Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, July 14, 2005

November 1933: Arabs use Koran for political purposes

In 1933, the Palestinian Arabs wanted to pressure the British not to allow Jews to immigrate to the area. They chose to use mass demonstrations, as a follow-up to the 1929 riots. The British didn't want to see a repeat of 1929 and made such demonstrations illegal. The Arabs held them anyway, in Jerusalem and Jaffa, and there were a number of injuries that were greatly exaggerated by Arab newspapers.

Anyway, as the following article shows, a month later the Arabs used Islam as an excuse to have the demonstrations. They claimed that Britain, by making their anti-Jewish demonstrations illegal, was infringing on their religious freedom! And they were using Western standards of "freedom of religion" to push their own purely political (and, incidently, bigoted) agenda!

This is perhaps one of the first times that Arabs who despise Western ideals used those same ideals as weapons against the West.

Things have not changed much since 1933.

Cross-posted to Palestine Post-ings.

Reuters' editorial quality shines through

Apparently, Reuters in England doesn't know English. Either that, or pieces of land have turned murderous.

Here was the headline:

Gaza kills Israeli woman, Palestinians clash

I guess it was just too hard for the "news" agency to say that Palestinians killed an Israeli.

NYT cluelessness

A jaw-dropper:

LEEDS, England, July 13 - In the gritty, working-class suburbs of Leeds, Shahzad Tanweer, 22, was the fun-loving, rich kid of the neighborhood, the son of a savvy, Mercedes-driving shop owner.

Hasib Hussain, 18, who lived nearby, was the impressionable one, a charming young man who had been drifting into a reckless teenage life until religion set him straight.

And Mohamed Sadique Khan, 30, was the grown-up one, with a wife and a baby daughter at home. The three men used to work out together at the Hardy Street mosque in Beeston, the Leeds neighborhood that two of the suspects called home.

As the identities of these suicide bombing suspects slowly emerged Wednesday behind a thicket of disbelief, the question that nobody in these neighborhoods could answer was this: What kind of radical force threw the three men together, with another bomber, to commit such a heinous crime against their country, the one they rooted for in soccer matches, and their people?

Obviously it couldn't have been the religion that set them straight, could it?

45% of terror attacks during "lull" from Fatah

The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center publishes a bi-weekly review of all Palestinian terror attacks since the "cease-fire" was announced. Here was an interesting statistic: Mahmoud Abbas' own Fatah organization was responsible for far more terror attacks than Islamic Jihad or Hamas.

So, which is it: that he cannot control the "militants," or that he doesn't want to? After all - these guys are on his payroll. This shows yet another lie of his, that somehow by paying the terrorists to be "policement" they would stop their attacks.

Distribution of total terrorist attacks perpetrated since the
Sharm el-Sheikh summit by terrorist organization
(estimate based on claims of responsibility)

Every rabbi has his price

Working late nights and browsing JBlogs I came across this at mentalblog in between the GoogleAds for Jews for Jesus and Third Temple supporters:

(Apologies for diappointing those who thought I was writing an article showing how all rabbis of persuasion X are hypocritical scum. There are plenty of other blogs for that.)

Why Muslim leaders don't truly condemn Islamic terrorism

In the aftermath of the London bombings there have been a number of excellent articles in the British press that take an honest look at the role of Islam in modern terrorism. This long one is also excellent, and although he parrots the "tiny minority of extremists" line, the author raises some very good points. Here is an excerpt:

There seem to be two broad reasons why many Muslim leaders appear unable or unwilling to break absolutely with the teachings that give cover to violence. The first is that their religion is much more literal and much more political than modern Christianity. Its Prophet was a political and military leader.

The faith Mohammed taught does not just hope that the world will become Muslim. It wants all human society and politics to be governed by religious law: it draws no distinction between the secular and religious sphere (except to condemn the secular). Therefore, Muslim leaders find it very difficult to resist the hotheads who say that Sharia - the divine law - should be imposed wherever possible.

In addition, the religion is absolute in its attitude to particular bits of territory. It is forbidden, for example, that any other religion be practised in the Arabian peninsula, because that land is considered sacred to Islam. Therefore, it is hard for a "moderate" to oppose the second-class citizenship of Christians or Jews in Muslim lands, or to say that "infidels" fighting in Muslim countries should not be murdered - even when they are his fellow citizens in a Western country.

