Friday, November 24, 2017
Melanie Phillips: Worried about Jew-baiters? Give it straight back to them
In the Diaspora, people are aghast at rampant antisemitism and Israel-bashing and dismayed over the failure to halt its apparently inexorable rise.The Expanding Umbrella of Anti-Semitism
In Britain, the parliamentary group on antisemitism heard evidence last week that anti-Jewish bigotry is now entrenched in many British universities. Student officers have used the Twitter hashtag #Jew while discussing wealth, and the swastika is now seen on campus as a “casual symbol of fun.”
In the US earlier this year, researchers from Tel Aviv University found a 45 percent increase on campus of “all forms” of antisemitism. At McGill University in Canada, three board members of the University’s Students Society were removed from their appointments over their alleged “Jewish conflict of interest” in a battle about BDS.
Much valiant effort is going into fighting this scourge.
It’s not getting anywhere, though, because the overall strategy is wrong. This is because it’s based on defending Israel against demonization and Jewish students against intimidation. It needs urgently to move from defense to attack.
Accusations of antisemitism can easily be brushed aside as hysterical shroud-waving. Evidence of Israel’s humanitarian acts towards Syrians, the moral uprightness of the IDF, Palestinian rejectionism and so on is accurate but ineffective.
This is because it’s being presented on ground defined by Israel’s enemies. To engage with their calumnies is to grant these an inescapable validity. Israel’s defenders should be reframing the whole issue. Instead of trying to rebrand Israel, they need to rebrand its enemies.
The Israel-bashers delegitimize Israel through lies and libels. Its defenders need to delegitimize them through facts and truths. Israel’s defenders should not be trying to rid it of its pariah status. They should be turning its attackers into pariahs instead.
Islam did not trick Western nations; the West brought itself to the embrace of Islam.Martin Kramer: Sadat and Begin: The Peacemakers
The center of the original Islamic message seems to have been to convert, kill or drive away Christians and Jews, rather than to meet the spiritual needs of Muslims. To this day, the central preaching of Islam still appears to be an intolerance of non-Muslims.
What made America great is being discarded together with America's imperfect past, without acknowledging that America has taken -- and is still taking -- steps to correct its injustices, as many Middle Eastern nations have not.
There is a good possibility that, with the impact of Islam -- and the replacement of the active values of personal responsibility and "pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps" by the passive values of victimhood for blackmailing, redistribution and abdication to "government" -- the West's humanistic values, which welcomed Islam in the first place, may not survive.
It has been 38 years since the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, most famously evoked by the three-way handshake on the White House lawn that changed the Middle East.
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat put war behind Israel and Egypt, and in so doing, ended the Israeli-Arab conflict. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues, and so too does the Israeli-Iranian struggle.
But Israeli-Egyptian peace put an end to the destructive battlefield wars between Israel and Arab states of the kind that erupted in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. Since the famous handshake among Begin, Sadat and Jimmy Carter, there has been no battlefield war between Israel and a conventional Arab army. And Egypt and Israel now have been at peace longer than they were at war.
It has often been said of Begin and Sadat that the two men were like oil and water. “The two men were totally incompatible,” recalled Carter, describing the Camp David negotiations that produced the treaty. “There was intense perturbation between them, shouting, banging on the tables, stalking out of the rooms. So for the next seven days, they never saw each other. And so we negotiated with them isolated from one another.”
Yet in a briefing paper prepared for the US team prior to the Camp David negotiations, these sentences appear: “Both Begin and Sadat have evidenced similar personal and national objectives throughout their familiar transformation from underground fighter to political leader. Despite their often vituperative comments, each should be able to recognize the other as a politician basically capable of change, compromise, and commitment.”
Lyn Julius: Celebrate and commemorate impact on Jews from Arab countries
2017 has been quite a year for anniversaries: we’ve celebrated the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, and 50 years since Israel’s lightning victory in the Six Day War and the reunification of Jerusalem. On 29 November looms another cause for celebration: the 70th anniversary of the approval of the UN Partition plan, dividing Palestine west of the Jordan river into a Jewish and an Arab state.Tom Gross on Jews from the Arab world
Shimon Sasson, 85, remembers his excitement at hearing the UN vote over a crackly radio at home in Aden, a British crown colony at the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula with a Jewish population of about 5,000. But elation soon turned to horror as Arabs began burning Jews’ cars, stores, a school, businesses and homes. After three days of rioting, 87 Jews were dead – most shot by a unit of Bedouin troops under British command. Instead of protecting the Jews, the troops had fired at them and had eagerly joined the looters.
