Shining Light on the Israel-Haters

by Jennifer Rubin

The Jew-haters among the European elite (yes, there’s quite a bit of overlap there) are pitching a fit. Why? Israel is moving ahead with a measure to force NGOs to be more transparent. Nervous that anti-Zionist groups will be unmasked as pawns of anti-Israel figures in European governments, the European Parliament “devoted [a session] to attacking a Knesset bill that seeks greater transparency regarding foreign governmental funding of NGOs operating in Israel.” There is reason for the members of Parliament to freak out:

Gerald Steinberg, the head of Jerusalembased NGO Monitor, told the Jerusalem Post on Tuesday that the session “was led by a small group of MEPs who work closely with the NGOs involved in the demonization of Israel.”

German Alexandra Thein, one of the European Parliament members who submitted the motion to debate the Knesset bill represents the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, and is a member of the Free Democratic Party (FDP). Thein, who is married to an Israeli- Arab, visited the Gaza Strip last January and met with Hamas legislators along with 49 other MEPs.

At one point her party’s Web site contained a link to the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza group. On her own Web site, Thein has a section called “Focus Palestine,” and posts notices about Israeli acts of “land discrimination.”

Steinberg also took time out to blast Human Rights Watch and its founder George Soros (who also provided the seed money for J Street) :

Steinberg said that “HRW claims to be ‘even-handed’ and to publish ‘credible reports,’ but this is contradicted by highly biased activities in the Middle East, particularly on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“Time and again, HRW reports on Israel are based on false or unverifiable claims, and the analysis strips away the context of the conflict, denying Israelis the right to self-defense. George Soros has supported this travesty,” he said.

Well, the Knesset certainly hit a nerve, revealing once again that the political and social ostracism which kept anti-Semitism under wraps in the post-Holocaust years has vanished. It’s about time some light was shed on those who fund the demonization of Israel from the cafes and salons of European capitals.

Jennifer Rubin

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

On All Fronts

by Marc Prowisor

The problems of the world are all based on Israel giving up its historic heartland, everybody knows that. The peace loving Arab nations are willing to let bygones be bygones, and are willing to live in peace, side by side in harmony with their Jewish neighbor Israel…NOT. I am constantly amazed by those who believe in that scenario. Time magazine has clarified the issue for many by explaining how we Jews in Israel are not even interested in peace, you see we like sending our children to the army, we like terror attacks against us, you know you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a bus load of people blow up in front of your eyes.

This battle is on all fronts now, in all locations, so many fail to notice it, so many innocent fall victims to the treachery and lies. In true Arab custom, the weak are targeted, those that lack strength or means to truly defend themselves, no, I am not just talking about the Jews in Israel anymore, I am talking about Jews throughout the Diaspora.

College campuses have become the new killing fields, the targets – unaffiliated Jews, Jews who are ignorant about their faith and their history, children of Israeli immigrants and a slew of others who tend to be oblivious to the reality in Israel.

Various Islamic groups along with supposed “Human” rights groups and others who claim to champion justice ambush these unsuspecting souls in the name of the school of progressive and liberal thought, often turning them into violent and extreme adversaries, brainwashed to hate themselves, their history and their identity. Bastions of safe Jewish havens such as Hillel houses have become bases of operations against any hint of Zionism or support of Israel.

Most are not even aware of the dangers present and all too often fall into these traps. Funding for these anti-Jewish workshops supposedly comes from sources ranging from foreign governments to our own quasi Jewish Funds, masked efficiently to hide their true intentions of harming the Jewish State of Israel by alienating these young people from themselves and the possibility of a future strong Jewish leadership in the Diaspora.

The Arab nations have always been an enemy to the existence of the State of Israel, nothing has changed, and peace is not in their lexicon regarding Jews ruling over the Land of Israel. Growing up in Israel prepares you for this reality, it is one of the advantages of being surrounded by bullies who only wish you harm and worse. But most Jews in the Diaspora are not prepared for this aggressive behavior that they witness on their campuses. Their reactions vary, most either hide their identities and thoughts waiting quietly for still waters, while others join this parade of hatred, fooling themselves into thinking that they are a part of a new order that will bring a just change to a region, culture and in many cases, a people they do not even know.

