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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Fitzgerald: Edward Said, hoist by his own petard

May 25, 2006 10:49 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald recalls an apposite quote by A. Carlebach and its use by the deceased and egregious Christian dhimmi and Islamic apologist Edward Said:

The relentless Jihad against Israel — against, rather, any Infidel sovereign state within the Dar al-Islam — always included imposition of the Shari’a as part of its intended goal. Imposition of the Shari’a was, in fact, demanded as early as 1920 by a group of Arab notables in the former Ottoman territories that were quite properly assigned to Mandatory Palestine (i.e. all of Western Palestine, while Eastern Palestine went to form part of the Emirate of Transjordan).

Nor was there any doubt that the attempt to keep Jews out of the area was a Jihad directed at Infidels throughout the Mandatory period; curiously, it was some British officers, rather than the Palestinian Jews, who recognized the Islamic grounds for opposition to the Jews and the restoration of a Jewish Commonwealth. It is also true that a few Israelis, early in the history of the state, had the wit to recognize the problem. One of these was Dr. A. Carlebach, whose analysis published in Ma’ariv (Oct. 7, 1955) would have been lost to history, one suspects, but for the fact that it is reprinted, amusingly and quite uncomprehendingly, in Edward Said’s preposterous “The Question of Palestine.”

Fortunately for us, Said often provided quotes from various European and Zionist sources that are so deadly, so convincing, particularly in the light of all we have learned about Islam over the past few years, that as works of propaganda they no longer serve their purpose. Here is what Said quoted from Carlebach, and what Said obviously thought it was self-evidently absurd, but we read it now with quite a different frame of mind:

These Arab Islamic countries do not suffer from poverty, or disease, or illiteracy, or exploitation; they only suffer from the worst of all plagues: Islam. Wherever Islamic psychology rules, there is the inevitable rule of despotism and criminal aggression. The danger lies in Islamic psychology, which cannot integrate itself into the world of efficiency and progress, that lives in a world of illusion, perturbed by attacks of inferiority complexes and megalomania, lost in dreams of the holy sword. The danger stems from the totalitarian conception of the world, the passion for murder deeply rooted in their blood, from the lack of logic, the easily inflamed brains, the boasting, and above all: the blasphemous disregard for all that is sacred to the civilized world…their reactions — to anything — have nothing to do with good sense. They are all emotion, unbalanced, instantaneous, senseless. It is always the lunatic that speaks from their throat. You can talk ‘business’ with everyone, and even with the devil. But not with Allah…This is what every grain in this country shouts. There were many great cultures here, and invaders of all kinds. All of them — even the Crusaders — left signs of culture and blossoming. But on the path of Islam, even the tries have died.

We pile sin upon crime when we distort the picture and reduce the discussion to a conflict of border between Israel and her neighbors. First of all, it is not the truth. The heart of the conflict is not the question of the borders; it is the question of Muslim psychology…..Moreover, to present the problem as a conflict between two similar parts is to provide the Arabs with the weapon of a claim that is not theirs. If the discussion with them is truly a political one, then it can be seen from both sides. Then we appear as those who came to a country that was entirely Arab, and we conquered and implanted ourselves as an alien body among them, and we loaded them with refugees and constitute a military danger for them, etc. etc. …one can justify this or that side–and such a presentation, sophisticated and political, of the problem is understandable for European minds–at our expense. The Arabs raise claims that make sense to the Western understanding of simple legal dispute But in reality, who knows better than us that such is not the source of their hostile stand? All those political and social concepts are never theirs. Occupation by force of arms, in their own eyes, in the eyes of Islam, is not all associated with injustice. To the contrary, it constitutes a certificate and demonstration of authentic ownership. The sorrow for the refugees, for the expropriated borders, has no room in their thinking Allah expelled, Allah will care. Never has a Muslim politician been moved by such things (unless, indeed, the catastrophe endangered his personal status). If there were no refugees and no conquest, they would oppose us just the same.

Now when Said put this into his little work of propaganda back in 1979, the invented “Palestinian people” and their “legitimate rights” were in full swing. In 1979, the front of dhimmis, those islamochristians such as Hanan Ashrawi, were already in evidence — on campuses, before church groups, disguising the nature of the Jihad against Israel which cannot be assuaged, cannot be sated, and is not a matter of borders.

But something has changed: other Muslim attacks, in America, in Russia, in Europe, and other Muslim cries against Infidels, and other Muslim behavior, including the demand that European peoples yield to Muslim demands, have caused many, and should cause many more, to read the words written above with a new understanding and a new appreciation.

Hoist by his own petard was Edward Said — he bothered to quote just a bit too much. Nowadays we do not scorn those he assumed we would scorn, but see the truth of their remarks, and the scorn of the good and intelligent reader is reserved for Said’s own text. Quite something.

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