Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, May 25, 2007

Muslims lying about how many there are in the US

A very nice article from David Harris that shows how consistently the media is willing to parrot Muslim claims of 6-7 million Muslims in America when in fact the number is much, much lower - closer to 2 million according to a recent respected study.

Another example of how Palestinian Arabs think

This editorial was printed in "Palestine Today" (Arabic) in reaction to Mahmoud Abbas calling Qassam fire ridiculous and counterproductive. It shows the depravity and mindset of these terrorist supporters. And this is not a Hamas newspaper (autotranslated):

Mahmoud Abbas resumed use of language that serve the Zionist entity, which does not serve the interest of our forces and, when stopping to describe Palestinian Rocket again as ridiculous, in an implicit reference to the Palestinian resistance, in an attempt to minimize the amount and value in an affront to the feelings of the Palestinians who see valuable resistance means defending the dignity and themselves.

Mr. Abbas's position is very resistance, which sees a futile, and had previously described one of the martyrdom operations carried out by the Islamic Jihad, stating that it (the menial), and this naturally to the media, which documented the video, as documented in sound and picture vocabulary yesterday.

Interviews with Olmert, what can be classified, and Embrace Embrace again, let alone conduct a long and tortuous negotiations, which is still in Eugena maze behind the other, all these matters are not considered absurd from the standpoint of Mahmoud Abbas, but Palestinians requested a abandon their resistance, and proven, causing panic in the hearts of Zionists and at all levels.

The position of Abbas came here in favor of the Zionist entity, because he did not recall the size of the suffering of the Palestinian people, and would like to see assassinations and physical liquidation daily, and all drive the cease-fire, and throwing down their arms and surrender Palestinians resisting the Zionist entity.

Betting on the settlement reported what the Palestinian people, and to Embrace Olmert km of prisoners liberated from the constraints, but what is the position of Abbas began defense of the Zionist position, and came at a time when the Zionist massacres are continuing, and interaction within the military institution especially in front of the continued Zionist missiles fall, that made a ghost town of Sderot.

Once again the position of Mahmoud Abbas in favor of the Zionist entity, does not take into account the other hand, the magnitude of the tragedy, which requires the logic of the need to retaliate and to deter the enemy.

Missiles are not ridiculous, but negotiations are useless, because it limits the minimum finding umbrella of settlement expansion, while Rocket, made the area around the Gaza unsafe areas, where no future for settlement.

Rockets opportunity and the means necessary to deter use to protect our people in the West, but the arms of the Zionists came only disasters.

The amount of fantasy that ordinary Palestinian Arabs can maintain simultaneously is staggering.

They honestly think that Qassams are deterring Israel from hurting them more.
They look at these rockets as a huge ego boost and they hang their very dignity on their ability to force Jews from their homes.
They say explicitly that terror is better than peace.
They don't care about their own people's welfare as long as they can hurt the "Zionist entity."

How anyone can think that it is possible to negotiate with people who have no grasp of reality to begin with?

A Palestinian man runs with an injured boy after an Israeli missile strike on a Hamas base after they gathered at the scene of an earlier airstrike in Nusseirat, central Gaza Strip, Friday May 25, 2007. An Israeli airstrike hit a Hamas training center south of Gaza City on Friday, destroying the compound and lightly injuring at least three, witnesses said. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

A Palestinian evacuates a wounded boy after an Israeli air strike at Hamas Executive Force position in the central Gaza strip May 25, 2007. Israeli aircraft fired missiles into the central Gaza Strip on Friday, hitting a position used by the ruling Hamas Islamist movement, residents said. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa (GAZA)

A Palestinian man runs with an injured boy after an Israeli missile strike on a Hamas base after they gathered at the scene of an earlier airstrike on area in Nusseirat, central Gaza Strip, Friday , May 25, 2007. An Israeli airstrike hit a Hamas training center south of Gaza City on Friday, destroying the compound and lightly injuring at least three, witnesses said. (AP Photo/Majed Hamdan)

Nusseirat Refugee Camp, -: A Palestinian man carries a wounded boy as he flees following an Israeli air strike on Hamas's Executive Force building in Nusseirat refugee camp in the centre of the Gaza strip, 25 May 2007. Warplanes pounded the Gaza Strip for a ninth day today as Palestinians continued to fire rockets into Israel despite a call from Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas for a truce. AFP PHOTO/MAHMUD HAMS (Photo credit should read MAHMUD HAMS/AFP/Getty Images)

