T. Belman. This is Part XII of the series, ISLAM, Our Deadliest Enemy: Time is Running Out. I have been posting one Part every day for the last week. These articles written by VIPs and renowned scholars devastate Islam more comprehensively than anything in print. It is intended that this series come to the attention of Trump’s committee to Study Islamic Terrorism, when formed.
ISLAM, Our Deadliest Enemy: Time is Running Out
By Prof. Paul Eidelberg, President, Israel-America Renaissance Institute, Jerusalem and Philadelphia
CONTENTS
Part I. Introduction
Part II. Identifying the Enemy
Part III. A Former Muslim Shows How to Combat the Enemy
Part IV. An Insider’s View of ‘Moderate’ Muslims
Part V. Beyond Multicultural Relativism
Part VI. The Theological Basis of Today’s Crisis
Part VII. Islamophobia: Facts and Fictions
Part VIII. Islamic Bellicosity and Blood Lust
Part IX. Blood Lust (cont’d)
Part X. Iran and Necrophelia
Part XI. Islamic Imperialism
Part XII. Islam: A Cult of Hatred, Especially of Jews
Part XII. Islam: A Cult of Hatred, Especially of Jews
Dr. Robert Wistrich, professor of Modern European and Jewish History at Hebrew University, observes that contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism utilizes many themes and symbols from classic European anti-Jewish bigotry and from Nazi propaganda. Thus it is commonplace to see caricatures of Jews portrayed as devils with hooked noses and jagged, blood-dripping teeth. Cartoons depicting Jews sporting Nazi-style uniforms adorned with swastikas are familiar sights throughout the Middle East, where Jews are often compared to Nazis for their alleged cruelty. In recent months, numerous articles in the Egyptian and Saudi government dailies contained such quotes as these: … “It seems like Hitler is alive again, and is following his old ways, but this time with the Palestinians…. There is no doubt that what is happening on the Holy Palestinian land… renews the Nazi phenomenon.”[i]
In the Middle Eastern press, the Holocaust itself is commonly dismissed as either a gross exaggeration or an outright fabrication. “With regard to the fraud of the Holocaust,” writes Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud in the Egyptian government daily, Al-Akhbar, “many French studies have proven that this is no more than a fabrication, a lie, and a fraud. . . . Hitler himself, whom they accuse of Nazism, is in my eyes no more than a modest ‘pupil’ in the world of murder and bloodshed. He is completely innocent of the charge of frying them in the hell of his false Holocaust.
. . . But I, personally and in light of this imaginary tale, complain to Hitler, even saying to him from the bottom of my heart, ‘If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened.’ “Notably, in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, Arabic editions of Mein Kampf are hot-selling items.
Hate literature rife with allegations of a Jewish world conspiracy — such as the infamous 19th-century forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—has gained great popularity throughout the Arab world. Even the most preposterous fables are widely believed by hate-filled extremists. Israelis have been accused of selling hormonally altered fruit to Egyptian men in order to kill their sperm; of supplying Egyptian farmers with poisoned seeds and disease-bearing poultry; of devising and distributing carcinogenic vegetables and shampoos to spread cancer among Arabs; of promoting drug consumption and devil worship in Arab society; of poisoning Arab water supplies; of trying to throw Egyptian society into chaos by campaigning for the legalization of homosexuality; and of following rabbinical exhortations to kill Palestinians as a means of ensuring their own swift entry into paradise. “Hardly a mishap occurs in the Arab world,” Daniel Pipes has written, “which does not get blamed on Jews.” (See, e.g., Middle East Forum, April 19, 2002.)