As a child in 1947, Joseph Howard recalls that an Arab neighbour told him not to go to school on the day that the riots broke out. ‘There were not riots, but murder,’ he says. Twenty years later, Joseph was caught up in equally fierce riots, when Adenites, furious at Israel’s 1967 defeat of the Arabs, vented their wrath on the few hundred Jews still living in the port city. The Jews were saved by two men: Abraham Marks, headmaster of the Jewish school, who shepherded them to safety in the Victoria Hotel, and Barnett Janner, who arranged for the entire Jewish community to be evacuated.
The destruction was repeated across the Arab world – today only Morocco and Tunisia have communities of any size – and these live under the shadow of Islamist terrorism.
While we must never stop celebrating milestones such as the Balfour Declaration and the Partition Plan, the disastrous reprisals suffered by the ancient Jewish communities of the Arab and Muslim world must also never be forgotten.
Launching "Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight" by Lyn Julius
'An Israeli stamp on a cereal packet could get you jailed'
In order to leave all Jewish families were forced to sign a document saying that if they did not return in three months all their assets were surrendered to the Iraqi state. Dangoor remembers his father saying his freedom was worth more than anything he left behind.UM Students Behind Anti-Israel Resolution: ‘Jews Are Not a Nation’
David Khalastchi carried on in Iraq despite worsening persecution against the Jewish community making it almost impossible to live in the country. Eventually in 1967 after having his passport confiscated for three years he managed to secure one through an intelligence contact and flee over the border with his wife and daughter.
Of the many tragedies he was forced to witness in exile, one occasion from 1969 stands out for David Khalastchi when the young Ba’athist Saddam Hussein hanged 13 people, nine of them Jewish, as supposed traitors to the regime in front of a jubilant crowd.
“They were people who had nothing to do with anything,” he says with sorrow.
Khalastchi and Dangoor are proud of their adopted homeland and have raised families here. The latter was a pupil at (now closed) Carmel College, once known as the Jewish Eton, and helped his father establish a multi-million pound property business in London.
Students at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (UM) supporting an anti-Israel student government resolution were caught on hidden camera rejecting the concept of Jewish nationhood and denying a Jewish student the right to participate in a discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Call for the Immediate Resignation of Rutgers President Barchi
In one of the exchanges in the footage obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, students agree that Palestinian activists should engage in a "re-evaluation of the past nonviolent stance."
In another conversation, Ahmed Ismail, a member of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), the group that led the coalition of clubs supporting the resolution, is seen having an extended argument with an unidentified male and female about the existence of a relationship between Judaism and Israel.
"Jews are not a nation," he said repeatedly. "There's no nation called ‘Judaism,'" Ismail said. "Where on the map is there a country called ‘Jews'?"
"Zionism is a dirty political ideology," said Ismail, co-founder of the Michigan Muscle Club, which endorsed the SAFE motion. Zionism, a term coined in the nineteenth century, refers to the goal of rebuilding a Jewish state in the land of Israel. There are political, religious, and cultural forms of Zionism.
Ismail reinforced his comments in a phone call with the Free Beacon, saying that Zionism was the Jewish version of the Ku Klux Klan or ISIS.
Yet, despite the tireless work of the Jewish community and its allies, including that of CAMERA students Miriam and Austin, President Robert Barchi has turned a blind eye to the Jewish community, defending the employment of all three professors. Barchi has shockingly gone so far as to question The Algemeiner, the Jewish newspaper that has provided significant coverage on the disturbing sentiments of both faculty members.Jewish Free School launches investigation into teacher’s alleged claim to sixth formers about “collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists”
At a town hall meeting sponsored by the Rutgers student government last Thursday, President Barchi addressed the ongoing controversies surrounding Chikindas, Puar, and Adi, noting that “the one thing that is common to all of these is that they were all brought forward by The Algemeiner.”
