Yesterday I was told that a prominent network is not interested in inviting me on to its shows because one of its directors is "pro-Palestinian and pro-Arab, and he felt that you were too hostile to Arabs."
I was stunned, because the only thing I am really hostile to is the organized worldwide attempt to murder or subjugate my family and my countrymen. No one could be less hostile to Arabs than I am, and this showed me (again) how successful has been the campaign by American Muslim advocacy groups and their allies to blur the distinctions between Arabs and Muslims and between Muslims and Islam. The problem of global terror is one of jihad ideology, not of Arabs. Most Muslims today aren't Arabs at all. I am in daily contact with Arabic-speaking Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian Christians. My own grandparents were exiled from Turkey by radical Muslims in 1919. A dear friend of mine, a Palestinian woman, was so enthusiastic about my book Islam Unveiled that she spoke to me about translating it into Arabic.
In short, I am "pro-Palestinian." I just don't understand this term the way most do, and I think that the dominant understanding of it is harmful to the Palestinians and to other people. To point out the nature and goals of violent jihadists and radical Muslims, as I do in my books and here at Jihad Watch, is not injurious to the Palestinians in any way, shape, or form. Much more injurious to their cause is their jihadist leadership, which blackens their cause with suicide bombings in restaurants, buses, etc. And that jihadist leadership has already made Sharia a key component of the legal structure of the Palestinian Authority, which bodes ill for my friends the non-Muslim Palestinians, as well as for Muslim and non-Muslim women. The idea that, in order to secure Palestinian rights, Christians must unite with Muslims against Israel founders on the fact, explicitly stated in documents such as the Hamas Charter, that jihadists are not interested in making common cause with Christians or anyone else. They intend to subjugate Palestinian Christians along with Jews as second-class dhimmis in an Islamic state if they get the chance.
Therefore, anti-jihad activity, such as what I am trying to do, is "pro-Palestinian and pro-Arab" in the best and truest sense. And now Clifford May, in a magnificent piece, expands on why decent people grow uneasy when it comes to supporting the Palestinian cause as it is defined today. From the Manchester Union Leader, with thanks to David Zohar:
CONSIDER WHAT’S required to wear the label “Pro-Palestinian.”To start, you have to appear non-judgmental about innocent Palestinian children being raised to become human bombs.
You must refer to those who send such children on suicide/mass murder missions as “political leaders” or, even better, as “spiritual leaders.” Call them militants if you must, but never terrorists.
To be thought of as pro-Palestinian, you must cite the plight of the Palestinian refugees as a key motivation for violence, ignoring the fact that there would have been no refugees had Israel’s Arab neighbors not launched a war to destroy the tiny Jewish state immediately upon its birth.
Indeed, Arabs who chose to stay in Israel are today Israeli citizens, as are their children, enjoying more freedoms than do the citizens of neighboring Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia or even Jordan.
Supporters of Palestinians must point to the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as another root cause of violence. Avoid mentioning that it was a second Arab war against Israel that led to the seizure of those territories, which, at that time, were not called Palestinian territories. Gaza was administered by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan and no one demanded that they be turned them over to Palestinian sovereignty.
The Israelis captured the Sinai as well. That territory, several times larger than all of Israel, was returned to Egypt in exchange for a piece of paper promising peace. Forget these awkward details.
To burnish your pro-Palestinian credentials, even as you rail against the Israeli occupation, say nothing positive about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to end that occupation entirely in Gaza and to withdraw Israeli troops and settlements from 85 percent of the West Bank.
While it is true that at Camp David in 2000, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered about 95 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, Yassir Arafat turned that offer down and initiated several years of terrorist attacks. Even so, Mr. Sharon has said he’s willing to consider further withdrawal, to discuss permanent borders, though he won’t negotiate with those dispatching terrorists. Dismiss all that as irrelevant — if you want to be described as someone who sympathizes with the Palestinians.
Also, continue to insist that Israelis eventually must agree to a “right to return” — that they must let millions of Palestinians settle not just in an independent Palestinian state next to Israel but in Israel itself.
Promote this idea even if you’re savvy enough to know it can never happen — just as Hindus can never re-settle in what is today Muslim Pakistan, just as Greek Christians can never re-settle in what is today Muslim Turkey.
In fact, Israelis with roots in Arab countries today comprise about half of Israel’s population. They might understand better than anyone else that a Palestinian “right to return” would mean the end of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people, that Jews would become a minority in what would no longer be the world’s only predominately Jewish state.