Pipes further reports: “As if all that were not enough, millions of Muslims accept the notion that Jews forcibly take the blood of non-Jews for ritual purposes. No less a personage than Syrian defense minister Mustafa Tlas once alluded to that “fact” in his 1983 book, The Matzah of Zion. This past March in the Saudi government newspaper Al-Riyadh, a King Faysal University medical professor contributed an article claiming that for the holiday of Purim, Jews “prepare very special pastries” filled with the blood of a Christian or Muslim adolescent. This, the professor [sic!] explained, was in contrast to Passover treats, for which “the blood of Christian and Muslim children under the age of 10 must be used.” The blood for Purim, he elaborated, is collected by placing the victim into “a needle-studded barrel” wherein his body is pierced on all sides, causing “dreadful torment — torment that affords the Jewish vampires great delight as they carefully monitor every detail of the blood-shedding with pleasure and love that are difficult to comprehend.”
Any forms of artistic expression that cast Jews in a positive or sympathetic light are heavily censored throughout the Middle East. The film “Schindler’s List,” for instance, is banned in Arab countries. Even the movie “Independence Day,” which has nothing to do with religious or Middle Eastern affairs, was condemned in the Arab media because it features a heroic Jewish character. In Lebanon the film’s release was delayed until censors had removed all indications of the hero’s Jewish faith, such as a skullcap and a Hebrew prayer. Even the brief appearance of Israelis and Arabs working cooperatively in a desert outpost was edited out of the film.
Given the vast breadth of Muslim anti-Semitism illustrated by the aforementioned examples, it is quite apparent that much of the Islamic world’s current antipathy toward Israel is rooted simply in the refusal to embrace any nation — no matter how small — wherein “infidels” predominate. To justify this bigotry, Muslim fundamentalists can recite an endless litany of alleged Jewish transgressions — most notably Israel’s “occupation” of Palestinian land. But let us reflect, for a moment, upon this lynchpin of Muslim grievances.
The purported need for a Palestinian homeland became a monumental issue only after the West Bank and Gaza came under Israeli control during the 1967 Six Day War — a conflict that was forced upon Israel when several Arab armies ringed the tiny nation with 250,000 troops, 2,000 tanks, and 700 aircraft. Prior to that, it was not an issue at all. When Jordan and Egypt controlled the West Bank and Gaza from 1948 to 1967, neither of those countries made the barest effort to establish a Palestinian state on those lands; and neither country was criticized for “occupying” those regions.
- Daniel Pipes. A Wishful Thinking Realist
The refusal to face uncomfortable truths about those who seek our destruction only prevents us from comprehending the enormity of their hatred. And that is a recipe for disaster of a magnitude beyond words. Unfortunately, the eminent Dr. Daniel Pipes obscures the problem by his emphasis or wishful thinking concerning “Muslim moderates,” which I shall now refute using his own writings.
Today the Muslim’s overweening pride, his sense of cultural superiority, his confidence in Allah’s reward of the faithful, has been shattered by Western dominance. This dominance casts doubt on the truth of Muhammad’s revelation and therefore alarms as well as infuriates the Muslim soul.[ii] For the traditional Muslim, religion provides not only universal significance; it also constitutes the ultimate basis and focus of his identity and group loyalty.[iii] It bears reiterating that Muslims devoutly believe that the Qur’an is God’s literal uncreated word, without any influence on it from Mohammed as its transmitter. It is not historically, culturally, or linguistically contingent on the circumstances of its revelation[iv] Therefore, Islam cannot be reformed without rejecting its deity, its theology, and its prophet..
Islamic hatred of the West must therefore be understood in theological as well as in political and psychological terms.