Responding to President Barchi, Slomich made the following statement:
“After Oberlin College President Krislov wrongfully defended Professor Joy Karega after she shared anti-Semitic posts on social media last year, he appropriately stepped down.
Rutgers University President Barchi has repeatedly defended anti-semitism similar to those of Karega’s by three of his own faculty members. Not only has Professor Barchi defended these shocking actions, which targets a significant portion of Rutgers students, he also has expressed anti-Semitic rhetoric of his own, making disparaging remarks about The Algemeiner, the Jewish newspaper which has provided extensive coverage of these anti-Semitic incidents.
President Barchi’s continual defense of these anti-Semitic faculty members, in addition to his own apparent prejudice, leave no other option other than Barchi stepping down immediately to allow Rutgers students the justice and safety they deserve.”
To sign the petition created by Rutgers students for action against Professor Chikindas, click here.
To sign the petition created by UN Watch for action against Professor Adi, click here.
Ethan Saunders, a teacher at the Jewish Free School (JFS), is reportedly facing an inquiry following comments he is alleged to have made during a guest speaker’s lecture to sixth form pupils on Monday.Yisrael Medad: Dear JFS Pupils
The comments were reportedly made during the question-and-answer part of a lecture on left-wing antisemitism by renowned sociologist Dr David Hirsh, who had been invited to speak to fifty sixth formers about his new book, Contemporary Left Antisemitism.
After telling students about comments made by figures such as Ken Livingstone and Professor Moshe Machover in which they compared Zionists to Nazis, Dr Hirsh told the JC that “a teacher stood up at the back and, in a fairly kind of belligerent way, said: ‘I don’t agree with anything you said.’ He said that I hadn’t told the whole story to the students; it was a pretty clear allegation not only that I kind of got it wrong, but that I was speaking in bad faith. He said: ‘You haven’t explained to the students about the Ha’avara Agreement and the real collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists. You haven’t explained that it was Israel that was responsible for nurturing Hamas at the beginning, and Hamas is a creature of Israel.’” Dr Hirsh said that Mr Saunders also said that Ken Livingstone was “correct” to say that “Hitler was supporting Zionism” by agreeing to the Ha’avara Agreement, which allowed Jews to emigrate from Nazi Germany to what would become Israel, on condition that they forfeited most of their assets to the Nazis.
The notion that Adolf Hitler was in some way supporting the right of Jewish self-determination in Israel, despite having railed against it, it extremely offensive. The Ha’avara Agreement was nothing more than the formal robbery of German Jews fleeing for their lives.
Dear pupils,IsraellyCool: Algemeiner CEO and Editor-In-Chief Dovid Efune Wrongly Takes Credit For Exposing Michael Chikindas
I have read the Jewish Chronicle item on Ethan Saunders' intervention of the talk by Dr. Hirsh. I am not sure he is this Saunders (whose account info suggests we read Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry).
It seems, in his challenge, he said that Hirsh hadn't "told the whole truth..." or "hadn’t explained that Begin was a terrorist and about Sabra and Shatila". There was also this: "‘You haven’t explained to the students about the Ha’avara Agreement and the real collaboration between the Nazis and the Zionists. ‘You haven’t explained that it was Israel who was responsible for nurturing Hamas at the beginning, and Hamas is a creature of Israel’.”
As I wasn't there, I am treading on loose soil but the sound of that conversation is all too familiar. It is that of a voice of a radical and even extreme anti-Zionist or, to be fair, a politically leftist progressive Jew who rejects Zionism, prefers socialism, will champion the Diaspora over a Jewish national home. Of course, he could be psychotic in his hatred for his own Jewish identity.
Let me be short, as you may have some homework to do or after-school sports to engage in.
Israellycool readers will already be familiar with antisemitic professor Michael Chikindas, who I exposed on here a month ago. The story was subsequently picked up by others, including Jewish publication The Algemeiner, and even the mainstream media. And while the prospects of this Jew hater losing his job is not looking promising, I am proud of my role in bringing this to public attention.BBC News goes from not reporting car rammings as terror to not reporting at all
I work hard to expose the Jew haters as part of my “anti-Zionist-not-antisemite” series, and it takes a personal toll. Unlike Canary Mission, who go to great lengths to remain anonymous while exposing the Jew haters, my real identity is no secret. So as a result of my work, I have been targeted by the antisemites, who try to take vengeance on me, including spreading libels about me (even to my employer), making fun of my wife’s cancer, and, in Chikindas’ case, accusing me of hacking.
