| FrontPageMag.com | Articles By Robert Spencer | Articles By Hugh Fitzgerald | Books | Islam 101 | Qur'an Blog | Robert Spencer Bio |  |
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
The European essayist Fjordman contributes an important essay on an important book.
Dr. Andrew G. Bostom asked me earlier to write a review of his latest book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History, which I am more than happy to do. I consider his previous book The Legacy of Jihad to be the most complete book published to date regarding the history of 1400 years of Islamic Jihad, from Indonesia to France.Islam is hostile to everybody, but Jews are singled out for particular hatred. If you believe the prominent historian Bernard Lewis in his book What Went Wrong?, "The earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East occurred among the Christian minorities, and can usually be traced back to European originals." In other words, everything bad in the Islamic world is imported from Europe. This view fits well with the general anti-European bias of modern media and academia.
It is true that anti-Semitism exists elsewhere, too. I discuss this in my essay The Causes of Anti-Semitism at the website Atlas Shrugs. But according to Robert Spencer in Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't, "While Christian anti-Semitism has been minimized, it still exists, particularly in the Middle East where some Christians have absorbed the anti-Semitism of the Islamic culture which surrounds them."
As Ibn Warraq – be sure to read his latest book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism – says in the forward to The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism:
"During the last fifteen years, certain Western scholars have tried to argue that, first, Islamic antisemitism—that is, hatred of Jews—is only a recent phenomenon learned from the Nazis during and after the 1940s, and, second, that Jews lived safely under Muslim rule for centuries, especially during the Golden Age of Muslim Spain. Both assertions are unsupported by the evidence. Islam 1, that is, the Islam of the texts, as found in the Qur'an and hadith (the sayings and deeds of the Prophet and his companions) and in the sira (the biography of Muhammad, which obviously overlaps with the hadith), and Islam 2—that is, the Islam developed or elaborated from those texts early on by the Qur'anic commentators and jurisconsults, and then set in stone more than a millennium ago—and even Islam 3, in the sense of Islamic civilization—that is, what Muslims actually did historically— have all been deeply antisemitic. That is, all have been anti-infidel, so that Christians too are regarded with disdain and contempt and hatred, but the Jews have been served, or been seen to have merited, a special animus."
The myth of the tolerance of Muslim Spain lives on, as my text Refuting God's Crucible demonstrates. The connection between Nazism and Islam has been made by many observers before, but usually with the emphasis that Nazism was like Islam, not the other way around:
"We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god). That can be the historic future." - Karl Jung, The Collected Works Volume 18, The Symbolic Life (1939)
"Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message." - Winston Churchill on Adolf Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf, in The Second World War, Vol. I (The Gathering Storm).
According to his architect Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler was fond of saying things such as: "You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"
Nazism was essentially a new religion of Jihadism, which had much more in common with Islam than with Christianity. The admiration was mutual. In 2005, Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf was among the top bestsellers in Turkey, behind a book about a Turkish national hero detonating a nuclear bomb in Washington D.C. At the same time, Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan stressed that Islamophobia must be treated as "a crime against humanity." It is banned by law to discuss the Armenian genocide in Turkey. Would a country the size of Germany, with a history of a thousand years of continuous warfare against its neighbors and where Adolf Hitler is a bestselling author, be hailed as a moderate, Christian country?
The president of the Union for Reform Judaism, one of the largest Jewish movements in North America, in 2007 accused the media, politicians and religious groups of demonizing Islam. Addressing the convention of the Islamic Society of North America, Rabbi Eric Yoffie said Muslims have been turned into "satanic figures.""There exists in this country among all Americans…a huge and profound ignorance about Islam ... there is no shortage of voices prepared to tell us that fanaticism and intolerance are fundamental to Islamic religion, and that violence and even suicide bombing have deep Koranic roots," he said. He said Americans need to know "how far removed Islam is from the perverse distortions of the terrorists who too often dominate the media, subverting Islam's image by professing to speak in its name."