This hatred may be veiled among many Muslims who appear as “moderates,” or it may explode in the rage of Muslim “extremists.” One thing is clear: the barbarism perpetrated on September 11, 2001 was gleefully celebrated in the Muslim street throughout Islamdom. That gruesome display makes the distinction between “moderates” and “extremists” problematic. Bernard Lewis writes:
Even when Muslims cease believing in Islam, they may retain Islamic habits and attitudes. Thus, among Muslim Marxists, there have been ulema [doctors of law] and dervishes [popular mystics], defending the creed and proclaiming the (revolutionary) holy war against the (imperialist) infidel… Even when the faith dies, loyalty survives; even when loyalty fades, the old identity, and with it a complex of old attitudes and desires, remains, as the only reality under the superficial, artificial covering of new values and ideologies.[v]
Not that there are no genuine Muslim moderates, meaning Muslims who sincerely deplore Islamic extremists. Daniel Pipes mentions some notable Muslim moderates.[vi] Like many others, however, he obscures the magnitude of the threat Islam poses to the West by waving the flag of Muslim “moderates,” a minute number which, in war—and the West is at war—is strategically insignificant. He himself has indicated that many “moderate” Muslims may be or become quiescent “extremists.” when he quotes the following spokesmen: (1) Algerian secularist Said Sadi: “A moderate Islamist is someone who does not have the means of acting ruthlessly to seize power immediately.” (2) Osmane Bencherif, former Algerian ambassador to Washington: “It is misguided policy to distinguish between moderate and extreme Islamists. The goal of all is the same: to construct a pure Islamic state, which is bound to be a theocracy and totalitarian.” (3) Mohammad Mohaddessin, director of international relations for the People’s Mojahadin in Iran, a leading opposition force: “Moderate fundamentalists do not exist…. It’s like talking about a moderate Nazi.”[vii] Although these statements refer to “Islamists” and “fundamentalists,” these labels refer to the Islam of the Quran and Sharia. As Henri Boulad, an Egyptian Jesuit, and a specialist in Islam, states in an article, “L’Islamisme, c’est l’Islam” (“Islamism is Islam”):
This statement is perfectly consistent with history and geography, with the Quran and the sunna, with the life of Muhammad and the evolution of Islam, with what Islam says about itself. I reject the position of people—Muslims or Christians—who bury their heads in the sand like ostriches … refuse to see the situation objectively, or take their wishes for realities, on behalf of dialogue and tolerance.[viii]
[i] See http://library.eb.co.uk/eb/article-35212 (Robert S. Wistrich, 1999.
[ii] See Daniel Pipes, In the Path of God, p. 182.
[iii] See Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, p. 136.
[iv] I am here indebted to Robert R. Reilly (in private correspondence) for this observation.
[v] Lewis, Islam in History, p. 7.
[vi] See Daniel Pipes, “Who will stand up for Moderate Muslims,” Jerusalem Post, September 24, 2003, p. 7 (italics added). Contrast Robert Spencer, Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West, p. 300, who writes: “Ultimately, if moderate Islam is ever to become the dominant form of Islam around the world, the impetus must come from Muslims themselves. They must do it by renouncing some aspects of Islamic tradition and history—most especially jihad and dhimmitude.”
[vii] Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America, pp. 46-47. Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, p. 41, defines “moderates” in secular Islamic regimes as those who are “partisans of reIslamization from the bottom up (preaching, establishing sociological movements) while pressuring leaders (in particular through political alliances) to promote Islamization from the top (introducing the shariah into legislation) …” But if the government should take an anti-Islamic stance unaffected by peaceful protest, revolution becomes a right and an obligation.
[viii] Cited in Bat Yo’er, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations and Collide, (Farleigh Dickenson University Press, 2002), p. 339.
Endnotes
[1] See Kenneth Hart Green, “Leo Strauss’ Challenge to Emil Fackenheim: Heidegger, Radical Historicism, and Diabolical Evil,” in S. Portnoff, J. A. Diamond, and M.D. Yaffe, Emil L. Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew, (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008). For a refutation of Islamic supremacism—understood as the “final revelation”— see Paul Eidelberg, Toward a Renaissance of Israel and America: The Political Theology of Rabbi Eliyahu Benamozegh (Springdale, AR: Lightcatcher Books, 2009), Preface.
[1] See Paul Eidelberg, A Political Scientist in Israel: From Athens to Jerusalem (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010), ch. 6, a landmark essay on “demophrenia,” which offers a logical and psychological analysis of the most serious mental disorder of our times, virtually unrecognized because it is rooted in university-bred doctrine moral relativism, which permeates and emasculates the mentality of democracy’s opinion makes and decision makers.
