Jerusalem News (12 May, 2013, Sivan 3, 5773)
Contents:
1. Dying Atheistical Nations Hate Israel! Snaking the Scotch by David P. Goldman
2. Why Muslims Must Hate Jews by Nonie Darwish
3. Comparative Statistics: Relative Support for Israel and the USA
====
1. Dying Atheistical Nations Hate Israel!
Snaking the Scotch by David P. Goldman
Asia Times
May 6, 2013
http://www.meforum.org/3499/snaking-the-scotch
Extracts:
Ethnocentrism is the snake in Christianity's garden, and last week it slithered into the Church of Scotland. It took the form of a screed denying the special claim of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.
By no coincidence, the most successful Christian communities embrace the State of Israel, while the least successful ones abhor it. Almost four-fifths of Americans identify themselves as Christians, for example and two out of five worship every week. Less than two-fifths of Britons say they believe in God, by contrast, and only one out of eight attends weekly services. More than half of Britons never go to church, against only 18% of Americans.
This division is mirrored in attitudes towards the State of Israel. By a margin of nearly five to one, Americans say their sympathies are more with Israel than with the Palestinians, and the proportion is at an all-time high. Britons view Israel negatively by a margin of 65 to 17, and the numbers are similar across the European continent, according to a BBC poll.
We observe eruptions of unabashed Jew-hatred in the European nations most likely to become extinct, notably in Hungary, where the ethnic Hungarian total fertility rate is just 0.83 per female, barely a third of the replacement rate. The third-largest party in the Hungarian parliament, Jobbik, wants to list all Jewish officials of Jewish origin as a national security risk and blames the country's economic problems on a "Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy". The party demonstrated on May 5 in Budapest to denounce the World Jewish Congress, which held its annual meeting in the Hungarian capital.
Hungary's demographic disaster and Jobbik's Jew-hatred are extreme cases, to be sure, but existentially challenged nationalities elsewhere in Europe evince a special animus against Jews and the Jewish State. Last week the Church of Scotland issued a report rejecting the notion that the Jewish people had any special claim on the Land of Israel, excoriating Zionism in general and the actions of past and present Israeli governments.
Both the Church of Scotland, the bearer of the Scots Calvinist tradition, and the country itself are a shadow of their former selves. The number of births per year has fallen by half since 1950 (and the number of births to married couples has fallen by four-fifths).
If we had some Scots, we would still have Scots Presbyterians, if we had some Presbyterians. That is a sad end to a great religious tradition that, among other things, fostered Christian Zionism. It may well have been a Kirk minister, notes the Church of Scotland report, who coined the phrase "a land without people, for a people without land", referring to Jewish settlement of the then-sparsely populated Land of Israel at the end of the 19th century.
With the specter of disappearance visible at the horizon of a single generation, why is the Church of Scotland so concerned about the Jews' claim on their historic homeland? One would think it had more urgent concerns. Its report, "The Inheritance of Abraham?," is a junkyard dog's assemblage of arguments against a special Jewish claim to the land.
The borders specified by the Bible are not the exact borders of the present state; even if they were, "The lack of detailed archaeological evidence supports the view that the range of scriptural material makes it inappropriate to try to use the Hebrew scriptures to determine an area of land meant exclusively for the Jewish people"; even if there were such evidence, the biblical grant of the land is conditional on a standard of behavior which the Church of Scotland doesn't think Israel meets; even if the original Zionist concept was valid, it called for equal treatment of all of Israel's citizens, and the Church of Scotland thinks Palestinian Arabs are badly treated, and so forth. It reads as if the presbyters had conducted a contest for the best excuse to turn the Jews out of Israel, and printed all the responses.
As a regional entity clamoring for national status, Scotland imagines itself in a position similar to the Palestinian Arabs and identifies with them. The Irish tend to sympathize with the Palestinians out of the same misplaced nostalgia.
There is a great deal of wisdom in this observation: each nation views the other nations through the carnival-mirror of its own preoccupations. But there may be something deeper to the Church of Scotland's newfound obsession with repudiating the Jews' claim to the Land of Israel. It denounces Christian Zionism, which it defines (quoting an Arab Christian) as "a movement within Protestant fundamentalism that understands the modern state of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and thus deserving of political, financial and religious support."
