Huge, in all senses of the word
The indefatigable anti-jihadist Andrew Bostom's new book is out, and it is huge: not just because it is a massive compendium of information (700 pages in double columns), but because it will necessitate, for any honest analyst, a full-scale and thoroughgoing reevaluation of some of the core assumptions that prevail today regarding Islam and the Jews. The myth of a tolerant, pluralistic past dominates everywhere, supported by everything but the facts, and of course it has policy implications not only for the Israeli/Palestinian conflict but for other jihadist flashpoints where the learned analysts assure us that peace is right around the corner, as soon as we hit on the right mix of concessions.
The huge amount of documentation that Andy marshals here demonstrates that that is a pollyannaish view both regarding Israel and other conflicts as well. Islamic Jew-hatred (and one could also add hatred of all unbelievers, although the Jews are certainly singled out for especial vituperation) is deeply rooted in the Qur'an and Sunnah, and has been consistently acted upon throughout Islamic history.
The policy implications of this are clear, if difficult, but they aren't even close to being considered since the basic premises aren't even accepted, and mythology reigns in their stead. But it will be much, much harder for those myths to be sustained now that we all have access to The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.
At The American Thinker, Robert Kaplan compares Bostom's data to the (universally accepted) assertions of one of the foremost proponents of the historical myth of tolerance, Bernard Lewis:
Bostom's book is part of an ongoing debate about the comparative situation of Jews under the crescent and the cross. In this debate Bostom is in sharp disagreement with Bernard Lewis, the well known and much quoted authority on the history of Islam. Lewis has written:"On the whole, in contrast to Christian anti-Semitism, the Moslem attitude toward non Moslems [including Jews] is not one of hate or fear or envy but simply contempt.""Jews of Christendom suffered incomparably greater persecution [than the Jews of Islam]. Persecution, that is to say violent and active repression was rare and atypical. Jews and Christians [dhimmis] under Moslem rule were not normally called upon to suffer martyrdom for their faith."
"They [the Jews] were not often obliged to make the choice which confronted Muslims and Jews in reconquered Spain, between exile apostasy and death."
How is it that Lewis and Bostom evaluate Islamic antisemitism and the experience of Jews living in Muslim societies so differently, given the fact that though they might disagree on a few particular points of fact, the body of information they begin with is essentially the same?
Bostom's picture of Moslem antisemitism is much more somber than Lewis's. One source of difference lies in the fact that compared with Lewis's his writing includes considerably more detail of the anti-Jewish elements in Islamic religion, culture and history. By quoting the words of Jews who lived under the Muslims and non-Moslems visiting their lands, Bostom's text conveys emotions of sympathy and indignation regarding the oppressed condition of Jews which Lewis's academic, non-emotional style largely omits.
The structure of Lewis's and Bostom's arguments are also quite different. Employing a genetic approach, Bostom shows that Islam's holy books, the Koran, the hadith and the sira all have sharply negative things to say about Jews, that these have been emphasized and reinforced by Moslem thinkers, jurists and preachers throughout the history of Islam, and that the attitudes and ideas engendered by them have directly influenced the actions of Moslem rulers, clergy and mobs both in their oppression of Jews as dhimmis and their aggressive excesses against Jews which have included pogroms, forced conversion, pillage and expulsion. The status of dhimmi to which Jews and Christians are relegated under Islamic law is one entailing serious suffering and indignity in the best of circumstances. Frequently circumstances were far from the best.
Lewis puts Islam's record regarding Jews in a favorable light mainly with the generalizations he makes rather than the particular facts he marshals. These generalizations, which crumble under the slightest scrutiny, are of four general types. One holds that the least onerous version of Moslem oppression is typical of Moslem practice [Lewis writes "dhimmitude was a minor inconvenience Jews learned to live with ...under Muslim rule the status of dhimmi was long accepted with gratitude by Jews." In making this improbable claim he gives no evidence or explanation. Could he mean that the Jews were grateful for not being killed?]
A second type of generalization claims that the worst of the behavior of Christians towards Jews was the norm. ["Jews of Christendom suffered incomparably greater persecution (than Jews of Islam). Persecution (under Islam), that is to say violent and active repression was rare and atypical. Jews and Christians (dhimmis) under Moslem rule were not normally called upon to suffer martyrdom for their faith. ...They (the Jews) were not often obliged to make the choice which confronted Muslims and Jews in reconqured Spain, between apostasy and death." Besides employing a peculiarly narrow definition of "oppression" which excludes all disabilities of dhimmitude, Lewis implies that Jews in Christendom were often obliged to suffer martyrdom for their faith or make a choice "between apostasy and death" -- both of which are simply untrue.]
