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Yassin: the Palestinians' worst enemy
A thoughtful piece by David Pryce-Jones, who wrote the Foreword to my book Islam Unveiled, on the hypocritical outcry following the killing of Sheikh Yassin. From the Jerusalem Post:
Christians and Muslims are defending themselves with the very same measures and moral values as Israelis"Blood will have blood" is the grim observation Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Macbeth. Unlike that character, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin did not kill in person, but he organized murder, a great deal of it. He strove all his life to make a reality of the mind-set of the Muslim Brotherhood, in which good Muslims everywhere at last assert their deserved supremacy over irredeemably bad Christians and Jews. Compromise is excluded. The only available options are victory or martyrdom.
An unlikely figure with several severe physical disabilities, wheelchair bound all his adult years, Yassin nonetheless founded Hamas and thereby gave himself responsibility for the Palestine sector of the wider Islamist struggle. Palestine, he believed, was a land exclusively reserved by God for Muslims. With a consistency that has to be acknowledged, he rejected the existence of Israel in any shape or form and led jihad to eliminate it. His specialty was the recruiting and dispatching of suicide bombers. He wanted to kill Jews and didn't mind how many Muslims died in the process. Israel, he prophesied in a recent interview, would finally collapse in 2007. For him, then, peace meant war, and so he was the victim of his own violence. Blood will have blood.
Far and wide, from Morocco to Indonesia and Nigeria, personalities exactly in his mould are struggling in their sectors to implement the Muslim Brotherhood mind-set. For the likes of Osama bin-Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and al-Qaida, compromise also means surrender, and peace means war.
At the very moment when an Israeli helicopter was targeting Yassin, American and British special forces, with Pakistani soldiers in support, were engaged in a fire-fight against a substantial unit of al-Qaida on the Pakistan-Afghan border. President George W. Bush has repeated several times that he would like to capture al-Qaida leaders dead or alive. If the opportunity were to arise for any or all of these special forces, Western or Pakistani, to kill bin-Laden or Zawahiri as expeditiously as Yassin was killed, they would take it without hesitation.
Both Christians and Muslims, in other words, are defending themselves with the very same measures and moral values as Israelis. What, then, explains the uproar of indignation and condemnation released by the killing of Yassin? Can British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw really believe that his description of Yassin as "an old man in a wheelchair" is a necessary or sufficient definition? The EU foreign ministers in collective session have declared that the killing "undermines the concept of the rule of law." Did that concept have any meaning either for Yassin or for those who attacked the Madrid railway station? Will observance of the concept be enough to thwart further terror attacks anywhere in Europe?
Beyond the usual humbug of diplomatic discourse, there seems to be an anxiety to pretend to Arabs and Muslims that all is well when evidently it is not. It is as if Arabs and Muslims were children who mustn't hear the truth; that assorted Islamists are destabilizing Islamic countries and dragging them by the scruff of the neck into suicidal wars with the neighbors.
THE ABSOLUTE rulers of the Arab and Muslim world make it difficult for themselves, it is true, by playing to the street in the hope of earning popularity. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt says that the killing of Yassin is a "completely meaningless and miscalculated Israeli action." In 1998 Yassin had just been released from an Israeli prison after a botched Mossad assassination attempt on another Hamas organizer (and both the attempt and the release really were miscalculated actions). He then toured Arab states collecting millions of dollars for Hamas. At the time, Mubarak had been energetically suppressing his Islamists, hanging them by the hundreds, and he made sure to refuse Yassin an entry visa. His current fury is a pretense.
Similarly, King Abdullah of Jordan speaks of the crime of killing Yassin; but, like his father, he has taken every measure to throttle Hamas in his own country. As for Arafat, he and his men have often shot it out with Hamas and engaged in kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, and other skulduggeries in what amounts to subterranean civil war. In spite of the three days of mourning he has decreed, Arafat is freed, at no cost to himself, from the main rival to his monopoly of power. President Pervez Musharraf is on the front line for the time being because Islamists have several times come close to murdering him, and he knows that he has to kill them before they kill him.
Hamas rhetoric promises to open the gates of hell, and of course it is possible that the death of Yassin will activate the Palestine sector of the Islamist struggle to frenzies of revenge and suicide bombings. Ariel Sharon and most of his government evidently decided that this was a risk worth taking. The implication must be that Israel will indeed be withdrawing soon from the Gaza Strip, to shelter as best it can in isolation behind its fences while the Palestinians sort their society out. The previous withdrawal from southern Lebanon was certainly another miscalculation, not in itself but because it was carried out with slipshod haste. Palestinians jumped to conclude that Israel was on the run, and might run further.
