the French set up a Maronite Catholic protectorate in Lebanon in 1860?
Remember than in 1946, the Maronite Patriarch welcomed the Jews to the area. The Maronites were neutral regarding Israel. It was the Muslims who impelled Lebanon. Had the French controlled the area, the Maronite population would have stabilized instead of immigrating into a minority, and Lebanon would be Christian and neutral today.
3) Did the Germans and British really have to reinvigorate political Islam during WW1?
4) Did we Americans really have to help Al-Qaida in Afghanistan?
Political Islam succeeds because of Western rivalry and idiocy. It could have been crushed in the 19th century. It almost was.
This rivalry existed before oil, though oil has aggravted it.
Hopefully, Israel will strike oil in the offshore areas now found to hold gas. If Israel strikes major oil, the Europeans may lose their Islamophilic sympathies. As history has shown, morality and principle does NOT dictate their national policies.