So forgive me for taking offense and making a big deal about others trying to take credit for my work (presumably for the honor or even to attract donors). Others like Dov Efune, CEO and Editor-In-Chief of The Algemeiner:
President Barchi rightly noted that the controversies facing the three members of his faculty staff originated with exposés published by The Algemeiner – but his goal wasn’t to offer a vote of thanks to Shiri Moshe, our reputable journalist who brought these vital issues to the public attention. Instead, his intention was clearly to disparage, undermine and delegitimize our reporting. And on what basis? On the basis that the stories had originated in a Jewish newspaper.
Efune knows the truth because I reminded him on Twitter and in the comments to his report. (I want to point out that their journalist Shiri Moshe has been careful to credit me in her reports on the saga, and I very much appreciate and respect this).
A week after that double attack took place, it still has not received any BBC coverage whatsoever.Facebook Refuses to Remove Antisemitic Calls to Violence
If readers are perhaps inclined to conclude that the absence of BBC reporting is attributable to the fact that the attack fortunately did not result in fatalities, it is worth noting that last month the corporation did report a non-fatal car-ramming in Canada under the headline “Edmonton attack: Refugee arrested over ‘terror’ incident“, with readers being told that:
“Canadians are again shaken by a suspected terror incident that is reminiscent of recent vehicle attacks in European cities like Barcelona, London, and Berlin.”
On the other hand, visitors to the BBC News website’s Middle East page throughout the entire past week have been able to find a report produced by no fewer than three BBC employees on the topic of what some people on Twitter said about a photograph posted on another social media platform.
Ex-Spanish Official Condemned for Insinuating Jews Might Be Behind Recent Death of Country’s Attorney General
A prominent US-based Jewish human rights group has expressed outrage over an ex-Spanish official’s insinuation that Jews might have been responsible for the recent death of his country’s attorney general, José Manuel Maza, during a trip to Buenos Aires.ADL demands action from Poland over hotel with no Jews allowed sign
The 66-year-old Maza passed away on Saturday after being taken to a hospital in the Argentine capital with a kidney infection. He was in Buenos Aires to attend an international law conference.
Maza had been leading the prosecution of 20 Catalan politicians following the recent independence referendum in the autonomous region of northeastern Spain.
In an Alerta Digital interview published on Monday, a predecessor of Maza in the attorney general position, Ramiro Grau, stated, “If we join the interest of some states for Catalonia to be constituted as a new country, for example Israel — as much as its president has said otherwise — and the existence of a large colony of Jews in Argentina, there are those who claim that the real controllers are the Jews, it would not be a bad idea to do an autopsy to check and verify the real causes of his death.”
Dr. Shimon Samuels — the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s director for international relations — characterized Grau’s comment as “an extreme example of obsessive antisemitism” and called on Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy “to condemn Grau and take measures to strip him of his honors and state pension as the price for his hatemongering.”
The Anti-Defamation League has urged Polish authorities to investigate and take action against a hotel displaying a sign outside saying no Jews allowed.Polish police seize ‘No Jews allowed’ banner from hotel
“Entry forbidden to Jews, Commies, and all thieves and traitors of Poland,” said the large red sign, photographed recently by Polish media hanging outside a hostel in Cesarzowice, just outside the major western Polish city of Wroclaw.
“The ADL is urging Polish authorities to investigate the illegal and anti-Semitic banner at the hostel and take appropriate action against those responsible,” the Jewish organization said in a statement.
Wroclaw attracted attention in November 2015 when Piotr Rybak, a leader of the extremist National Radical Camp, burned an effigy of an Orthodox Jew at an anti-immigrant demonstration in one of the city’s main squares.
The National Radical Camp was also one of the co-organizers and leaders of a 60,000 person march on November 11, Poland’s Independence Day, which included banners that read “White Europe” and “Clean Blood.”