I suggest Mr. Yoffie reads up on the institution of dhimmitude, which is detailed in the work of Bat Ye'or. Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, wrote this about dhimmitude, the repressive and humiliating system imposed upon non-Muslims under Islamic rule: "The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only.…A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He lives under a contract (dhimma) with the State.…In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam."
This "modified form of slavery" is now frequently referred to as the pinnacle of "tolerance." If the semi-slaves desire equal rights and self-determination, Jihad resumes. This is what happened with the non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire, starting with the Serbs and the Greeks in the 19th century, and continuing with Bulgarians, Croatians and others. They were repressed with massacres, culminating in the outright Jihad genocide by Turkish and Kurdish Muslims against Armenians in the early 20th century. The Jews of Israel are not only attacked because they are Jews, but primarily because they are Jews who do not meekly disarm and accept the status of servitude that they should have according to Islamic law. They are disobedient dhimmis, just as the Armenians were.
In addition to the constant threat of violence and abuse, living under Islamic rule was a serious economic burden even at the best of times. S. D. Goitein's analyses of the Cairo Geniza materials from the High Middle Ages (c. 950–1250) highlighted the adverse social consequences of the jizya tax imposed on non-Muslims, according to Koranic instructions:
"There is no subject of Islamic social history on which the present writer had to modify his views so radically while passing from literary to documentary sources, i.e., from the study of Muslim books to that of the records of the Cairo Geniza as the jizya . . . or the poll tax to be paid by non-Muslims. It was of course, evident that the tax represented a discrimination and was intended, according to the Koran's own words, to emphasize the inferior status of the non-believers. It seemed, however, that from the economic point of view, it did not constitute a heavy imposition, since it was on a sliding scale, approximately one, two, and four dinars, and thus adjusted to the financial capacity of the taxpayer. This impression proved to be entirely fallacious, for it did not take into consideration the immense extent of poverty and privation experienced by the masses, and in particular, their persistent lack of cash, which turned the 'season of the tax' into one of horror, dread, and misery [emphasis added]."
In The Legacy of Jihad, Andrew G. Bostom reprints a text by the scholar K. S. Lal regarding slave-taking under Islamic rule in India, where something resembling the Ottoman Turkish practice of "devshirme" (Greek for "collecting boys") existed. In Europe, boys, Croatian, Bosnian, Serb, Bulgarian, Greek and others, were taken away from their families, forcibly converted to Islam, indoctrinated with hatred of their own people and taught to fight them. According to Lal, in India, "Under Muslim rule, a substantial portion of the agricultural produce was taken away by the government as taxes and the people were left with the bare minimum for subsistence in order to impoverish them because it was thought that 'wealth' was the source of 'rebellion and disaffection.'" This policy was in practice under the Sultans as well as the Mughals:
"Conditions became intolerable by the time of Shah Jahan as attested to by Manucci and Manrique. Peasants were compelled to sell their women and children to meet the revenue demand. Manrique writes that 'the peasants were carried off…to various markets and fairs (to be sold), with their poor unhappy wives behind them carrying their small children all crying and lamenting, to meet the revenue demand.' Bernier too affirms that 'the unfortunate peasants who were incapable of discharging the demand of their rapacious lords, were bereft of their children who were carried away as slaves.' As in the Ottoman Empire, Christians and Jews turned Muslim were trained to fight their erstwhile brethren, so also in India in the medieval period Hindus captured and converted were made to fight their erstwhile brethren in Muslim wars of conquest. Trained or accustomed to fighting their own people, these converts to Islam are posing various kinds of problems in the present-day India and Eastern Europe."