And that’s a frightening thought because, sadly, few minorities living in the 22 Arab countries and the more than 50 predominately Muslim nations enjoy anything approaching freedom and equality. Such freedom and equality may be achieved in Iraq in the years ahead — though not if the dictators of Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia can help it, and not if the Palestinian “political and spiritual leaders” who supported Saddam Hussein and who now oppose the American “occupation” have anything to do with it.
Nor should Friends of Palestine plan for the opportunities that the Israeli withdrawals will present. Don’t even think about the Israeli homes that will be turned over to Palestinian families, the hotels that could be built along the Mediterranean. Forget about foreign investors, new hospitals and schools. And certainly don’t talk about cooperation with Israel. On the contrary, shrug when Hamas terrorists bomb the checkpoints through which Gazans pass on their way to work in Israeli factories. But should the Israelis respond by closing those checkpoints, complain vehemently that the Israelis are cutting off the livelihood of Palestinian workers.
The United Nations is very pro-Palestinian. That’s why U.N. experts are not hard at work drafting a plan to give Palestinians more say over who governs them. Arafat was elected Palestinian leader — he ran exactly one time in 35 years and in that election he was opposed by a woman whose name few can recall and who hadn’t a ghost of a chance. Surely, that’s as much democracy as any reasonable person could desire for Palestinians.
Perhaps someday people will look back in astonishment on all this.
Mr. Spencer;
Can you name the network, giving some particulars vis-a-vis programs, contact names, etc. so that some of us may protest?
Thanks!
CGW
Off topic:
Can anyone recommend a comprehensive work by Bat Ye'or?
Also, has anyone read or heard about "The End of Democracy" by Abid Ullah Jan, which lays out arguments for why democracy is finished, to be replaced by worldwide Islam? (I haven't read it, but it came up on an Amazon search.) From the reviews, Muslims are just eating it up! Check out some of the "customer reviews" on Amazon ...
My dear CGW,
Thanks for your interest. I don't want to name the network right now, as I heard this second-hand, and so there is the possibility (slim, but real) that it may not be true. I have sent a message to the director in question that is very similar to what is above, and we'll see how he responds -- if he responds.
"Can anyone recommend a comprehensive work by Bat Ye'or?"
She has three books in print in English. All are excellent and ground-breaking, and will open the eyes of anyone with persisting illusions. "The Dhimmi" introduces the concept of dhimmitude (a word she coined) and may be the overview you're seeking. "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam" and "Islam and Dhimmitude" examine other aspects of the dhimmi problem. I highly recommend all three.
Cordially,
Robert Spencer
Mr. Spencer:
Will you update us on the network situation?
Thanks,
CGW
CGW: Certainly. RS
Robert,
Excellent post! Keep on fighting the good fight.
Someone posted a kind of potential "master plan" for Muslims to infiltrate and take over western societies awhile back. I meant to print it out but now I have no idea where to find it. Anyone know where to access it?
Interesting post.
Only one week ago I urged both PBS and NPR to invite to invite Mr. Spencer.
Furthermore, NPR has yet to invite terrorism expert Steven Emerson, depsite their 1998 denial that he was blacklisted.
How can anyone call this an "oversight" when Emerson's prophetic "Jihad in America" predicted in 1994 many of the very problems the Bush administration would be addressing post 9/11!
But the best way to be "pro-Palestinian Arab" is to ignore Islam as the basis for Arab hostility to the Infidel state of Israel. For that is not only the key, the ultimate explanation, of what is going on, despite the carefully-construed campaign of using, up front, some "Christian" Palestinian Arabs in order to obscure the Islamic basis for the war against Israel (it would not have resonated too well in Christian, or quasi-Christian, Europe), but to keep others, including the Israelis, from comprehendinig that no negotiations leading to treaties mean anything other than a temporary "truce treaty" on the model of that made by Muhammad at Al-Hudaibiyya with the Meccans -- a treaty he broke as soon as his forces became more powerful. If the Islamic tenets that require Muslims to attack and destroy Israel -- by degrees if necessary, where outright assault cannot work -- were known, then a great many people would realize that these treaties -- Oslo, Camp David, and so on -- are simply a snare, a delusion, a waste.
What keeps the peace now between Egypt and Israel is not something called the Camp David Accords, but the military power of Israel. In other words, Egypt does not attack Israel for the same reason that Syria does not attack it.
Amazing how resistent the foolish Israeli leadership is to comprehending this, and to making clear that it now understands what is going on. When Israelis were distracted with nation-building, and resettling huge numbers of Jewish refugees in the first two decades of the state's existence, such inattention was understandable. But when, after 1967, the Arabs began to methodically dress up their campaign in the camouflage of a "struggle for legitimate rights" and then invented, for the occasion, the "Palestinian people" (who are not mentioned once in the UN records between 1948 and 1967 -- not once, not by any Arab or non-Arab), the Israelis should have been vigilant. They were not. They have damaged themselves, terribly.