As Sharon resorts to his time-honored tactic of showing strength in the face of violence, Hamas is in no position to claim with any plausibility that withdrawal from Gaza is another step towards Sheikh Yassin's goal of victory through the elimination of Israel. Nor is there anyone of equivalent authority or credentials to succeed Yassin. At least one report of his funeral mentioned a surprising atmosphere of depression in Gaza, partly because of the suspicion that some informer must have provided crucial information to Israeli intelligence and partly out of a general sense that the intifada has run its course.
The Arab and Muslim world is caught between a past that will not release its grip and a future not quite able to come to birth. Sheikh Yassin had no solution to this dilemma. His inhuman passion could only ensure that blood will have blood. Everyone, Palestinians first and foremost, is better off without him.
Posted by Robert at March 27, 2004 9:03 AM
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The impulse to throw Israel to the wolves is very strong. Its supporters include, of course, that irreducible minimum of antisemites in all Western societies, and those who, seeing Israel as an ally of America, a convenient stand-in for their anti-American impulses. It may be natural to think, as non-Muslims, that "if only we give them what they want from Israel" (now one would have to be a fool, at this point, to believe that this means anything other than the complete disappearance of Israel, an Infidel sovereignty in the middle of dar al-Islam --but many have proven equal to the task)all manner of things shall be well. But it is precisely the opposite. The surrender of Israel will play to Muslim triumphalism; it will encourage Muslims to kill Christians in Indonesia and the Philippines, to expand da'wa in Mexico and Chile, and Brazil, and the rest of South America were operatives have been especially busy, though working under the Infidel radar, it will make it all the more difficult for Western Europe to get a grip, and realize that in order to save its own civilization it is going to have to reverse decades of appeasement (beginning with the ludicrous Euro-Arab Dialogue) and to prepare its own population for measures which, in the end, will be essential -- including the mass expulsion of Muslims to their countries of origin. Any Muslim victory anywhere simply encourages Muslims elsewhere to press on in what is central to Islam: the expansion of dar al-Islam at the expense of dar al-Harb. What part of this does the Infidel world not understand? Or why does it wish to do everything it can to avoid understanding it?
It is through darura -- necessity -- that Muslim behavior can be checked. If Muslim Arabs believe that Israel is overwhelmingly powerful, they have an excuse to present to themselves and to their people -- we just can't do it at present. Why, Muhammad waited for a year before breaking the treaty of al-Hudaibiyya with the Meccans. Meanwhile, the non-Muslim world has to educate itself, or a sufficient number of those who are articulate, to understand what, as a geopolitical cult, Islam is all about (the Five Pillars, the putative links between the "Abrahamic" faiths, and suchlike -- the topics of the time-wasting "interfaith dialogues," may all be safely ignored). And then one must work to allow, within the Muslim world, real freedom of conscience, and a spirit of free inquiry that, if it were really to take hold, would allow the freest and most vital spirits to abandon Islam altogether. There is no way, through "Islamic feminism" (the Azizah al-Hibri, Leila Ahmed, Shirin Ebadi detour) or through appeals to the example of Mu'tazilites or others (the faltering attempts of Iranian "reformers" to find their way to some solution within Islam, instead of forthrightly returning to Zoroastrianism, or something else outside of Islam), to change the texts. So we must encourage the fissures, national and ethnic, within Islam (Arab v. non-Arab, for a start), which after all are based on history. It is not a fiction that the Arabs have persecuted the Kurds, and the Berbers. It is not a fiction that Arab money, building madrasas in Pakistan, and among the poor Muslims of East and West Africa, is helping to destroy these societies by creating people fit not for gainful employment, however modest, but only for Jihad. This has to be emphasized, again and again.
And the West must protect, and sponsor, and publicize, the testimonies of ex-Muslims -- much as ex-Communists were so helpful in alerting Western Europeans to what the Comintern, and the Politburo, and Joseph Stalin had in mind.
Posted by: Hugh at March 27, 2004 9:36 AMHugh-Once again a very well-presented explanation of our current situation. We in the Wes must take the indicated steps, but who in the public arena will make the sacrfices to "come out" and appear not politically correct knowing that not appearing politically correct is a "career buster"? I fear that there are few courageous men and women willing to take the risk at this time. A groundswell of lesser voices could prompt those in power to be risk-takers.
Posted by: epg at March 27, 2004 10:04 AMBravo Hugh!
Posted by: Bob Stern at March 27, 2004 10:05 AMIt's not just da'wa they're engaged in in the Muslim Triangle, Hugh. I believe they've begun to kill those who will not bend to Islam. The Brazilians, Uruguyans, and Argentians won't say anything until it's too late.
Anyway this: "It is as if Arabs and Muslims were children who mustn't hear the truth." The thing is, even when they hear the truth they say it is a lie. They believe no truth that does not come from the ummah. Look at the Hussam Abdu story and how they say it's Israeli fiction.
Posted by: Helen at March 27, 2004 12:08 PM
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