In The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz notes that Indian income distribution was significantly more unequal than in China, Japan or Western Europe, yet he doesn't explain why. Mr. Pomeranz is too busy bashing or belittling Europe, as are most scholars these days, and does not mention the words "Jihad" or "jizya," even though he probably should have:
"A study of Mogul land taxes for 1647 finds that 445 families received 61.5 percent of all revenues, which were about 50 percent of gross agricultural output, and that roughly one-quarter of the revenue flow to those families represented actual personal income. (The rest was consumed in various expenses of office.) If this is accurate, these 445 families – presumably less than .002 percent of the population – would have received an income from their offices alone equal to 7.5 percent of total agricultural output, or perhaps 6 percent of the society's total income! An estimate based on Shireen Moosvi's reconstructions for 1595 is similar: it suggests that 1,671 Mughal nobles would have had a net personal income from their claims on government revenue alone equal to about 7 percent of total empire-wide output. Although the records Moosvi worked from have been questioned, her calculations could be off by quite a bit and still confirm our general picture. And while at least some European visitors to China commented on a lack of severe poverty there, Europeans in India seem to have been struck by its extremes of wealth and poverty."
Non-Muslims could suddenly be the victims of even stricter Islamic rulers. As Bostom writes:
"Rigid conformity to a motif in the hadith (and sira) based on the putative deathbed wish of Muhammad himself, as recorded by Umar (the second Rightly Guided Caliph), 'Two religions shall not remain together in the peninsula of the Arabs,' had tragic consequences for the Jews of Yemen. (The hadith and sira further maintain that Umar did eventually expel the Jews of Khaybar.) Thus a pious seventeenth-century Yemenite ruler, Al- Mahdi, wishing to fulfill the mandate of this hadith in Yemen in 1679–1680, expelled the entire Jewish population of Yemen—men, women, and children—deporting them to the inhospitable wastelands of the plain of Tihama. This expulsion was accompanied by the destruction of synagogues, desecration of Torah scrolls, and inducements for conversion to Islam. Three-quarters of the thousands of Jews expelled perished from exposure to the intense heat (and cold), absence of potable water, and the subsequent spread of epidemic disease. The major Yemenite Jewish community in San'a experienced a 90 percent mortality rate from this catastrophic exile—of about ten thousand persons exiled, only about one-tenth survived."
Dehumanizing Jews as apes (Koran 2:65/7:166), or apes and pigs (Koran 5:60) has been common throughout Islamic history, more than 1300 years before the establishment of the state of Israel. Muhammad himself referred to the Medinan Jews of the Banu Qurayza as "apes" before orchestrating the slaughter of all of their men. There are anti-Semitic statements in the hadith, traditions about the Prophet: "The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: 'Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.'"
Shaikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, who is currently the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, the most prestigious center of learning in Sunni Islam, in a 700 page treatise [Jews in the Koran and the Traditions], originally published in 1968/69, and then re-issued in 1986, explains in detail why Jews are cursed by Allah:
"[The] Koran describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e. killing the prophets of Allah [Koran 2:61/ 3:112], corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people's wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness...only a minority of the Jews keep their word....[A]ll Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims [Koran 3:113], the bad ones do not."
When the late 23 year-old Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi was being tortured to death in February 2006, his Muslim torturers, as journalist Nidra Poller wrote in the Wall Street Journal "...phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan's tortured screams could be heard in the background." Halimi's murderers did not invoke any non-Islamic sources of anti-Jewish hate, only the Koran. Islamic texts, the Koran and the hadith, are the causes of Islamic hatred of infidels, and Bostom does an excellent job at demonstrating this.
I recommend sending a copy of this book to Bernard Lewis, Eric Yoffie of the Union for Reform Judaism in the USA, as well as to every member of the Israeli cabinet and parliament. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism is massive in scope, just as Bostom's previous book The Legacy of Jihad is. Those who have never progressed beyond the "Islam for dummies" stage and believe Britney Spears is the greatest Western musician since Beethoven may find it a bit overwhelming. For those looking for a serious, scholarly work on the subject of Islamic hatred of Jews, there is simply no better book available on the market today.
