HATRED: COMING SOON TO A CAMPUS NEAR YOU
Dore Gold
Jerusalem Post, February 22, 2012
Anti-Israel hatred on campus crests each year during an event called Israel Apartheid Week. With this ominous name and programs that thrive on ignorance and blind disregard for the facts, tens of thousands of college students are urged to rise up against Israel—painfully evoking the types of racist characterizations of the Jewish people which defined attitudes once heard in Europe in the middle of the last century.…
These campus initiatives were incubated in 2001 at the first Durban Conference, proclaiming: “no apartheid South Africa in the 20th century and no apartheid Israel in the 21st.” This battle cry sparked the BDS movement calling for boycotts, divestment and sanctions to punish Israel, and it all evolved into an invective-loaded campaign that found a degree of favor on campuses coast to coast, not to mention among some labor unions, churches, media and cultural institutions. But it is based on a lie.
Typically, those hurling these charges against Israel hope their audiences are ignorant of the facts. In apartheid South Africa, blacks were not allowed to use white hospitals, they could not attend white universities and they could not participate in the South African parliament. Visit Hadassah Medical Center today, or any other health facility in Israel, and see Jewish and Arab doctors caring for Jewish and Arab patients. Witness for yourself at Hebrew University or any institution of higher learning as Jewish and Arab professors teach students of different backgrounds. Go to the Knesset, and observe the debates involving both Jewish and Arab parliamentarians.
Given this reality, Justice Richard Goldstone, a former judge on the South African Supreme Court, wrote in The New York Times on October 31, 2011: “The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony.” Goldstone, it should be remembered, did not have a problem criticizing Israeli policies in the aftermath of its 2008-2009 military operation in the Gaza Strip. But when it came to calling Israel and apartheid state like the old South Africa, with which he was intimately familiar, he firmly rejected the charge, which was completely divorced from the reality of modern Israel.
No nation has fought racism more consistently than the Jewish people, whether through the anti-apartheid activists in the South African Jewish community or through those American Jews who joined the civil rights movement and locked arms with Martin Luther King Jr. The Jewish state was founded on the very same moral outlook, reflecting the Jewish value of “Tikkun Olam,” or repairing the world, which is deeply held across the Jewish religious spectrum.…
Moreover, no group cherishes or champions freedom of speech more than the Jewish people. But the systematic dissemination of hate-based lies is not what freedom is about. This crosses the line. No one has a license to lie, manipulate or manufacture falsehoods. Make no mistake, the primary characteristics of Israel Apartheid Week programming are terrible, unjustified charges expressly aimed at demonizing Israel.…
Here’s the good news. Friends of Israel are not backing off or ignoring the challenge. Important new initiatives are already working hard to roll back the hatred.…
Specifically, I conclude with a vitally important call to action, as easy to do as it is effective: I invite you to watch a film of monumental importance called Crossing the Line: The Intifada Comes to Campus [A 6-minute, must-see preview of the film can be viewed on CIJR’s website, https://isranet.org/crossing-line-intifada-comes-campus—Ed.] This powerful documentary exposes the growing anti-Israel sentiment taking root on college campuses across North America. Once you understand the problem, I hope you will join me in my quest to make sure all Jewish students are educated and empowered with the facts about Israel.
If modern Jewish history has taught our generation anything, it is that no threat to our existence should ever be ignored. Generations to come will judge us for what we do, or do not do, today to secure Israel’s future.…
(Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations,
is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.)
LEARNING TO LOVE BIG BROTHERHOOD
Daniel Greenfield
FrontPage, February 28, 2012
The Arab Spring, like the banking system and the national debt, has become too big to fail. The “too big to fail” label mandates the cover-up of a bad policy that has too many influential people, movements and countries tied into it to allow anyone to admit that the whole thing has gone pear-shaped.
The only way to deny the failure of the Arab Spring as a means for creating a better and freer region is by embracing its disastrous consequences. In other words, goodbye, Egyptian Twitter activists; hello, Muslim Brotherhood. The triumph of Islamic parties in Egypt and Tunisia leaves Western “Springers” with only two choices: to either admit that the whole thing is a disaster and that the brakes need to be applied or learn to love the Brotherhood.