Abandoning Gaza gets retroactively dumber every day

Besides the facts that since Israel abandoned Gaza, hundreds of Palestinian Arabs have killed each other; Israelis who lived in Gaza are still living in trailers and have been all but abandoned by their government; the Gaza economy has gone to hell; the greenhouses Israel left behind were destroyed; the only growing industries are tunnel digging and Qassam building; PalArabs that can afford to are emigrating in huge numbers; PalArabs living in Gaza are now ruled by terrorists who are proud of it as opposed to the terrorists who were slightly embarrassed by it beforehand - forgetting all of that:

When Israel left Gaza it left a trillion cubic feet of natural gas for Hamas to screw up:

The militant Hamas movement has launched a stinging attack on BG Group and vowed to block a potential £2 billion deal being brokered by the company to supply Palestinian gas to Israel.
The Islamist group told The Times that any agreement would be equivalent to a modern-day “Balfour Declaration” – the British Government statement that formally approved the creation of an Israeli homeland in 1917.
Ziad Thatha, the Hamas economic minister in the Palestinian Government, said: “BG Group is an embarrassment to the Palestinian people.
“When a company sells Palestinian gas to the Zionist occupation, it is similar to acts of theft the Israelis are practising against our land every day.”

The comments threaten to overshadow key negotiations BG Group hoped would lead to the development of the Gaza Marine gas field it discovered seven years ago. Talks over a 15-year contract are due to begin next week and the Israeli Foreign Ministry said it was keen to conclude a deal “as soon as possible”.
The Gaza Marine field is Palestine’s only sovereign natural resource and its development could generate £500 million for the Palestinian economy in royalties from BG Group. The gas would meet 10 per cent of Israel’s annual energy requirements. BG Group said that its priority was thrashing out a deal acceptable to the Israeli and Palestinian authorities. “We need a bilateral agreement for this project to get across the line,” a spokesman said.
However, Hamas controls a majority of the seats in the Palestinian Government. The more moderate Fatah Party reiterated yesterday that it wanted guarantees over how cash payments would be made before signing off any deal.
Mohammad Mustafa, the economic adviser to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, said: “We hope that we will reach an understanding and remaining obstacles will be overcome.”

To Hamas, there is no distinction between Israeli buying things and Israel stealing things. Which explains a lot.

Two day round-up

During the two days of Shavuot (in the Diaspora):

Two men tied up two more men and set a cafeteria on fire in Gaza;
A 57-year old was killed and his son injured in Gaza when more anonymous gunmen shot their car;
Three Fatah men were injured from gunfire in Gaza;
A Hamas fighter injured during the Fatah/Hamas fighting died and hundreds attended his funeral.
A Fatah Fatwa against Hamas, saying that Hamas acts too Jewish.

So, by PalArab standards, it was a pretty quiet two days.

The self-death count for the year rises to 268.

The 23-week winning streak that Palestinian Arabs had in outkilling the IDF when their own people were victims was finally ended, with Israel winning, 32-20. To put this in context, during the same week some 77 Palestinian Arabs and others were killed in Lebanon by other Arabs.

Also, another difference between Ma'an News in English and Arabic: besides referring to Palestinian Arabs killed by Israel as "martyrs," the Arabic service also refers to Israeli towns being bombarded by Qassams in the Negev that are within the Green Line as "settlements." This is by far the best journalism that Palestinian Arabs are exposed to, and it is filled with lies.
(Background can be found here. )

UPDATE:

citizen killed Samih Hussein Massoud Shawahneh 45 years killed and five others were injured after a family quarrel of families in the village of Ras Tireh south of Qalqilya.

269.

UPDATE 2: 1 killed, 15 injured in Fatah/Hamas clashes. 270.
UPDATE 3: Man in Gaza found tortured to death. 271.

"Cease fire" update

During a funeral for a Hamas terror leader on Monday there was some cross-factional cease-fire shooting that didn't get reported anywhere. Today, one of those shot, a fifty year old man who was also a member of Hamas' Al-Qassam Brigades, died from his wounds. (IMEMC seems to indicate that the shooting was last Monday, not yesterday.)

Yesterday there was also a cease-fire shooting of two Hamas students in Khan Younis and one died last night, and their "university" library building was set on fire.

Our PalArab self-death count climbs to 266 for 2007.

Meanwhile, on the other front...