There are of course the few, the minority that does fight back, that attempt to stand strong. These smaller Israel Advocacy groups lack the numbers, funding and fashionable stance to compete and present a viable challenge to this on going and growing threat. Never the less they do try and at times, just like Israel, they are victorious against what is perceived as overwhelming odds.

It used to be that for many American Jews, the problems and challenges that Israel faces are far away, not their problem, not their concern, …no longer.

If you are Jewish, you have no choice but to ultimately, eventually face the same challenges, the same enemies that Israel must contend with, the same challenges, the same enemies that our people have contended with throughout history, wherever you are.

We will do this together.

Marc Prowisor served as the Chief Army Security Coordinator for the Shilo Region in Israel from 1996 through 2006.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People

by Joshua Teitelbaum

From the San Remo Conference (1920) to the Netanyahu-Abbas Talks

• According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the real root of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians had been their ongoing refusal to recognize "the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in their historic homeland" and he has singled out this issue as a key "prerequisite for ending the conflict." Netanyahu's proposal puts back on the global agenda a fundamental Jewish national right that was once axiomatic but today is rarely mentioned.


• Ninety years ago at the San Remo Conference following World War I (April 1920), the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers determined the allocation of the Middle Eastern territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire and decided to incorporate the 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine into the British Mandate for the territory, a move which confirmed international recognition of the right of Jewish self-determination.


• The language adopted at San Remo was a triumph for Zionism, which saw a national solution to the problem of the Jews. It recognized the existence of the Jews as more than individuals who subscribed to a certain religion - Judaism - but rather as a corporate group deserving of national expression, in this case in the form of a national home. And this home was to be in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews. The language agreed upon at San Remo was, as British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon put it, "the Magna Carta of the Zionists." It was clear at the time that the term "national home" really meant a state.


• Jewish self-determination was part of a process that ended up decolonizing the Middle East in an effort that led to Arab as well as Jewish independence. Repeated recent associations of Israel with colonialism - an ahistorical canard that erases the millennia-long association of Jews with the Land of Israel as an indigenous people - ignores the benefit that Zionism actually brought to the Arabs through the process of decolonization. The British Peel Commission Report of 1937 was quite clear on this. Indeed, it was the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel that gave critical mass to a distinct and unique Palestinian identity as well.


• The Jews have been brought back into history through the establishment of the State of Israel. This was accomplished with the aid of international institutions which recognized the justice and importance of Jewish national self-determination. These institutions accepted the validity of Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jews. Today, those who deny the Jewish right to national self-determination, more than 60 years after the founding of Israel, engage in a new kind of anti-Semitism.

In his June 14, 2009, address at Bar-Ilan University in which he accepted the principle of a demilitarized Palestinian state, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly emphasized an important Israeli requirement for a final peace agreement: Palestinian recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. For Netanyahu, this was not a precondition for negotiations. But, according to his analysis, the real "root of the conflict" between Israel and the Palestinians had been their ongoing refusal to recognize "the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in their historic homeland." He thus singled out this issue as a key "prerequisite for ending the conflict."¹

The recognition of the right of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland is not a new idea. It actually has long historical roots which, unfortunately, have been forgotten in much of the public discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Indeed, the denial of this right has been part of the international campaign to challenge Israel's very legitimacy. For that reason, it is critical to reemphasize the international, legal, and historical foundations of this idea in order to challenge the current discourse of delegitimization and restore the idea of Jewish self-determination as an internationally-accepted norm. Thus, Netanyahu's proposal is important for reasons that go beyond the peace process, for it puts back on the global agenda a fundamental Jewish national right that was once axiomatic but today is rarely mentioned.