A third variety of generalization employed by Lewis claims that Muslim abuses are far less bad than the worst imaginable abuses by non-Moslems. ["Dhimmitude involves some rights...and is surely better that no rights at all. It is certainly preferable to the kind of situation that prevails in many states at the present time where minorities and for that matter where the majority enjoy no civil or human rights." Offering no evidence or examples, Lewis writes as if there is any place on Earth where the majority of residents have "no rights at all."]
A fourth type of generalization ascribes to "human nature" rather than Islam, with no basis of evidence, the unattractive characteristics exhibited by Moslems [After describing the intense anti-Semitism in the Arab world today Lewis tacks on the generalization that "No people is immune from the universal disease of ethnic or social hostility and the Arabs are no exception. Obviously Arabs are as liable (my italics) as Germans, Russians or Jews or anyone else to develop hostilities against other peoples; and their history and literature bear ample witness to this." Lewis's suggestion that hatred is a trait shared by all peoples equally -- Germans, Russians and Jews, Britons, Italians, Canadians, Australians -- as if raging mobs, as familiar in the annals of Moslem history as to today's television viewers, are typical of all peoples; as if hate filled speeches by clerics are common in all religions; as if survey statistics of harbored hatred are not vastly higher among Moslems than among others; as if Moslem converts to Christianity do not regularly report their revulsion at the hatred which saturates the Moslem religion with which they were familiar. Replace Moslems with Danes, British, Russians Jews, Brazilians, Japanese or whoever and imagine, if you can, raging mobs rioting and killing over a newspaper cartoon.]
This is very, very important. Please read it all. And get the book.
I'm buying this right now.
Just bought it.
This is powerful and telling stuff. I look forward to reading it and hope it goes some way towards changing perceptions, especially of those people in the media and other positions of influence.
slightly o/t,
I also wonder if anyone at JW has read the newly republished version of Ali Sina's biography: 'Understanding Mohammed, a psychobiography'
http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Muhammad-Ali-Sina/dp/0980994802/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210628143&sr=8-5
surely also worth a plug?
My copy of Dr. Bostom's book should be arriving in today's mail.
StephenA55 - I have read the original release of Ali Sina's book (Lulu publication) and can definitely recommend it. Muhammed's mental state was documented historically . .. Maimonides and the “Meshugga” Prophet (by Dr. Bostom).
No one can read the Qur'an without recognizing the hatred towards Jews that penetrates its text. It is and will always be - anti-semitic.
The conflict between Israel and its Moslem neighbors must be read in this context.
Although the Qur'an is particularly vile concerning Jews, the distaste for all kaffurs (unbelievers) is there for anyone to perceive.
The conflict between Radical Jihadi Islamofacism and the rest of the world must be read in this context.
justamomof4,
Thanks for the tip, also for the link to the Bostom site. I hadn't seen that before and it has some good material.
I like Ali Sina because his writings at FFI seem to carry his trademark gift of irresistible logic.
I wish that more Muslims could use their natural wit to see through the fallacies of Islam as he does. But then of course, they wouldn't be Muslims.
Regards,
Stephen
Very INTERESTING! Just called local Borders to check availability of Bostom's book; was told it is NOT IN STOCK, at that store, or ANY Borders' warehouse!I was told I could "SPECIAL ORDER" It, which would take 6-8 WEEKS, because it was "OLD". Borders does have ,IN STOCK AND PROMINANTLY DISPLAYED,"MEIN KAMPF", however. Perhaps it's time for the PUBLISHING/BOOK-SELLING COMMUNITY to see WHO HAS INFILTRATED and INFLUENCES the Industry!
For every Bat Ye'or there are dozens of ideologically driven dishonest scholars who filled book shelves with their praise of Islamic treatment of Jews. As Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis has written: "The Golden Age of equal rights was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam."
Jews must wake the heck up and stop
http://www.peacefaq.com/golden.html#howdid
For every Bat Ye'or there are dozens of ideologically driven dishonest scholars who filled book shelves with their praise of Islamic treatment of Jews. As Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis has written: "The Golden Age of equal rights was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam."
http://www.peacefaq.com/golden.html#howdid
From Kaplan's article, describing Bernard Lewis' contrasting of the differing emphases of Christian versus Muslim attitudes toward Jews:
"In this debate Bostom is in sharp disagreement with Bernard Lewis, the well known and much quoted authority on the history of Islam. Lewis has written:
'On the whole, in contrast to Christian anti-Semitism, the Moslem attitude toward non-Moslems [including Jews] is not one of hate or fear or envy but simply contempt.'"
Seemingly, Lewis thought 'contempt' was preferable.
Lewis forgot something: that contempt can in fact be worse than hate, fear, or envy. Hate can be a 'hot' emotion, the flipside of love; fear and envy involve an element of respect (you only fear that which is a threat; envy means that the other has something worth desiring).
