Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 are here.
XII
The Peace to Prosperity plan also holds dangers for Israel. After Oslo, the “secular,” PLO brigades were let into Judea, Samaria and Gaza, purportedly to fight and defeat the “Islamist” Hamas. According to Nabil Shaath, a top PLO official:
“You could have let a thousand businessmen and wealthy people enter, and instead you preferred 10,000 gunmen. …Arafat fought very hard against the establishment of a Palestinian middle class and preferred a military entity.”
10,000 gunmen, rather than a thousand businessmen, was a fundamental Oslo mistake that the Peace to Prosperity plan corrects. A “Palestinian middle class,” so feared by Yasser Arafat, is exactly what $50 billion means. The century since the demise of the Ottoman Empire saw a middle class slowly emerge in most Arab states, matured by the cultural and economic integration of the world and the Internet. In short, the autonomous individual has arrived, especially as entrepreneur, professional and intellectual. “We hear and we obey,” (Qur’an 24:51) is antithetical to this development. The lay Muslim cannot grasp this, but the Arab leaders wishing to release their Islam-shackled middle classes, do.
The Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and their dhimmis, the Vatican and the EU, rejected the Peace to Prosperity plan, but the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Morocco, Egypt and Bahrain gave it their guarded to full support. In the smoke and mirrors of Middle East politics, this means, “Go for it, Netanyahu!” Jordan, the country objecting the loudest, stands to gain the most. The cash-strapped Jordanian government would welcome a demilitarised Palestinian state behind an IDF buffer, plus, of course, the second-largest chunk of $50 billion for the Palestinian 70% of its 19% unemployed population. Far from threatening the peace treaty with Jordan, the Peace to Prosperity plan bolsters it.
Peace agreements with Arab states are clearly of strategic importance to Israel, yet it is a grave error to rely on them as the final guarantor of peace. The enemy of Israel, and of the Jewish people, is not the Arab states, but the religion of Islam. Allah’s terms for peace: Jewish non-existence. The end of any Israeli-Arab peace treaty is never more than a jihadist’s bullet away.
The century of cosy arrangements between corrupt ruling elites, mendacious “scholars,” sycophantic clergy and ignorant Muslim masses might historically be over, but its passing is uneven, even contradictory, across Arab states. For some Arab leaders, Islam may no longer be a tiger worth riding; for others, it is but a matter of adjusting gait. The Saudi elite only mitigates some of its excesses so as to coax help out of those who find them repulsive; they change so they can stay the same. In Egypt, President El-Sisi toppled the Muslim Brotherhood regime of Muhammad Morsi and is demanding the “scholars” of Al-Azhar radically reform Islam. The UAE is the most gung-ho about what it expects from the Peace to Prosperity plan.
While this is not the end of Islam, the stage is set for the ummah’s doctrinal and geopolitical internecine skirmishes to merge into full-blown intra-religious war in which the key Arab states are placing their hopes in the Peace to Prosperity plan to boost their middle classes. The plan acknowledged the middle class’ critical role when it was presented first as an economic plan (in Bahrain), and later as a political plan (in Washington).
The “Palestinians” will finally get the “thousand businessmen and wealthy people,” they missed out on at Oslo. Business needs peace and stability; money is interfaith. Grounded in the political economy of Islam, the ‘Deal of the Century’ marks the beginning of the end of ‘we hear and we obey,’ and the end of the beginning of ‘we think for ourselves.’ It confronts not only the “Palestinians,” but also Islam, not just in Israel, but across the Middle East.
A Palestinian middle class ushers the wider Arab middle classes towards their real target, Israeli investment and know-how. The ‘Deal of the Century’ is elegant in its symmetry: the Arab middle classes, including the Palestinian middle class, are exactly the elements in Arab Muslim society that need a neutered Islam, as does Israel. The “annexation” of parts of Judea and Samaria is a most convenient red herring disingenuously raised by Israel’s detractors themselves.
The Jordanians may have kindled in Israelis the hope that Saudi jihad funding in east Jerusalem overtaking Turkish jihad funding in east Jerusalem will somehow benefit Israel, risking a repeat of trying to play the PLO and Hamas terrorist armies off against each other. The Jordanian initiative suggests their desire to outsource the Palestinian problem to the Saudis in exchange for the prestige of the Temple Mount waqf. The Saudis sharing the waqf offers them the perfect segue to an open relationship with Israel, whose help they need in fending off Iran’s threat to their preeminence in Islam, the Jew-killing religion.
