“In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.”
–Lemony Snickit, from ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’
George Jonas, author of Vengeance, has written: “But is there something about Islam that is conductive to the formation of extremist sects and radical movements? Is Islam a petri dish in which a culture of fundamentalism thrives? Arguably, yes.” Otherwise, the only explanation for the enduring presence of Islamic fundamentalism and its attendant Jew-hatred in the Middle East is that Arabs are bad and Islam is good. But if we say Arabs are bad, we are condemned as racists. If we say Islam is bad, we are condemned as Islamophobic. Far easier to pretend Islamic imperialism is non-existent and blame all the troubles of the Middle East on a Western appetite for oil and those damn Jews and their Zionism.
And if Zionist Jews are so bad simply because they’ve reacquired only that small parcel of land stolen from their ancestors centuries ago by Muslim invaders, consider the imperialist footprint of Arab Muslims, as historian Vernon Eggers points out: “Within the lifetime of some of the children who met Muhammad and sat on the Prophet’s knees, Arab armies controlled the land mass that extended from the Pyrenees Mountains in Europe to the Indus River valley in South Asia. In less than a century, Arabs had come to rule over an area that spanned five thousand miles.” The State of Israel is maligned and excoriated simply because Jews refuse to lie down and die, but the history of Islam’s shameless imperialism and expansionist adventures is to be forgiven and forgotten, as though trivial and inconsequential.
Former spook Michael Scheuer, who resigned from the CIA, would have us believe that Israel’s oft quoted maxim of “right to exist” is untenable in the real world, that no country has the right to exist. He suggests that history teaches us that “You form your country and you take your chances,” and yet blames the United States for the unenviable and weak position of “the fairly and democratically elected Hamas” (Adolf Hitler and the Nazis Party were also “fairly and democratically elected”) in a political arena where Israel demands that Hamas recognize Israel’s right to exist “before talks between the two can begin and before Hamas can receive Western economic aid.” It sucks to be Hamas—it sucks to be regarded by the elites of most Western democracies as a terrorist entity notorious for its implacable anti-Jewish hatred and genocidal vision of the Middle East. Cry me a river, Michael Scheuer.
George Jonas in another place reminds us that “…Christendom has come a fair distance since the Crusades. Fundamentalist Islam has not.” The relationship between Jews and Christians has progressed salubriously since the Holocaust, and especially since the formation of the State of Israel. Of course, the world will always be plagued with sciolists from both camps, those who are enthralled with the false pretense that the Holocaust did not necessitate the existence of the State of Israel (regardless the Torah’s prescription for a Jewish state) and that Hamas and the PA are nothing more than the illegitimate progeny of “Zionist aggression.” I agree with Rabbi Kahane: Better a Jewish state that everyone hates than an Auschwitz that everyone loves.”
Nobody hates the State of Israel more than the Arab Muslim. This is not the fault of being born Arab but the fault of being born Arab Muslim. Since the advent of Islam into the Middle East, Jews have since been hated not because they were allied with this Arab kingdom or that Arab kingdom, but solely because they were Jews, the Golden Era of Islam be damned. Those truly dedicated to the Prophet and his avant-garde religion turned on and murdered local Jews only because they were Jews; because they had rejected the Prophet Mohammed’s inane (in their view) proclamation to them, that he was a prophet-come-lately of the G-D of Israel. And this violent religious egoism has dominated the politics of Islam ever since. How else to explain the absurdity of many of modern Islam’s prerogatives, like the demand that Jews be prohibited from worshipping on the Temple Mount, or—to hasten to the essence of this religion’s real purpose—that Jews and their Judaism cease to exist altogether, whether in Israel or beyond? And all these demands in order to make way for the political and religious preponderance of a future Caliphate. Think Osama bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda. Think ISIS. Think Anjem Choudary.
So, to borrow again from Lemony Snicket, “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.” Islam the religion did not start out on a happy or innocuous note, nor does it exist today as a source of good news, and there are very few (if any) happy stories in between. Moreover, even if you fairly revile this religion for the flagitious tales it leaves in its wake, you could be gunned down in the street. Atheists (whom I deeply and wholeheartedly admire) may disparage Christianity and Judaism with little risk to themselves or their families, but not so if they point out inconvenient truths about Islam and its umma. Religious egoists dislike hearing the inconvenient truths about their faith, about “the very few happy things in the middle,” and none more than the Muslim zealot.
Written by Michael Devolin