Senator McCain’s delegation to Egypt, which included Senator Lindsay Graham, praised the Brotherhood for its opposition to the laws that the International Republican Institute activists ran afoul of in aiding the overthrow of Mubarak. It’s not quite an endorsement of the Brotherhood, it’s something worse—it’s an endorsement of the process that brought the Brotherhood to power. The Muslim Brotherhood is not a supporter of foreign funded regime change, unless it’s a foreign funded regime change that brings them to power. When the Brotherhood is wielding absolute power, then IRI activists won’t merely be prevented from leaving the country, they’ll be put on trial and face the death penalty, like Amir Mirzaei Hekmati in Iran.…
Reasonable people who find themselves on the same side as a genocidal organization like the Muslim Brotherhood would check twice to see if they really are doing the right thing.… [However], the “Springers” are unwilling to admit the possibility even while the Al-Nahda party is crushing unions in Tunisia, and Egyptian Islamists are burning Coptic Christians out of their homes. The Libyan capital is in the grip of the militias, and the anti-torture McCain, who endorsed intervention in Libya, can stop by to witness the militias he supported torturing former members of the regime and anyone with black skin.
There has yet to be a single positive outcome in any of the Arab Spring countries where the government was overthrown. Egypt is now mortgaged to the Brotherhood, Tunisia, to its Al-Nahda cousins and Libya may fall to a former Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist-group-turned Brotherhood proxy. Yemen is starting to look a whole lot like Afghanistan. Contrary to “Springer” dogma, the healthiest countries in the region are those which managed to outlast the seasonal pressures of the Arab Spring.
If the Arab Spring were an experiment, it has indisputably failed. The Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov said of Communism that if it were an experiment, he would regret subjecting even a frog to it. The Arab Spring has already subjected approximately 100 million people to this particular experiment, not counting the collateral damage in nearby countries like Israel.… But the experimenters seem determined to keep cutting open frogs until they successfully graft an Islamic green-banded poison toad onto a democratic fire-bellied bullfrog.
The future for women and minorities in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya is already about as grim as possible. The exodus of Coptic Christians in the wake of riots and church burnings would be described as ethnic cleansing if the media and the political establishment were not busy covering up the consequences of the “too big to fail” Arab Spring.
While Hillary Clinton was holding a photo-op meeting with “young Tunisians” to discuss the future of democracy in the region, the Al-Nahda regime was suppressing a union protest over attacks on union offices. Had a protests of thousands taken place under the old Ben Ali government, it would have been front page news and proof positive that regime change must take place, but under Al-Nahda rule, it’s only another footnote. Like the 150,000 Copts who are headed for the exit in Egypt.
Last month, Tunisia’s new president Moncef Marzouk received a golden key to a mosque in Jerusalem from a Hamas leader. This month he shook hands with Hillary Clinton. She also met with Tunisian Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali who had pledged, “The conquest of Jerusalem will set out from here, Allah willing” and described his party as the sixth caliphate. She did not, however, meet with Al-Nahda leader Rashid al-Ghannushi, who has stated that there are no civilians in Israel, declaring, “The population—males, females, and children—are the army reserve soldiers, and thus can be killed.…”
Some four centuries ago an Elizabethan courtier scathingly observed, “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” In the Arab Spring, extremism can never prosper, for if it prospers, none dare call it extremism. The Brotherhood and Al-Nahda are all “moderates” now. Along with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Any group that comes to power as a result of the Arab Spring must be considered democratic and moderate, for if it isn’t, suddenly the Arab Spring is no longer democratic or moderate.…
At the end of Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith wins a victory over himself by learning to love Big Brother. “Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache,” Smith thinks. But it has not taken the “Springers” that long to discover the kind smile lurking under the dark mustaches of the Brotherhood. In less than a year, the proponents of Arab democracy are already winning their own victory over themselves by learning to love Big Brotherhood.
