|
« Home | Next »
'As it goes with Israel...'
By MORDECHAI NISAN
In my 1999 book Identity and Civilization: Essays on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, I examined the connection between religion and war in ideological and historical terms. While the logo of Christianity is love, with Pope John Paul II urging young people this past July "to build a civilization of love," Islam offers a different sensibility. The Koran impels Muslims to "fight the infidels" for Allah; holy war is considered a religious duty designed to convert everybody by force or persuasion and to dominate the world.
Judaism, restricting its political scope to the Land of Israel alone, and devoid of any missionary purpose, commends neither love nor war in particular, but life as the pertinent doctrinal value.
The religious origins of the Muslim attack against Christian America on September 11 are not in the mountains of Afghanistan, or the immigrant neighborhoods of Hamburg or Bradford, nor even the mosques of Arabia, but in the belief that jihad is a permanent Islamic obligation against the infidels. Islam catalogs Jews and Christians together as dhimmis, allegedly protected and tolerated non-Muslim "peoples of the book," but more pertinently demeaned and fundamentally enslaved communities under the rule of the "book and sword" of Muhammad's faithful.
The political origins of the Muslim attack against targets perceived as symbols of Christian power are of a piece with the religious crux of the matter. The Muslim-Arab war against Israel, the assault upon Zionism and the wanton murder of Jews, is where it all began. This is because Islam's war against Christianity is part of the overall war against Judaism. In a mosque sermon in Doha, Qatar, on June 7, the imam prayed to Allah "to humiliate the infidelsto destroy the Jews, the Christians, and their supporters... make their wives widows, make their children orphans, and make them a prey for Muslims."
Yet the West turned a political blind eye to the incessant barbaric Arab campaign against Israel from 1948. The Arab world sought to eradicate Israel from the map of the Middle East, and Europe and America adopted a stance of tacit assent to this goal of politicide-genocide.
Cultivating economic and diplomatic interests in the Middle East was the overwhelming Western priority. Palestinian hordes killed babies at Avivim in 1970, children at Ma'alot in 1974, and adults on a tour bus near Tel Aviv in March 1978; then Europe recognized the PLO in 1980. Later, the Palestinian intifada insurgence beginning in 1987 took a toll of Jewish civilian deaths; then America in 1989 recognized the PLO.
Despite the West virtually accommodating both the Arabs' rejection of Israel's right to exist and Palestinian terrorism which lent barbaric vitality to their position, the Islamic Koranic linking of Jews and Christians would inevitably be applied in the interminable Muslim jihad against both Israel and the West. Israel is the first line of Western defense in the battle for non-Muslim survival and prosperity in the world.
Western collusion would not prevent the Arabs from cutting a pound of Christian fair flesh many times over, but rather prompt it.
JERUSALEM, the internationally unrecognized capital of Israel, remains a critical political benchmark of Western infidelity to principles of right and wrong in the Middle Eastern quagmire. Stubbornly bound to antiquated United Nations resolutions that deny Israel its rightful affirmation of Jerusalem, and succumbing to an assortment of explicit or implicit Arab oil and political threats, the West goads Arab-Muslim-Palestinian perseverance to demand the city as the capital of a future Palestinian state.
Islam first conquered Jerusalem in 636 from Greek Byzantium, later re-conquering the city from the Crusader Latin Christians in 1187. With Israeli rule extending throughout Jerusalem as of 1967, the Muslims felt outraged and therefore obligated to try and recover the city for themselves.
Jerusalem is, of course, not just an urban terrain of conflict but a sweeping religious symbol of historical significance. Were the Palestinians to acquire Jerusalem as a capital city, this would signal a great triumph for Islam that would reverberate around the world. Muslims would pursue their global goals with the assurance that incessantly and incrementally Islamicizing the Christian West, their erstwhile and foolish collaborators, will be consummated too.
A recent article by al-Qaida "activist" Ubeid al-Qurashi drew an analogy between the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes in 1972 and the al-Qaida attack against Americans in New York in 2001. Both were great Muslim-Arab victories, he wrote, with tremendous media coverage that conveyed the struggle and tragedy of the Palestinians in the one case, and Islam's bold assault on the industrialized, though vulnerable, West in the other.
Nonetheless, two years after Arafat's Black September gang murdered Israelis in Munich, he was invited to address the General Assembly at the United Nations. While Osama bin Laden is unlikely to be invited to address the international body (though it may be too early to be sure of this!), he has however succeeded in arousing global Muslim enthusiasm, compelling European submission, dividing the Western World, and threatening the fabric of freedom and security in the United States.
The sagacious American author Eric Hoffer, longshoreman-philosopher from San Francisco, gave voice to a profound Holocaust-related 20th-century truth, whose implication in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War evoked a prophetic insight: "I have a premonition that will not leave me, as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us."
Undoubtedly, Hoffer sensed the primacy and mystery of the Jewish people's place in world history.
Mordechai Nisan teaches Middle East Studies at the Rothberg
International School of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The World
Israel and the Middle East
Ground Zero
Editorials
-----------------------------
« Home
|