The Western media has reluctantly started mentioning Qassam attacks on the Western Negev and Sderot, usually in articles that are headlined about how Israel is bombing poor overcrowded starving Gazans. But you will never see articles like these mentioned:

An explosive device has been found by soldiers on Tuesday in a Palestinian car at a checkpoint near the West Bank town of Qalqiliya.
Sappers defused the device safely.

A pipe bomb was found during an IDF scan of the Jenin area on Monday afternoon. The pipe bomb was detonated under a controlled detonation, and not one was injured.

Every single day the IDF finds bombs built in the West Bank for the purpose of killing Jews. Almost every day someone is caught at a checkpoint (often women and children) with weapons.

In other words, those horrible repressive IDF actions that "human rights" organizations spend so much time condemning are saving lives every day. It would seem that "human rights" and saving lives are incompatible according to these defenders of terror.

Leader of Coptic church calls Jews "Christ-killers"

From Religious Intelligence (h/t Zionist Spy):

Pope Shenouda in anti-Semitic outburst
Monday, 21st May 2007. 10:55am

By: George Conger.

THE LEADER of the Coptic Church, Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria told Egyptian television last month the Western Churches were wrong to exonerate Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and criticised recent statements apologising for Christian anti-Semitism.

In an interview with Dream 2 TV broadcast on April 8, Shenouda was asked if the Coptic Church would follow the lead of the Western Christian churches. Shenouda responded that the Christian Churches had “done nothing that warrants an apology,” adding he believed the apologies were being “done for appearance’s sake.”

Asked whether Jews were “Christ-killers”, responsible for the crucifixion, Shenouda stated, “The New Testament says that they are,” and asked rhetorically whether the Vatican was “against the teachings of the New Testament?”

Shenouda stated he had banned Copts from visiting Israel for fear they will “be influenced by the Israeli media, and we will not be able to prevent this. Who knows what ideas they will return with?”

This is not the first Christian leader in the Middle East who has been infected with an extreme case of dhimmitude, where the ones actually oppressing his people are not criticized at all - see our Dhimmi of the Year 2006 and his runner up.

UPDATE: A commenter at Discarded Lies, Frank IBC, points out the resemblance between our esteemed Coptic pope and a more famous icon of royalty:

Reuters reports an Islamic miracle

Female Palestinian suicide bombers attend a news conference in Gaza May 21, 2007. The bombers, members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, declared that they are ready to blow themselves up in attacks against the Israeli army if it attacks Gaza. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem (GAZA)

Wow. They look really good for being suicide bombers! I wonder how they managed to keep themselves together.

How many lies can you find in this article?

From Ma'an:

Bethlehem – Ma'an – The political advisor of the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmad Yousif, on Monday refused to halt the launching of homemade projectiles at Israeli towns.

The resumption of projectile launching was the Palestinian factions' response to Israeli violations of the ceasefire agreement.

Yousif depicted the projectiles being hurled at Israeli targets as "fireworks which alert the world that there can be no solution except forcing Israel to halt its hostilities."

Yousif told Ma'an that he does not expect Hamas to cease launching projectiles as long as Israeli aggression and the international embargo on the Palestinian people continue.

He considers the homemade projectiles part of the Palestinian right to self-defence. He said, "They represent a message which says 'no to siege and no hostility' and they do not contain nuclear heads."

Yousif condemned those who call for an end to the launching of projectiles, especially, he said, in light of the Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip. He added, "The Palestinian government exerted efforts and convinced the factions to cease fire, yet the Israelis did not stick to that and so the projectiles will continue."

Well, he's right when he says that the Qassams don't contain nuclear heads. Got to give him some credit.

Woman killed in Sderot rocket attack

YNet reports that Sderot residents' luck finally ran out. A woman was killed in her car and a man injured.

Will we finally see Israel killing Hamas leaders?

There have been 10 rockets today.

Time to break out the playing cards

In a nod to the famous playing cards that the US Army gave its soldiers when looking for Saddam's top henchmen, Ma'ariv published their own facsimiles of cards representing the major terrorists that Israel may have on its list for assassination.

(Of course, the Arab newspaper that published this took it seriously.)

Morning roundup

Another PalArab who was shot during the "unfortunate events" died - after the imperialistic Israelis failed to save him in the Zionist hospital he was transfered to. The PalArab self-death count for the year climbs to 263.

2 Hamas members were critically injured from more unfortunate gunfire during the "truce." (Perhaps when Israel is doing the shooting, it is "fortunate?" )

At least 3 Qassams this morning towards the western Negev. (JPost: 4.)