When someone like bin Laden says that Islam should confront the "Cross-worshippers" and the "Zionists", he is making a claim in which politics and religion dangerously reinforce one another - a claim which most Muslims might not like, but which most of their leaders cannot find quite the right words to resist.

The second reason is that the leaders are frightened. In private conversations with the moderates, one is always told that they are under "enormous pressure", that they risk losing control of their own people, and therefore they cannot say very fierce things against the extremists. One must accept that this pressure exists, which only goes to show how serious the problem is.

The Bishop of Stepney, say, would not have to look over his shoulder before he dared to condemn Christian suicide bombers (if there were any). But if his friend Mohammed Abdul Bari wants to condemn Muslim ones in Israel, then his life - or certainly his career - might be threatened.

The Jews (Michael Ledeen, National Review Online)

An interesting article on British anti-semitism's role in the proliferation of terrorists in the UK.

It was widely noted, most passionately by the Iraqi blogger Hammorabi, that when Tony Blair reminded the House of Commons that many countries had been scourged by the terrorists in recent years, he omitted Iraq from the list. His speechwriters had Iraq in a different part of their database; Iraqis weren't victims of terrorism in the same way as Brits, Americans, Kenyans, and Indonesians. One's instinct is to let it go as an oversight, but there was another country missing from the list, and this case was somewhat less widely noted: Israel. And at this point, one is forced to do some thinking. What do these two countries have in common, that they should both be ignored in the British government's response to the London attacks?

Fake Palestinian terror "condemnation" #1473

Yet again, the Palestinians attack and kill Jewish civilians in a terror attack.

Yet again, the head fo the PA pretends to "condemn" the attack - but a closer look at his words shows that he has no moral qualms with Jews being blown up, it's just that it was done at the wrong time.

And yet again, the world media prints this "condemnation" as if the head of the PA is anything less than a pathological, habitual liar.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday condemned a suicide bombing that killed two Israeli women in a seaside city hours earlier, using unusually strong language.

'We condemn this terrorist attack. It's a crime against the Palestinian people,' he said. 'Those traitors are working against the Palestinian interest. There is no rational man who can do those things on the eve of the Israeli withdrawal from 22 settlements,' Abbas said.

'They did a stupid thing that they should be punished for,' he told reporters."

Sometimes you need to believe Al Qaeda

After every major terror attack, pundits try to come up with reasons that Al Qaeda decided to choose this place, this time, this date; they try to relate the bombings to other recent world events like Iraq or "Zionist aggression,", and in general they try to make it appear like it has a semi-rational cause.

Here is a reminder for everyone. The following is the entire text of the fatwa that Bin Laden and his pals issued in 1998, who they issued it against ("Jews and Crusaders"), and their deranged "reasons." It is a blueprint for worldwide Jihad that "explains" the London bombings as well as every other Al Qaeda terror attack since then. It shows that nothing will stop them besides their utter destruction.

Keep in mind that if the "tiny minority" of Muslims who take this fatwa seriously is "only" 10%, that is still a hundred million potential Jihadis worldwide.

And in fact, the number of Muslims who support Bin Laden is significantly higher than 10% in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, Jordan, - and even one third of Muslim Americans think that the US is engaged in a "war on Islam," which is Bin Laden's entire justification for his fatwa. And of course, those somewhat sympathetic to Bin Laden are a much higher percentage, ensuring that Islam will not solve the problem of genocidal terrorist Islamists in the foreseeable future.

Isn't it time that the West takes these explicit threats at face value rather than continually try to spin the unspinnable? The battle lines have been drawn since 1998 and the war is now seven years old. Too bad most of the West doesn't realize it, even today.

Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders

World Islamic Front Statement
23 February 1998 Shaykh Usamah Bin-Muhammad Bin-Ladin
Ayman al-Zawahiri, amir of the Jihad Group in Egypt
Abu-Yasir Rifa'i Ahmad Taha, Egyptian Islamic Group
Shaykh Mir Hamzah, secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan
Fazlur Rahman, amir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh

Praise be to Allah, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)"; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said: I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped, Allah who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.