ISLAM IS ISLAM, AND THAT’S IT
Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review, January 23, 2012
The tumult indelibly dubbed “the Arab Spring” in the West, by the credulous and the calculating alike, is easier to understand once you grasp two basics. First, the most important fact in the Arab world—as well as in Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other neighboring non-Arab territories—is Islam. It is not poverty, illiteracy, or the lack of modern democratic institutions. These, like anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and an insular propensity to buy into conspiracy theories featuring infidel villains, are effects of Islam’s regional hegemony and supremacist tendency, not causes of it. One need not be led to that which pervades the air one breathes.
The second fact is that Islam constitutes a distinct civilization. It is not merely an exotic splash on the gorgeous global mosaic with a few embarrassing cultural eccentricities; it is an entirely different way of looking at the world. We struggle with this truth, which defies our end-of-history smugness. Enthralled by diversity for its own sake, we have lost the capacity to comprehend a civilization whose idea of diversity is coercing diverse peoples into obedience to its evolution-resistant norms.
So we set about remaking Islam in our own progressive image: the noble, fundamentally tolerant Religion of Peace. We miniaturize the elements of the ummah (the notional global Muslim community) that refuse to go along with the program: They are assigned labels that scream “fringe!”—Islamist, fundamentalist, Salafist, Wahhabist, radical, jihadist, extremist, militant, or, of course, “conservative” Muslims adhering to “political Islam.”
We consequently pretend that Muslims who accurately invoke Islamic scripture in the course of forcibly imposing the dictates of classical sharia—the Islamic legal and political system—are engaged in “anti-Islamic activity,” as Britain’s former home secretary Jacqui Smith memorably put it. When the ongoing Islamization campaign is advanced by violence, as inevitably happens, we absurdly insist that this aggression cannot have been ideologically driven, that surely some American policy or Israeli act of self-defense is to blame, as if these could possibly provide rationales for the murderous jihad waged by Boko Haram Muslims against Nigerian Christians and by Egyptian Muslims against the Copts, the persecution of the Ahmadi sect by Indonesian and Pakistani Muslims, or the internecine killing in Iraq of Sunnis by Shiites and vice versa—a tradition nearly as old as Islam itself—which has been predictably renewed upon the recent departure of American troops.
The main lesson of the Arab Spring ought to be that this remaking of Islam has happened only in our own minds, for our own consumption. The Muslims of the Middle East take no note of our reimagining of Islam, being, in the main, either hostile toward or oblivious to Western overtures. Muslims do not measure themselves against Western perceptions, although the shrewdest among them take note of our eagerly accommodating attitude when determining what tactics will best advance the cause. That cause is nothing less than Islamic dominance.
‘The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” wrote Samuel Huntington. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture.” Not convinced merely in the passive sense of assuming that they will triumph in the end, Muslim leaders are galvanized by what they take to be a divinely ordained mission of proselytism—and proselytism not limited to spiritual principles, but encompassing an all-purpose societal code prescribing rules for everything from warfare and finance to social interaction and personal hygiene. Historian Andrew Bostom notes that in the World War I era, even as the Ottoman Empire collapsed and Ataturk symbolically extinguished the caliphate, C. Snouck Hurgronje, then the West’s leading scholar of Islam, marveled that Muslims remained broadly confident in what he called the “idea of universal conquest.” In Islam’s darkest hour, this conviction remained “a central point of union against the unfaithful.” It looms more powerful in today’s Islamic ascendancy.
Of course, conventional wisdom in the West holds that the Arab Spring spontaneously combusted when Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor, set himself ablaze outside the offices of the Tunisian klepto-cops who had seized his wares. This suicide protest, the story goes, ignited a sweeping revolt against the corruption and caprices of Arab despots. One by one, the dominos began to fall: Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya—with rumblings in Saudi Arabia and Jordan as well as teetering Syria and rickety Iran. We are to believe that the mass uprising is an unmistakable manifestation of the “desire for freedom” that, according to Pres. George W. Bush, “resides in every human heart.”