Paltoday reports that some members of Knesset from Labor, Likud and Kadima suggest compensating Sderot residents retroactively from the time of disengagement from taxes collected for the PA that Israel has been withholding. An excellent idea, although all terror victims should be able to get compensated from that ever growing fund. The idea that Israel is still bound by all the agreements it made with an entity that continuously tries to kill and kidnap her citizens is ludicrous.

UPDATE: One of the Hamas members shot this morning has died. Fatah denied it had anything to do with it so the fiction of the cease fire remains. 264.

UPDATE 2: A 17-year old youth was killed when a "mysterious object" he was holding exploded in Rafah. 265.

The religion of peace

From the Jerusalem Post:

According to sources close to the two parties, several mosques in the West Bank and Gaza Strip witnessed fistfights and screaming matches over the past few days between Hamas and Fatah supporters.
The same preachers who until recently were attacking Israel, the Jews and the "Crusaders" in the US and Europe, have now shifted their anger toward PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction.
According to PA security sources, some of the Hamas-affiliated preachers exploited Friday prayers to call for the killing of Fatah political leaders and security commanders. In many cases, worshipers walked out of the mosques in protest against what they described as "incitement." The sources claimed that Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal was kicked out of a mosque near Damascus after worshipers held him responsible for the internecine fighting in the Gaza Strip.
Fatah spokesmen accused Hamas of exploiting the mosques to launch a wave of incitement against their leaders.
"This is not the first time Hamas has used the mosques to call for killing Palestinians," said Jamal Nazzal, a Fatah representative in the West Bank. "We must put an end to the incitement in the mosques."
Fatah officials are particularly enraged by the harsh rhetoric that many preachers have begun using when referring to the Hamas-Fatah clashes. These preachers are calling the PA security forces the "Lahad Army," a reference to the former pro-Israel South Lebanon Army headed by Gen. Antoine Lahad.
The preachers have also been denouncing Abbas and his top aides in Fatah as a bunch of corrupt infidels who are conspiring with the US and Israel against Islam.
The tension reached its peak on Friday, when thousands of worshipers stormed out of mosques after the preachers launched scathing attacks on Fatah.
In the town of Deir el-Balah in the southern Gaza Strip, preacher Maher Huli was forced to run away from a local mosque after being attacked by dozens of worshipers.
Huli enraged many mosque-goers after declaring that all the PA and Fatah members who were killed in the clashes with Hamas would "end up in hell." He also claimed that Fatah and Israel had been jointly bombing the Hamas-controlled Islamic University in Gaza City.
Hamas militiamen who rushed to the scene assaulted a number of worshipers and fired into the air to disperse the angry crowd.
A similar incident occurred in another mosque in the town, where preacher Ahmed Nakla was also forced to flee the mosque after being attacked by worshipers. In his sermon, Nakla had called for killing members of the PA security forces under the pretext that they were implementing a "Zionist-American plot to eliminate Hamas."
The worst incident took place in the Beersheva Mosque in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, where at least five people were wounded in a melee that erupted after the preacher accused Fatah leaders of high treason.
Witnesses quoted the Hamas preacher as saying that some of the Fatah leaders were "not even fit to serve as shoe shiners." The remarks were directed especially against Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Azzam and PA National Security Adviser Muhammad Dahlan.

Sounds like houses of worship in any religion. No difference at all.

A Psychological History of Palestinian Arabs - Part 1

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13

Understanding history is difficult unless one understands the psyches of the major players in history. This applies not only to individuals but to groups as well. Members of relatively homogeneous groups tend to think similarly and knowing how they think is a critical piece of the puzzle in understanding how they act.

Unfortunately, historians generally do not put primary emphasis on the state of mind of the subjects of their histories. Events are listed and discussed but not the psychology of the people involved. There are a number of reasons for this: historians are trained to deal with facts and to discount conjecture, and there is no greater conjecture than to guess how someone thinks. The reluctance to look at history through this prism is perhaps also due to an understandable reluctance to place entire groups of people into a single bucket, as this seems to be too close to racism. Paradoxically, today's Western mindset where the disgust of racism is paramount may be hurting the understanding of the mindsets of other cultures and historical periods.

In starting this series of posts, I am engaging in some hubris. I am not a historian, nor a psychologist, nor a demographer, nor a sociologist, and I'm not even a professional writer. To make matters worse, I do have biases that I freely admit. Even with these shortcomings, I hope that I can contribute in a small way to the understanding of today's issues revolving around the Arab-Israeli conflict. Especially in this case, there is really no dividing line between history and current events, and too much history glibly assumes that all people think the same way - an error that has great ramifications in our time as well.

