Over at Atlas Shrugs I explain why Jews and Christians (and all others) must unite in defense of freedom against the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. That is also the subject of my brief address in the video above, given last Sunday night in Santa Monica, California at the Creative Zionist Coalition's Purim party.
Sunday night in Los Angeles I had the great honor of receiving the Shushan Award for Righteous Gentile from the Creative Zionist Coalition, a noteworthy new group dedicated to the defense of Israel. At a time when Leftist Christians are rushing to imitate the zeitgeist by condemning Israel and initiating Nazi-style boycotts of Jewish businesses, it is useful to recall why a Jewish-Christian alliance could be essential at this point for the survival of the free world.The history of Christianity’s relationship of Judaism, of course, is marred by innumerable incidents of antagonism and worse. Reading histories of Catholic medieval Europe and Orthodox Russia under the czars makes me ashamed to share the same faith as the persecutors; at the same time, while the Catholic Church and other Christian bodies have at the highest level rejected anti-Semitism and the interpretations of the New Testament that buttressed it, Islamic anti-Semitism remains deeply rooted in the Qur’an and Sunnah, and no Islamic authorities show any inclination to reexamine it.
What’s more, Islam envisions the same fate for both Jews and Christians. Islamic law assigns both to dhimmi status: the institutionalized subjugation that the Qur’an mandates for “the People of the Book” (cf. 9:29). The dhimmis are forbidden to hold authority over Muslims, and so are relegated to the most menial jobs in society; are forbidden to build new houses of worship or to repair old ones, so that their communities are in a perpetual state of decline; and must submit to numerous other humiliating and discriminatory regulations – above all, the payment of the jizya, the tax that the Qur’an mandates as the most vivid manifestation of the non-Muslims’ submission to Muslim rule.
The dhimmis’ Muslim masters throughout history worked to sow antagonism among the various dhimmi groups, so as to ensure that they would never band together against their oppressors. A modern example of this came in 2007, when Ingrid Mattson, then-President of the Islamic Society of North America, a group that has admitted ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, said in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government that "right-wing Christians are very risky allies for American Jews, because they [the Christians] are really anti-Semitic. They do not like Jews.”
Mattson did not mention that her own holy book says that Allah transformed Jews into apes and pigs (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166), or that it designates Jews “the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe” (5:82), or that it says that they are under the curse of Allah (9:30), or that they should be warred against and subjugated (9:29). Nor does she deign to note that the New Testament, while it does contain passages that were used to justify anti-Semitism (although none call for or justify any violence) contains nothing of this…vehement hostility.
What Mattson was trying to do was not to warn the Jews of a genuine threat out of the goodness of her heart, but to sow discord among two communities targeted by jihadis, so as to ward off the formation of a united front. And Mattson is just one of many, and their efforts are working all too well: some Christians are regarding Jews today with a renewed anti-Semitism disguised as moral dudgeon directed against Israel, and some Jews view Christians with so much suspicion that they miss genuine allies.
All this makes a united front even more necessary. The pioneering historian Bat Ye’or has emphasized this in her writings, and her buttressing her point recently is hard evidence that the Islamic imperative to subjugate Jews and Christians as dhimmis is not (as Islamic apologists frequently claim these days) a relic of the distant past, never to be revived again; on the contrary, Muslims in Bosnia, Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan have in recent years called for its reimposition. The elements of Islamic law that call for jihad against Jews and Christians so as to bring them under the rule of Sharia are very much still a part of that law; they have not been reformed or rejected.
Jews and Christians have a common Scripture and, in numerous ways, a common outlook. We are the children and heirs of the greatest civilization the world has known. And today, if we do not hang together, we shall most assuredly hang separately.
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I'm with you 150% on this one, Robert.
And this I say as someone who sees the fulfillment of biblical prophecy in the person and work of Jesus Christ rather than in any movements of people gathering in a patch of Middle Eastern land.
Further, that the Jewish Bible is the first four-fifths of the Christian Bible needs to be stressed. This ought to be a standing rebuke to Islam's excusing itself from reading books it refers to as prior Scriptures. It should also be a question referred to the Da'wa boys by every one who encounters them: if the Christians and Jews corrupted the Scriptures, how come they wrangle over thirty-nine books that they hold in common, and recognize when they read each others' versions (viz., Isaac Leeser's wholesale use of the Protestant Christian Authorized Version in his own Anglo-Jewish version)? How could this common Torah, Prophets, and Kethuvim have happened when the two faiths were not cooperating at all?
I've been called a "supercessionist" because I believe that God's elect are recognized gathered about the Messiah (Jesus) rather than from being gathered in a patch of Middle Eastern Land; yet I can recognize a superior moral, economic, and even ecological stewardship of 'Eretz Yisroel by the modern Zionist movement even as I see whether or not the modern Medinat Yisroel is a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy as an open question. Further, I believe it imperative that amidst an anti-Israel din orchestrated by a fiercely anti-Christian political Left, that Christians note the infinitely better treatment the religious minorities in Israel receive when compared to ANY place in the Islamic world, Arab or other.
Also, if the New Testament has "buttressed anti-Semitism", I am of the mind it has done so chiefly because we have allowed post-biblical sociology to inform out interpretation of the text; when looking carefully at it shows that it is fundamentally a "Jewish book" presenting a Jewish Messiah and a controversy that began in a Jewish community. Jesus, on page one of the New Testament, is clearly presented as the Messiah of Israel, and this is a thread that continues through all twenty-seven books. His apostles were all Jews, and even if Luke was a Gentile, he seems to be one sympathetically conversant with Jewish customs (a God-fearer before he was a Christian?). I will concede that the original meaning of the new Testament is "anti-Semitic" only if my interlocutor will so concede the same of Isaiah, Hosea, Jeremiah, the authors of quite a few of the Psalms, and Moses himself.
Hmm. I ought to blog about this myself.
And, again, Amen and Amen and Amen to Robert's warnings of the dangers of Dhimmitude. As an heir of Middle Eastern Christianity, Robert probably knows better than many others what Dhimmi status means. Once, when a "liberal" (actually social democrat) Jewish interlocutor near and dear to me castigated the Mizrahi majority in Israel for its electoral support of rightist parties, I countered that the Mizrahim probably have a perspective on life as non-Muslim subjects of Islamic power that the rest of us would be wise to heed.
As for the accommodation of Sharia in recent Western jurisprudence, I see this merely as an instance in which our civilization has become so open-minded that its brains have fallen right out of its collective head.
While I'm at it, I just enjoyed some Hammentaschen--"Haman's pockets"--which began as a Purim treat.
Keep up the good work, Robert.