Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (13 page)

In 1939 Abul Ala Maududi, founder of the Pakistani Jamaat-e-Islami (Party of Islam), explained, “The objective of Islamic ‘Jihad’ is to eliminate the rule of an un-Islamic system and establish in its stead an Islamic system of state rule. Islam does not intend to confine this revolution to a single state or a few countries; the aim of Islam is to bring about a universal revolution.”
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Maududi, one of the most influential Salafist ideologues of the twentieth century, added that jihadists include not only those who actively fight for Allah, but everyone who helps them achieve their goal of worldwide Islamic domination: “In the jihad in the way of Allah, active combat is not always the role on the battlefield, nor can everyone fight in the front line. Just for one single battle preparations have often to be made for decades on end and the plan deeply laid, and while only some thousands fight in the front line there are behind them millions engaged in various tasks which, though small themselves, contribute directly to the supreme effort.”
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Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch told Fox News in early January 2010, “Of course the vast majority of Muslims—there are 1.4 billion—are not terrorists, but there are hundreds of millions who are.”
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If one thinks of terrorists or jihadists as not just active fighters but also their supporters, one sees that Mayor Koch’s message is largely the same as Maududi’s seventy years ago.

Since Islam is bent on destroying our constitutional system and its attendant liberties, we should not extend to it the leeway that we allow religions in general. Indeed, we put all of Western civilization at risk if we fail to recognize Islam for what it really is: an aggressive enemy of freedom. As President Andrew Jackson proclaimed in his farewell address, “But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing.”
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We must be vigilant. We should listen to the famous twentieth-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who wrote, “It is impossible to understand national socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam, its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s prophet.”
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And we should listen to one of the great scholarly authorities on the Middle East, Professor Bernard Lewis, who compared Islam to another totalitarian ideology: “The traditional Islamic division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War... has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs.... The aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same.”
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We should not be deceived by the few aspects of Islam that resemble other religions. Instead, we must focus on the many dangerous threats this ideology poses to the entire world.

When I was in Israel, I made a lot of new friends—Israelis, Europeans, and Americans. One European friend was more interested in politics than I was. He asked the Israelis what they thought of the Arabs, and the Arabs how they felt about the Israelis. Afterward, he liked to mull over those conversations with me, asking, “Hey, Geert, did you hear what he said?” or “What do you think he meant?”

We both noticed that Israelis often had negative political opinions about Arabs, but they did not feel offended by the Arabs’ mere existence. Even Israelis who had lost relatives to Arab terrorists had the same attitude. Obviously, the Israelis had a problem with terrorists, but they did not seem to have a problem with Arabs or Muslims
per se.
The Arab sentiment was different. When I visited Egypt, I was surprised to notice that even there, notwithstanding the Egyptians’ immense kindness and generosity, the mention of Israel inevitably produced an outburst of vitriolic hatred. Their wrath was not confined to Israeli soldiers or politicians or to Israelis who had done them personal harm. No, this was hatred against all Jews, even children.

I never heard an Israeli talk that way about Muslims, but it was hard to find an Arab who spoke about Jews with anything but unconcealed contempt. Their views were encapsulated by a statement made by Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the Grand Sheikh of Cairo’s al-Azhar University, who was President Obama’s host during his Cairo visit. “All Jews are not the same,” declared Tantawi. “The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.”
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Tantawi, who died in March 2010, was generally considered a moderate by Western policymakers and media outlets despite his habitual anti-Jewish exclamations.
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In another typical display, in 2002 he told a delegation of Palestinian Muslims they should intensify suicide attacks against Israelis “including children, women, and teenagers.”
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I quickly learned during my first foray in the Middle East that it’s better and safer to live as a Muslim in Israel than as a Jew in Egypt. Muslims in Israel have mosques, they have the right to vote, and they have representatives in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. Jews in Egypt and other Arab countries—though they have been living there for more than twenty-five centuries, almost twice as long as Muslims have inhabited the land of Israel—have virtually no rights at all.

The victimization of Jews in the Middle East is nothing new. In January 1915, the
New York Times
reported from British-controlled Egypt, “Nearly all the [7,000] Jewish refugees in Alexandria come from Jerusalem and other large towns [in Palestine].”
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Indeed, the Jews of Palestine had long been persecuted by their Muslim neighbors, falling prey to pogroms in 1920, 1929, and 1936-39 that were organized by the British-appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The 1929 attacks included the murder of sixty Jews in Hebron, including women and children, whose families had lived in the area for centuries.

Sadly, the plight of Palestine’s Jews was not unique; in 1912 and 1942 there were anti-Jewish pogroms in Morocco; in 1917, 1940, and 1941 in Tunisia; in 1933 and 1947 in Yemen; in 1934 in Algeria; and in 1936, 1941, and 1946-47 in Iraq. There were also pogroms in 1942 and 1945 in Libya,
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where at the time a quarter of Tripoli’s population was Jewish. Today, there is not a single Jew left there. One Jewish man returned to Tripoli in 2011 after Moamar Gaddafi was overthrown and tried to reopen an abandoned synagogue; he was quickly hounded out of the country by mobs that tried to storm his hotel room while carrying signs declaring, “There is no place for the Jews in Libya.”
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There were further pogroms in 1945 in Egypt; in 1945-47 in Syria; and in 1947 in Bahrain.
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Jews had been indigenous to all these lands for hundreds of years before the Islamic conquest.