In the wake of the 1948 birth of the state of Israel came the creation of a wholly new people, known today as "Palestinians." They became a people as a result of a confluence of events that, in the end, brought them together and gave them a shared identity. This essay will attempt to show how these Arabs who originally came from all over the Middle East ended up perceiving themselves as a separate people, how their Arab mindset became the specifically Palestinian Arab mindset, and ultimately how the Palestinian Arabs became who they are today.

One other note: leaders of societies do not necessarily reflect the thinking of their people, and the Palestinian Arabs have had many leaders who acted in ways that were counterproductive to their people as a whole. This essay is not as concerned with the psychology of the leaders nearly as much as with the Palestinian Arabs themselves, as a group.

----
The Arab psyche in the early days of the Zionist movement

The psychology of the Arabs of Palestine in the decades before Israel's founding is indistinguishable from that of all Arabs. This is because, to the Arabs, Palestine was just another Arab district in the larger Arab world, usually associated with southern Syria. While the Arab world was hardly unified, from the average Arab man's viewpoint there was little difference between one area and another, except for some minor cultural differences.

We can divide the major components of the Arab psyche into three major groups, each of which include some corollaries and subgroups. The major groups are Honor/Shame, Community and Unity, and Islam.

Honor/Shame
The most important and overriding component of the Arab psyche is that of honor, and its flip-side of shame. Although there is some controversy about this, I posit that there is nothing inherently better or worse in an honor/shame culture versus the "guilt" culture that typifies the Western psyche. The emotions of shame or guilt can be constructive or destructive depending on how the individual deals with it. And outside circumstances can accentuate and amplify these attributes. People in the Far East exhibit the same honor/shame viewpoint although they exhibit it somewhat differently than Arabs do.

In brief, in an honor/shame society, more emphasis is placed on how the individual is perceived by others rather than how he views himself. The appearance of wrongdoing is far more upsetting than actual wrongdoing, and the respect of others is more prized than self-respect.

Honor/shame can be divided into two complementary components: seeking honor and avoiding shame.

The idea of honor as a positive incentive is critically important. The Arab man in the early 20^th century, as with the Arab men in previous centuries, aspired as individuals to be honorable, and in a part of the world where there was little chance for real social or political advancement, this desire would be concentrated on the idea of raising a family honorably. The basic requirement of supporting a family is to make money.

The disincentive of shame is spoken about much more nowadays than in the past, as the phenomena of so-called "honor killings" get some measure of publicity. The fear of being shamed predates Islam and has always been a very powerful concept.

Almost every other major feature of the Arab mindset in general, and the Palestinian Arab mindset in particular, can be traced back to understanding the overwhelming importance the Arab people ascribe to honor and shame. But there are others that need to be understood.

Community and unity
Like other peoples, Arabs build and take pride in their communities. But through the first half of the twentieth century, they did not feel as much allegiance to their individual countries as they did towards the Arab "nation" as a whole. This is understandable as national boundaries were somewhat arbitrarily decided by the West and were ignored when possible.

The commonality that Arabs throughout the region had dwarfed any possible differences. Most shared the same religion, all spoke the same language, almost all shared a distrust of outsiders and particularly Westerners. Not that there weren't conflicts within the Arab world but on a personal level the differences were quite small.

Ties to a particular region were somewhat tenuous. When the need arose, Arabs were not reluctant to move elsewhere. Perhaps it was the influence of the Bedouins but the Arabs have been historically much more nomadic within the sphere of Arabia than most other peoples. In those times, Arabism was a much stronger tie between people than Islam was.

Islam
While there were many Christian and Jewish Arabs, the vast majority have been Muslim, and the relationship between Islam and the Arab world has been a two-way street. Islam itself has been very influenced by Arab customs (such as women covering their faces, which is mentioned as an Arab habit in the Talmud that predates Islam) but Arab culture and thinking have likewise been influenced by Islam. It is difficult to know which influences the other more. Examples of Arab cultural habits that probably at least partly a result of Islam would include charity, misogyny and a level of supremacy.

Each of the three main categories include other aspects of personality and mindsets.

The Honor/Shame mentality spawns an entire host of feelings and potential actions. One of the corollaries to Arab pride and sense of honor is the importance of manliness. Masculinity is functionally equivalent to honor in the Arab world, as honor is all about how one appears and not so much about how one thinks. The man is the breadwinner of his household, the defender of his people, the public face of his family and the leader of his community. Aggressiveness is an attribute of masculinity but it is not a necessity to prove oneself through aggression. It can be exhibited through macho posturing but this is by no means a necessity. Quietly supporting one's family is also an attribute of manliness. Unfortunately, misogyny is often a result of this attribute as well.