Posted by Robert at June 21, 2008 6:33 AM
Print this entry
| Email this entry
| Digg this
| del.icio.us
|
Someone posted an article a few days ago entitled Is Allah God? (Not the Daniel Pipes one) My machine crashed and I lost it. Could you please re-post?
Thanks,CGW
![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/nav-commenters.gif)
at June 21, 2008 7:49 AM
I have started reading The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism and it is excellent. I will be sending a copy of both of Dr. Bostom's books to our two remaining presidential candidates. Now, if there was some way to insure that they actually read them...
Posted by: George Mc. at June 21, 2008 8:11 AM
The primary reason for whatever Muslim tolerance may have existed is that it was realized by pragmatic Islamic leaders, following the initial conquests that persecuting the large conquered population would have had a number of unfortunate results. Any attempt by Muslims to forcibly convert or drive out all infidels would have led to mass rebellion and a stiffened military resistance on the part of the yet unconquered population. It would have also destroyed the economic base of the conquered territories which provided Muslim warriors with the resources for further expansion. And, in fact, once enough of the population became Muslim, the possibility of rebellion receded and the economic dependence on non-Muslims lessened. Under these circumstances, Muslim authorities became less accommodating and put increased pressure on the remaining non-Muslims to emigrate or convert.
In addition, the nature of Islamic expansion was quite unlike the history of Christian expansion in Europe. In their rapid conquests Muslims found many different sects of nonbelievers in the conquered population. Muslim leaders found it advantageous to play off one set of infidels against another. They also found it advantageous to cultivate alliances with persecuted sects against the governing authorities in the still unconquered dar-al-harb. This would, naturally, give the illusion that Muslims were more tolerant, when in fact those infidel groups presently favored were simply pawns in a greater political game.
Norman Stillman, author of The Jews of Arab Lands, a specialist in the history of the Jews under Islam provides the following perspective. In iconic Spain there was a “depth of anti-Jewish sentiment” as seen in “the rabble-rousing poetry of Abu Ishaq of Elvira.” Following the assassination of the Jewish vizier Joseph ha-Nagid “a mob went on a rampage in the Jewish quarter of Granada, slaughtering its inhabitants and razing the quarter to the ground.” The Almohad rulers ended whatever small degree of toleration of the Jews still remained in Spain. By 1172 the Almohads “tolerated neither Jews nor Christians within their empire. There were mass conversions of Jews to Islam. Many fled over the frontier into Christian Spain, while others made their way to the more tolerant Muslim East. … Jewish life in … Islamic Spain ceased to exist altogether.” Thus, Jews were expelled from Muslim Spain centuries before their more famous expulsion at the hands of the Christians.
Muslim Spain, therefore, was no paragon of religious toleration for the “peoples of the book”. However, the circumstances for Christians and Jews in the Maghreb were far worse. In fact Christianity in the land of St. Augustine ultimately became extinct under Muslim rule. Thus in “contemporary North Africa, however, there were no native Christians to absorb some of the Muslim hostility against nonbelievers.” For that reason, the persecution of the Jews of North Africa paralleled that occurring anywhere in medieval Christian Europe. In Almohad North Africa the “urban Jewish population from Tunisia to Morocco had outwardly professed Islam during the height of the Almohad terror. Those communities that resisted were put to the sword.” The Almohad regime also dealt the final blow to North African Christianity. “The Jews became the dhimmis par excellence in North African society, for no native Christian population seems to have survived the Almohad persecution.”
Muslim persecution of the Jews in the Maghreb, however, eased somewhat under the Merinids of 14th century Morocco who found the Jews to be useful allies and go-betweens with respect to the rising Portuguese power. The Merinids “employed Jews in their service because of the latter’s extreme vulnerability and, hence, according to Islamic political psychology, dependability.” Christians in conflict with Muslims, of course, were equally capable of playing that game. In 16th century Morocco “most of the Jewish newcomers seem to have preferred living in the Portuguese-held coastal towns rather than the Islamic interior. They joined in the defense of these enclaves against Muslim attacks.” The practical-minded Portuguese were “notably tolerant toward the Jews in their African possessions” long after Jews were expelled from Portugal proper in 1497.
