"The Jews” build “ovens” to “bake” Palestinians.6
Sometimes the same crazy, ugly lies are told about both Israel and the United States. For instance, on December 13, 2004, the Iranian Sahar 1 TV station began broadcasting a series entitled Zhara’s Blue Eyes. This series asserts that Israelis steal the organs of Palestinian children for transplant into Israeli medical patients. In the first episode, the beautiful eyes of the title character, a little Palestinian girl, are stolen for transplant into the son of an Israeli army officer.7 In the second episode, (first broadcast on December 20, 2004), the audience is informed that the president of Israel “is being kept alive by organs stolen from Palestinian children."8 In an interview, the producer of the series stated that “Zionists” kidnap “children only one or two years old” raise them to teenagers on “a white ship sailing the oceans . . . under constant physical monitoring and supervision” so that they (the Israelis) can steal “the heart, the kidneys, and their other organs. . . . This story is a collection of facts. As I mentioned, we conducted research and reached conclusions, and we have turned them into this film to make the world aware of what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians."9 Did this fellow get a peek at the screenplay for the movie The Island, in which people are raised for spare body parts, or did he just catch a preview of coming attractions? As Goebbels said: “If you repeat a lie long enough it becomes truth.” That’s taqiyya at its best. Or worst, depending on your moral compass.
Less than a week after the broadcast of the first episode of Zhara’s Blue Eyes, Saudi Arabia produced a variation on this ugly lie and applied it to the United States. On December 18, 2004, the Saudi Arabian government daily newspaper Al Watan published an article which accused the United States of stealing eyes and other organs from dead and wounded Iraqis. According to this official Saudi newspaper, “[a] secret team of American physicians follows the troops during their attacks ... to ensure quick operations for extracting some organs and transferring them to private operations rooms before they are transported to America for sale. . . . These teams offer $40 for every usable kidney and $25 for an eye."10 This story was immediately picked up and repeated in government-controlled newspapers in Iran and Syria.11
Now for some real award-winning taqiyya. This is about both Israel’s and the United States' responsibility for the 9/11 terror attacks. According to numerous Arab government officials and “journalists,” the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated and perpetrated by Israel, the Mossad, the Jews, the international Zionist conspiracy, the United States military, the CIA, the FBI, conservative Christians, a conspiracy headed by President George W. Bush and then-secretary of state Colin Powell,12 and/or the “World Council of Churches, which was enacting the Vatican’s plan to eradicate Islam and Christianize the world."13 Choose your own cast of conspirators. This insanity is repeated at the highest levels of Arab governments14 more than four years after 9/11, even after Osama bin Laden acknowledged that al Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.15
Why would anyone spread and believe such crazy, ugly lies? Because they want to be America’s friends? Because they are willing to live in peace with Israel (if only Israel would withdraw to the 1967 border)? No, they spread and believe these atrocious lies in order to perpetuate hate and to justify the real terrorist atrocities that they themselves commit in their jihad against America and Israel. Israel has been on the front line of the war against international terrorists since before the Arab-Israeli conflict became one of the fronts in the worldwide jihad of radical Islam. In order to understand more clearly the direct connection between the terror war against Israel and the terror war against the United States, it is necessary to understand how the Arab-Israeli conflict began, and how it evolved.
Many scholars believe the Arab-Israeli conflict did not start out as a war between religions, but as a territorial dispute between two competing groups—Jews and Arabs—with nationalist claims and aspirations, and that religion was one of the characteristics that identified the competing nationalist groups. I will agree that that is what it might look like on the surface. But for these two particular groups whose religion, at least for the Muslims, is a significant daily part of their lives, it is hard to believe that religious beliefs do not influence their thinking and aspirations. All you have to do is read a few scriptures from the Koran about the Jews and hear the holy book recited weekly in every mosque and you’ll begin to understand where this resentment is coming from, regardless of what country this hate verbiage is coming out of. The major difference between the religions is that Judaism does not aspire to convert the world as Islam does. Jews can live within the context of a different society without seeking converts. Jews do not go to temple every Friday and read that God’s will is victory over all Muslims. They do not read that all Muslims are apes and pigs because they are cursed by Allah, which is what Muslims teach about Jews in their mosques. Muslims are out to convert everyone. Once they have the upper hand, they want to run the whole show and subject everyone to their own rules.
Growing up in the Middle East, I came to find out that Arab children are taught hatred of the Jews from their mother’s milk. From a young age, Arab children are constantly bombarded with stories and information presenting Jews as barbaric, conniving, manipulative, warmongering people. Meanwhile, Jews teach their children patience, humility, service, tolerance, understanding of others, and charity to all. They call it tikkun olam, "to repair the world."
