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The long Arab-Muslim war against the Jewish people goes on and on... but the Jews are winning.
We need to acknowledge that the conflict is an ongoing expression of Arab-Muslim religious hatred toward Jews as manifested since the time of Muhammad and embedded within the Koran and the Hadiths. Further, it is promoted and prolonged by western-progressive hostility toward Israel, and thus toward Jews, more generally, veiled within profoundly hypocritical notions of social justice and universal human rights.
Some will speak of a semi-historical / semi-mythological Islamic "Golden Age" wherein ascending Islam led the world in science and was amicable toward non-Muslims, including the Jewish minority.
This is false.
Islam, historically, has most often not been friendly toward non-Muslims and their scientific contributions, aside from the advancement of Algebra, have been negligible for many centuries.
The truth is that long before the rise of the Western Enlightenment - long before Galileo pointed his little refracting telescope at Venus and proved the heliocentric view of the solar system - the Islamic world was a civilizational leader.
It conquered vast territories from Christians and Jews and others throughout the Middle East, suppressed those around them, and made a few scientific advances during a period of human stupidity, backwardness, and blindness.
Islam, however, seems to have nowhere to go but down and one major reason for this is the ongoing and violent hatred toward the Jewish minority and all other infidels or apostates or "wrong" kinds of Muslims. Islam, after all, beats on nobody so much as it beats on its own.
What I would argue is that if Islam, in general, and the Islamic states, in particular, would stop harping on the fact that the Jewish people have independence on the small historic Jewish homeland, perhaps Middle Eastern Arabs could begin the process of moving into the modern world. They could - in my fondest imagination - give up old hatreds in favor of cultivating interest in the sciences and arts, building businesses and advancing local economies, bolstering the well-being of the world rather than seeking to tear it down through the Jihad.
{That would be nice.}
But the fact of the matter is that the Jews have basically won the Long Arab War.
The Long Arab War Against the Jews in the Middle East has taken the following phases in its contemporary iteration.
The Phases of the Long Arab War:
Phase 1, 1920 - 1947: Riots and Massacres
Phase 2, November 1947 - April 1948: The Civil War in Palestine
Phase 3, 1948 - 1973: Conventional Warfare
Phase 4, 1964 - Present: The Terror War
Phase 5, 1975 - Present: The Delegitimization Effort
Given the fact that the Jews in that part of the world represent a tiny minority and their Arab-Muslim enemies represent a far larger majority - and given the fact that the EU, the UN, and the United States, under the Obama administration, is hostile to that small minority - it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that the Jewish people are losing the Long War.
The fact of the matter, however, is that the Jews have survived all their historical enemies and the Arab-Muslim world, while a far larger demographic in the Middle East, is a mess. The Muslims of the Middle East suppressed and abused the Jewish minority there, not to mention the beleaguered Christians, from the time of Muhammad until the fall of the Ottoman Empire early in the twentieth-century following World War I. They conquered the Jews and they conquered the entirety of eastern Christendom and now honestly believe that such imperial conquests give them moral rights to the land that they plundered and continue to occupy and harass indigenous populations throughout the area.
However, from that moment until this the indigenous Jews have consolidated their position economically, scientifically, diplomatically, and militarily. Furthermore, they did so while under constant violent pressure from their inhospitable neighbors and while enduring the snide contempt of the European states who generally side with the Arabs against the Jews.
This is a remarkable accomplishment and it should be celebrated.
As has often been remarked, if you were to go back in time and tell a Jew in 1916 that by 2016 a reconstituted Israel would be among the most powerful nations on the planet he would certainly have thought you bonkers.
This is, of course, not to suggest that the long war is over because the Jews have defeated our enemies. We have not, and we will not any time soon, for the simple reason that our numbers are far too few and our enemies are far too many.
Nonetheless, when looking at contemporary Arab-Muslim hostility toward the Jewish people we need to teach them that they are beat.
The sooner that they realize this the better for everyone.
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.
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