But contempt dehumanises.
Here is a thought-provoking discussion of the significance of contempt, in Malcolm Gladwell's 'Blink'. A pair of marriage counsellors discovered that by observing the interaction of couples for a very short period, they could predict the future of the relationship quite accurately. It turned out they were going by a small number of key 'indicators'; and in fact, just one, 'contempt' was *the* killer. If it was present, the marriage would die.
"Gottman [the counsellor]...has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know just by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, AND CONTEMPT'.
"Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: Contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.'
"'You would think that criticism would be the worst', Gottman says, 'because criticism is a global condemnation of a person's character. Yet contempt is qualitatively different from criticism. With criticism, I might say to my wife, 'You never listen, you are really selfish and insensitive'. Well, she's going to respond defensively to that. That's not very good for our problem solving and interaction.
'But if I speak from a superior plane, that's far more damaging, and contempt is any statement made from a higher level. A lot of the time it's an insult: 'You are a bitch. You're scum.' It's trying to put the person on a lower plane than you. It's hierarchical.'"
(DOES THIS RING ANY BELLS, PEOPLE?)
Gladwell continues:
"Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt towards you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.
"Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community. {AGAIN - DOES THIS REMIND US OF ANYTHING, PEOPLE?}
'contempt is special. If you can measure contempt, then all of a sudden you don't need to know every detail of a couple's relationship'.
Malcolm Gladwell, 'Blink' (Penguin 2005), pp. 32-33.
So - going back to Bernard Lewis - if he identified the Muslim attitude toward all non-Muslims, including Jews, as being primarily one of contempt, that fact should have chilled him to the bone.
A further thought: I read the whole thing, over at 'American Thinker'.
I was struck, however, by Kaplan's concluding paragraphs, which appear to try to push off onto 'the Europeans' almost the entire responsibility for the Muslim world's current eruption of Jew hatred:
QUOTE "The post-World II alliance of "Europe" and Arab Moslems is known as "Eurabia." Promoting it has been one of the main activities of the European Union and its leading members. As in the past the Europe-Arab alliance is seen by its "European" promoters as a means of attacking the world's leading naval/commercial power which now happens to be the United States. An important weapon in this attack is propaganda promoting hatred of Israel and the United States. Such propaganda is directed from within the foreign ministries of the European states and distributed through media which are still mainly national. An innovation of recent times is that the European Union itself, operating through a broad range of well-funded of educational, academic, cultural and political projects, is a major promoter of anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda.
"Lewis recognizes the influence that European propaganda directed towards Arab Moslems has had in the past in promoting hatred of Jews.
'"Nazi Germany," writes Lewis, "from 1933 to 1945 devoted considerable effort to wooing Arab opinion. These efforts were very successful at the political and strategic levels in mobilizing Arab support against the common enemies, the Western democracies and the Jews."
'Similarly an understanding of Arab hatred of Jews and Israel in the Cold War period must give considerable weight, as Lewis does, to the role of Soviet propaganda.
"Yet neither Bostom nor Lewis mention the role since the 1960s of European propaganda promoting the EU's Eurabia project and influencing Europeans, Middle Easterners and others to hate Israel and the United States.
'The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism provides a broad history of the darker side of the Jewish experience in the lands of Islam and the ideas and beliefs which guided Moslem attitudes towards Jews. In this the book brings to light a little known and largely misunderstood area of history and provides an important corrective to the skewed interpretation common among scholars of Islam who, for whatever reason, feel they must put a positive spin on what is essentially negative history.
'Today's Moslem/Arab hatred of Jews and Israel is not adequately explained as either a product of traditional Moslem anti-Semitism which Bostom has documented or Bernard Lewis's New Moslem anti-Semitism which takes as its foundational text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
'A proper understanding of the sources of Arab/Moslem attitudes today must take into account recent European influence in molding Middle Eastern minds as it did in the Nazi and Cold War periods which themselves were similar in this regard to the eras of Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm II." ENDQUOTE
So: despite everything he has just read in Bostom's book, Kaplan seems to be arguing that the present-day volcanic eruption of Jew-hatred in the Muslim world must be blamed primarily not on anything within Islam itself, but on 'European influence', as well as on the malign meddling of the Nazis 1930s-40s, or the Soviets 1950s-80s? If Europe, if the 'outside world' had left well alone, things wouldn't be so bad?
But if I read Yeor's 'Eurabia' aright, Eurabia itself was not begun from the European side, though European traitors/ collaborators and Islamophiles lent themselves to it. The AGENT in the 'Eurabia' project was the Islamosphere - using its vast influx of oil wealth to finance the conduct of Stealth Jihad by its time-honoured methods of Splitting the Camp, Subversion, Beautiful Words, Buying Traitors, Infiltration, the Hegira, etc, mixed in with judicious applications of ultraviolence. Pen, Purse and Sword.