The Arab-Israeli conflict has remained intractable because the Arab world refuses to accept the right of a Jewish state to exist autonomously in the middle of the Muslim Middle East. At first this refusal was based on what appeared to be pan-Arab nationalism, and then on Palestinian nationalism. There is a lot of bluster, pride, and honor among Arabs, which supports the nationalism angle. But as a Lebanese Christian looking at it from ground level and willing to blow the whistle on the hatred that Arabs harbor and teach their children against Jews, I can tell you that religious hatred, humiliation, and resentment are the driving factor behind the Israeli-Arab conflict. As a Christian who was raised in a country where people were shot at checkpoints because their ID card said “Christian,” I see it differently. I think that with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and especially after the rise of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) during the 1987 intifada, the world is seeing the true reason for the Arab world’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist: radical Islamic supremacism. It has come to the surface, overshadowing the nationalist rationale and moving on, seeking bigger game in the West.
Israel has become one of the most innovative and technologically advanced countries, contributing to the world’s improvement in fields from medicine to communications. It is a successful, modern, educated, Western-thinking society in the midst of a sea of Arabic failure, corruption, backwardness, and ignorance. Israel’s success in turning a desolate desert land into an oasis blossoming with Western culture and wealth irks its failing neighbors. It is in contrast to everything they are not and cannot be because of their culture, values, and religion, which suffocate the individual and drown out human rights.
Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees per capita in the world, while most of the Arabic world still wallows in ignorance. About one-third of Arab men and half of Arab women are illiterate.16This simple fact about Israel is a reflection of the society and its hunger for education and growth and has nothing to do with America’s financial support. Money doesn’t buy brains or a desire to learn and be informed. Israel has the highest average living standard in the Middle East. Its $100 billion economy is larger than all of its immediate neighbors combined despite the fact that it is in a constant state of war trying to defend itself and doesn’t have a drop of crude oil to sell.
Israel has more than three thousand high-tech companies and start-ups, giving it the highest concentration of high-tech companies in the world apart from Silicon Valley. Voice-mail technology, the first PC antivirus software, and t
he cell phone were developed by Motorola, which has its largest development center in Israel. Four young Israelis developed the technology for AOL Instant Messenger.
What have the Arabs contributed to the world other than suicide bombing and terrorism? Where is their contribution to science, medicine, technology? If Israel did not exist, the Arabs would have to invent something like it to blame their failures on. It is their fundamental ways of thinking and own culture that hold them back, not the Jews.
In a region that shuns outsiders and other religions, Israel stands out like America, a free society, a melting pot of people who came from all around the world and brought their rich cultures with them. Israel is one of the most multiracial and multicultural countries in the world. More than a hundred different countries are represented in its population of 6 million. Consider how the Israeli government spent tens of millions of dollars airlifting more than forty thousand black Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1984 and 1991. Since 2001 Israel has reached out to help others, taking in non-Jewish refugees from Lebanon, the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, Liberia, and Congo, and even Bosnian Muslims. How many such refugees have the twenty-two states in the Arab League taken in? The Arab world won’t even give Palestinian refugees citizenship in their host countries. Remember, Jews can’t live in the neighboring Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But Arabs are living as citizens in Israel. What does that tell you about their respect for other cultures?
Over 1 million Arabs are full Israeli citizens. An Arab sits on the Supreme Court of Israel. There are Arab political parties expressing views inimical to the State of Israel sitting in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Women are equal partners in Israel and have complete human rights, as do gays and minorities. Show me an Arab nation with a Jew in its government. Show me an Arab country with half as many Jewish citizens as Israel has Arab citizens. Show me freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and human rights in any Arabic country in the Middle East the way they exist and are practiced in Israel. It is those same freedoms that the Muslims resent as a threat to Islam and that they are fighting against, be it in Israel, Europe, or the United States.
Regardless of their hatred and disapproval of Israel’s existence in the Middle East and their desire to seek its destruction, Israel has a historical, legal, and moral right to exist as a Jewish state. Let me crunch a lot of history, laws, and deal making by world powers into a few paragraphs.
According to the Arab-Palestinian-Muslim narrative, Israel is an alien colony, recently planted in the Arab world by American and European imperialism. This narrative recognizes no history prior to the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880s, and emphatically denies any ancient historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. This is the central lie, the mega-taqiyya, offered to justify uncompromising opposition to Jewish national rights. It’s almost as if they honestly expect people to think the word “Israel” was invented in modern times. The alarming truth is that their seemingly successful revision of history has taken hold in some minds.
The truth is carved in Egyptian stone. According to a well-known hieroglyphic inscription, the tribes of Israel were a significant, established presence in Canaan no later than 1212 BC.17 There is a vast body of archaeological evidence that demonstrates the ancient Israelite/Jewish presence in Israel/Judea as far back as 925 BC.18 This historical presence is verified in the ancient records of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim empires. The Arab conquest did not occur until AD 638. An exercise in elementary arithmetic reveals that the Jewish people were there eighteen and one-half centuries before the arrival of the Arabs. Despite being conquered many times, the Jewish people have had a constant, uninterrupted presence in the land of Israel for over thirty centuries.19The Arabs and Islam have been there less than fourteen centuries.20 It has conveniently been forgotten that the Jews and Christians were there first.
