Here is a brilliant column by Diana West, touching on recent stories we discussed here, here and here.
Christmas came early to the Palestinian Authority when the "international community" decided not only to meet PA President Mahmoud Abbas' request for $5.6 billion in aid, but to throw in almost $2 billion more. Why? Did the PA end its terrorist ways? Stop state-sanctioned incitement against Israel and the West? Change Fatah's charter (forget about Hamas) calling for Israel's destruction?Alas, no, no and no. We are heaping riches on the PA for other reasons, one of which I discuss below.
But first, a digression: Christmas, obviously, doesn't come to the PA, even if Western billions do. Despite a tiny (and decreasing) number of Christians, the PA is a land of Islam-Dar al-Islam. That makes Israel, the object of the PA's destructive animus, Dar al-Harb, land of war, right?
Right. But not according to the PC script of the "international community." We never, ever discuss the Islamic context of "Arab-Israeli" conflicts. But how else can we hope to understand them? Jihad ideology inspires the Arab struggle against Israel. It also explains it. As the only non-Muslim country amid Middle Eastern Dar-al Islam, as the only "dhimmi" nation to reclaim its land once conquered by Islam, Israel's very existence is a religious offense to the "umma," or Islamic community. In this same context, what we call "foreign aid" to the PA may be understood as a form of "jizya," the protection money paid to Muslims by non-Muslims.
But the non-Muslim world prefers not to think like that. We avert our collective eye from the goals of jihad, from the history and teachings of Islam. Instead, we see ourselves as villains — Israel for its existence, and Israel's supporters for, well, their support for Israel's existence.
In so doing, we create a sinkhole of Western guilt and responsibility for suffering Muslims, in this case in the PA. They suffer not as a consequence of their religio-political bloodlust to destroy the Jews in Israel (the nearest infidels), but because there are Jews in Israel. In other words, it's everyone else's fault but their own. Islam — particularly, jihadist ideology — is not to blame. Throw more money down the hole.
Of course, this works only until we stop misreading such ideology. And how long will that take? Probably forever-so long as we continue leaning on the same authorities who got us into this mental mess in the first place.
As it happens, I began the calendar year thinking about this subject — exonerating Islam — while discussing a PBS documentary on anti-semitism in the Islamic world. The show's conclusion: What isn't Israel's fault is that of the West.
Well, you can't expect much more from (lefty) PBS. What was startling about the message, however, was one of the messenger's: none other than the eminent historian Bernard Lewis. He declared that anti-semitism didn't even exist in the Middle East until European Christian colonizers brought it. You don't need to be a scholar of Mr. Lewis' stature to know that European colonization of the Middle East didn't begin until some 1,100 years after Islamic anti-semitism got going in the Koran, the canonical commentaries on the Koran and in a long and painful (for Christians also) historical record.
Because Mr. Lewis is probably the most influential voice on Islam in our time — particularly for the U.S. foreign policy establishment — this pronouncements are more than significant. Right or, in this case, wrong, they become the conventional wisdom, or reinforce it.
This comes to mind because Mr. Lewis has done it again — holding Europe responsible for unpalatable traditions of Islam. Writing at The American Thinker blog, Andrew Bostom, author of "The Legacy of Jihad" and, forthcoming, "The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism," quotes a recent speech in which Mr. Lewis said: "The authoritarianism present in the Middle East region is not part of the Arab and Muslim traditions, but it has been imported from Europe."
Mr. Bostom goes on to cite copious chapter and verse — including earlier writings by Mr. Lewis himself — demonstrating that "the Arab and Muslim tradition" needed no lessons from Europe on authoritarianism.
Why is Mr. Lewis making statements contradicted by the historical record? If European Christendom truly is the source of Islamic evil-e.g., anti-semitism and authoritarianism-Islam is let off the hook, and blame falls on the West. Whether that is Lewis' point, it is certainly Lewis' effect.
And it is certainly the conventional wisdom. Not very wise, though, when it helps feed the kind of guilt assuaged only by giving billions of dollars to murderers and thieves.
We avert our collective eye...
Been going on for 1,385 yrs now. Ever since the first blood letting. Ever since its first murder, Islam and its constituent Moslems have been given a free pass. Free from criticism, free from responsibility. Beneficiaries of special treatment.