Historical Roots of the Internationally-Recognized Right of Jewish Self-Determination

Ninety years ago at the San Remo Conference in Italy following World War I (April 1920), the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, and Italy) determined the allocation of the Middle Eastern territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire. At San Remo it was decided to incorporate the 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine into the British Mandate for the territory, a move which confirmed international recognition of the right of Jewish self-determination in the place known to the Jews as the Land of Israel (in Hebrew, Eretz Yisrael).

While some have viewed the mandate system as a continuation of British and French colonialism, the mandates were temporary by design and eventually gave way to Arab and Jewish independence. Indeed, the mandate system could be viewed essentially as a move toward decolonization (U.S. President Woodrow Wilson certainly saw it as such),² a step on the way to returning much of the Middle East to its indigenous peoples and freeing them from the Ottoman colonizers who had ruled for 400 years.

Ironically, the peace process of recent decades, which revived the idea of a two-state solution which would allow the fulfillment of both Jewish and Palestinian self-determination, has also resurrected the idea of a one-state solution - a move which in time would bring about an Arab majority in the land, thus ending Jewish self-determination. Although the supporters of a one-state solution or a Palestinian "right of return" may drape their ideas in the cloth of human rights, in effect they would be denying the Jewish people their fundamental right of self-determination. Beyond the great injustice this would bring upon the Jewish people, it would most certainly not bring about peace. Those truly concerned with peace and stability should support self-determination for both peoples in two states, since in the Middle East a one-state solution would only bring death and destruction. Think Lebanon, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan - not Switzerland.


The Lead-Up to San Remo

By the time the San Remo Conference convened in April 1920, the Allies had already made some progress regarding the disposition of Ottoman territorial possessions. The British had become convinced of the desirability of a post-war British Palestine, but still needed to convince the French, since this contradicted the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 which determined that Palestine was to be under international control. The best way for the British to gain French support was first to convince them to support a Jewish national home in Palestine, which was achieved in June 1917.³ As a result of this diplomacy, the Balfour Declaration was issued on November 2, 1917. French acquiescence to British rule in Palestine was a result of the realities brought about by British military successes in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and Palestine in particular - in which the French played practically no role at all.⁴

The Covenant of the League of Nations, which was approved by the Paris Peace Conference in April 1919 and later incorporated in the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, recognized the mandate system of "tutelage" and gave international validity to it in Article 22 of the Covenant.⁵ But the nature of the mandates and who would be the actual mandatory powers was negotiated between the victorious powers, Britain and France, who first met in London during February 12-24, 1920. The London conference, and the San Remo meeting which followed in April, were aimed at establishing an Allied consensus prior to signing a treaty with the Ottoman Empire, which would become known as the Treaty of Sèvres (and which would eventually be replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey).


At San Remo

Britain, France, Japan, and Italy, with the United States observing, met from April 18 to April 26, 1920, as the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers to discuss the mandates and the future of the Middle Eastern territories of the recently defeated and now defunct Ottoman Empire. Britain was represented by Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Lord George Nathaniel Curzon. At the table for the French were Prime Minister Alexandre Millerand and the director of political affairs for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Philippe Berthelot. The significance of what transpired at San Remo on April 24-25, 1920, has not always received the attention it deserves, for in a sense, it was at San Remo that Israel was born.⁶

On April 24, Britain and France, with Italy chairing the meeting and Japan observing, discussed the future of Palestine. The British, led by Lloyd George and Lord Curzon, were keen to have the mandate for Palestine awarded to Great Britain, and to include the language of the Balfour Declaration in the treaty with Turkey. The French, however, were not enthusiastic, despite what the British perceived to have been prior agreement on the issue. Berthelot argued that the Balfour Declaration was a unilateral British document, and "an unofficial declaration made by one power" had no place in the treaty. Furthermore, the French wanted some recognition of their role as a custodian and protector of Christian holy sites, which the Balfour Declaration did not mention.

