Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

MEMRI: Latest News, Jan. 6, 2009

Egyptian Cleric Safwat Higazi on Hamas TV: Dispatch Those Sons of Apes and Pigs to the Hellfire – On the Wings of Qassam Rockets

Following are excerpts from a speech by Egyptian cleric Safwat Higazi, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on December 31, 2008.

Safwat Higazi: “Being killed is nothing new to us. It is what we desire and hope for. It is martyrdom, by Allah. This is Allah’s victory coming to us. It is Paradise with the first drop of blood of the martyr.[...]

“Allah is with us, and there is nobody with them. Allah is our God, and there is nobody with them. We say to them: We are not equal. Our dead go to Paradise, while your dead go to the Hellfire.” [...]

“The [Jews], who are as smooth as a viper, and who lick their lips as [does] a speckled snake, will never live with us in peace and harmony. They deserve to be killed. They deserve to die. They are the ones at whom the Qassam rockets should be fired. You should not care if you hit a man, a woman, or a child. Just like they killed your children – kill their children. Just like they killed your women – kill their women. Just like they destroyed your mosques – destroy their places of worship. Destroy… everything over there.”

Hamas: Jewish Lobby in U.S. to blame for global financial crisis – Haaretz, October 7, 2008
By News Agencies and Haaretz Services

The Palestinian militant group Hamas on Tuesday accused a “Jewish Lobby” in the United States of fomenting the global financial crisis.

The crisis was the result of “bad administrative and financial management and a bad banking system put into place and controlled by the Jewish lobby,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said in a statement.

Barhum said that despite approving a bailout plan of $700 billion dollars, the U.S. government was ignoring the role of “the Jewish lobby that put the U.S. banking and financial sector into place.”

This lobby, said Barhum, “controls the U.S. elections and defines the foreign policy of any new administration in a manner that allows it to retain control of the American government and economy.”

The Anti-Defamation League reported last week a major upsurge in the number of anti-Semitic postings on the Internet relating to the financial crisis engulfing the United States.

The Jewish-American organization cited hundreds of posts regarding the bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers and other institutions affected by the subprime mortgage crisis.

The messages railed against Jews in general, with some charging that Jews control the U.S. government and finance as part of a “Jew world order” and therefore are to blame for the economic turmoil.

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, said: “We know from modern history that whenever there is a downturn in the global economy, there will be an upturn in the level of anti-Semitism and bigotry, and that is what we are seeing now.”

This is a short article I published in the ISIM Newsletter in 2002. Ironically, it was posted online by “CampusWatch,” a site created by Daniel Pipes, whose views I criticize in it. Presumably someone at CampusWatch posted the article because, although I am critical of the neoconservative view of the Middle East, I am also critical of some of my fellow Middle East experts who seem determined to ignore the more odious aspects of militant Islamic movements.

It should be obvious that it is unethical to object to the antisemitism lite of a Pat Robertson or an Ann Coulter while ignoring the more obvious antisemitism that pervades many Islamist texts. One can be, and should be, outraged by both the simplistic neoconservative cant about “Islamofascism” and much of what is said and done by Islamists. One can be, and should be, outraged by what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza. But this does not entail portraying Hamas as the innocent victim of “Islamophobia.” One can be, and should be, outraged by the neoconservative effort to induce the government of the United States to attack Iran. But this not entail ignoring the vile Holocaust denial of Ahmedinejad.

By failing to condemn that which deserves condemnation, many prominent Middle East experts unintentionally help the neoconservatives portray all critics of Israel as antisemites. Analyzing the nationalistic and anti-imperialist dimensions of Islamic militancy is legitimate. Ignoring the reactionary and xenophobic dimensions of Islamic militancy is not.

There is a middle path between demonization and idealization. And that is the path that should be taken by serious analysts of Islamic militancy.