The nations of Europe stopped having children because they lost their Christian faith (as Mary Eberstadt argues in a brilliant new book, How the West Really Lost God, they also lost their faith because they stopped having children). As Christianity sloughs off the declining peoples of the West, some of them cling instead to ethnic identity. Rosenzweig wrote that once Christianity taught the Gentiles the Hebrew promise of eternal life, they abandoned their ancient fatalism about their inevitable extinction of their tribe.
After Christianity taught them about the election of Israel, the Gentiles wanted the same kind election for themselves. In some cases that can lead to philo-Semitism - for example, among the Scots Calvinists of the past century. In other cases it leads to what one might call Election envy, Jew-hatred inspired by jealousy.
What makes America unique, an "almost-chosen people" in Abraham Lincoln's quip, is the absence of ethnicity. As a nation founded on a covenant rather than an ethnicity it absorbs folk from every ethnicity, and despite the sin of slavery and ugly episodes of racism and xenophobia, America remains less polluted by the original sin of ethnic hatred than any land on earth. That helps explain why Americans instinctively sympathize with the State of Israel.
Asked why they support Israel, most devout American Christians will cite Genesis 12:3: "And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed."
David P. Goldman is an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. His book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published by Regnery Press in September 2011.
====
====
2. Why Muslims Must Hate Jews
Nonie Darwish - American Thinker, August 3rd, 2012
Extracts:
Recently, a Pakistani religious leader, Pirzada Muhammad Raza Saqib Mustafai, said: 'When the Jews are wiped out , the sun of peace [will] begin to rise on the entire world.' The same preaching is routinely done not only by clerics, but by politicians - in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere. This is not just Ahmedinijad; it is at the heart of Islamic theology that world peace will be established only when all the Jews are wiped from the earth. But few people in Western media are alarmed by this kind of rhetoric or care to expose this dreadful dark side of Islam's obsession with Jew-hatred.
After a lot of thinking, analysis, research, and writing, I discovered that Jew hatred in Islam is an essential foundation to the Islamic belief system that Muslims cannot seem to be able to rid themselves of. Jew-hatred masks an existential problem in Islam. Islam is terrified of the Jews, and the number-one enemy of Islam is the truth, which must be constantly covered at any cost. It does not matter how many Muslim men, women, and children die in the process of saving Islam's reputation. The number-one duty of Muslims is to protect the reputation of Islam and Mohammad. But why would a religion burden its followers like that? This is why:
When Mohammed embarked on his mission to spread Islam, his objective was to create a uniquely Arabian religion, one created by an Arab prophet, which reflected the Arabian values and culture. Yet to obtain legitimacy, he had to link it to the two previous Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity. He expected the Jewish tribes who lived in Arabia to declare him their Messiah and thereby bring him more legitimacy with Arabs, especially with his own tribe in Mecca, the Quraish. Because his own tribe had rejected and ridiculed him, Mohammed needed the approval of the Jews, whom he called the people of the book. But the conversion of Jews to Islam was part of the scenario that Mohammed had to accomplish in order to prove to Meccans that they had made a mistake by rejecting him.
That was one of the reasons Mohammed chose to migrate to Medina, a town that had predominantly been settled by Jewish tribes and a few impoverished Arabs who lived around the Jews. The Jews allowed Mohammed to move in. At the beginning, the Koran of Mecca was full of appeals to the Jews, who were then described as 'guidance and light' (5:44) and a 'righteous' people (6:153-154), who 'excelled the nations' (45:16). But when the Jews rejected the appeasement and refused to convert to Islam, Mohammed simply and completely flipped. The Quran changed from love to threats and then pure hatred, cursing, and commandments to kill Jews. Rejection by the Jews became an intolerable obsession with Mohammed.
Not only did the Jews reject him, but their prosperity made Mohammed extremely envious. The Jewish Arabian tribes earned their living from legitimate and successful business, but Mohammed earned his living and wealth through warfare - by attacking Arab tribes, some of whom were from his own tribe, and trade caravans, seizing their wealth and property. That did not look good for a man who claimed to be a prophet of God. The mere existence of the Jews made Mohammed look bad, which led Mohammed to unspeakable slaughter, beheading of 600 to 900 Jewish men of one tribe, and taking their women and children as slaves. Mohammed had the first pick of the prettiest woman as his sex slave. All of this senseless slaughter of the Jews was elaborately documented in Islamic books on the life of Mohammed - not as something to be ashamed of, but as justified behavior against evil people.