The Arabian Peninsula has never -- since Allah made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas -- been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food. In the light of the grave situation and the lack of support, we and you are obliged to discuss current events, and we should all agree on how to settle the matter. No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries. This was revealed by Imam Bin-Qadamah in "Al- Mughni," Imam al-Kisa'i in "Al-Bada'i," al-Qurtubi in his interpretation, and the shaykh of al-Islam in his books, where he said: "As for the fighting to repulse [an enemy], it is aimed at defending sanctity and religion, and it is a duty as agreed [by the ulema]. Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life."

On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah." This is in addition to the words of Almighty Allah: "And why should ye not fight in the cause of Allah and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated (and oppressed)? -- women and children, whose cry is: 'Our Lord, rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from thee one who will help!'"

We -- with Allah's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.

Almighty Allah said: "O ye who believe, give your response to Allah and His Apostle, when He calleth you to that which will give you life. And know that Allah cometh between a man and his heart, and that it is He to whom ye shall all be gathered."

Almighty Allah also says: "O ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of Allah, ye cling so heavily to the earth! Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place; but Him ye would not harm in the least. For Allah hath power over all things."

Almighty Allah also says: "So lose no heart, nor fall into despair. For ye must gain mastery if ye are true in faith."

The Mufti and the Arab refugees

I've been looking through the pages of the Palestine Post to find contemporaneous information about the Arab refugees from Palestine. There are many articles about the issue, I touched upon it specifically for the Arabs of Haifa over here.

Among Zionists, it is an article of faith that the Arab leaders encouraged Palestinian Arabs to leave, and far more left from the urging and rumors caused by Arabs than from anything the Jews did. In the future I hope to put together an article of the number of times that Jews encouraged Palestinian Arabs to stay where they were.

It becomes apparent upon researching the issue that there were a specific set of Arab leaders who consistently encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to flee, but not the entire Arab world - especially not the leaders of Arab countries who were expected to host these thousands of undesirables. It was, in fact, the members of the Arab Higher Committee, which was led by the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, who consistently led the Palestinian Arabs to ruin because of their own narrow political goals. And the Arabs at the time, especially the Palestinian Arabs, knew this quite well.

First, here are the players' positions on the refugee issue in August, 1948:

Now, here is a good analysis of the Mufti's position and motives:

So the Mufti and the Arab Higher Committee once again showed that their interests lied not in their people but only in their own power. Today's Palestinian leadership, from Arafat to Abbas, has shown remarkably similar characteristics. Reading the vitriol from the Mufti in the 40's it is striking how similar it is to the same idiocy spewed out today, and how little it has to do with bettering the lives of actual Palestinian Arabs.

Which was well-known even in 1941 when the Mufti was partying with his pal Adolf: (December 31, 1941)

Crossposted to Palestine Post-ings.

Operation Divest Terror

The website is a little shrill but the idea makes sense. If the many anti-Israel divestment campaigns gain so much traction, shouldn't anti-terror divestment campaigns work as well? The fact is that in the end, it is Western money that funds terror through various investments in countries that support terror either explicitly or implicitly.

And here is a link to the only terror-free mutual fund there is.

The Islamist fifth column in England

Great and scary article in the CSM. Excerpts:

Since the bombings, the media and Muslims have been at pains to explain that most of the country's 2 million Muslims are peaceful. "The Muslim community in Britain has a long history and is enormously diverse," says Anas al-Tikriti, a member of the Muslim Association of Britain.

But the attacks are turning attention to the increasing numbers of young British Muslims (hundreds of thousands? -EoZ) who are rejecting their parents' traditional culture in favor of a radical and expansionist Islam. This strikingly Western version of Islam combines an independence of thought with a contempt for established traditional scholarship and a theme of teenage rebellion.

"Getting involved in radical Islam is an emotional thing rather than a rational decision," says Abdul-Rahman al-Helbawi, a Muslim prayer leader. "And it's not a matter of intelligence or education - a lot of these radicals in Britain are very well-educated."