Egypt differed from the rest of North Africa, in that a strong Christian minority survived; the consequence was a slight mitigation in the situation of the Jews. “In the Mamluk Empire, the Jews were not the only infidels. The Copts more frequently and more immediately took the brunt of anti-dhimmi persecution.” Muslim rulers often found it useful to play one group of dhimmis off against another.
at June 21, 2008 9:52 AM
"There exists in this country among all Americans…a huge and profound ignorance about Islam ...
- which began to remedy itself after 9/11
there is no shortage of voices prepared to tell us that fanaticism and intolerance are fundamental to Islamic religion, and that violence and even suicide bombing have deep Koranic roots," he said.
If only we had listened to them sooner.
He said Americans need to know "how far removed Islam is from the perverse distortions of the terrorists who too often dominate the media, subverting Islam's image by professing to speak in its name."
That's hard to do once you read the Koran and some Muslims' own words. MEMRI is a danger to Islam.
Anyway, we're still waiting for "the vast majority" of "peaceful Muslims" to show us just how distorted those terrorist beliefs are and how far they themselves are willing to go to put an end to the killing in the name of Allah. The clock is ticking.
at June 21, 2008 11:41 AM
Thank you for posting, Robert.
Posted by: Fjordman at June 21, 2008 12:05 PM
Good, Fjordman. Thank you.
The hatred of Jews is one of the most interesting (and despicable) aspects of human history.
I really don't know what peculiar significance, if any, the current explosion of Jew-hatred has. Is there an odder form of non-organic mental illness?
Equally odd is the self-hatred of so many Jews, who are on the front lines of defending those who hate them, and of attacking those who understand the grave implications of Jew-hatred for every civilized person.
The fact that Jew-hatred is central to mohammed-worship confirms the centrality of mental illness to that total belief system.
But why will most Jews in America vote for Obama, a man who, every intuitive fiber screams, is not a friend of Jews?
It is enough to make this agnostic almost consider some metaphysical explanation.
Posted by: Moonzoo at June 21, 2008 1:20 PM
But why will most Jews in America vote for Obama, a man who, every intuitive fiber screams, is not a friend of Jews?
by Moonzoo
Maybe it's the "D" after his name. Old habits die hard. Most Jews are Democrats, dating back to FDR and Harry Truman.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/09/the_democratic_party_and_the_j.html
Posted by: PMK at June 21, 2008 3:49 PM
Review or essay, that was most interesting. I've been visiting JW for a couple of weeks and this sort of reading is engrossing. In the middle of the review I side tracked and read fjordman's text on Refuting God's Crucible. The origin of chess...
I've bought a couple of Robert's books and I'm eager to read them. At nearly 800 pages, I think I may hold off a bit before I try to absorb Dr. Bostom's work presented here. Thank you for the essay, though fjordman. Quite filling. I believe you say that anything under 1000 words is haiku.
I've known there is a serious problem with Muslim expansion into the West since 9/11. Since finding JW I've come to realize much more clearly the nature and extent of the threat. Folks banter back and forth amongst themselves, which is great, but it doesn't get the message out. I plan on giving my books away when I've read them to whomever doesn't understand jihad and will read them. It's not just about discussing this information on a blog, it's about spreading the word.
at June 21, 2008 5:29 PM
Magne tusen tak, Fjordman.
I'm glad that you recognize that Nazi anti-Semitism was not "Christian". The most anti-Jewish Christians always saw the "Jewish problem" solved with baptism. I suspect that much Muslim Judaeophobia is also "cured" with conversions.
at June 23, 2008 1:03 AM
FJORDMAN IS THE MAN!!!!! I am so buying Bostom's new book.
