Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald offers some considerations for the currently hotly debated question of whether the Israelis and others should continue giving aid to the Palestinians and their new Hamas government:
Many take it as axiomatic that the Israelis “owe” it to the local Arabs to supply them with jobs. But why? Most of these local Arabs, far from being some kind of since-time-immemorial peasantry, in fact arrived between 1920 and 1940. They came mostly from Iraq and Egypt. Others are descended from troops of Mehmet Ali or of Abd el-Kader; they arrived in the 19th century. Still others are Muslims who were transplanted by the Ottoman government from Europe when the Ottomans left Bulgaria in the 1880s.
This whole business of a “Palestinian people” also ignores the demographic data. It is a post-1967 fabrication, but one which has become the central belief of the U.N. That august body has chosen over the past 30 years to devote more than one-quarter of its total time to the so-called “plight of the ‘Palestinians.” Poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, pollution, the exploitation of women, the enslavement of child workers, the changes in the earth’s climate — all of these subjects have been scanted by those within the U.N. bureaucracy, which is almost entirely now simply part of the Islamintern International. It is time to see that for what it is: a Jihad, using military means, economic boycotts and bribery, propaganda, and diplomatic pressure and maneuvering, to weaken and demoralize the Israelis and to force them to make concession after concession.
This strategy has worked. It has worked largely because the Israelis themselves have been unable to define what threatens them as a Jihad (the Lesser Jihad), because of their unwillingness to give up hope for better relations with some Muslim states. They were fooled by the temporary possibility of alliances with still-secular Turkey and with the Shah’s regime in Iran into thinking that the problem was not Islam. But it was, and is — and the only reasons that, for a while, both Turkey and Iran were not hostile to Israel was that both countries regarded the Arabs as a threat; both were still under secular regimes; and both were tied into the American system of defense.
None of that is true any longer. But Israel still is taciturn on the subject of Islam — after all, it would like to believe that the aggression against it has some kind of end. It doesn’t. And it won’t. But that does not mean that the camp of jihad cannot be demoralized and divided, as Soviet Communism became demoralized and its adherents divided. It is a question of waiting it out, and doing one’s damnedest to present things correctly, based on an accurate analysis of the nature of the threat. This the government of Israel is refusing to do — though here and there individual Israelis have done it.
This means that Israel’s presentation of its own case must be supplemented, or re-interpreted, in a truthful manner — for even if Israel does not dare to say it faces a Jihad (and why not, exactly?) those of us outside Israel are free to describe it as exactly what it is.
And had that description, that analysis, been widely disseminated thirty years ago, when Europe had not yet had its collective mind poisoned in the press and television against Israel, it might have helped warn the people of Western Europe about the danger of Islam and of Muslim immigration.
Now, of course, it is too late for that. But it is not too late to open our eyes and, among other things, end the Jizyah of foreign aid, which is based on a similar unwillingness to face the realities of Islamic jihad. Even Ahmadinejad of Iran seems to think that a cutoff of Western largesse to the Palestinians is possible. He has told them: “Don’t worry about economic problems, because God’s treasures are endless and if you work for Him, He will meet your needs from where you had not foreseen.”
I agree. The “Palestinians” — the local Arabs, that is, who are to be carefully distinguished from the other local Arabs, those within Israel as temporarily defined by the 1949 armistice lines (the Arab states refused to recognize those armistice lines as permanent borders — so why should Israel be asked to do so at this point?), who are called “Israeli Arabs” — should put their faith in “God’s treasures.”
But what are “God’s treasures”? For Muslims, the entire world belongs to Islam. The Infidels have no permanent claim to possession of anything — not land, not goods, not “their women.” If they happen to possess a life estate — well, lives can be shortened. Infidels can be robbed and looted by Muslims, for what Infidels call “robbery” and “looting” is merely helping yourself, in lands that do not yet have the Shari’a, to the “jizyah” that is properly due (see, in Bruce Bawer’s “While Europe Slept,” the Norwegian imam who preaches this quite logical Gospel According to Islam). Perhaps what Ahmadinejad meant was that “God’s treasures” include the money that Israel, and the Europeans, and the Americans, should all be forking over — for the Jizyah can be seen as one of “God’s treasures” to which Muslims have a right.
There is yet another interpretation of “God’s treasures.” It is that of the oil money. For as soon as the OPEC revenues quadrupled, the Saudis and other Muslim beneficiaries of this accident of geology — discovered by Infidels, produced for years by Infidels, and for which a use had been found only in the Infidel lands — began to see that oil wealth as a direct gift from Allah to the Muslims and especially to the Arabs, “the best of people.” A politico-theological interpretation was given to this manna from heaven to be found underground. So perhaps Ahmadinejad is referring to the oil wealth which, I am sure, he as a good Muslim loyal to every member of the umma in need, is quite ready to share with the “Palestinian” Arabs.
Or is he?