Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Quran

Showing posts with label Quran. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Gharqad trees and other Arab conspiracy theories

You are probably familiar with the Islamic hadith, quoted in the Hamas charter:

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharqad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.

The Muhtawayat website is meant to be a reference site for Arabic readers where questions can be answered authoritatively. As there has been a lot of interest in Jews in Arabic media for the past couple of weeks, the site tackled the question, "Why does the Gharqad tree protect the Jews?"

Note how the question pre-supposes the magical properties of the gharqad tree as fact.

It is a purely Islamic legend, but that doesn't stop Muslims from assuming its truth. The article even says,

The Gharqad tree has cultural and religious importance for Jews, as in Jewish culture it is believed that the Gharqad tree represents a symbol of protection and shelter, and therefore they respect and preserve it as part of their cultural and religious heritage....

This article, and plenty of others, as well as videos, state as fact that Israeli Jews have planted thousands of gharqad trees because we believe they protect us.

It says that Yediot Aharonot reported in 2014 that Israel was planting gharqads as a temporary measure to protect a rail line that was exposed to rocket fire. (Israel did indeed plant trees, but no one said they were gharqads. )

In fact, no one quite knows what kind of tree it is (most people think it is the boxthorn.)

The thing is, this absurd legend is accepted as truth in the Muslim world. Even though the "proof" that Jews plant gharqads is not from Jewish sources but from Islamic sources, not one Muslim bothers to ask a Jew to verify the story about what Jews believe. (Just as Muslims believe that Jews worshipped Ezra the Scribe as the son of god, something against every tenet of Judaism, because the Quran says so.)

And these kinds of lies are the backbone of Arab and Muslim beliefs about Israel and Jews. Palestinians swear today that an Israeli airstrike hit the Al Ahli hospital, killing 500. They are 100% certain that Israel is waging genocide - even though, according to their own fictional numbers, fewer people have died than bombs dropped, a pretty inefficient genocide. They are absolutely convinced that the Temples never existed and Jews have never found any proof for them. They have written books "proving" that.

Any evidence that disprove the lies are themselves automatically assumed to be manufactured and forged by Jews. The world is one big conspiracy theory. The side that actually cares about accuracy is accused of being the liars; the side that actually is the victim of a campaign of attempted genocide is accused of genocide when defending themselves.

It's easy to laugh about the gharqad tree myth. But it is not so easy to laugh when you realize that myths like that are considered absolute truth by tens of millions, or hundreds of millions, of people. Fighting lies with truth sounds good in theory, but when you are dealing with people who are emotionally invested in the lies, one cannot win.

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Today's Arab antisemitism, part 2: "Jews tried to distort the Quran"

A video has spread through many Arabic websites today concerning an interview with the daughter of the 20th century's most famous Quran reciter, Mahmoud Khalil Al-Hussary of Egypt.

Yasmin al-Hussary was interviewed on the Al-Nas satellite channel on Sunday and she described her memories of her father.

The elder al-Hussary was known for his accurate renditions of the Quran.

During the interview Yasmin claimed that in his travels, her father came across Qurans written and distorted by Jews. He therefore fought these distortions by reciting it correctly.

Why would Jews bother rewriting the Quran and distort it? One does not need to ask such questions. Obviously, because they are Jews and they want to destroy Islam.

It is important to note that every year, printed Qurans are discovered that have mistakes in them, and they are destroyed and the incidents widely reported in Muslim media. I guess it was only a matter of time before the Jews were blamed for Quranic errors.

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Those who scream the most about religious hatred are the most guilty of religious hatred

From the Jerusalem Post/Reuters:

Muslim states including Iran and Pakistan on Tuesday said desecration of the Koran amounted to inciting religious hatred and called for accountability, as the UN rights body debated a contentious motion in the wake of a Koran burning in Sweden.

The motion, brought by Pakistan in response to last month's incident, seeks a report from the UN rights chief on the topic and calls on states to review their laws and plug gaps that may "impede the prevention and prosecution of acts and advocacy of religious hatred."

The debate highlighted rifts in the UN Human Rights Council between the OIC, a Muslim grouping, and Western members concerned about the motion's implications for free speech and challenges posed to long-held practices in rights protection.

Yes, Iran and Pakistan - two of the most antisemitic countries out there - are claiming to care so much about "religious hatred."

The country that sponsors the Holocaust Cartoon Contest is telling others that they shouldn't hurt Muslim feelings.