The birth of the modern state of Israel in 1948 provoked a shocking campaign of ethnic cleansing throughout the Islamic world, as Jews were expelled
en masse
from their homes and had their properties confiscated. In 1948, there were 75,000 Jews in Egypt and almost 1 million in the Arab countries combined, including more than a quarter million in Morocco. Today, there are only 100 Jews left in Egypt and less than 8,000 in the entire Arab world, of whom just 6,000 remain in Morocco. It’s a little-known fact that more Jews became refugees from Arab countries in 1948 than the estimated 710,000 Arabs who fled the newly created state of Israel that year.
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No one talks about the Jewish refugees anymore because they quickly made new lives for themselves in Israel, Europe, and America, even though many of them had arrived penniless. This is a relatively common phenomenon in recent history. The Germans who were expelled from the Sudetenland and the lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, the Greeks who were ejected from the Aegean coast of Anatolia, the Hindus who fled the Punjab—all of them resettled somewhere and started over. World War II produced 50 million refugees who began anew in different countries.

Today, all the refugee problems predating the 1950s have been solved with one exception: the Palestinians. Instead of granting citizenship to their fellow Arabs, Arab regimes in Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere stripped Palestinian refugees of their basic rights and locked them into refugee camps. This created a permanent underclass of disenfranchised refugees who have been used for sixty years by their Arab rulers as pawns in the conflict with Israel.

The blame lies not just with the opportunistic Arab governments, but with the international community as well. According to international practice, the status of “refugee” or “displaced person” only applies to first-generation refugees—in other words, to a person who himself is actually displaced—but the United Nations makes an exception for Palestinians, who are defined as refugees even if they are descendants of refugees. Consequently, the number of so-called Palestinian refugees registered with the UN increased from just over 700,000 in 1950 to 5 million in 2011.
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This all comports with a strong characteristic of Islam: it nurtures resentment, passing it on from generation to generation. Islam still complains about the Crusades, as if France would still moan about the Hundred Years’ War or America would seethe over the War of 1812. What’s more, it’s not just the actual victims of some supposed injustice who burn with resentment, but also people who live half a world away and were never, directly or indirectly, part of the original conflict, whether it be the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 or the foundation of Israel in 1948.

Islam denounces Israel’s Jews as usurpers—recent arrivals who stole the country from its rightful owners—and the
Umma
crudely falsifies history to justify Islam’s exclusive claim to the land. Islam ignores or denies the Jews’ nearly 4,000-year presence in the region, which continued to various extents even after the Romans’ expulsion of most Jews from ancient Israel in 70 AD. In fact, contrary to popular belief, the only autonomous states that ever existed in the land of Israel were Jewish ones.

It is a cardinal belief of Islam today that Israelis stole the land of Palestine. In reality, the British partitioned the territory of the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922 into Cisjordan in the West and Transjordan in the East. The largest part, Transjordan, comprising 78 percent of the territory, was handed over to Hashemite strongman Abdullah ibn Hussein. In 1948, the United Nations partitioned the remainder—Cisjordanian Palestine—into a Jewish and an Arab part. Although the Jews accepted the tiny slice of land they were allotted, the Arabs rejected the UN ruling and invaded Israel in order to drive the Jews into the sea.

After the tiny, fledgling Jewish state defeated troops from approximately a dozen Arab nations plus Palestinian irregulars, the Arabs took revenge on the Jews in East Jerusalem and in the provinces of Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank), areas which the Arab forces retained after the war. All the Jews were evicted from these regions and all their synagogues were destroyed, including the ancient Hurva Synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem. Those lands were then assigned to the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, later known simply as Jordan. Notably, when the Israelis liberated these territories in 1967, they did not return the favor by systematically destroying mosques or expelling all the Muslim residents.

Following the 1967 liberation, Jewish settlers returned to Judea and Samaria. They turned barren land into flourishing fields, gardens, and orchards in places like Tomer, near age-old towns that bear the mark of millennia of continuous Jewish history, from 1500 BC until 1948. I respect these settlers. Their spirit is the spirit of the West, the spirit of the pioneers who settled America and spilt “their own blood... in acquiring lands for their settlement,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1774. These settlers, Jefferson noted, expended “their own fortunes... in making that settlement effectual; for themselves they fought... and for themselves alone they have right to hold.”
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That also applies to today’s Israeli settlers, whom the international media, unthinkingly regurgitating Islamic propaganda, has unfairly demonized

This all explains why I always feel at home in Israel: it is animated by the same spirit that made Western civilization great—that of the soldier protecting the frontier and the pioneer settling the land. Israel is, indeed, a vital outpost of Western civilization. That is a big reason why Islam conditions the faithful to hate the Jewish state and to view its destruction as a religious imperative.