“Iran’s malign activities in the region,” as TV7 Israel News puts it, is all about Islam, as are Saudi overtures towards Israel, yet delusion and diplomatic vanity dictate that a “Rapprochement between Jerusalem and Riyadh,” clears the way for those wary of Arab disapproval to do business with Israel. Certainly, in a world of BDS, this is a point, but it does not annul Saudi malign activities in the region and the world. The Kingdom, after all, hosts the Head Quarters of both the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, one of the key opponents of the Peace to Prosperity plan, and the Muslim World League, the mastermind behind jihading the Holocaust. A bad Iran does not make a good Saudi Arabia any more than a bad Hamas makes a good PA.
The Peace to Prosperity plan offers Israel the perfect opportunity to terminate the waqf altogether. It must not miss this opportunity. Non-Muslims tend to understand waqf only in the limited sense of “trusteeship,” especially as it pertains to the Temple Mount. This is a mistake on several counts.
Firstly, to defer to the waqf is to submit to Shari’a, a victory for Islam right there. This waqf is grounded in a hadith dealing with ’Umar and the property he seized at Khaybar, where the Muslims drove out the Jews. Upon Muhammad’s suggestion, “’Umar gave the land as Sadaqa (in endowment on the condition) that [it] must not be sold, inherited, or given away, (Bulugh Al-Maram 7:786).
Secondly, the Temple Mount is used for jihad, including the storage of weapons, “And he gave its produce as Sadaqa to be devoted …in Allah’s Cause [i.e., jihad],” emphasis added. Thirdly, to recognise the Temple Mount as, “the third holiest site in Islam, the spot where the prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven,” is to agree with Mahmoud Abbas: “The Al-Aqsa is ours… and they [the Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.” This insult goes much deeper than Jews realise: the feet of Muhammad’s flying horse are purer than the most devout Jew. Blocking Jewish worship at the holiest site in Judaism simply by clinging to the third holiest site in Islam is a double-coup for Muslim supremacism and a powerful inspiration to every jihad killer.
Finally, and most importantly, “waqf” must be seen in the context of their Allah bequeathing the entire planet to Muslims that they must “reconquer” for Islam. In this context, the Temple Mount is the last 150,000 sq m of “Muslim land” that Islam has stopped the Jews from “stealing.” Its significance is psychological, sustaining the will to “drive them out from where they drove you out.” The waqf of the Temple Mount is, quite literally, a springboard for “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
The waqf is an affront to reason, ethics and the memory of the Holocaust, yet Jews keep it alive at the very heart of Judaism. Ending the waqf is the one blow from which the jihad against Israel might never recover, just as the ummah will never recover from the 1924 abolition of its precious caliphate.
Benjamin Netanyahu, and by extension, Donald Trump, already knew from Yasser Arafat’s conduct at Tunis that if they offered the Palestinians $50 billion for economic development, they would reject it. Economic development means: a middle class independent of PA hand-outs; erosion of the recruiting ground for terrorist armies; and waves of free thinkers released into the Palestinian body politic. To outfox the Palestinians as the Peace to Prosperity plan has done, would have required an understanding of the Muslim mind beyond the ability of the technocratic Jared Kushner. Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the few Israeli leaders who understand what it’s all about: a religious war to destroy Israel.
This is not news to the Muslim Members of Knesset, who know that Netanyahu is Islam’s nemesis. The Muslim Arabs’ current hope lies with the Jews so filled with hatred for Netanyahu that they would do anything to remove him as leader, elected or not, unaware that they could not hate Netanyahu more than the Muslims hate them.
That supremacist and wannabe Goebbels, Abduljalil Sajid, seized the opportunity at Auschwitz to tell the world, “Where there is anti-Semitism, Islamophobia is not far away,” (emphasis added). Jews may be anxious to avoid another Holocaust, but their Muslim friends’ concern is for Islam alone, always. Everyone sees Muhammad al-Issa as standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Jews against anti-Semitism, which is not at all how he sees it:
“There are Jews who have stood by the Muslims against Islamophobia. We do not deal with …those who have caused harm to the Muslims,” (emphasis added).
Who are “those who have caused harm to the Muslims?” The Jews! Whether Abduljalil Sajid, Mohammed al-Issa, Mustafa Cerić or Mansour Abbas, the cynicism of the jihad propaganda machine has one aim: turn the world’s revulsion away from anti-Semitism and towards “Islamophobia.” As an instrument of thought-control, “Islamophobia” is the perfect foil for anti-Semitism. With “Islamophobia” in the place of anti-Semitism, Jews can feel virtuous supporting the “Palestinians.”
