Just in case anyone out there (Hello, State Department!) still thinks that negotiations and concessions will bring peace between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. The jihad imperative makes that impossible, as do the classic tenets of Islamic law upon which the Palestinian Religious Scholars Society are basing their ruling. From the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to Ruth King:
The Palestinian Religious Scholars Society on Wednesday issued a fatwa (Islamic religious decree) forbidding normalization with Israel.The fatwa came in response to a surprise ruling earlier this week by Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, head of Egypt's al-Azhar Mosque University, in favor of normalization with Israel.
"Islam does not prohibit normalization with other countries, especially Israel, as long as this normalization does not affect religion," Tantawi, one of the Arab world's leading Muslim scholars, wrote.
Condemning Tantawi's stance, the Palestinian Religious Scholars Society said his ruling was tantamount to supporting infidels, a move that is banned by Islam. "This is like sharing with the infidel in his evil deeds," it added.
Reaffirming a long-standing ban on normalized relations with Israel, the Palestinian group said relations with occupiers of Muslim lands meant recognition of their aggression.
"It is the religious duty of all Muslims to help their brethren in driving the enemy out of their lands," the Palestinian group added. "How can there be any cooperation between Muslims when some of them are involved in normalization with the enemies of Islam?"
Criticizing Egypt's agreement to deploy border guards along the border with the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian "scholars" said they were expecting the head of al-Azhar to issue a fatwa "calling for the mobilization of Muslim armies to expel the Jews from the rest of the lands of Palestine instead of deploying troops to defend the enemy's borders."
The Palestinian group is headed by Sheikh Hamed Bitawi, who also serves as head of the Palestinian Authority's Sharia Appeals Court in Nablus. Bitawi is also known as a senior Hamas official in the West Bank.
Did you catch that? Head of the Palestinian Authority's Sharia Appeals Court in Nablus and also a senior Hamas official in the West Bank. Just in case anyone still thought that the PA shunned and rejected Hamas and its terror attacks against innocent civilians.
That's because the 1% of territory occupied by Israel in the Middle East is too much to tolerate.
That is exactly what we have been saying all this while. We ould see the evil ideology right from the start.
But the liberals etc. are blind. So is the State Dept.
There are of course divisions in the "Palestinian" Arab as in the rest of the Arab, and indeed, Muslim, world. One says there is no need to hide the tenets of Islam, the impossibility of permitting an Infidel state to exist on territory once held by Muslims (like Spain, Sicily, much of India, Greece, the Balkans). While ultimately the entire world must be subjugated to the power of Muslims and Islam (some non-Muslims may continue to live, and if Christians or Jews even practice their faith, on the conditions laid out for non-Muslims under Muslim rule -- the dhimmis -- by Islam, and put into effect everywhere that it was possible).
Abbas prefers taqiyya and Al-Hudaibiyya now, Hamas all-out war. Their final goals do not differ. It is a matter of presentation. Egypt, of course, never did normalize relations with Israel, and does the absolute minimum that it thinks it needs to do not in order to please the Israelis (the Israelis, for the Egyptians, have no rights under the Camp David Accords or anything else under the sun), but the Americans, whose money and military equipment need to keep flowing.
A classic Jihad has been obscured by the failure of the Israelis themselves, some out of ignorance of Islam (Israel's leaders are no worse, but no better, than the run-of-the-mill leaders elsewhere -- it is just that in the case of Israel, given the forces arrayed against it, run-of-the-mill just will not do), and out of a desire not to offend but to win over Muslim allies (when the Shah ran Iran, when Turkey was more firmly in control of the keepers of Kemalism, this made sense -- but now there is less to gain from Muslims by avoiding the issue of the Jihad, and more to gain from other Infidel states). And of course the Israelis too, with far more reason, have been subject to that psychological urge not to believe, the urge to think that Islam will not in the end cause people to behave as, through time and over space, when given the chance, they have always behaved toward non-Muslims -- the same impulse that lies behind the deplorable remark of Jack Straw that there had to be a way to -- appease was the mot juste, though he didn't use it -- Muslims, because the alternative "was too terrible to contemplate."
This "too terrible to contemplate" stuff, fortunately, was not the attitude taken by the Administration during the Cold War. The nature of Islam, the tenets of Islam, the attitudes that Islam fosters, are not "too terrible to contemplate." What is "too terrible" is not to contemplate, to study, to analyze, them, backwards and forwards.
No, no, no. The State Department isn't blind to what the ultimate aim of the Palestinians happens to be in regard to Israel. Those folks over at State aren't stupid- they know that the Palestinians wish to destroy Israel and kill every last Jew who lives there.
You got those folks at State all wrong.
You see, the good folks at the US State Department happen to agree with that sentiment. Nothing would please State more than the destruction of Israel and the death of every Jew who lives there ( and everywhere for that matter).
It's not that the State Department is "blind"; it's we who are blind to the aims of the State Department.
Where's Goliath now that the Philistines really need him?
MJ:
I'm sure, sadly, that there's no small truth to your suggestion about the sentiments at State.