The country whose foreign minister went on CNN in 2021 and said in the context of Israel, "they are very influential people. I mean, they control media" is railing against anyone disrespecting Islam.

And here's a twofer: The Tehran Times, which is either officially or effectively state media, published earlier this year a Holocaust denial article written by a Pakistani political scientist and "pro-Palestine activist" Dr. Sabir Abu Maryam:

The Holocaust refers to those people belonging to the Jewish religion, about whom the Zionists have propagated to the world on the basis of lies and deception that they were brutally murdered by the German Nazis between the years 1933 and 1945.

Zionists called the Nazi killing of Jews a systematic state-sponsored massacre, and hence it is now referred to as the "Holocaust."

The Zionists, who were responsible for starting the First World War in the world, have always made efforts to destabilize governments through riots in different countries around the world. The fall of the Ottoman Caliphate was also an example of the Zionist rebellion.

After the First World War, there was a number of Jews in Germany. In the First World War, Germany had to suffer a lot, which was actually the Zionist movement under the guise of which the First World War was started. In fact, the Zionists wanted to burn the world in the fire of war and implement the plan of occupying Palestine only so that their influence in the future region would be established.

It is said that the German Nazis hated all these Jews and Zionists and this hatred may have been the reason why they asked the Jews to leave Germany.

These people are not in a position to tell anyone else about inciting religious hatred.

I myself do consider the deliberate burning of the Quran specifically to hurt Muslim feelings to be a hate crime. But everything depends on context, and the Muslim desire to make the entire world prohibit such acts is not out of concern for religious hatred but a means to exert control.

Especially when Palestinian Muslims already have a rich history of desecrating Jewish holy books, including handwritten Torahs - and the Muslim world remained silent.

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You just KNEW that Jews would be blamed for the Quran burning

From Iran's PressTV (no surprise here):

Following the desecration of the Holy Qur'an in Sweden, the leader of the Yemeni popular resistance movement Ansarullah says the West allows the perpetration of the heinous crime under the Zionist lobby's influence.

Abdul-Malik al-Houthi made the remarks on Tuesday, less than a week after two men stood outside the Swedish capital of Stockholm's central mosque and burned a copy of the holy book following a go-ahead given to them by a Swedish court.

Al-Houthi vehemently condemned Western countries' double standards vis-à-vis Muslims, saying acts of sacrilege against the Holy Qur'an amounted to insult against all prophets and holy books.

The Westerners refuse to expose Zionists' crimes, he said, adding, "This points to the Zionist lobby's influence [across the Western countries]."

"The lobby manipulates the West and infiltrates nations as it pleases. The Western world has, therefore, turned into a hotbed of the lobby's plots."

I admit I don't quite follow the logic. It seems that since the Jews control the world, then they are obviously responsible for an ex-Iraqi in Sweden choosing to burn the Quran.

It is interesting that even though the Houthi's slogan includes "Curse the Jews," there is very little coverage of their explicit antisemitism in Western media. Moreover, the Houthi's main Shiite allies, who claim to be only anti-Zionist and not antisemitic in the least, have absolutely nothing negative to say about the Houthi's explicit (and in this case barely implicit) Jew-hatred.

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Thoughts on the burning of the Quran in Sweden

On Wednesday, an Iraqi immigrant to Sweden tore up and burned a Quran after receiving permission to do so as an act of protest, A Swedish court ruled that burning the Quran was a legal expression of free speech and the police gave a permit for the action.

In response, the Muslim world is seething. Many Muslim-majority countries lodged protests against Sweden, and there were riots in Iraq as protesters attempted to break into the Swedish embassy.

In 1976, on Yom Kippur eve, a group of Arab youths - fueled by a false rumor that Jews had torn Qurans - stormed through the synagogue at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and tore up numerous Hebrew holy books as well as several handwritten Torahs which were ripped to shreds.

The desecration of the Torah is much, much worse than tearing or ripping a printed Quran. The best analogy to a ripped Quran would be to a torn up Chumash, a mass printed version of the Torah; tearing up a Torah is more like tearing up a handwritten Quran manuscript.

And Jewish prayer books, chumashim and other holy books are desecrated by Palestinian Arabs much more often than you know.

In 2007, I visited Samuel's Tomb in Israel, unaware that Arabs had rampaged through there the previous Friday night, tearing prayer books, heavily damaging the Torah ark and stealing a Torah.

Nearly all Israeli media ignored this incident. Because Arabs desecrating Jewish holy books and sites is simply not worth mentioning.