And what is more, they have damaged the West, which not understanding the Jihad against Israel, also failed to understand the elements of Jihad that are being used against the entire non-Muslim world, with Western Europe the first to suffer. Yet one sympathizes with Israel, for it simply did not have a policymaking elite that could permit itself the leisure to think and to comprehend; they were so busy countering that attack, putting out this diplomatic fire, and so on -- and who, after all, wants to allow himself to believe that his country will forever be a target, will forever -- no matter what its size -- be for the Muslim Believer an outrage, a "humiliation" (for Islam "must dominate and not be dominated") that, sooner or later, in a decade or a hundred years, or a thousand years, be undone.
Oh, on a lexical note, it may be difficult, but I would urge those who care about such things not to promote the adjective "Palestinian" to an ethnic noun; that would be to collaborate in the Arab propaganda effort. "Palestinian Arab" keeps the geographic epithet in its place -- just where it belongs.
CGW:
It was in the latter part of April sometime. Just go through the archive in the last couple of weeks of April or, if you can remember some key words from it, do a search using the search function. I am sorry but I don't remember any key words from it.
Well, we can all take a look at Mr. Spencer's media list, can't we? I see some missing networks, people.
What say that when Ibby Hooper shows up on the ABCCBSNBC evening news with Walter Cronkite's Illegitimate Children we start demanding a little equal time for Spencer, Pipes, Trifkovic, & Emerson? Don't just let's write the networks, because they don't care what stupid old flyover people like us think; let's alert some media watch dogs like MRC and so on.
At least we can start to expose their bias.
Hugh:
I agree. The Muslims view Israel just as they viewed the Crusaders - an outpost of the West that, given enough time, they will get rid of. After the Crusaders took Jersualem, it took approximately two hundred years for the Muslims to get rid of them. They look at Israel the same way. If we in the West survive, we may live to see an ever vigilant Israel still battling to survive a thousand years from now.
Stirring and insightful. She gives me some actual hope that there may one day be peace. Let us all hope it is not far away.
Actually Mentat, and while I do agree with you and Hugh (that sounds unwieldy), Israel is simply the closest and most convenient outpost. I'm quite sure no one here actually believes--as those poor suckers on moonbat sites such as democraticunderground--that the muslim world would stop hating us if every Israeli up and moved to the Upper East Side, thus leaving that tiny sliver of land to be turned into yet another huge economic failure ruled by kleptocrats.
No, the West will be hated until it is all Dar al Islam (sp). I live in a small town in western Maryland, and even here I have a regular editorial go at a radical muslim. At least he's been decent enough to admit to being an islamist.
I agree with 99% of what you say. However, is it not true that the Palestinian refugee problem would have existed even without the attack on the fledgling Israeli government? According to Benny Morris, Ben Gurian et al knew they had to "resettle" as many Palestinians as possible outside Israel's borders and as quickly as possible to have any chance at short-term as well as long-term survival. Do you not agree?
hugh
may i suggest not to use paleostinian instead try the LGF word Jordyptian since a mojority are of jordanian and egyption decent or at least were till 1967
While the articles and comments above are great, I am not sure that I can entirely agree with Hugh on the basically Islamic nature of anti-Israel sentiment in history. Yasser Arafat and his ilk are in no way serious Muslims; I think one could make the case that he's still an orthodox Marxist. As Mitrokhin and others have shown, Arab socialist governments and the PLO received Soviet financial and ideological support for efforts against Israel for decades.
The fundamental similarity between Marxist and Jihadist hostility is the same: Israel and the US are seen as the preeminent representatives of Western culture, individualism, capitalism and republican governance. Any ideology -- whether religious or secular -- which opposes these ideas will be driven to try to destroy both nations. The question is, whether we are willing to acknowledge and celebrate our virtues, or continue apologizing for them?
The modern Left loves "authenticity". An authentic black is a gangster; an authentic Palestinian is a suicide bomber. The former definition has cost untold thousands of innocent black lives, caught in the crossfire between authentic Bloods and authentic Crips. The latter definition is even more deadly.
What makes this trick so effective is that the members of the target ethnic group find it impossible to act against the "authentic" ones. A young black man who wants to be civilized will be treated as a traitor to his race; presumably the same thing happens to a would-be civilized Palestinian.
Here's one way out: when there's no more Semites around left to hate.
In case anyone is interested, I heard from the network exec in question. He denies the rumor. He did not, however, show any indication that I (or anyone else with similar views) might actually appear. Discussions continue. RS