Conversely, the fear of being emasculated is a strong component of the Arab psyche.

Another possible outcome of the honor/shame mentality is dishonesty. In cases where telling the truth can cause disgrace, it is preferable to lie. The incentive to lie increases with how high a position one occupies because any mistake he makes could cause a commensurate amount of disgrace.

Another aspect of the Palestinian Arab personality that can be ascribed to honor is itinerancy. Arabs tended to wander from place to place within the Arab nation. The purpose would usually be financial, and quite justified - to be able to make enough money to raise a family in an honorable fashion. For most of the history of the Middle East one can find Arabs migrating from place to place, and even after the Western world imposed semi-arbitrary borders they would be ignored.

One of the famous Arab attributes that come from their sense of community and unity is that of hospitality. Within the Arabian sphere, all likely guests were, in a sense, family. Any Arab traveling to any other village or area could rightfully expect to be treated as an honored guest. This attribute would be extended to strangers as well, and while the Arab world on a political level was highly sensitive about Western influence, individual travelers from the West seem to have been treated generally well.

Arab Anti-semitism has many possible sources, but for now we will assume the influence of Islam. Arab anti-semitism has historically been of a fundamentally different type than Christian Jew-hatred. Notwithstanding the Damascus blood libel of 1840, for the most part Muslims and Arabs are correct when they say that Jews lived in relative peace under Arab rule. However, living in peace is not the same as living as equals. The tolerance of Jews in Arab nations was salted with contempt. Even so, overt anti-semitism was relatively rare before the 20th century, and some argue that the influence of Christians in Arab lands accelerated these ideas.

In Islam, dhimmis (Christians and Jews) are second-class citizens, forced to pay allegiance and taxes to their Muslim masters. Islam looks upon itself as building upon and improving Christianity and Judaism. Dhimmis may live in Muslim lands but they may not display conspicuous religious symbols; they may not use church bells or blow shofars in public, or even to build or expand churches or synagogues in many circumstances. The punishment for murder of a dhimmi was rarely equivalent to that of a Muslim, and dhimmis could be executed for blasphemy.

So while there was not the same overt hatred towards Jews than Christian Europe exhibited too many times, the clear mindset of Muslim Arabs as the 20th century dawned was that Jews and Christians were beneath them.

Islamic supremacy was a difficult position to maintain in the early 1900s. The Western world had dominated the Islamic world militarily, culturally and scientifically since the Muslim defeat in 1683 at Vienna. Colonialism had already been encroaching on the edges of the Arab world since the 18th century and Europe was dividing up the Islamic world after the collapse of the Ottoman empire. The Islamic idea of a global 'Ummah had steadily deteriorated from the heights of the 15th and 16th centuries to a mere dream after World War I. So while the Muslims may have privately felt that Christians were just as low as Jews, in fact they maintained a healthy fear and respect for Christians who had beaten them. And their sense of being shamed by the Westerners so thoroughly translated into a hate that could not be acted upon without losing even more control.

But there were still Jews who seemed to still accept their dhimmi status in the Islamic world, and the fact that the Christian "ummah" seemed to hate them even more than the Arabs did made the Arabs think that at least they are not on the very bottom of the international food chain.

There are two other layers of the Arab psyche that need to be understood. They are hardly unique to Arabs but, in combination with the other characteristics we described, they are important to understand.

The first is projection. Everyone tends to think that others think as they do, and the West is at least as guilty of this mistake as anyone else. In this case, we are dealing with the Arabs assuming that the West is similar to them - in unity, in cohesiveness, in religiosity, and in hate. We see this today, with Arab (and other) Islamists referring to the entire Western world as "crusaders" and their conviction that everyone is working in concert against them.

The second is lack of sophistication. Although the American-run universities in the Arab world since the 19th century made a dent in how the Arab intelligentsia thought, the vast majority of Arabs were not well educated and especially not aware of other ways of thinking. As a result, any event or rumor could set off a mob mentality (the "Arab street") that would be impossible to control with logic.

Given this background, we can now begin to understand the Arab reaction to Zionism from its founding until the birth of Israel.

(It took a while to write Part 1 so don't expect Part 2 very soon, but I wanted to get this posted.)