In Dalston market in north-east London on Thursday, "Abdullah," a Muslim watch-mender and evangelist, was in a pugnacious mood.

"We don't need to fight. We are taking over!" he said. "We are here to bring civilization to the West. England does not belong to the English people, it belongs to God."

Hours after the bombings, Helbawi logged onto an Internet chat room run by British Muslim extremists. "They were all congratulating each other on the attacks," he said. "It was crazy. They were talking about how they had won a great victory over the infidels, as if they had just come back from a battle."

Although so far, there is no evidence that British Muslims were involved in the bombs, there is little doubt that many British Muslims feel that Britain "deserved" the attacks for supporting the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The hypocrisy of Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi

Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement and the head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, told www.islamonline.net [9] that he condemned the bombings in London: "We were dumbfounded by the grave news which surprised us, and all the world today, about the bombings that took place in the city of London, that killed dozens and wounded hundreds of innocent people who attacked no one and had committed no crime to remove the immunity of their blood."

Al-Qaradhawi described the bombings as "cruel and barbaric black actions that Islam harshly condemns." He also said, "[Even] In an official war, when state armies battle face to face, Islam does not permit the killing of women, children, elders, priests, farmers and merchants, and those like them, who are non-combatants, and whom nowadays we call civilians."

Al-Qaradhawi offered his condolences to the families of the victims, and sent a special letter of condolence to the mayor of London, which stated: "We express our condolences to our dear friend, London Mayor Ken Livingstone, a man of justice who always defends Arab and Muslim causes."
------------------
And concerning other types of attacks against civilians, he says:
------------------

SHEIKH YUSEF AL-QARADAWI
(Qatar University)
TRANSLATION:
It's not suicide, it is martyrdom in the name of God, Islamic theologians and jurisprudents have debated this issue. Referring to it as a form of jihad, under the title of jeopardising the life of the mujahideen. It is allowed to jeopardise your soul and cross the path of the enemy and be killed.

MARSHALL:
In the mind of Sheikh Yusuf Al- Qaradawi, that view prevails even though women and children are often the innocent victims.

SHEIKH YUSEF AL-QARADAWI
TRANSLATION:
Israeli women are not like women in our society because Israeli women are militarised. Secondly, I consider this type of martyrdom operation as indication of justice of Allah almighty. Allah is just. Through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak what the strong do not possess and that is the ability to turn their bodies into bombs like the Palestinians do.

Haveil Havalim #28 is out, and something about Islamic womens wear

This blog is mentioned in HH for this post.

As usual, it is an excellent collection of articles around the Jewish blogosphere, this time hosted by Soccer Dad.

For the two fans out there that I have, you can submit any articles you think are particularly noteworthy to this page. Unfortunately I haven't had the time recently to post really noteworthy articles, although I thought that this one was a pretty good find.

Another tidbit about Islam courtesy of Daf Yomi: The custom of Arab women covering their faces completely except for their eyes predates Islam by at least a few centuries, as a Mishnah discusses this in BT Shabbos 65A. Which is interesting, at least to me; both because it indicates that wearing a chador is not an Islamic innovation, but the idea is much older than the mid-'70s as is implied by the excellent Amir Taheri. (Re-reading the article he is speaking about a very specific kind of hijab, so he is strictly correct, but the implication that I took from the article was that major face-covering was a newer innovation.)

UK-Sun: Israel not victim of Islamic terror

Thanks to Media Backspin for posting this map in the Sun (UK) of major terror attacks by Islamic terrorists in recent years:

So they do recognize that it is "Islamic" terror. They do recognize that it is a worldwide phenomenon.

But no matter what happens, they will not acknowledge that the hundreds of terror attacks against Israel fit the same definition. Somehow, they still think that terror attacks against Jews in Israel are not terror but a legitimate freedom fighter movement - even though Hamas' and Islamic Jihad's philosophy is indistinguishable from that of Al Qaeda.

Interestingly, synagogues in London are built like fortresses to foil terror attacks. But there is still the cognitive dissonance between Arabs wanting to kill Jews in Britain (bad) and Arabs wanting to kill Jews in Israel (justifiable.)

Genteel Jew-hatred is alive and well in England.