Lloyd George, however, would hear nothing of a French presence. Two mandatory powers in Palestine were quite impossible, and, he threatened ominously, "it might even easily raise difficulties in regard to [Great Britain's] relations with France." France should let Britain handle Palestine alone and have mercy on London's burden, since "[i]n any case the task of governing Palestine would not be an easy one, and it would not be rendered less difficult by the fact that it was to be the national home of the Jews, who were an extraordinarily intelligent race, but not easy to govern."⁷ The French eventually relented, reducing their demands to a stipulation in the procès verbal that the rights of non-Jewish communities would not be suspended. A draft of the article was put before the Supreme Council on April 24 and it was officially approved on April 25. In the end, the British had carried the day.

The San Remo language gave detailed content to the general provisions regarding the mandate system as formulated in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations noted above. The operative paragraph reads:

The mandatory power will be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on the 8^th [2^nd] November, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.⁸

The parties also agreed that France would be the mandatory power for Syria, and Great Britain for Mesopotamia (later Iraq) and Palestine.⁹

The language with respect to Palestine adopted at San Remo is remarkable for several reasons. First, it established recognition by the Great Powers of the principle of Jewish national self-determination. As such, it was a triumph for Zionism, which saw a national solution to the problem of the Jews, as opposed to other proposed solutions, such as assimilation. It recognized the existence of the Jews as more than individuals who subscribed to a certain religion - Judaism - but rather as a corporate group deserving of national expression, in this case in the form of a national home. And this home was to be in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews. Interestingly, the rights of the Arabs ("non-Jewish communities") in Palestine did not include national, but only civil and religious rights.

The language is a verbatim repetition of the Balfour Declaration, with one significant change. Whereas in the Balfour Declaration, Great Britain promised to "use their best endeavours to facilitate" a Jewish national home in Palestine, at San Remo this became an operative obligation. As the mandatory power, Britain was directly charged with "putting [the Balfour Declaration] into effect." But most importantly, when the Balfour Declaration was first issued, it was little more than a political declaration. Once it was embedded into the Palestine Mandate, it became "an international legislative act" by the Principal Allied Powers.¹⁰

The language agreed upon at San Remo was, as Lord Curzon put it, "the Magna Carta of the Zionists."¹¹ It was clear at the time that the term "national home" really meant a state. Back in 1917, three months after his declaration was issued, Lord Balfour confessed: "My personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish state."¹² U.S. intelligence recommendations drafted for President Wilson at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference had the same impression: "It will be the policy of the League of Nations to recognize Palestine as a Jewish State as soon as it is a Jewish state in fact."¹³


In the Wake of San Remo

On April 26, 1920, acting upon instructions, British Major General Louis Jean Bols, Chief Political Officer and Chief Administrator, Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (South), announced to the heads of the communities in Jerusalem that the Supreme Council had approved a mandate for Palestine that would probably go to Great Britain. Most importantly, he told them, "the Balfour Declaration regarding a Jewish National Home shall be included in the Turkish Peace Treaty."¹⁴ The announcement, reported the Times, "was quietly received."¹⁵ But in Jewish communities throughout the world, there were celebrations.¹⁶

The agreed language of San Remo was incorporated verbatim into the Treaty of Sèvres, signed with Turkey on August 10, 1920, as Article 95.¹⁷ The treaty, however, was never ratified by Turkey since the new nationalist government headed by Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, would have no part of the treaty due to its many clauses - unrelated to Palestine - that he considered prejudicial to Turkey. By the time a replacement treaty, the Treaty of Lausanne, was signed with Turkey on July 24, 1923,¹⁸ the mandate for Palestine had already been confirmed in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine of July 24, 1922.¹⁹ It went into effect on September 26, 1923.

The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine is a key document that underscores the international legitimacy of the right of Jewish self-determination in the Land of Israel, or Palestine. According to Howard Grief, this can be seen in the three "recitals" occurring in the Preamble.²⁰ The first recital is embodied in the reference to Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, which, by implication, represents self-determination as "the well-being and development" of the former subject peoples. The second recital is the repetition of the Balfour Declaration as changed at San Remo, where Britain is charged with actually carrying out the intent of the Declaration. Finally, the third and perhaps the most important recital in the Preamble recalls and notes that "recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine"; it further stresses that this was "grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."²¹

