Thursday, February 28, 2013
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Bernard Lewis and islamic anti-jew
well worth reading. i know you admire bernard but.......
Since the late ninth century, the Shi’ites have been expecting the emergence of the hidden imam-mahdi, armed with divine power and followed by thousands of martyrdom-seeking warriors. He is expected to conquer the world and establish Shi’ism as its supreme religion and system of rule. His appearance would involve terrible war and unusual bloodshed.
Ahmadinejad, as mayor of Teheran, built a spectacular boulevard through which the mahdi would enter into the capital. There is no question that Ahmadinejad believes he has been chosen to be the herald of the mahdi.
Shi’ite Islam differs from Sunni Islam regarding the identity of the mahdi. The Sunni mahdi is essentially an anonymous figure; the Shi’ite mahdi is a divinely inspired person with a real identity.
However both Shi’ites and Sunnis share one particular detail about “the coming of the hour” and the dawning of messianic times: The Jews must all suffer a violent death, to the last one. Both Shi’ites and Sunnis quote the famous hadith [Sahih Muslim, Book 40, Number 6985] attributed to Muhammad: The last hour will not come unless the Muslims fight against the Jews, and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and the stone or the tree would say: “Muslim! Servant of Allah! Here is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!” Not one Friday passes without this hadith being quoted in sermons from one side of the Islamic world to the other.
The rise of Jewish nationalism — Zionism — has posed a predictable, if completely unacceptable challenge to the Islamic order — jihad-imposed chronic dhimmitude for Jews — of apocalyptic magnitude. As historian Bat Ye’or has explained [6],
…because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery, the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad.
This is exactly the Islamic context in which the widespread, “resurgent” use of Jew annihilationist apocalyptic motifs — Sunni and Shi’ite alike — would be an anticipated [6], even commonplace occurrence.
Such is the state of ferment we find in the Muslim world of today. It was epitomized [17] by the openly expressed annihilationist sentiments of Muslim Brotherhood “Spiritual Guide” Yusuf al-Qaradawi which marked his triumphal return to Cairo Friday February 18, 2011. After years of exile, his public re-emergence [17] in Egypt was sanctioned by the nation’s provisional military rulers. Qaradawi, a vocal advocate [17] of Islam’s Jew-hating mainstream canon (like the late Al-Azhar Grand Imam Tantawi), used the occasion to issue a clarion call [17] for the jihad re-conquest of Al-Aqsa mosque, i.e., Jerusalem.
A message to our brothers in Palestine: I have hope that Almighty Allah, as I have been pleased with the victory in Egypt, that He will also please me with the conquest of the al-Aqsa Mosque, to prepare the way for me to preach in the al-Aqsa Mosque. May Allah prepare the way for us to (preach) in the al-Aqsa Mosque in safety — not in fear, not in haste. May Allah achieve this clear conquest for us. O sons of Palestine, I am confident that you will be victorious.
This pronouncement was met [17] with thunderous applause by the millions assembled in Tahrir Square celebrating the so-called Arab Spring.
Sadly, if predictably, Bernard Lewis in an April 2, 2011 Wall Street Journal interview [17], although wary of Qaradawi, ignored the immensely popular cleric’s mainstream, canonical jihadism and Jew-hatred. But Lewis did manage to reject his own repeated [17] 1950s characterization of Islam as authoritarian, even totalitarian, while burbling [17] his now oft repeated pieties about the putative tolerant, anti-authoritarian “tradition” of Islam, to cast a hopeful light on the Arab Spring:
The whole Islamic tradition is very clearly against autocratic and irresponsible rule.. We have a much better chance of establishing…some sort of open, tolerant society, if it’s done within their systems, according to their traditions.
Historian Robert Kaplan has dispassionately analyzed [17] the views of Bernard Lewis on Islamic Jew hatred. Kaplan’s discussion [17] provides broader insights which help elucidate how Lewis may have developed the other self-contradictory, or apologetic positions he has taken on Islamic authoritarianism and dhimmitude. As Kaplan explains [17], central to Lewis’s method are the invalid generalizations he proffers, absent any hard data, i.e., supportive facts.
Lewis puts Islam’s record regarding Jews in a favorable light mainly with the generalizations he makes rather than the particular facts he marshals. These generalizations, which crumble under the slightest scrutiny, are of four general types. One holds that the least onerous version of Muslim oppression is typical of Muslim practice….A second type of generalization claims that the worst of the behavior of Christians towards Jews was the norm… A third variety of generalization employed by Lewis claims that Muslim abuses are far less bad than the worst imaginable abuses by non-Muslims… A fourth type of generalization ascribes to “human nature” rather than Islam, with no basis of evidence, the unattractive characteristics exhibited by Muslims.
Kaplan describes [17] perhaps the most egregious example of the first type of generalization, as follows:
Lewis writes “dhimmitude was a minor inconvenience Jews learned to live with …under Muslim rule the status of dhimmi was long accepted with gratitude by Jews.” In making this improbable claim he gives no evidence or explanation. Could he mean that the Jews were grateful for not being killed?
Kaplan also demonstrates [17] how Lewis employs a cynical manipulation of semantics to negate the concept of Antisemitism in Islam.
How does Lewis reach the conclusion that Antisemitism is unknown to classical Islam? He defines Antisemitism as hatred of Jews according to Christian doctrine, not simply hatred of Jews. In doing so he distorts the ordinary meaning of “antisemitism” which in contemporary English means hatred of Jews.
Once again, it is illuminating to juxtapose [17] Lewis’s attempt to deny the existence of Antisemitism in Medieval Islam, with the conclusions [6] of S.D. Goitein, based upon the latter’s thorough philological and historical analyses of the primary source Geniza documents. Thus, in the specific context of the Arab Muslim world during the high Middle Ages (circa 950-1250 C.E.), Goitein’ s seminal analyses revealed [6] that the Geniza documentary record employed the term antisemitism,
…in order to differentiate animosity against Jews from the discrimination practiced by Islam against non-Muslims in general. Our scrutiny of the Geniza material has proved the existence of “antisemitism” in the time and the area considered here…
Goitein cites [6] as concrete proof of his assertion that a unique strain of Islamic Jew hatred was extant at this time (i.e., up to a millennium ago) — exploding Lewis’s spurious claim of its absence — the fact that letters from the Cairo Geniza material,
…have a special word for it and, most significantly, one not found in the Bible or in Talmudic literature (nor registered in any Hebrew dictionary), but one much used and obviously coined in the Geniza period. It is sinuth, “hatred”, a Jew-baiter being called sone, “a hater.”
Incidents of such Muslim Jew hatred documented [6] by Goitein in the Geniza record come from northern Syria (Salamiyya and al-Mar‘arra), Morocco (Fez), and Egypt (Alexandria), with references to the latter being particularly frequent.
A concluding example illustrates how Lewis’s Islamic apologetics — primarily via the same spurious method of “generalization” Kaplan identifies — morphs into frank moral confusion.
Friday, February 1, 2013
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