<< 1. KILL A JEW FOR ALLAH -
(special thanks to SWU member Avi Zirler, for bringing this to our
attention)
National Review Online.....
John Derbyshire
NRO Columnist
http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/
derbyshire032202.shtml
KILL A JEW FOR ALLAH: The Mideast Problem
Mr. Derbyshire is also an NR contributing editor
March 22, 2002 9:20 a.m.
From the text:
"I don't think we should be sending diplomats to the Middle East. I think
we should be sending teams of psychiatrists. This is a diseased culture, a
sick culture. Go back to that (recent) disgraceful recycling of the Blood
Libel in the Saudi press..."
BEGIN:
I recently got a long, carefully composed e-mail from a reader, who begged
me to circulate it among "other opinion-formers." It laid out a plan for
peace in the Middle East. The writer, obviously an intelligent and
well-informed person, had composed the e-mail with great care. With some
passion, too, he really wants to find a solution to the Israel-Arab
problem. Here was a public-spirited person doing his citizenly best to
promote an idea that, he fervently believed, would put an end to the
horrors.
And what was that idea? In a nutshell: The U.S. should lean hard on Israel
to abandon the Jewish settlements in Arab land i.e. beyond Israel's
pre-1967 borders. These settlements (my reader argued) were the root cause
of all the strife. Closing them down would remove the main casus belli;
and the good faith shown by this act would open the eyes of the Arabs to
the fact that peace with Israel is possible. The logjam would be broken.
I don't know what to say to people like this. Obviously they are decent,
good citizens. Obviously they are trying their best, trying to be
constructive, to give some hope to the world. How do I tell them what I
feel? Which is, that they are floating in orbit between Uranus and
Neptune, inhabiting some place that does not touch the real world at any
point.
Look: Possibly there would be some abstract justice in closing down the
settlements, I don't know. I don't see it myself, I must admit. Why should
Jews not live among Arabs? Lots of Arabs live in Israel, and do very well
there. There are rich Israeli Arabs; there are Israeli-Arab pop stars and
comedians; there are Israeli-Arab intellectuals, teachers, writers,
businessmen, athletes. Why, when the whole thing gets sorted out, should
there not be Jews living in Arab territory, as there were for centuries
past? What, exactly, is wrong with the settlements? I don't see it.
But, okay, let's suppose there is some valid moral objection to the
existence of the settlements; and let's suppose my reader's plan were to
be carried out, and all the settlements were removed, their populations
transferred back to metropolitan Israel, their buildings razed, their
fields ploughed with salt. Does anybody think it would make a damn bit of
difference? There was no such thing as settlements, no such thing as
"occupied territories," before the 1967 war. There were no such things in
1960, for example, when Adolf Eichmann was abducted from his hiding-hole
in Buenos Aires by Israeli secret agents, an event recorded by Saudi
Arabia's principal government-controlled newspaper as: "ARREST OF
EICHMANN, WHO HAD THE HONOR OF KILLING 6 MILLION JEWS".
The problem of the Middle East is not the settlements. It is not this
piece of land or that piece. It is not the Golan Heights or East Jerusalem
or Temple Mount. It is not oil, or land, or water, or history, or
geography, or metaphysics. The problem is in plain sight. You know what
the problem is, and so do I. The problem is that the Middle East hates the
Jews.
I say "the Middle East" because I don't know any more precise way to say
it. You can't say "the Arabs" (though of course the Arabs hate the Jews
more than anyone), because the Iranians and the Pakistanis and the Berbers
of North Africa hate the Jews too, and they are not Arabs. You can't say
"the Muslims". That is a lot closer, I think, and there surely cannot be
much doubt that institutional Islam is riddled with Jew-hatred. Still,
Malaysia is a Muslim country, and they don't hate the Jews, except in a
go-along, pro forma sort of way, to keep on good terms with the Saudis and
Gulf Emirs.
And I am sure, before you write to tell me, that lots of people in the
Middle East don't hate the Jews. Lots of Arabs, millions probably, don't
hate the Jews. Probably lots of non-Arab Muslims don't hate the Jews,
either. Yet it's hard to avoid the impression, from reading the MEMRI
translations, from looking at the kinds of things taught in schools all
over the Middle East (and in Islamic schools here in the U.S.A., see
below), from listening to the pronouncements of Middle East politicians
(remember the Syrian foreign minister explaining to the Pope, (to the
Pope!) that: "When I see a Jew in front of me, I kill him"?) and from
random conversations with New York cab drivers, that visceral, murderous
Jew-hatred is awfully widespread among Arabs, Pakistanis, Iranians, and
North Africans. Awfully widespread.