It should be clear from the above that Jewish self-determination was part of a process that ended up decolonizing the Middle East, if not entirely by design. This effort led to Jewish as well as Arab independence. Repeated recent associations of Israel with colonialism - an ahistorical canard that erases the millennia-long association of Jews with the Land of Israel as an indigenous people - ignores the benefit (even if ironic) that Zionism actually brought to the Arabs through the process of decolonization. The British Peel Commission Report of 1937 was quite clear on this:

The fact that the Balfour Declaration was issued in order to enlist Jewish support for the Allies and the fact that this support was forthcoming are not sufficiently appreciated in Palestine. The Arabs do not appear to realize in the first place that the present position of the Arab world as a whole is mainly due to the great sacrifices made by the Allied and Associated Powers in the War and, secondly, that, insofar as the Balfour Declaration helped to bring about the Allies' victory, it helped to bring about the emancipation of all the Arab countries from Turkish rule. If the Turks and their German allies had won the War, it is improbable that all the Arab countries, except Palestine, would now have become or be about to become independent states.²²

With respect to the Palestinians per se, it is clear that for many years after the end of World War I, they considered themselves part of Syria,²³ although through constant contact with the challenge of Zionism, and with the independence of the Arab states, a separate Palestinian identity later developed.²⁴

Indeed, it was the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel that gave critical mass to a distinct and unique Palestinian identity. If Jewish national self-determination had not been fulfilled, it is debatable if an entirely separate Palestinian nation would have emerged. The Syrian delegate raised this issue during the UN debate on the 1947 partition plan:

Palestine used to be a Syrian province. Geographical, historical, racial and religious links exist there. There is no distinction whatever between the Palestinians and the Syrians and had it not been for the Balfour Declaration and the terms of the mandate, Palestine would now be a Syrian province [emphasis mine - J.T.], as it used to be.²⁵

Putting Jewish Self-Determination into Action: The Partition of Palestine and the Admission of Israel to the United Nations

If there were some lingering doubts in the international community about the wisdom of a Jewish state, the German Nazi horrors of the Holocaust made abundantly clear its absolute necessity. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations, in General Assembly Resolution 181,²⁶ agreed to the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state,²⁷ to share an economic union, with a special international regime for Jerusalem. The tally was 33 votes in favor, 13 against, 10 abstentions, and one absent. At the time, the idea of a Jewish nation-state was internationally accepted, even taken for granted. Jews were referred to in national terms - not just religious - throughout the UN document, as are Arabs. The term "Jewish state" is mentioned 27 times in the resolution.

Israel is both a Jewish nation-state and a democratic state. This was neither an impossible feat nor a contradiction in terms to the framers of the partition resolution, who stipulated that both the Jewish and Arab states in partitioned Palestine would have to be democratic and protect the rights of the national minority in their respective states.²⁸ But Israel's legitimacy as a state is not by definition connected to its democratic nature. That Israel's democracy is imperfect - and what democracy is not - does not detract from its legitimacy. As Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein write,

Even nations that do not maintain even a semblance of democracy are universally recognized as entitled to national independence, and even in such cases (not in fact wholly exceptional in the Middle East) no one claims that the very idea of national independence is an undemocratic one.²⁹

Israel allowed a large national minority to remain in its territory after the 1948 war. (Jordan and Egypt did not allow Jews to remain in the territory they captured, which had been allotted to the Arab state authorized by the UN to come into existence in Palestine.) It naturally gave expression to the Jewish majority by using Jewish symbols in the national flag and seal, and in national culture and the designation of Saturday as the day of rest. This is no different from the many democracies that give expression to the Christian identity of their majority populations. For example, several states have Christian crosses in their flags: the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia (these actually have threes crosses in their flags); Switzerland; Norway; Finland; Denmark; Switzerland; and Greece. Pakistan and Turkey make use of the Islamic crescent in their flags, while India uses a religious symbol in its flag. Britain's head of state, the Queen, is head of the Church of England.