Jew-hatred is like all inexplicable hatred. It's based on insecurity. Muhammad knew how inferior his people were, being by and large far more primitive, illiterate, and less civilized than not just the rest of the world at the time, but the Jews in the Arabian peninsula. Who do you think he he got the whole idea of monotheism from? It was either the Jews or those Byzantine Christian heretics with whom he mingled who convinced him that polytheism made no sense and that one god necessarily had be the head honcho, that everything his people had ever believed was ridiculous and that the Judeo-Christian tradition made more sense. Even the "science" in the Koran was stolen from the Jews, the Greeks by way of the Jews, or just made up.
There has never been a good reason to hate Jews. The Romans hated them supposedly for being usurers, like usury is some sort of crime against humanity. Usury is the basis of the American Dream. It's how people pull themselves up by their bootstraps and release themselves from serfdom by owning homes and financing educations. But we admit that the Jews were right and everyone else was wrong, and that it was wrong to banish the Jews, since all societies are better off for having them around.
Muhammad knew how inferior his people were to the Jews, how much more progressive, harmonious, literate, and knowledgeable the Jewish tribes were, so he he spread hatred and lies about them and the Old Testament. "Tricky," "cunning," "conspiratorial:" those are words which are used to twist intelligence and civility into something horrible-sounding. We still see this today. Who hates the Jews the most? The "Palestinians." And who the ones who are the most acutely aware of how inferior they are? Yeah, because they see it every day. They have to go to Jewish hospitals when they get sick or injured because "Palestine" has failed to build anything resembling a civilized society. Read 'Because they hate' by Brigitte Gabrielle and her descriptions of Palestine vs. Israel, of Palestinians vs. Israelis. It's not just Islam's lies and despicable teachings and propaganda that continue to further antisemitism. It is the Muslim world's inferiority to the West, and to Israel in particular, which furthers this hate. No country in the history of time has come so far in so little time or accomplished so much with so little and so few people, all the while being endlessly stepped on and abused. Making the desert bloom, a feat which no Muslim has ever accomplished given 1400 years and billions of people to do so (although the Coptic monks in Egypt have, but they're Christian) was just the foundation for one of the world's most progressive societies.
It is also interesting to note that Israel is the only nation with state religion which has managed to not fall decades behind the ball in terms of freedom, progress, and the economy a` la Italy, the Republic of Northern Ireland, Portugal, and the entire Latin world, and they started with less than nothing only 60 years ago and had more obstacles to overcome than any modern civilization, even Muslim ones. A 4000-year-old doctrine was so progressive as to be perfectly compatible with modern democracy and the modern world. That is amazing. Catholicism is 2000 years old and it barely manages to work in the modern world, and it has disastrous effects on society. Islam is 1400 years old and yet its doctrine is so much more regressive, primitive, and self-destructive. Islam's/the Muslim's world's inferiority and self-destructiveness are self-evident, and yet the Muslim world is a shame culture, so they project that inferiority onto the Jewish "other" and keep themselves more ignorant of history and psychology than any free-world 9th-grader so that they can't even recognize their own malignant narcissism. Sad.
There are 13.3 million Jews and 1.2 billion Muslims, and yet 148 (I hope that's correct) Jews have won Nobel Prizes, while only one Muslim has, and he was an Ahmadiyya who was so shunned by his own people he received political asylum in the West. Muslims don't even consider him a Muslim because he wanted to reform Islam so as to make it compatible with peace, democracy, and human dignity. Israel serves as a reminder to the Muslim world of what epic failures they are, and of how regressive their way of life is. Deep down, they know that they are not God's chosen people. And deep down, so do the Jews. But for different reasons. Jews abide by the Golden Rule and treat everyone equally, and while it is entirely possible to read the Old Testament as a supremacist document, the Jewish people never chose to despite overwhelming evidence in favor of Jewish supremacy. And Jews never tried to play themselves as victims - despite the horrible antisemitic things that are said and printed throughout the Muslim world, and despite multiple attempts to wipe Jews off the planet and to deprive them of land and dignity - the way Muslims do anytime THEY commit horrible atrocities or someone with freedom of speech decides to speak or print the TRUTH about Islam or the Muslim world. Yet the Koran is far more supremacist, and Muslims take that message to the extreme out of narcissism which is combined with and rooted in their subconscious awareness of their own inferiority. Arabs in Israel enjoy more dignity and freedom than Arabs anywhere in the Muslim world. The difference is that Jews embrace the Judeo-Christian work ethic, the Golden Rule, treat everyone as human beings, live in peace and harmony, and assume responsibility for their own fate, even despite the fact that, so often throughout the course of history, their fate has lain in the hands of those wanted to persecute and exterminate them.