It was hardly a unique occurrence.

Also in 2007, Arabs burned down a synagogue near Doled, destroying Torah scrolls.

In 2009, Arabs raided a yeshiva in Homesh and destroyed many volumes of Chumash and Talmud.

In 2012, Arab youths were caught trying to burn books of Psalms at the Mount of Olives.

Holy books at the Tomb of Joseph have been destroyed by Arabs more than once.

Prayer books were burned in an attack at a Gush Etzion synagogue in 2016.

In May, 2021, Arabs torched synagogues in Lod.

In 2022, Arabs burned a Jewish center in Harasha and destroyed many holy books.

When has the Muslim world condemned these incidents against holy Jewish books - equivalent or far worse than the desecration of one of hundreds of millions of printed Qurans?

They haven't, and this weakens their pretense of outrage. If you demand that people respect your holy objects, then at a minimum you should do the same.

The Muslim outrage over Sweden is not about their disgust at a holy book being desecrated. It is an expression of Islamic supremacy.

They want the entire world to adhere to Muslim laws against blasphemy and that everyone should enshrine Islamic laws against destroying the Quran. These protests are just as much political as they are expressions of popular anger: they send a message that unless the West acts as Muslims demand, they can expect violence.

Any attempts to impose Muslim mores or beliefs on the world must be opposed wholeheartedly. It is an attack on everyone's freedom.

_____________________________________

That being said, Sweden's legal ruling allowing the burning was wrong.

From the narrow perspective of freedom of expression, yes, burning a Quran - just like burning a flag - is valid and should not be illegal. But there is another, far more important issue here.

The deliberate burning of the Quran is a hate crime. It was meant not as a message of freedom but as a direct attack on the sensibilities of Muslims worldwide. It was not an expression of criticism of Islam but an expression of hate against Islam and Muslims, by an apparent ex-Muslim.

And Sweden does have hate crime laws.

The Swedish Penal Code, chapter 16, section 8, says:

A person who, in a disseminated statement or communication, threatens or expresses contempt for a national, ethnic or other such group of persons with allusion to race, colour, national or ethnic origin or religious belief shall, be sentenced for agitation against a national or ethnic group to imprisonment for at most two years or, if the crime is petty, to a fine. (Law 1988:835)

The deliberate burning of a Quran is an expression of contempt for believing Muslims. As such, it should be illegal - and so should the deliberate burning of Jewish holy books.

The protester could make the same point by burning a photo of a Quran. Destroying symbols of a religion or other protected group is criticism; destroying actual objects of importance to those groups is hate.

That is where the line should be drawn between freedom of expression and purposeful hate.

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Sweden's Jewish community condemns Quran burning incident

Turkey's Anadolu Agency reports:

"Those who burn books will in the end burn people," Jewish and Muslim communities in Sweden have warned, quoting famous German Jewish author Heinrich Heine following recent burnings of the Muslim holy book, the Quran.

In a reference to book burnings in Nazi Germany, the Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities and the AMANAH Muslim Jewish Partnership of Trust said in a joint statement on Wednesday that book burning often indicates the beginning of the normalization of hatred towards a group in society.

"Historically against Jews, now against Muslims," said the statement, warning that racists and extremists are once again "allowed to abuse democracy and Freedom of Speech in order to normalize hate against one of the religious minorities in Sweden, by burning Quran."

Drawing attention to the intensified attacks on Jewish and Muslim people in the country, they expressed concern.

There are two strange things about this story.

One is that, while there is certainly plenty of right-wing antisemitism in Sweden, a great deal of it is fueled by the immigrant Muslim community there. I hope that behind the scenes of Jewish-Muslim cooperation against hate, the Jewish community is not sweeping Muslim antisemitism under the rug.

The other is that I cannot find this story in any Swedish media. In fact, the only place it is being reported is Turkey. I have no idea why.

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Normalization? Egyptian Muftis translate part of the Quran into Hebrew

Arabic media is filled with dozens of mentions of this story:

Dr. Mohamed Mukhtar Gomaa, Minister of Awqaf, confirmed that the ministry has finished translating 20 chapters of the Holy Qur’an into Hebrew, and added that the aim of the translation into Hebrew is that there are Jewish orientalists who translated the Qur’an and there are big mistakes that lead to deviation in the meaning, so it was necessary to translate into Hebrew..