Henry Munson, Between Pipes and Esposito, ISIM Newsletter, July 2002

Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy published a short book (137 pages) by Martin Kramer entitled Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. Kramer is the editor of the Middle East Quarterly, a journal founded by Daniel Pipes and others who feel that the discipline of Middle Eastern Studies, as practised in the United States, has become too pro-Arab and too ‘dovish’. Kramer, a former director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, shares Pipes’s views, though he has generally been less strident in expressing them. Ivory Towers on Sand is primarily a critique of scholars dealing with issues related to American foreign policy in the Middle East. Kramer is not especially troubled by current trends in the study of Sufi poetry.

Both Kramer and Pipes, like their intellectual mentor Bernard Lewis, view the Muslim world as inherently irrational, violent, and above all, anti-Semitic. The Arabs in particular only understand force. They will behave only if they are beaten mercilessly. The American government should not waste time trying to address their alleged grievances, or those of Muslims in general, because these all boil down to primitive hatred of the infidel and resentment that the infidel now dominates the believer instead of the other way around (Lewis 1990).This view of the Islamic world underlies the policies of the Sharon government in Israel and the policies favoured by at least some members of the American administration. So the issues at stake are by no means strictly academic.

Munson: All those rightly outraged by American and Israeli policies in the Middle East should condemn this antisemitic rhetoric just as emphatically as the neoconservatives do. The fact that neoconservatives and right-wing Israeli extremists exploit this kind of language does not mean it can be ignored.

MEMRI, October 31, 2007

TV Channel Affiliated with Lebanese Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Beri in Show on Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Jews Use Drug Trafficking to Control World, Subjugate Other Nations

The following are excerpts from a Lebanese TV report on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The report aired on NBN TV on October 22, 2007.

Maria Maalouf: “On land and in the heavens – the use that American and Israeli Zionism makes of the weapon of drugs in order to thwart intifadas and revolutions cannot be justified by the American claims about the intensification of the struggle on land, as long as the Jews purport to have their own private god in the heavens, who commanded them to annihilate the nations and peoples of the world, using drugs and causing anxiety, and numbing the mental, psychological, and physical capabilities of non-Jews, as written in the Talmud or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”Isn’t it true that these Jewish plots to corrupt the peoples were described by American ‘plot-disrupters,’ such as Benjamin Franklin and Henry Ford, and even by some Jews, like Alfred Lilienthal, and even Karl Marx, who, more than 150 years ago, exposed in his book On the Jewish Question that there was an instinct within the Jewish individual that drives him to take control of the world, by means of illegal money – which is known today as ‘money laundering?’” [...]

While it is important not to assume that Muslim hostility to Israel is simply the result of anti-Semitism, it is also important to recognize that Islamist rhetoric is often anti-Semitic.

anti-semitic-motifs-in-the-ideology-of-hizballah-and-hamas.htm

Themes borrowed from European Christendom were adapted by incorporating explicit Islamic references in them. The most important example of this process, according to Prof. Bernard Lewis, was the restating of the story of Muhammad’s relations with the Jews. “Instead of being a minor nuisance, ineffectual and unsuccessful in their plots against him,” as they were traditionally depicted, “they [the Jews] are depicted as a dark and evil force, conspiring to destroy the Prophet, and continuing as the main danger to Islam.”6 Yehoshafat Harkabi calls this trend the “Islamization of the hatred of the Jews.”7

Hostility to the State of Israel and to Zionism as an ideology arising from the Arab-Israeli conflict, while not in itself necessarily a manifestation of anti-Semitism, gradually gave rise to a deeper, irreconcilable hatred that does not differentiate between Israelis, Zionists or Jews.

The Bush administration’s efforts to blame its problems in Iraq are ludicrous. But the Islamic Republic of Iran does deserve harsh criticism for its bigotry and human rights abuses. Middle East experts who condemn the demonization of Muslims in the West should also condemn the demonization of Westerners by Muslims.

For Iran’s Shiites, a Celebration of Faith and Waiting – New York Times
And there was the booth set up to warn people about “Satan worshipers.” There was a Jewish star at the entrance, posted atop a replica of what was supposed to be the Washington Monument which also was described as a satanic symbol because it is shaped as an obelisk.

There was also a movie concerning “perverted cults,” which focused on the Bahai faith.