[1] “The Crisis of Our Times,” Congressional Record, Senate, July 31, 1968, E.7150-E.7157
[1] See Adda B. Boseman, “The Nuclear Freeze Movement: Conflicting More and Political Perspectives on War and Its Relation to Peace,” Conflict 5:4 (1985), 274.
[1] Ibid., 274-275, 280.
[1] Ibid., 277.
[1] I am here indebted to Robert R. Reilly (in email correspondence) for this observation.
[1] George Weigel, Faith. Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Acton (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 17.
[1] Cited in Ibn Warraq, Why I am Not a Muslim (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 208, originally published in 1995, hence before 9/11.
[1]Winston Churchill, The River War (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899 1st ed.. vol. II, 248-50.
[1] Serge Trifkovic, The Sword of the Prophet: Islam, History, Theology, Impact on the World.
[1] Trifkovic, 43.
[1] Ibid., 44, 50.
[1] Ibid., 50. See Ibn Warraq, Why I am Not a Muslim (New York: Prometheus Books 2003), 97, originally published in 1995, who rejects this relativism.
[1] Trifkovic, 132. Muir’s statement also appears in Ibn Warraq, 88.
[1] Ibid., 19.
[1] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (New York: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 73-74. Judging from Daniel Pipes’ essay “Uncovering Early Islam,” National Review Online, May 16, 2012, http://www.danielpipes.org/11280/uncovering-early-islam, the jury is still out as to whether Muhammad really existed. In a review of Robert Spencer, Did Muhammad Exist? (Wilmington: ISI, 2012). Pipes writes:
The year 1880 saw the publication of a book that ranks as the single most important study of Islam ever. Written in German by a young Jewish Hungarian scholar, Ignaz Goldziher, and bearing the nondescript title Muslim Studies (Muhammedanische Studien), it argued that the hadith, the vast body of sayings and actions attributed to the Islamic prophet Muhammad, lacked historical validity. Rather than provide reliable details about Muhammad’s life, Goldziher established, the hadith emerged from debates two or three centuries later about the nature of Islam…. [This opinion does not in the least affect the issue of the character of Islamic ideology, whose savagery is plain to any candid reader—as it was to Arab philologist and historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406)—regardless of any revisionist speculation about the dating of Islamic scriptures or even about Muhammad’s existence (PE).]
The revisionists postulate a radically new account of early Islam. Noting that coins and inscriptions from the seventh century mention neither Muhammad, the Koran, nor Islam, they conclude that the new religion did not appear until about 70 years after Muhammad’s supposed death. Spencer finds that “the first decades of the Arab conquest show the conquerors holding not to Islam as we know it but to a vague creed [Hagarism, focused on Abraham and Ishmael] with ties to some form of Christianity and Judaism.” In very brief: “the Muhammad of Islamic tradition did not exist, or if he did, he was substantially different from how that tradition portrays him” – namely an Anti-Trinitarian Christian rebel leader in Arabia.
Only about 700 A.D., when the rulers of a now-vast Arabian empire felt the need for a unifying political theology, did they cobble together the Islamic religion. The key figure in this enterprise appears to have been the brutal governor of Iraq, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. No wonder, writes Spencer, that Islam is “such a profoundly political religion” with uniquely prominent martial and imperial qualities. No wonder it conflicts with modern mores.
[1] Bat Yo’er, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations and Collide (Farleigh Dickenson University Press, 2002).
[1] Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The book was in page-proofs when the Twin Towers were destroyed by Muslim terrorists.
[1] See http://www.yeshua.co.uk and http://www.bible.ca/islam/islam-polytheism.htm.
[1] Phillip J. Baram, The Department of State in the Middle East 1919-1945 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 46.
[1] See http://amilimani.com/2012/05/a-perspective-on-islam/#more-1734.
[1] See Paul Eidelberg, Beyond the Secular Mind: A Judaic Response to the Problems of Modernity (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), ch. 9.
[1] The following report is elaborated in Beyond the Secular Mind, pp. 37-38.