The historical connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel was clear to the international community, as manifested in the League of Nations mandate which recognized the "historic connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" and their right to reconstitute "their national home in that country."³⁰ UNSCOP, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine which recommended partition, clearly saw the historical connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel and its report mentions this several times.³¹

On May 11, 1949, the UN admitted Israel, the Jewish state created by the United Nations, as "a peace-loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations."³²


Europe and America: The Denial of the Legitimacy of Jewish Self-Determination is Anti-Semitic

Not only is Jewish self-determination a right recognized by the international community for nearly a century, it has been defined as such by the European Union and the U.S. State Department in recent years, and the rejection of that right has officially been declared to be anti-Semitism.

The EU's European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia arrived at a "Working Definition of Anti-Semitism" in 2005. In elaborating the various manifestations of anti-Semitism, the document notes that the State of Israel is "conceived as a Jewish collectivity," and cites as an example of anti-Semitism:

denying the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of Israel is a racist endeavor.

This definition was adopted verbatim by the U.S. State Department in March 2008.³³


The International Legal Status of the State of Israel

In traditional international legal theory, states deserving of recognition are those which "possess a defined territory; a permanent population; an effective government; and the capacity to enter into relations with other States."³⁴ Israel met and continues to meet these criteria. The fact that Israel is a Jewish state did not add to (or, for that matter, hinder) its acceptance as a legitimate state among the family of nations. It is legitimate because it meets these criteria.

The State of Israel is the legitimate expression of Jewish self-determination. This is in keeping with universal human rights, including the right to self-determination. While there are those who deny Jewish self-determination by claiming that the Jews are only a religion, this is not the position historically shared by the international community. This is because the Jews have a history of attachment to the Land of Israel and a constant yearning for a return to it, whether it is physical and contemporary, or metaphysical and anchored in messianic times.

The term "Jewish state" refers to national, not religious, identity. Most Israelis would claim they are members of the Jewish people, but are not religiously observant Jews. As Ruth Gavison admits, the relationship between Jews and Judaism is a unique one, since

[n]o other people has its own specific religion. The Arab peoples, for example, comprise Christians, Muslims, and Druze. While there was a time when the French were mostly Catholics or former Catholics, they still waged religious wars with the Huguenots, and today a large number of Frenchmen are Muslim. At the same time, no other religion has a specific nationality of its own: Christians can be French, American, Mexican, or Arab; Muslims, too, can be Arabs, Persians, or African-Americans. This distinction is not merely the result of secularization: Judaism, at least from a historical perspective, has never differentiated between the people and the religion. Nor was there any belated development that altered this unique fact: Social stereotyping never allowed an individual to be a part of the Jewish people while at the same time a member of another religion; nor could one be an observant Jew without belonging to the Jewish people.³⁵

Denying Israel's Legitimacy: Thoughts on Root Causes

The legitimacy of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people seemed unassailable when the UN Partition Plan was approved in 1947 and the State of Israel was admitted to the United Nations the following year. What has happened to change that?

Supporters of Israel continue to be baffled by the constant barrage of media attacks on Israel, no matter what Israel does. Sure, Israel still controls the West Bank, and its settlement policy is controversial, but this is not for lack of trying to reach an agreement based on far-reaching and serious offers to the Palestinians (Camp David, 2000; Taba, 2001; and Prime Minster Ehud Olmert's proposals, 2008). Yet Jerusalem seems to get no credit for withdrawals from Sinai (1982), Lebanon (2000), and Gaza (2005). In addition, clear acts of self-defense when attacked from these areas: Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2008-2009), and defending a legal blockade against Turkish blockade runners (2010), receive little sympathy from self-righteous pundits and government officials. In September 2010, TIME magazine published a cover story entitled: "Why Israel Doesn't Care About Peace," just as Israel and the Palestinians re-embarked on direct negotiations, which had been delayed for a year and a half at Palestinian insistence. The article itself suggests that Israelis (read Jews) care more about money than about peace.³⁶

