Londonistan

by Melanie Phillips

  Israel’s struggle is simply being played out in a unique place where metaphysics and geopolitics have become fused.

  But Britain doesn’t see it this way at all. Instead, it insists that the Middle East conflict is a dispute about land. Partly, this is because the empirical, rational British are incapable of understanding the hysteria and paranoia unleashed by religious fanaticism. They think that the only thing that could drive someone to the inhuman act of suicide bombing is the despair and rage caused by oppression. Because they put Israel in a box marked “territorial dispute,” they cannot see that Israel is actually the front line of defense in the war that has been declared upon the United States and the United Kingdom, and that buses are being blown up in Jerusalem for exactly the same reason that Tube trains were blown up in London, and the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were hit in New York and Washington. Instead, they blame Jerusalem and Washington for the atrocities in London. While they loathe and fear Islamist extremism, they accuse the Jews of provoking it. While they detest the terrorism that results, they are dismayingly receptive to the very prejudices that fuel it.

  To understand this lethally misguided mindset, we have to know a little more about what people in Britain believe about the Middle East. The general view is that, to assuage European guilt over the Holocaust, European Jews were given land belonging to the Palestinians, who were driven out by this process to the West Bank and Gaza. After 1967, Israel was determined to colonize these areas too—despite the fact that they were also Palestinian lands—thus frustrating the Palestinians’ desire for a homeland of their own.

  There are many more fundamental errors in this false analysis than can be dealt with here. They include the fact that Israel and parts of the West Bank were the ancient Jewish national home before this land was conquered by the Arabs; that half of Israel’s Jewish population consists of Jews driven out of Arab countries; that the Palestinian Arabs were offered a state of their own in 1948 but refused and tried to wipe out lawfully constituted Israel instead; that they were not driven out of Israel but in the main fled; that the resulting war of annihilation against Israel has never stopped; that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was legal because it was an action taken in self-defense against combatants who have never stopped waging war against it; and that these territories, far from belonging to the Palestinians, had previously been illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt and should more properly have been described as no-man’s-land since the end of the British Mandate in 1948. It is necessary to identify some of these errors because they are preventing Britain from grasping the essential dimension of the Israel conflict that has such a direct bearing on the jihad against the West. It is that the fight against Israel is not fundamentally about land. It is about hatred of the Jews. It is certainly not about the absence of a separate state of Palestine, which was on offer in 1936, 1948 and 2000, and could have been established at any time between 1948 and 1967 by Jordan and Egypt. The agenda here remains the extermination of the Jewish state itself. The reason is that the Jews are hated, the hatred is rooted in religion, and this hatred lies at the core of the war against the West.

  It is true that before the twentieth century, Muslims had not been as savage towards the Jews as had been the Christians. Although there are many vicious references to Jews in the Koran, it was traditionally understood that the perceived faults of the Jews at the time of the Prophet Mohammed did not devolve upon all Jews throughout time, unlike the curse laid upon them in the New Testament. Accordingly, Jews were allowed to live for long periods in a state of religious and cultural autonomy within the Muslim lands they once inhabited—but only as dhimmi people, or second-class citizens, since Islam could not recognize unbelievers as equals. Although there were periods of cultural flowering, these Jews nevertheless lived under varying degrees of duress. Deeply rooted anti-Jewish feeling among Muslims was further inflamed and exploited by Christian Jew-hatred. Pogroms arising from the blood libels against the Jews, initiated by Greek Christians in the Ottoman Empire, spread during the nineteenth century to Beirut, Antioch, Hamma, Tripoli, Damascus, Aleppo and Damanhur.1

  During the 1930s, Nazi antisemitism, the demonizing of the Jews as a subhuman race apart, found an eager echo in the Muslim world. The Muslims of Palestine were already alarmed by the steady arrival of Jews who they decided were secular communists, with women dressed in shorts and enjoying sexual freedom and equality with men.2 Foreshadowing Muslim concerns of today, they viewed this arrival of such free spirits as profoundly destabilizing and a threat to their religion and social order. Employing the language and imagery of the tsarist classic anti-Jewish forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they seized upon the tropes of Christian antisemitism in claiming that revolution was inherent in the Jewish “character,” which was to sow dissension, subversion and ruin everywhere.