Le Monde.fr, 30 août 2007

Le Hezbollah lance une campagne contre l’organisation Human Rights Watch

Mouna Naïm

LE MONDE | 29.08.07 | 15h00, Article paru dans l’édition du 30.08.07

Le Hezbollah a lancé, mardi 28 août, une virulente campagne contre l’association de défense des droits de l’homme Human Rights Watch (HRW), en prévision du rapport de 120 pages qu’elle doit publier sur les violations, par le Parti de Dieu, des lois de la guerre lors du conflit qui l’a opposé à l’armée israélienne pendant l’été 2006. Un autre rapport, début septembre, concernera les violations commises par Israël. La campagne a été lancée par la chaîne de télévision Al-Manar, du Hezbollah, à quarante-huit heures d’une conférence de presse que HRW entend tenir à Beyrouth. “Cette conférence (…) affaiblit le sentiment national et constitue une incitation contre les droits de la résistance (le Hezbollah)“, a annoncé Al-Manar. “Des organisations estudiantines, des associations de la société civile ainsi que les familles des martyrs, des blessés et des personnes lésées (par la guerre) vont organiser une protestation” pour empêcher la tenue de la conférence, a ajouté la chaîne, qui a ouvert son bulletin d’informations de la soirée sur cette affaire.

Versant dans un anti-américanisme et un antisémitisme primaires, la chaîne a qualifié HRW d’“association américaine greffée de juifs”.

MEMRI is a right-wing Israeli organization that seeks to attribute Arab and Muslim hostility to Israel to anti-Semitism and thereby divert attention from the agony of the Palestinians. This perspective is both absurd and morally repugnant. That said, Islamist antisemitism is also absurd and morally repugnant. Middle East experts who are rightly critical of attempts to demonize all Islamists should not go to the opposite extreme of idealizing them all. The fact that Islamist antisemitism is often used to divert attention from Palestinian suffering does not mean it can be ignored. The following statements by the former Turkish prime minister Prof. Necmettin Erbakan, who is the founder and leader of the Islamist movement Milli Gorus are clearly outrageous. And those of us outraged by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians should condemn such rhetoric just as vehemently as we condemn the bigotry of Christian and Jewish religious reactionaries. If we do not, we simply invert the moral myopia of the neoconservatives.

MEMRI:
Erbakan: “When we look at the map of the world, we see about 200 countries painted in colors, and we think that there are many races, religions, and nations. The fact is that for 300 years, all these [200 nations] have been controlled from one center only. This center is the racist, imperialist Zionism. Unless you make this correct diagnosis for the illness, you cannot find the cure to it. You will ask, ‘What is this belief, this racist imperialism that destroys happiness in this world?’

“This belief began 5,765 years ago, when the children of Israel were living in Egypt, with a book of magic that was written by someone called Kabbala. The author or authors of this book later claimed that they belonged to the tribe of Moses, but this is not true. They distorted the Tevrat [bible] of Moses and put in it the Kabbala. If you want to see proof of this, you can look at their Tevrat and then look at the Kabbala.

“What do these people believe in? Their belief has four principles [while ours has six] that say: [...] 1) You are the real people of God; all others are created to be your slaves; you were created as men and others [were created] as monkeys that later turned into men. This is what they believe and what they teach. They believe that they are the superior class. 2) This superiority will be not only in thought, but will be materialized, actually realized. They will be the masters and the others will be their slaves. 3) For all this to come true, they must perform three duties: The first duty will be to gather all the exiled sons of Israel into Quds [Jerusalem]; the second duty is to build the ‘Greater Israel’ between the Nile and the Euphrates, within these determined borders, and to provide for the safety of this Greater Israel.

“Do you know what the safety of Israel means? It means that they will rule the 28 countries from Morocco to Indonesia. Since all the Crusades were organized by the Zionists, and since it was our forefathers the Seljuks who stopped them, according to the Kabbala there should be no sovereign state in Anatolia. This is these people’s [i.e. the Jews'] religion, their faith. You can’t argue or negotiate with them. This is their religion, and it comes from the Kabbala.