... An enormous number of verses in the Koran encouraged Mohammed's fighters to fight, kill, and curse Muslim fighters who wanted to escape fighting and killing Jews. The Quran is full of promises of all kinds of pleasure in heaven to those who followed Mohammed's killing spree and curses and condemnation to those who chose to escape from fighting. Muslims were encouraged to feel no hesitation or guilt for the genocide because it was not they who did it, but rather 'Allah's hand.'
Mohammed never got over his anger, humiliation, and rejection by 'the people of the book' and went to his grave tormented and obsessed that some Jews were still alive. On his deathbed, Mohammed entrusted Muslims to kill Jews wherever they found them, which made this a 'holy commandment' that no Muslim can reject. Muslims who wrote sharia understood how Mohammed was extremely sensitive to criticism, and that is why criticizing Mohammed became the highest crime in Islam that will never be forgiven even if the offender repents. Mohammed's message on his deathbed was not for his followers to strive for holiness, peace, goodness, and to treat their neighbors as themselves, but rather a commandment for Muslims to continue the killing and the genocide against the Jews. Killing thus became a holy act of obedience to Mohammed and Allah himself.
Mohammed portrayed himself as a victim of Jews, and Muslims must avenge him until judgment day. With all Arab power, money, and influence around the world today, they still thrive at portraying themselves as victims. Sharia also codified into law the duty of every Muslim to defend Mohammed's honor and Islam with his own blood, and allowed the violation of many commandments if it is for the benefit of defending Islam and Mohammed. Thus, Muslims are carrying a huge burden, a holy burden, to defend Mohammed with their blood, and in doing so they are allowed to kill, lie, cheat, slander, and mislead.
... One hundred years after Mohammed's death, Arabs occupied Jerusalem and built Al Aqsa mosque right on top of the Jewish Temple ruins, the holiest spot of the Jews. Muslims thought they had erased all memory of Jewish existence.
Mohammed's genocide of the Jews of Arabia became an unholy dark mark of shame in Islamic history, and that shame, envy, and anger continues to get the best of Muslims today. In the eyes of Mohammed and Muslims, the mere existence of the Jewish people, let alone an entire Jewish state, delegitimizes Islam and makes Mohammed look more like a mass murderer than like a prophet. For Muslims to make peace with Jews and acknowledge that Jews are humans who deserve the same rights as everyone else would have a devastating effect on how Muslims view their religion, their history, and the actions of their prophet.
Islam has a major existential problem. By no will of their own, the Jews found themselves in the middle of this Islamic dilemma. Islam must justify the genocide that Mohammad waged against the Jews. Mohammad and Muslims had two choices: either the Jews are evil sub-humans, apes, pigs, and enemies of Allah, a common description of Jews still heard regularly in Middle Eastern mosques today, or Mohammad was a genocidal warlord not fit to be a prophet of God - a choice that would mean the end of Islam.
Nonie Darwish author is the author of The Devil We Don't Know.
====
====
3. Comparative Statistics: Relative Support for Israel and the USA
This Ongoing War: A Blog
http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.co.il/
10-May-13: Peaceful co-existence: Israelis and Palestinian Arabs believe in it to about the same degree. Not.
Extracts:
Pew Research Center announced yesterday (Thursday) the findings of a poll that shows Israelis generally believe an independent Palestinian state can coexist peacefully with their country. Palestinian Arabs, by contrast, overwhelmingly say this is not possible. When asked about the best way to achieve statehood, a plurality of Palestinian Arabs prefer armed struggle over negotiations or nonviolent resistance.
Americans who favour the Israeli side outnumber those preferring the Palestinian side by 53% to 14%. In the United Kingdom, the proportions are almost the reverse: 19% for Israel, 35% for the Palestinian Arabs. (In the UK, the proportion who say they are undecided is a whopping 22%.) In France it's 40% for Israel and 44% for the Palestinian Arabs; in Germany it's 28% Israel versus 26% Palestinian Arabs.
When it comes to groups who don't sympathize with either the Palestinian Arabs or the Israelis, the standouts are Germany (31% prefer neither) and Russia (42% prefer neither)
83% of Israelis have a favorable view of the U.S. Among Palestinian Arabs, a mere 16% think the same.