So why do I hate Muslims? Because they hate me for everything that makes me me, and because I know that I am a good person. Because of what I believe, which is reasonable, decent, and fair, and because of who I am, which is never fair to do. I don't hate Arabs or Pakistanis or Indonesians. I hate Muslims. They hate me for who I am ethnically (Jewish and Catholic, not to mention blonde, so Muslim men are explicitly instructed to "islamize [my] vagina" because I would catch a hefty price on the slave markets of Mecca), out of ignorant racism, and for everything I choose to be and for which I am endlessly grateful: free, literate, educated, opinionated, outspoken, musical, fiercely independent, shamelessly sexual, kind, and because I think and read and come to my own conclusions about things rather than believe everything I'm told, and because I revel in art and humor as much as I can. And the more I better myself the more they hate me. I represent everything they have failed to be and everything they envy deep down. Oh, and I have a rich (Jewish) father who came from nothing, made himself a success out of sheer intelligence and determination, who never considered me or any woman his property, and whose wealth I will one day inherit along with my sister and my stepmother, and a rich mother who also came from nothing, from destroyed WWII and post-War Rome, who made a great career and life for herself in a time when that was not even believed to be possible for women, and who never answered to anyone. I represent the product of the American Dream combined with the Judeo-Christian work ethic combined with progress, and every single failure of their families, their countries, their society, particularly since my mother came from a failed fascist theocracy herself, not unlike many of them. And I LOVE AMERICA. I thank my lucky stars every single day for every single opportunity I have ever been given, for the fact that I am graced with inherent dignity and respect in the Land of the Free, and I recognize the fact that I would not be possible anywhere else. And I love everything about being a woman (except endometriosis - that's a bitch) and it never occurred to me that I was ever anyone's inferior or that there was ever anything I couldn't do. In fact, I always kinda believed that being a woman is preferable because we can bear children, have multiple orgasms, control men with our sexuality, because we have more freedom with and ways to change our appearance, and because children and animals seem to prefer us, but never that women are superior because I believe in inherent equality. And they hate me because I'm an "adulterer" (who has never engaged in anything but long-term monogamous relationships). I would never marry because I hate the medieval overtones of women-as-property by way of the father of the bride giving her away, because I simply don't want or need the approval of the Church, the State, or the Law to validate any relationship of mine, and because I have no desire to make it more difficult for someone to leave me because I would rather live on my own, like a well-adjusted, self-sufficient adult, than be with someone whom I no longer love or who no longer loves me. In short, I represent all their fears of the "horrors" of freedom, so they hate me, because I am their worst nightmare, and yet, I'm really quite innocuous. And I hate that they want to rape, enslave, and kill me for reasons which decent people regard as reasons to love me.
Q: How many Muslims does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: None. They spend their entire lives in the dark and blame their failure to civilize themselves on the Jews.
Posted by: jdamn at June 25, 2008 5:47 PM
(Note: The Comments section is provided in the interests of free speech only. It is mostly unmoderated, but comments that are off-topic, offensive, slanderous, or otherwise annoying stand a chance of being deleted. The fact that any comment remains on the site IN NO WAY constitutes an endorsement by Jihad Watch or Dhimmi Watch, or by Robert Spencer or any other Jihad Watch or Dhimmi Watch writer, of any view expressed, fact alleged, or link provided in that comment.)