Leave Elegance to the Tailor
by Michael Devolin
Albert Einstein wrote, “If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.” It is never easy to look the harsh and bloody reality of Islam full in the face these days. Not only do you have a barbaric, tribal-driven, 7th century religious ideology, but also—and even more obtrusive for Western democracies—you have about 1.6 billion followers prohibited from even contemplating the very idea of dissent. How do you acquaint such an ugly truth to those Muslims whose far away, religious upbringing has beforehand rendered them impervious to feeling even a little bit gauche in the middle of the modern age?
And acquaint them with the truth we must, because the survival of all Western democracies depends on it. Regardless how unwanted this same truth is, regardless how despised its report, the truth must be told. Because, as Aldous Huxley once wrote, “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” And the violence the religion of Islam advocates against anyone or any sovereign state opposing its imperialistic designs seems to be manifest to everyone but those who claim to be an “expert on Islam” or whose “anti-Zionist” political agenda is coalesced by its ancient anti-Jewish sentiment.
How long can the Western world go on pretending that atrocities like the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teenagers in Israel by Palestinian Muslim Arabs have no connection to the religion of Islam? No one can tell me that the attempted assassination of Rabbi Glick in Jerusalem several days ago happened merely because Rabbi Glick is a “right-wing Jew” and not because his assassin was a Muslim Arab Palestinian who hated all Jews only because they’re Jewish. The truth about Islam is there to see for all who are courageous enough to see it, even though this truth is best defined by its incongruous and violent enemies. And even though incongruous, as Muslims (and Jew-haters), as Efraim Karsh pointed out about Abbas and Arafat, these enemies are “warp and woof of the same fabric.”
Muslims appear to be unified only in their hatred of the Jews. In all other matters, especially religious doctrine or geo-political aims, they would rather kill each other than offer compromises or concessions. And if they feel no self-reproach about murdering their fellow Muslims, how unreflective should it be for them to maintain, even publicly, their genocidal desires for the Jewish people and the State of Israel? In his book Palestine Betrayed, Efraim Karsh relates that “Musa Alami, one of the foremost Palestinian Arab moderates during the mandate era, told Ben-Gurion, ‘He would prefer the land to remain poor and desolate even for another hundred years’ if the alternative was its rapid development in collaboration with the Zionists.” The BDS movement, who seem also to have no qualms about the destruction of Israel and the extermination of its Jewish population, has continually obfuscated or side-stepped this repulsive truth about the majority Muslim mindset in the Middle East and the fact that most of Islam’s followers around the world seem to have no problem with it. They seem to think that jihad is not quite as bad as we make it out to be.
Someone in President Obama’s administration recently referred to Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu as “chicken shit,” an insinuation that Netanyahu is timid in his application of the “peace process” the American government and much of the non-Jewish world has dictated the government of Israel should accept and conform to. However, the non-Jewish world has never looked Islam full in the face, does not understand that sacrificing the Jewish claim to Israel as an ancient homeland would be equivalent to making a holocaust of the very essence of the Jewish existence. This is a sacrifice Binyamin Netanyahu is not willing to make. The nameless American official surely does not care to understand or comprehend the mindset of Netanyahu’s Islamic enemies; he cannot fathom the fact that Iran will certainly launch a nuclear weapon against the Jewish people (and not so much against the State of Israel) on the very day they become capable of doing so. This is an ugly truth the non-Jewish world either refuses to acknowledge or really isn’t concerned about, so long as Jews are being vaporized in their beds as they sleep and not gentiles. As for this American official, those who choose to remain nameless are “chicken shit” in my neck of the woods.
PM Netanyahu has looked Islam full in the face. Like many other Israeli politicians before him, he has described its unattractive truth (Hamas, Hizballah, and Fatah) to the world, and the world has turned its collective face away. This world believes truth to be elegant, even poetic. But from a Jewish perspective, an Israeli perspective, the truth of Islam is dangerous, expressly because of its terrorists and their imperialistic designs. There is no elegance to be found in that truth. For elegance you must see your tailor.
Michael Devolin has been a member of JDL Canada since the 1980s, and has served as the personal bodyguard to Meir Weinstein, National Director of JDL Canada, at several high-profile trials, including the Jim Keegstra hate crimes trial and the Imra Finta war crimes trial.