Polish police seized a banner reading “no Jews, speculators and traitors allowed” from the entrance to a hotel that reportedly is owned by an ultranationalist who is jailed for anti-Semitic hate speech.France’s Socialist Party Shows the Right Way to Respond to Antisemitism
Officers were sent to Dom Polski near the western city of Wroclaw Thursday night following the surfacing of images on social networks showing the banner on the gate to the Dom Polski hotel in the eastern suburb of Cesarzowice, Paweł Petrykowski, a spokesperson for the police department of the Lower Silesia Province, told TVP, Poland’s national public broadcaster.
The hotel, which featured the banner since spring, is owned by Piotr Rybak, an ultranationalist who earlier this year was sentenced to three months in prison for burning an effigy of a Jew at a 2015 demonstration in Wroclaw against Muslim immigration, Cesarzowic Mayor Jolanta Szulc told TVP.
It has been a long time since I’ve heard anyone say anything positive about the French Socialist Party (PS), once the giant of that country’s post-war politics, but trounced into fifth place in this year’s presidential election, with just 6 percent of the vote going to its candidate.Looking to Increase Israeli Ventures, India Bids for Offshore Exploration Rights in Mediterranean
But I’m nonetheless going to throw caution to the wind, and offer my modest congratulations to the PS for its November 21 decision to expel Gérard Filoche, the party grandee at the center of a row over a dismally transparent antisemitic tweet from his account, for violating its “core values.”
Filoche, who began his career as a Trotskyist, is — or was — a leader of the left wing of the PS, and like most European far left politicians, never endeared himself to the local Jewish community. During the war in Gaza in August 2014, at a time when one of many pro-Palestinian demonstrations evolved into a riot outside a Paris synagogue, Filoche was issuing wringing denunciations of Israel’s very legitimacy, declaring that the Jewish state was founded upon “terrorism and colonization.”
As several academic surveys during the last decade or so have demonstrated, individuals who hold these sorts of views about Israel are far more likely to be antisemitic, and Filoche is no exception. On November 17, he described French President Emmanuel Macron on Twitter as a “sale type” (“dirty guy.”) Accompanying that remark was a photomontage that showed Macron wearing a Nazi armband, with the swastika exchanged for a dollar sign. Immediately behind Macron, towering over him from the shadows, were images of three influential Jews — economist Jacques Attali, investor Patrick Drahi and banker Jacob Rothschild — who were themselves flanked by the American and Israeli flags. Not very subtle, then.
A consortium of Indian companies has applied for an Israeli Energy Ministry tender for offshore exploration licenses, signaling another step in the warming ties between Israel and India.Saved in a musical ‘Noah’s Ark,’ pre-Holocaust Jewish music performed again live
The tender, which closed last week, offered exploration licenses for 24 of the 69 potential areas designated for oil and natural gas exploration in Israel’s economic waters.
The Greek energy giant Energean Oil & Gas also submitted a bid. The Indian consortium comprises companies with an estimated combined worth of $90 billion, employing some 100,000 people. The tender’s results are expected to be released in the coming weeks.
India is Israel’s 10th-largest trade partner worldwide and its second-largest trade partner in Asia. In 2016, trade between Israel and India amounted to $4 billion.
In April, Israel Aerospace Industries inked agreements amounting to $2 billion with India, including a $1.6 billion contract to deliver a medium-range surface-to-air missile defense system and a $400 million deal for a long-range surface-to-air missile system. But this week, Indian media reported that the South Asian country cancelled a $525 million missile deal with Israel.
The Semer Records archive of Jewish music was lost to history for more than half a century. Created during years of escalating Nazi terror, the records were destroyed during the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938.Where Maccabees overthrew idolatry, early Georgian Christian mosaic uncovered
The trove was forgotten for decades until a German musicologist scoured the globe for pieces of the fragile shellac discs onto which thousands of Jewish songs, and secular music performed by Jews, were captured on the eve of the Holocaust. A box set of 11 CDs was published in 2002 and an ensemble of musicians currently tours the globe performing the archive’s material.