  Arab mobs were duly inflamed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, to commit massacres of Palestinian Jews. When Hitler came to power in Germany, Haj Amin avidly courted the Nazis. Landing up eventually in Berlin after having secured a commitment by Mussolini and Hitler to work for the “elimination of the Jewish national home in Palestine,” he became active in the Nazi war effort, rallying Muslims everywhere to rise up against the Allies, dispatching Bosnian Muslims to fight under German command and urging the foreign minister of Hungary to prevent Jews from coming to Palestine and to send them to Poland instead—as a result of which, hundreds of thousands of Jews were sent to the extermination camps.3 The history of the Palestinian Arabs is therefore inextricably bound up with their complicity in the Nazi Holocaust; the hatred for the Jews that they displayed during that period has been reflected ever since within their ranks and throughout the wider Arab and Muslim world.

  During this period, a seismic development within the Arab world was to cement and expand the Muslim hatred of the Jews being fanned by the Nazi flames. The rise of Islamism, under such thinkers as Hassan al-Banna, Sayed Abu’l Ala Maududi and Sayed Qutb, and the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood would bring to the fore a virulent interpretation of Koranic attitudes towards the Jews. Fixating upon the early conflict between the Prophet Mohammed and the Jewish tribes of seventh-century Arabia, the Islamists became obsessed with the archetype of a universal Jew, treacherous by nature, whose perfidy threatened not only Islam but all humanity.

  This suited their Manichean mindset of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, which was central to their goal of purging society of un-Islamic teachings and practices, returning to Islam’s original pure sources and establishing an ideal Islamic state. Seeing themselves as engaged in the final battle at the end of time, they needed to blame external forces for the intolerable situation in which they perceived Islam to be and thus devised conspiracy theories to fit. To excuse modern Muslim weakness and the sense of shame and humiliation it engendered, they targeted all Jews as scapegoats. It was the Jews who were behind the diabolical conspiracy of secularism, the Christian West and Freemasonry that made up the satanic, worldwide plot to exterminate Islam.4

  In particular, it was Sayed Qutb’s invective, through works such as his book Our Struggle with the Jews published in 1950, that turned antisemitism into the marker of Islamist movements and infected mainstream Muslim society with the virus. It was Qutb who made the Jews a metaphor for Western domination and immorality, representing a threat to the integrity of Islam. He accused the Jews of being the authors of Western decadence, having disseminated the doctrine of “atheistic materialism” through Karl Marx, “animalistic sexuality” through Sigmund Freud and sociology through Emile Durkheim.5

  Jews, according to Qutb, were inherently evil because throughout the ages they had rebelled against God. “From such creatures who kill, massacre and defame prophets,” he wrote, “one can only expect the spilling of human blood and dirty means which would further their machinations and evilness.” They were characterized, he said, by ingratitude, selfishness, fanaticism, isolationism, and hatred for al
l others, always fomenting dissension in their host societies and exploiting all disasters to profit from the misery of others. Modern secular philosophy was a trap laid by worldwide Judaism in order to destroy the barriers of creed, weaken society and enable Jews to penetrate every country with their “satanic usurious activity,” which would finally “deliver the proceeds of all human toil into the hands of the great usurious Jewish financial institutions.” Zionism was but the latest in the long line of Jewish plots against Islam.6