It is interesting that even though the story is widely reported, I am not seeing anyone accusing the Egyptian Waqf of "normalizing" with Israel because of this translation. Islamic scholars are especially sensitive to any misrepresentations of the Quran.

The most famous translation of the Quran into Hebrew was by Professor Uri Rubin, who was a scholar at the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Tel Aviv University. This abstract of an Iranian paper about his Quranic translations would explain why the Muslims might respect Rubin's scholarship but would not accept it as a translation that they would trust:

The Hebrew translation of the Quran by Uri Rubin, (1944-2021) was first published in 2005. In 2016, the translator after 11 years, published its edited version. The importance of this translation, regardless of linguistic debates, is the existence of a lot of footnotes under the verses; the content of some of them will definitely help interpretive- Intertextuality discussions, but in some cases the footnotes have conflict with the Muslim views. In fact, the final text is something beyond translation, but a commentary.

The content of the footnotes can be categorized in four main parts: I. Purely explanatory texts for literal explanation of the meanings of verses; II. Referring to exegetical views and disagreements of commentators; III. Referral to similar verses in the text of the Qur'an; IV. Referring to the similar concepts in Torah, and Midrash. The present article focuses on this new version and its changes in two subjects of basic issues and its references to pre-Islamic texts.

At any rate, it is clear that traditionalist Muslim scholars cannot allow any Quranic translation that includes commentary showing how it corrupted earlier Jewish texts to be considered an accurate translation, and why they would want to counter it.

Among other things, Rubin specialized in finding Jewish sources for Quranic episodes. It is well known that nearly all Quranic descriptions of Biblical events are based on Talmudic and Midrashic sources.

I looked up one of Rubin's papers about the famous Quranic story of sinning Jews, who gathered fish on the Sabbath, turning into apes and pigs. Rubin attempts (not very convincingly, IMHO) to tie the "apes" story with Midrashic interpretations of the Biblical story of God punishing the children of Israel with excessive amounts of quail, claiming that the description of the meat coming out of the sinners' noses is akin to turning them into animals, even though their sin had nothing to do with the Sabbath. (Since the quail came from the sea, and the Jews complained about a lack of meat and fish, he links the quail to the fish in the Quranic story.)

One of his footnotes, to a 1902 German paper on the topic, seems a little more likely an explanation to me:

Hartwig Hirschfeld, New Researches into the Composition and Exegesis of the Qoran (London, 1902), 108. Cf. Reynolds, The Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 114 n. 339. According to Hirschfeld, the Quranic story is “a mistaken rendition” of the biblical episode about the manna that became worms after the Children of Israel had disobeyed Moses by saving it for the morrow (Exodus 16:20). Hirschfeld posits that in the Quranic version, the people who left the manna overnight became insects themselves – qirāda (vermin). He maintains that the compilers of the Quran eventually preferred qirada (apes) to qirāda.

I did find another Hebrew translation of the Quran online, I do not know if it is based on Rubin or on another; there have been Jordanian and Saudi translations in recent years.

The earliest Hebrew translation of the Quran was published in 1857 by a German scholar. I was surprised to see that the lengthy introduction was written in "Rashi" script, I was unaware that this script was ever used for anything non-sacred.

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Arabic op-ed admits: Anger at UAE is based on hating Jews, not because anyone is "pro-Palestinian"

Al-Omah, an Egypt-based pan-Muslim news site, has a most revealing op-ed about the Israel/UAE accord that shows how systemic Arab antisemitism is.

The article, by Dr. Abdul Latif, is so dripping with anger at the UAE for partnering with Jews that it doesn't even mention the UAE by name.

It is entitled, "Loyalty to the Jews is the epitome of hypocrisy." In this case, the word "hypocrisy" is not a mere value judgment but a specific Quranic term describing someone who appears on the outside to be a Muslim but who is actively working to destroy the Muslim world from the inside.

Latif employs two well-known Quranic verses:

Quran 5:51:

O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you - then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.

Quran 4:145:

Indeed, the hypocrites will be in the lowest depths of the Fire - and never will you find for them a helper.

Dr. Latif is saying that UAE leaders who cooperate with Jews will go to the worst depths of Hell, beyond the spaces reserved for mere unbelievers.

Remarkably, Latif doesn't even pretend to care about Palestinians in his criticism of the Emiratis, which is the usual fig-leaf used by Arab critics of the deal. His enmity is based purely on old fashioned Muslim Jew-hatred. Cooperating with Jews on any level is a major sin and those who do it are condemned to hellfire.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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