Furthermore, in the thirty centuries preceding the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, there have been only two periods when there was an independent, internationally recognized state in the area that now comprises Israel. Both of them were Jewish states.21 Even when this land was part of the Arab empire (AD 638 through AD 1099), there was never an independent Arab state in “Palestine,” by that name or any other.22 No wonder the Arabs are donating millions of dollars to U.S. colleges for Middle Eastern schools of study. They have a lot of hard historical evidence to rewrite in the young minds of students.
Finally, the Jewish people have a distinct national identity. Religion is only one of the unique characteristics that define this national identity. (A large majority of Israeli Jews, 70-80 percent, do not practice the Jewish religion as a belief but more as tradition, although they are still Jewish.) In addition to a unique religion, the Jewish people have a separate and distinct language, culture, and customs, with a documented history of development over the past three thousand years. The Jewish people have created a vast body of art and literature, both secular and religious, which reflects the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. The Dead Sea Scrolls, written when the descendants of the Maccabees ruled an independent Judea, demonstrate that the Jewish people, both in the Holy Land and in exile all over the world, have been reading and writing secular and sectarian literature in the same distinct language for over two thousand years. In contrast, the Arabic language and culture and the Muslim religion of the Palestinians are essentially indistinguishable from those of the wider Arab world. Prior to the mid 1800s there is no trace whatever of uniquely “Palestinian” art, literature, music, or any other manifestation of a distinct culture. If you find this hard to believe try to think of one “Palestinian” book, or author, or artist, from the year 1300 through the year 1800. That’s a period of five hundred years. There must be one book written by a “Palestinian” Arab author. There must be one painting by a “Palestinian” Arab artist.
Guess what? There are none. If you still don’t believe it, ask a Palestinian nationalist or a Columbia University professor of Middle Eastern history to name one. The most honest response you will get is silence. The most likely response you will get is taqiyya.
In terms of historical presence and sovereignty in the land of Israel, and distinct characteristics of national identity, the Jewish claim of national rights in the land of Israel is at the minimum equal to the Palestinian claim. Any objective observer would conclude from the facts that the claim of the Jewish people to national identity and sovereignty in the land of Israel is much stronger than that of the Palestinians in every respect. However, Israel does not deny Palestinian national rights. On the contrary, the State of Israel, and the Zionist movement that preceded it, have accepted in good faith or initiated every proposal for a genuine “two-state solution” that has ever been put forward. In contrast, the Arab world, Palestinian nationalists, and radical Islamists have consistently denied Israel’s right to exist, and they have responded to every settlement proposal with extreme violence. The missed opportunities for peace include the 1937 Peel Commission proposal,23 the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan,24 UN Security Council Resolution 242 in 1967,25 and the proposals made by Israel at Camp David in 2000.
Even after the death of Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian nationalist movement and the wider Arab Muslim world still do not accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. This has not changed with the ascension of Mahmoud Abbas to president of the Palestinian Authority, despite the mantle of “moderate” conferred upon him.
Abbas was Arafat’s devoted acolyte and loyal henchman for four decades. Abbas is sometimes referred to as “Doctor,” perhaps to conjure up the image of a kindly family physician making a house call. In fact, he received a Ph.D. from Moscow’s Oriental University in the early 1980s. The title of his doctoral thesis is typical of Arab reasoning; “The Secret Relationship Between Zionism and Nazism.” In addition to parroting conventional Holocaust-denial formul
ations (there were no gas chambers, less than a million Jews were killed, and so forth), Abbas’s tract contained one original and imaginative assertion: that Zionists provoked the Nazis into perpetrating the Holocaust in order to spur Jewish immigration to what was then called Palestine. Doctoral candidate Abbas wrote, “The Zionist movement led a broad campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule, in order to arouse the government’s hatred of them, to fuel vengeance against them, and to expand the mass extermination.” I wonder where he stands on who brought down the World Trade Center. Abbas’s doctoral dissertation also asserts that Hitler did not decide to exterminate European Jewry until he was provoked by David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of war on the Nazis in 1942. “Doctor” Abbas has never retracted the assertions upon which his doctoral thesis is based (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/israeli-palestinian_history_denial).
As prime minister of the PA in 2003, Abbas was touted as “independent” and “moderate” because he frequently clashed with Arafat and eventually resigned in frustration. However, the clashes and resignation occurred because Arafat refused to relinquish any real power to Abbas, not because of any strategic difference between the two. Abbas began calling for a halt to terrorist bombings against Israeli civilians not because the intentional targeting and murdering of civilians is wrong, but because it had been tactically ineffective and had a negative public relations impact on the Palestinian cause. As both a candidate for president of the PA and as its president, Abbas has never questioned the morality of terrorist bombings and murders. His sole criticism (and the occasional criticism of his PA cronies) has been limited to asserting that suicide bombings, terrorist shootings, and rocket and mortar attacks against Israeli civilians “harmed Palestinian national interests."26 This is tantamount to intentionally running your car into a crosswalk full of schoolchildren, and then saying it was a bad thing to do because it dents your fender.
Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America Page 23