Jacques Ellul in 'Un Chretien Pour Israel' notes the roles of native 'western' antisemitism and Soviet-era antisemitism, in anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda; but also gives the Arab/Muslim world full credit for conducting their own propaganda campaign, aimed at the West.
The Plight of the Poor Palestinians [tm] has become what Bat Yeor calls 'Palestinianism', cleverly used to play upon and reawaken antisemitic demons in the European psyche; and it's also been used to split the churches (as 'Christian Zionists' are demonised and identified as heretics), to wreck the tentative reconciliations that were being attempted between Jews and Christians, to split Europe from the USA and Israel from both (and, also, to divide Israel from the diaspora and divide even Israel herself).
Money + Islam = JIhad.
When did significant amounts of oil money first begin to flow into Muslim bank accounts? 1920s?
Kaplan doesn't seem to be able to believe Lewis's diagnosis (which is also in part Bat Yeor's, and is not necessarily contradicted by Bostom's book) that the peculiar virulence of modern Muslim hatred of Jews may be accounted for by Muslim shock and rage when the despised dhimmi mouse (Jews as perceived and experienced by Muslims for centuries) suddenly grew teeth and roared like a lion (Israel and the IDF).
Bostom's book combines beautifully with Bat Yeor's books on dhimmitude, in order to lay bare exactly why it is that so many Muslims hate the Jewish state of Israel, and indeed all Jews, with such mind-bending viciousness.
The oppressor who has been forced to disgorge, and soundly defeated, by those he believed he had a divine right to use and abuse at will; the slavemaster who must watch his former slave walking free in the sunlight, no longer cringing and grovelling, no longer a thing but a person, is likely to be filled with rage and hatred and lust for vengeance. I have often used this analogy: Arab/Muslims hate the 'uppity Jews' of Israel in much the same way, and for much the same reasons, as the KKK in the deep South, immediately after Emancipation, hated 'uppity niggers'. Only - worse.
My impression is that Lewis - am I correct in saying that he is a Jew? - is affected by the disastrous Jewish prejudice that makes the Christians the worst enemies of Hebraism. This rests upon the most perverse of historical paradoxes. By the nineteenth century, nine-tenths of the world's Jews lived in the West (including Russia); so the opposition they experienced, in whatever guise, could conveniently be categorized as Christian. The reason why so comparatively few lived in Muslim countries is simple: historically, and in spite of the odd mob phenomenon such as that recorded in south Germany (a very limited area) during the First Crusade (a very limited period), the worst thing that Christian states did to resident Jews was expulsion. A person expelled from the land of his fathers has plenty of time to gripe and grumble about it. Such provisions were rare, but made a lot of noise and left behind a literature of lamentation and anger. (Nor did anyone tend to mind that, just as Christian rulers could sometimes expel the Jewish population, they also could, and did, call them to settle, as Cromwell did in England, a Duke of Tuscany in Italy, a King of Poland, etc.) On the other hand, every time a Muslim ruler or a Muslim mob felt that they had a "Jewish problem", their reaction was to bury the problem. And the grave is notoriously silent. Make a sufficiently thorough massacre, and nobody will rise up to denounce you. Subject a nation to a series of regular, devastating massacres, and even such records as they have been able to keep will eventually vanish. So, in Jewish communities, the complaint about Christian injustice, however limited and however carefully cicrumscribed, became a tradition and a refrain; whereas the memory of the persecution and massacre imposed dozens of times by the highest Muslim authorities as well as by raging mob led by know-nothing preachers became, at best, a pale and neglected whisper. So the policy of Israel to this day is, suicidally, to keep the Christians at arm's length and treat them as a potential enemy, while twits like Daniel Goldhagen go around inventing conspiracy theories, and at the same time to seek an accommodation, any kind of accommodation, with the people who really have been butchering them - and the Christians - and the Samaritans - and the Zoroastrians - etc. etc. etc. - from the beginning of history.
My reading of Lewis' Semites and Anti-Semites was a devastating experience, opening my eyes for the first time to the insane depths of hatred that festered in the Muslim world. But even then, I felt sure that Lewis' analysis was vitiated by a sorry prejudice against Christianity tha insisted that Jew-bashing must necessarily be Christian in origin. I am not in the least surprised to find that, diagnostic and important though his book may be, he has completely failed to understand the native "values" of his own subject - Muslims.
Whoops. At the end of my first paragraph in the previous post, what I really should have written is "...from the beginning of their history". I.e., the Muslims' history.