  The impact of such thinking by Sayed Qutb and other similar ideologues cannot be overstated. At around the same time that Nazi ideology was constructing its infernal vision of the Jews as a pestilential blight that had to be exterminated, Islamist ideology was constructing its own version of the same demonology. But whereas the Holocaust forced the world to acknowledge the link between the Nazi demonization of the Jews and Hitler’s program for global domination, the existence of Israel has made Britain deaf to the hatred of the Jews that underpins the Islamist threat. The anti-Jewish invective flowing from the mullahs of Iran or the leaders of al-Qaeda is thus all but ignored. Yet, in accordance with the thinkers who have inspired them, this egregious prejudice forms a key factor in their thinking. Thus Ayatollah Khomeini said in his “Programme for the Establishment of an Islamic Government” in 1970:We must protest and make the people aware that the Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world. Since they are a cunning and resourceful people, I fear that—God forbid!—they may one day achieve this goal and that the apathy shown by some of us may allow a Jew to rule over us one day. May God never let us see such a day.7

  Osama bin Laden has claimed that the Jews want to divide the Muslim world, enslave it and loot its wealth, and that they use Western powers to achieve these aims. “The Jews in the past attacked the Prophets and accused Mary the mother of Jesus, who is revered in Muslim tradition, of a great sin,” he said. “They believe all other humans were created to be exploited by them, and engage in killing, raping and stealing. They have managed to install governments in America that serve as their agents and do their bidding.”8

  Rashid al-Ghannushi, a Tunisian Islamist who lives in London, has spoken of “a Jewish-American plan encompassing the entire region, which would cleanse it of all resistance and open it to Jewish hegemony from Marrakesh to Kazakhstan.” He did not speak of an Israeli-American plan. He believed in a wider Jewish conspiracy, of which Israel would be just one agency.9

  There are many more such examples. But in addition to its deafness to the antisemitism of these radicals, Britain is even more oblivious to the hatred of the Jews that is central to Palestinian and other Arab terrorism. Britain is certain that the cause of the hatred is Israel in particular rather than the Jews in general, the claim assiduously peddled by Muslim groups in Britain. It refuses to acknowledge that the hatred of Israel arises because of the hatred of the Jews, a fact which is overwhelmingly obvious from what such groups say.

  The Iranian-backed Hezbollah, the “Party of God” which wants to transform Islam into a universal power and establish Islamic rule, negates Israel’s existence based on Islamic precepts portraying Judaism as the oldest and bitterest adversary of Islam. Hussain Fadlallah, Hezbollah’s most senior religious authority, has said: “We find in the Koran that the Jews are the most aggressive towards the Muslims, not because they are Jews or because they believe in the Torah but because of their aggressive resistance to the unity of the faith.”10 The main concern is with the perceived impediment to the imposition of Islam.

  So Hezbollah presents the struggle between Islam and Judaism in apocalyptic terms as the struggle between truth and falsehood, good and evil. Thus: “The Jews are the enemy of the entire human race”; “Zionism dictates the world and dominates it”; “The Torah inspires the Jews to kill”; and “The Jews constitute a financial power. . . . They use funds to dominate the Egyptian media and infect its society with AIDS.” In another interview, Fadlallah is quoted as saying: “The Jews want to be a world superpower. This racist circle of Jews wants to take vengeance on the whole world for their history of persecution and humiliation. In this light, the Jews will work on the basis that Jewish interests are above all world interests. No one should imagine that the Jews act on behalf of any super or minor power; it is their personality to make for themselves a future world presence.”11 To that end, it demonizes Israel as the source of all evil and violence in the Middle East and, as a Western tool, an obstacle to Islamic unity. Thus it freely interchanges the terms Zionism and Judaism and routinely employs antisemitic motifs in its depiction of Israel. Typically, Israel’s alleged ruthlessness is illustrated by a soldier with a long, crooked nose, long teeth and ears and a prickly chin, wearing an armband with the Star of David and a steel helmet on his head, and holding a dagger dripping with blood.12