That proclamation came in the heady days of 2004, when the democracy project was still a Panglossian dream, not the Pandora’s box it proved to be as Islamic parties began to win elections. Like its successor, the Bush administration discouraged all inquiry into Islamic doctrine by anyone seeking to understand Muslim enmity, indulging the fiction that there is something we can do to change it. Inexorably, this has fed President Obama’s preferred fiction—that we must have done something to deserve it—as well as the current administration’s strident objection to uttering the word “Islam” for any purpose other than hagiography. In this self-imposed ignorance, most Americans still do not know that hurriya, Arabic for “freedom,” connotes “perfect slavery” or absolute submission to Allah, very nearly the opposite of the Western concept. Even if we grant for argument’s sake the dubious proposition that all people crave freedom, Islam and the West have never agreed about what freedom means.…
Western beliefs about the Arab Spring—and the Western conceit that the death of one tyranny must herald the birth of liberty—have always been a delusion. There are real democrats, authentically moderate Muslims, and non-Muslims in places such as Egypt and Yemen who long for freedom in the Western sense; but the stubborn fact is that they make up a strikingly small fraction of the population.…
The Arab Spring is an unshackling of Islam, not an outbreak of fervor for freedom in the Western sense. Turkey’s third-term prime minister Recep Erdogan, a staunch Brotherhood ally who rejects the notion that there is a “moderate Islam” (“Islam is Islam, and that’s it,” he says), once declared that “democracy is a train where you can get off when you reach your destination.” The destination for Muslim supremacists is the implementation of sharia—the foundation of any Islamized society, and, eventually, of the reestablished caliphate.…
[Erdogan’s] banned Welfare party eventually reemerged as the new and democracy-ready AKP, the Justice and Development party.… [Since taking] power in 2002, Erdogan has cautiously but demonstrably eroded the secular framework Ataturk and his followers spent 80 years building, returning this ostensible NATO ally to the Islamist camp, shifting it from growing friendship to open hostility toward Israel, co-opting the military that was Ataturk’s bulwark against Islamization, and salting the country’s major institutions with Islamic supremacists.
The Turkish model will be the ticket for Brotherhood parties that have just prevailed in Tunisian and Moroccan elections. In Tunisia, Rachid Ghannouchi, a cagey Islamist of the Erdogan stripe, heads the Ennahda party, convincingly elected in October to control the legislature that will replace ousted ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. In Morocco, an Islamist party whose namesake is the AKP won the fall elections, but further Islamization is apt to be slower. Far from being driven from power, King Mohammed VI remains popular, having balanced his affinity for the West with deference to sharia norms. Moroccan Islamists are making significant inroads, though, as are their neighbors to the east. Algerian Islamists are poised to accede to power this spring after being thwarted by a military coup that blocked what would have been their certain electoral success in 1991.
Egypt, by contrast, will go quickly. There, the most salient development is not the weakness of secular democrats but the impressive electoral strength of the Salafists. Their numbers are competitive with those of the better-known Brothers, and they will tug their rivals in a more aggressively Islamist direction.… That trend is more blatant only in such basket cases as Libya, where each day brings new evidence that today’s governing “rebels” include yesterday’s al-Qaeda jihadists, and in Yemen, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, where even the New York Times concedes al-Qaeda’s strength.
Led by the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic parties have become expert at presenting themselves as moderates and telling the West what it wants to hear while they gradually ensnare societies in the sharia web, as slowly or quickly as conditions on the ground permit. They know that when the West says “democracy,” it means popular elections, not Western democratic culture. They know the West has so glorified these elections that the victors can steal them (Iran), refuse to relinquish power when later they lose (Iraq), or decline to hold further elections (Gaza) without forfeiting their legitimacy.… They know that the Obama administration and the European Union have deluded themselves into believing that Islamists will be tamed by the responsibilities of governance. Once in power, they are sure to make virulent anti-Americanism their official policy and to contribute materially to the pan-Islamic goal of destroying Israel.
We should not be under any illusions about why things are shaking out this way.… Islam is ascendant because that is the way Muslims of the Middle East want it.