[1] See Paul Eidelberg, Jewish Statesmanship Lest Israel Fall (Israel: ACPR Publications, 2000); (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002); The Myth of Israeli Democracy: Toward a Truly Jewish Israel (Fullerton, Ca: Davidson Press, 2007); An American Political Scientist in Israel (Lanham: Lexington books, 2010).
[1] See Leo Adler, The Biblical View of Man (Jerusalem & New York: Urim Publications, 2007), p. 21. Adler writes: “The greatest importance that the Bible attributes to humility is apparent in the anecdotal sharpness with which Scripture attacks every form of self-image, arrogance, and presumptuousness. Just as humility is the mark of the great pious men [indeed, the Rabbis deem it highest virtue], so too is the almost self-deifying power characterizes paganism… ” p. 52.
[1] Cited in Yehoshafat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel, p. 97.
[1] See John J. Donohue and John L. Esposito (eds.), Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 79, and contrast Huntington, p. 213. Esposito is a leading Muslim apologist. See his The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
[1]An amusing as well as horrific aspect of the clash between Islam and the West was reported on April 12, 2012 by Raymond Ibrahim (http://www.meforum.org/3211/islamic-adult-breastfeeding-fatwas), which reads in part:
Back in May 2007, Dr. Izzat Atiya, head of Al Azhar University’s Department of Hadith, issued a fatwa, or Islamic legal decree, saying that female workers should “breastfeed” their male co-workers in order to work in each other’s company. According to the BBC: He said that if a woman fed a male colleague “directly from her breast” at least five times they would establish a family bond and thus be allowed to be alone together at work. “Breast feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage,” he ruled. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breastfed.”
Atiya based his fatwa on a hadith—a documented saying or action of Islam’s prophet Muhammad and subsequently one of the Sharia sources of jurisprudence. Many Egyptians naturally protested this decree—hadith or no hadith—though no one could really demonstrate how it was un-Islamic; for the fatwa conformed to the strictures of Islamic jurisprudence…“ It has also been reported that Egypt’s Islamist-dominated parliament is set to introduce a law allowing husbands to have sex with their dead wives up to six hours after death! (http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/1,7340,L-4221310,00.html.) This “farewell intercourse” exemplifies the necrophilia discussed by Ledeen in the next end note.
[1] See Michael A. Ledeen, Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 99. Pagination references hereafter cited in the text.
[1] Ledeen, p. 103.
[1] See http://www.meforum.org/2105/judeo-christian-violence-vs-islamic-violence, March 15, 2009.
[1] See Andrew G. Bostom, FrontPageMagazine.com., September 29, 2004.
[1] See Daniel Pipes, “Islam vs. History, National Review Online: The Corner, July 2, 2012.
[1] See http://library.eb.co.uk/eb/article-35212 (Robert S. Wistrich, 1999.
[1] See Daniel Pipes, In the Path of God, p. 182.
[1] See Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, p. 136.
[1] I am here indebted to Robert R. Reilly (in private correspondence) for this observation.
[1] Lewis, Islam in History, p. 7.
[1] See Daniel Pipes, “Who will stand up for Moderate Muslims,” Jerusalem Post, September 24, 2003, p. 7 (italics added). Contrast Robert Spencer, Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West, p. 300, who writes: “Ultimately, if moderate Islam is ever to become the dominant form of Islam around the world, the impetus must come from Muslims themselves. They must do it by renouncing some aspects of Islamic tradition and history—most especially jihad and dhimmitude.”
[1] Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America, pp. 46-47. Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, p. 41, defines “moderates” in secular Islamic regimes as those who are “partisans of reIslamization from the bottom up (preaching, establishing sociological movements) while pressuring leaders (in particular through political alliances) to promote Islamization from the top (introducing the shariah into legislation) …” But if the government should take an anti-Islamic stance unaffected by peaceful protest, revolution becomes a right and an obligation.
[1] Cited in Bat Yo’er, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations and Collide, (Farleigh Dickenson University Press, 2002), p. 339.
I suspect that the reference to September 9, 2011 was intended to be September 11, 2001.