One explanation for this mess is Islam's status as a putative religion. But a more powerful reason for our occlusion is that Islam is just too awful to acknowledge as really being there. In other words, Islam is so terrible that its betters part the crowd and let it slide through unimpeded.
A fake religion too terrible to admit into reality. This formula worked for nearly a millenium and a half. But now they have TV, and the Internet, and the Marxists, and the academy, and the politicians, and the school teachers, and all the willful delusionalists.
And nukes.
IMHO it looks like another case of "gran'pa is too old to drive." The esteemed Mr. Lewis, along with Mr. Murtha, Mr. Carter and Mr. Buchanan, would perhaps be more comfortable out on the porch and back on his rocker.
A postiong above implies hardening of Lewis's mental arteries. This is false. He has full possession of his faculties, is still, all by himself, more intelligent and knowledgeable than his MESA Nostra detractors. Several of his books are likely never to be surpassed. He is intellectually superior as well to all -- or almost all -- of his detractors outside of MESA Nostra.
But his strange failure to adequately discuss the dhimmi, his misreading even of Turkey (and his narrow parsing of the word "genocide" and ignoring of the attacks by Muslim Turks on Christian Armenians, that began long before World War I -- in 1870, and then again in 1894-96 -- when the Ottomans felt Western pressure from the time of the Tanzimat reforms, and responded with attacks on their Christian subjects, including the massacre of Maronites in Damascus in 1860, the atrocities committed against the Bulgarians in 1876-78 that so enraged Gladstone, and repeated attacks agianst Armenians, with constant cries against the "giavour" or Infidel, that took place, pace Lewis, not because of wartime conditions but in wartime, and in peacetime as well. His derriere-les-coulisses denigration of Bat Ye'or as "polemical," his warning others not to bring up violations of the Oslo Accords, his policy enthusiasims (those same Oslo Accords, and the Iraq invasion-and-makeover that he supported, a fiasco (from which a victory might yet be plucked, if the Americans withdrawal) he now blames on faulty execution by the Administration, with not a word about his own faith, and that of others who relied on him, in Ahmad Chalabi, based on a misreading of Iraq, of Islam, and of the winning but often self-deceived Shi'a in exile, who had their own agenda, and it was not to weaken the Camp of Islam, but to win Iraq for the historically oppressed Shi'a.
As a general observation, foreign aid is virtually always a destructive practice. But it's orders of magnitude worse when it goes to peoples and regimes that revile the giver. It amplifies the envy and contempt of the recipient as nothing else could do. Not even an invasion, with the invading armies given free rein to rape, pillage, and burn, creates as much bad will as material munificence from a hated enemy.
We lucked out in postwar Japan and Germany. We ruled firmly enough, and stayed in place long enough, to convince the conquered nations that 1) we werent't the fleshly embodiment of evil, and 2) their envy and resentment would always run a poor second to our confidence, our riches, and our military might. We might have to repeat the performance in Iraq -- indeed, we are repeating it -- but with regard to the Palestinian irredentists, we lack both the will and the opportunity.
Let them sink.
yes i am starting to believe that indeed the “petrodiplomatic elites” are the main forces that have manipulated the progressive leftists into beatifying Islam, demonising Israel and breaking down the moral culture of our society.To prepare the ground for islamization of the west.
It has been a kind of false flag operation in which the aims of the political and business elites have been fulfilled by their own enemies.
When one considers how little time it took to turn Israel from a heroic tiny democracy into a pariah quasi Nazi state, one is flabbergasted by the invisible power behind the dupe activists.
Both Israel and the west are at war not with “terrorism” but with Islamic Jihad.But the useful phrase "war on terror" impies clearly that solutions are possible. THEY ARE NOT.
Neither Israel nor America uses the term because the conclusions are too painful to consider.
Namely that the struggle is eternal and therefore no permanent peace is possible.
It matters not what Israel does or does not do. It is the religious duty of every Muslim to work to return it to the control of the ummah.
Israel is no long lost, remote,Andalusia. The Jews were conquered by the prophet himself
It lies in the heart of deemed holy islamic lands.
The shame and insult to Islam is intolerable that a dhimmi people should have achieved independence .
And of course in the same way that Jihad cannot be allowed to be named as the root cause of Israel’s troubles, neither can it be said in America .
It is the world war that must not be named.