Jihad terror armies cannot prevail against the IDF. But with Jews paralysed by political correctness and hatred for Netanyahu and enough MKs, the Muslims can hope to disrupt the IDF’s effectiveness enough for knives and Qassam rockets to break the Israeli national spirit. The Peace to Prosperity plan might just have scuppered such schemes, but these are perilous times, for as this essay shows, jihad is everywhere, while most infidels see it nowhere, and often unwittingly assist it.
Peace comes not from treaties, but from one party being able to impose it. This means destroying the enemy’s capacity to wage war. Sometimes, as in Iraq in 1981 and in Syria in 2007, it means destroying a country’s nuclear reactors. Lt. Gen. Relik Shafir, an Israeli Air Force pilot, reflected,
“Many of us were grandsons or sons of people who had been through the Holocaust, and we had been a part of a mission that was to prevent another Holocaust.”
More important than the destruction of these two reactors, is that the 1981 Operation Opera in Iraq did not deter the Syrians from replacing that reactor with one of their own that Israel, in 2007, had to destroy in Operation Out of the Box, a mere twenty-six year later. At time of writing, thirteen years after Out of the Box, Israel again faces the same prospect of nuclear annihilation. This time Iran is doing exactly as Iraq and Syria before it. After Iran, will it be Pakistan, Turkey, Libya, even Afghanistan or Yemen? The Islamic imperative to annihilate the Jews does not go away just because a few nuclear facilities are bombed, or a few jihad murderers are shot dead. The genocide hadith stands for as long as there is Islam and there are Jews. One of them has to go.
Most Jews believe that Muslims in the Knesset are, by virtue of that fact, peaceful and democratic. This delusion matches a noted paralysis. The formidable Israeli international lawyer and diplomat, Alan Baker, shares this frustration:
“Antisemitism must be treated as sui generis, on its own merit. …To this end …the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs published in 2015 a ‘Draft International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Antisemitism.’ …Despite having presented this draft convention to all the major Jewish organizations involved in the struggle against antisemitism, no organization was prepared to take it up as a major crusade within the international community.”
As this essay has shown, Jews have let Muslims, history’s quintessential anti-Semites, freely hijack anti-Semitism and its consummation, the Holocaust, for jihad.
elee says
Muslims don’t “think for themselves.” K 33:37; 81:30.
Giacomo Latta says
”Arafat fought very hard against the establishment of a Palestinian middle class and preferred a military entity”
Keep them poor and keep them stupid. He worked overtime to ensure the former. The latter seems to have come naturally.
gravenimage says
Jihading the Holocaust: Auschwitz and the Knesset (Part 7)
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Islam has never wanted an educated, well-off middle class that might want something other than endless Jihad.
Middle classes have typically only emerged in places where Islam has been weak at one point or another, such as Turkey, Lebanon, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Iran–and even then, they tend to be small and unstable. It is notable that the most Islamic states, such as Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen, barely have a middle class at all.
Anjuli Pandavar says
Agreed, GI.
One could add to this the Islamic prohibition on interest, which makes it very difficult for money to convert into capital, thereby limiting such societies to trade, small-scale agriculture, human bondage of one kind or another, and conspicuous consumption, all the hallmarks of feudalism. The organs of state become the primary avenue to wealth, that is to say, bribery and nepotism are endemic to Islamic societies, especially as they are societies of dependent subordination. The lifeblood of the society is the granting and denying of favours. No one has any right to anything; no one has any professional obligation to do anything. The pettyist official becomes a lord. Things only get done when someone above orders that it get done, in which case everything is dropped to do only that one thing. In other words, society fractures at every point. Such a society must compensate for its growing needs by plunder of one kind or another, be it slavery, jizya, tribute, raiding, or other. In practice, of course, there are endless variations and combinations of the above, but they are of the above, i.e., inherent social stagnation, rather than inherent social dynamism.
If Muslims should ever escape Islam, they would do well to start by thanking colonialism. Then they should acknowledge their eternal debt to Western civilisation. I suppose it would be a bit much to expect there ever to be a world-wide movement demanding Islamic societies compensate the rest of the world, especially Europe, Africa and Asia, for jihad and slavery.
Anjuli Pandavar says
Oh, sorry. And more to your point, such a society has a vested interest in ignorance. In my opinion, Qur’an verse 24:51, “We hear and we obey,” is singularly responsible for the most damage to Muslims.