  In very similar terms Hamas, which defines itself as the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, also presents the Arab-Israeli conflict as the epitome of an inherently irreconcilable struggle between Judaism and Islam. It is not a national or territorial conflict but a historical, religious, cultural and existential conflict between truth and falsehood, believers and infidels, prosecuted through jihad until victory or martyrdom. This ideology is represented in the movement’s covenant, which in addition to declaring its aim of exterminating Israel displays the virulent and paranoid conspiracy theory that fuels it:The enemies [the Jews] have been scheming for a long time . . . and have accumulated huge and influential material wealth. With their money, they took control of the world media. . . . With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the globe. . . . They stood behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and most of the revolutions we hear about. . . . With their money they formed secret organizations —such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs and the Lions—which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. . . . They stood behind World War I . . . and formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains. . . . There is no war going on anywhere without them having their finger in it. . . . The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: “O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me; come and kill him.”13

  Hamas leaflets further propagate this hatred of the Jews through a torrent of antisemitic motifs that are used to whip Muslims up to genocidal frenzy. Thus they call the Jews: “The brothers of the apes, the killers of the Prophets, blood suckers, warmongers”; “barbaric”; “cowards”; a “cancer expanding in the land of Isra’ [Palestine] and Mi’raj [Mohammed’s ascent to heaven] threatening the entire Islamic world”; “a conceited and arrogant people”; “the enemy of God and mankind”; “the descendants of treachery and deceit”; Nazis “spreading corruption in the land of Islam”; “the Zionist culprits who poisoned the water in the past, killed infants, women and elders”; and “thieves, monopolists, usurers.”14

  Such ravings demonstrate that the British view of Hamas and Hezbollah—that these are merely terrorist outfits formed to liberate the Palestinian people and secure their homeland—is totally misconceived. Indeed, the idea that Israel is the cause of the jihad against the West is demonstrably absurd. Ever since the 1930s, the Muslim Brotherhood had advocated jihad in defense of Egypt, Arabism and Islam against the British and the Jews—even calling Egypt’s President Nasser the agent of a Jewish plot.15 Hamas and Hezbollah are not fighting for national self-realization by the Palestinians. They are front-line soldiers in the jihad against the Western world. But because the British are certain that Israel is the cause and not the victim of Arab terrorism, they are ignorant of the Jew-hatred coursing through Islamist ideology and through its progeny among the Palestinian terrorists; they have been deaf to the anti-Jewish hatred that has bee
n pouring out of the Arab and Muslim world for the past half-century, fusing Islamist conspiracy theory with the tropes of European Nazi Jew-hatred.

  In his book Holy War and Victory published in 1974, Abd al-Halim Mahmoud, the rector of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University—which has played a key doctrinal role in promulgating Islamist ideology—presented the Jews as a diabolical conspiracy:Among Satan’s friends—indeed his best friends in our age—are the Jews. They have laid down a plan for undermining humanity, religiously and ethically. They have begun to work to implement this plan with their money and their propaganda. They have falsified knowledge, exploited the pens of writers and bought minds in their quest for the ruination of humanity. Thus they proceed from this to seizing power . . . domination, mastery and gaining full control.16

  Throughout the Muslim world, the Nazi calumny and the tropes of medieval Jew-hatred have become assimilated into Islamic thinking. Thus in 1983 the Syrian defense minister, Mustafa Tlas, published The Matzah of Zion, which accepted as literally true the Damascus blood libel of 1840 in which eight Jews were falsely accused of murdering a Capuchin monk and his servant and using their blood to bake matzot, the unleavened bread eaten at Passover. Such blood libels have been regularly repeated. In March 2002, Dr. Umayma Ahmed al-Jalahma stated in the Saudi government daily Al-Riyadh: “The Jews spilling human blood to prepare pastry for their holidays is a well-established fact, historically and legally, all throughout history. This was one of the main reasons for the persecution and exile that were their lot in Europe and Asia.”17 And the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a coda to his declared intention to “wipe Israel off the map,” announced in December 2005 that “we do not accept” the claim that “Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces.”18