Last week at Tufts University, the Berlin-based Semer Project performed selections from the restored archive in a concert called “Rescued Treasure.” From Yiddish lullabies to Ukrainian drinking songs, the material shed light on Jews in conflict with each other, and their rapidly shifting societies.
The project’s journey, from birth in the 1930s to rebirth in the 2000s, was fraught.
Beginning in 1932, Hirsch Lewin recorded an eclectic variety of Jewish musicians onto 78 rpm shellac discs. One of Berlin’s top gramophone specialists, the Lithuanian-born Lewin’s project evolved in response to the Nazis’ early ban on Jews performing in public. His time capsule of pre-Holocaust music was largely destroyed during the regime’s Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, when 250 metal plates with 4,500 recordings were smashed to pieces.
Lewin’s careful assembly of the archive was an act of resistance against Nazi plans to eliminate Jewish culture, as well as remove Jews from the Kultur of the German nation. In addition to compiling traditional Jewish music, Lewin invited performers to record music banned by the Nazis.
The first evidence of a Georgian Christian presence on the shores of the Holy Land was uncovered during August excavations in the ancient city of Ashdod-Yam. Dating to the Byzantine period, a Greek inscription was found on the floor of a 1,500-year-old church, which mentions the date of 292 according to the Georgian calendar.Ritual Scribe from Israel Featured at Washington Bible Museum
The Ashdod-Yam inscription is the earliest known use of the Georgian calendar in the world — including in Georgia. Interestingly, according to the excavation’s lead archaeologists, modern Ashdod is now home to the largest community of Jews of Georgian origin.
“Testimony to the presence of the actual Georgians in the Land of Israel as far back as the Byzantine period has been found dozens of kilometers from Ashdod – in Jerusalem and its surroundings. But this is the first time that a Georgian church or monastery has been discovered on the Israeli coast,” said the archaeologists.
The large, colorful mosaic was uncovered at Ashdod-Yam during a third season of excavations under the direction of Dr. Alexander Fantalkin, from Tel Aviv University’s Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations Department, in cooperation with Prof. Angelika Berlejung of Leipzig University. This find was discovered during an enlarged excavation in a cooperative project which also included Dr. Balbina Bäbler of the University of Göttingen and Israel Antiquities Authority Ashkelon district archaeologist Sa’ar Ganor.
Rabbi Eliezer Adam is writing a Sefer Torah.Watch: Jew and Arab dance together in Huwara
But it’s hard to say when he’ll be able to finish, since people keep interrupting him.
These people are visitors to the brand-new Museum of the Bible in Washington, where Adam will be sitting for the next year. The Beit Shemesh resident is a live exhibit of sorts in the History of the Bible wing of the eight-story museum located in the heart of the US capital.
“For every 20 minutes of writing, I have another at least half an hour of talking,” Adam told The Jerusalem Post as he sat behind his desk in the museum on Monday. “People stop and ask, and they start by asking questions about the Sefer Torah, and then it leads to other things.”
The museum opened on Friday to much fanfare, speculation and media hype in an opening ceremony attended by Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer, Tourism Minister Yariv Levin and Jewish Federations of North America rabbinic leader Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt.
While the sprawling, 40,000-square-meter museum, created and funded by Steve Green, the conservative Evangelical heir to the Hobby Lobby retail chain, is ostensibly a tribute to the Old Testament and New Testament alike, it is hard not to notice a distinctive Jewish flair and a strong affinity for the modern State of Israel.
A new video released by the Boomerang organization shows how, despite the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, there is not necessarily much that separates Jews and Arabs on a personal level.
Boomerang is a public relations organization established by Ezri Tubi, the former spokesman of the Samaria community of Yitzhar. The group aims to bypass media bias and document what life in Judea and Samaria is really like.
In his latest video, Tubi enters a Nargila shop in the Arab village of Huwara in Samaria. He sits with the owner of the shop and the two engage in friendly conversation.
“I pray to God, you pray too,” the Nargila shop owner tells Tubi. “You wear a hat [as a God-fearing person], you wear tzitzit, and you pray, and believe there’s something above us. So why do [our respective nations] have problems [with each other]? he asks Tubi.
“Maybe because we each believe Allah wants something else from us,” Tubi suggests.
Later, the two drink coffee together, and even dance together in the street.