In between getting that e-mail and answering it, I did two unrelated
things, by way of my daily work. One was to prepare an editorial snippet
for the print National Review about Islamic schools here in the U.S.,
based on a long study in the Washington Post of February 25th. There are
estimated to be between 200 and 600 private Islamic day schools in the
U.S., with up to 30,000 students in attendance. They use textbooks
imported from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. One in use at the Islamic Saudi
Academy in suburban Virginia instructs readers that a sure sign of the Day
of Judgment will be that Muslims will fight and kill Jews, who will hide
behind trees that say: "Oh Muslim, Oh servant of God, there is a Jew
hiding behind me. Come here and kill him." School authorities did some
fast damage control when the Post confronted them (as the Saudis are doing
over the now-famous Blood Libel article). The textbooks are in process of
being replaced with special versions more suitable for American students,
they assured us, with the kill-a-Jew-for-Allah stuff left out. Presumably
that stuff remains untouched back home in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt,
Syria, Iran, Libya,... Their kiddies will get the right message, you can
be sure: "What do you mean, you don't hate Jews? Look, even the blessed
trees hate them!"
The other thing I did was read Jeffrey Goldberg's article about Saddam
Hussein in The New Yorker (titled "The Great Terror" in the 3/25/02
issue).
"Iraqi dissidents agree that Iraq's programs to build weapons of mass
destruction are focused on Israel. 'Israel is the whole game,' Ahmad
Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, told me. ....
"[Saddam] thinks he can kill one hundred thousand Israelis in a day with
biological weapons....' Students of Iraq and its government generally
agree that Saddam would like to project himself as leader of all the
Arabs, and that the only sure way to do that is by confronting Israel."
Seems to me, from what I read and hear, that those students are quite
right: That by "confronting Israel" via killing a hundred thousand
Israelis in a day, Saddam would win the hearts of the entire Arab world,
and of the Iranians, Pakistanis, Afghans and North Africans, too. (Does
Hamid Karzai, Washington's new darling, hate Jews? Has anyone asked him?)
I am sure Saddam himself believes this to be the case, and he is, with all
his endearing little character flaws, a man who knows something about the
Arab mentality.
It is not too difficult to envisage a plan by which the spoken grievances
of the Arabs against Israel could be addressed, and some compromise
struck. The chancelleries of the world (including Israel's) are in fact
full of such plans, drawn up with loving care by legions of diplomats,
experts, politicians, ambassadors, scholars and private do-gooders like my
reader, across decades of time. In an atmosphere of goodwill, and genuine
desire for a solution, the Palestine circle could be squared. You'd just
have to pull one of those plans down from the shelf, blow the dust off it,
and say: "Let's take this for a starting point, shall we?" The circle is
not going to be squared though, not by George W. Bush, not by my e-mail
pal with his elaborate scheme to shut down the settlements, not by another
round of "shuttle diplomacy," not by any amount of work on a "peace
process". It isn't going to be, because there is no goodwill, and no real
desire on the part of Israel's enemies for a solution. Or rather, there is
a widespread desire for only one solution, the extinction of Israel and
the driving out, or mass killing, of the Jews. That's what they want, the
Middle East; that's all they want.
I don't think we should be sending diplomats to the Middle East. I think
we should be sending teams of psychiatrists. This is a diseased culture, a
sick culture. Go back to that disgraceful recycling of the Blood Libel in
the Saudi press. Do you think anyone in that newspaper's readership
thought there was anything odd about it, anything deplorable about it,
anything untrue about it? I don't think so. To the newspaper readers of
Saudi Arabia, it was routine stuff, a statement of the obvious. If MEMRI
hadn't brought it to the attention of the civilized world, do you think
the Saudi authorities would have bothered about it? Do you think, even
now, they really have a clue what all the fuss is about? Of course the
Jews use gentile blood to make their cookies. Doesn't everyone know that?
We'd best pretend to be shocked, though. Those Americans are so-o-o
sensitive!
We are dealing here with people who are, not to put too fine a point on
it, nuts. The Arabs, the Iranians, the Pakis, the Libyans: they are nuts,
the great majority of them. Nuts. Not playing with a full deck. Not too
tightly wrapped. One brick short of a load, one coupon short of a toaster.
The smoke not going all the way up the chimney. Not quite 16 annas to the
rupee. Nuts.
Is there anything we can do about it? Only what Peggy Noonan told us to do
in her brilliant Wall Street Journal piece last week: Do what you do when
you find yourself in a roomful of glittering-eyed lunatics down at the
local funny farm. Keep smiling, talk softly, don't make any sudden moves,
keep nodding and smiling, and keep a tight hand on the stun gun in your
pocket. The Middle East contains three hundred million people, and most of
them are crazy as coots. Glad I don't live there. >>
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