Some American audiences have difficulty reconciling their notions of democratic freedom with that of Israel's. This is because the American idea of freedom revolves around the right of the individual to be free from tyranny - foreign and domestic - while the founders of Israel, heirs to a European legacy of nationalism, conceived of freedom as the collective rights of a certain nation or people - in this case, the Jewish people. Daniel Gordis writes that while America has inspired much of the Israeli project, each country had a different founding ethos. America was about freedom as defined by breaking away from an undemocratic monarchy, designed to end "the long train of abuses and usurpations," as stated in the American Declaration of Independence, while Israel's Declaration of Independence is based on the Land of Israel "as the birthplace of the Jewish people."³⁷

Edward Said, drawing on Michel Foucault and others, taught us about the importance of narrative and discourse in the Arab-Israeli conflict.³⁸ He was sensitive to how capturing the discourse - that nexus of language, knowledge, and power - was essential for promoting the Palestinian cause. Said and his followers have been enormously successful. Israel is often cast in the role of colonialist, and words and phrases such as "occupation" and "right of return" have become politically saturated expressions with only one meaning. They then play an insidious psychological role in forming and weighting the discourse against Israel.

Certain elite circles in Europe have their own reasons for denying Israel's legitimacy, especially the right of the Jewish people to a nation-state of their own. Daniel Hannan, a British Conservative Party member of the European Parliament, pointed out during an address in Jerusalem in early 2010 that Israel, by its very existence, challenges the intellectual basis of European integration, which seeks to supplant the old national ideal on the European continent with the European Union.

After all, Hannan argues, the EU was founded on the idea that old national loyalties are arbitrary, transient, and ultimately have been discredited since they were the cause of many of Europe's great wars. In contrast, Israel, which was resurrected after 2,000 years, is the embodiment of the national ideal. If Israel was right to re-establish itself, Hannan concludes, and the national ideal is correct, then some in Europe might feel challenged that their multinational alternative was a mistake, explaining their need to attack Israel and undermine its legitimacy.³⁹

There is something particularly galling about denying Jewish peoplehood and self-determination. Identity is by definition self-defining. The Jews define themselves as a people and overwhelmingly support the embodiment of Jewish self-determination as manifested in the State of Israel. Just as there can be a Palestinian state, since the Palestinians choose a unique identity, there can be a Jewish state. Affirming the right of the Jewish people to a nation-state, however, is not only important in the context of the Arab-Israeli peace process. It is critical for countering the forces that need to delegitimize the Jewish state for their own internal political reasons.

The Jews have been brought back into history through the establishment of the State of Israel. This was accomplished with the aid of international institutions which recognized the justice and importance of Jewish national self-determination. These institutions accepted the validity of Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jews. Today, those who deny the Jewish right to national self-determination, more than 60 years after the founding of Israel, engage in a new kind of anti-Semitism, one that calls for the elimination of a state created by the United Nations.

This cannot stand. The circumstances that led the international community to support the establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state (the Arab state did not come into existence because the Arabs made war on Israel and took over the territories allotted to the Palestinians) still obtain today. The international community thus has an obligation not only to work for peace and a two-state solution, but also to stand by its previous decisions and stop the campaign to delegitimize Israel as the nation-state of the Jews.

* * *

Notes

1. Address by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Bar-Ilan University, June 14, 2009, http://bit.ly/bZUrlH.

2. Irwin Mansdorf, "Is Israel a Colonial State? The Political Psychology of Palestinian Nomenclature," Jerusalem Center For Public Affairs, Jerusalem Viewpoints, No. 576, March-April 2010, http://bit.ly/Is_Israel_a_Colonial_State.

3. French Foreign Minister Paul Cambon to Zionist Executive Member Nahum Sokolow, June 4, 1917, in J.C. Hurewitz (ed.), The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, Vol. 2, British-French Supremacy, 1914-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 103.

4. Hurewitz, p. 119; 202-203.

5. Avalon Project - The Covenant of the League of Nations, http://bit.ly/CovenantofLeagueofNationsArticle22.

6. The most exhaustive study of the international legal basis for the State of Israel is Howard Grief, The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law (Jerusalem: Mazo Publishers, 2008), which attributes great importance to the San Remo decision, and which he terms the "San Remo Resolution."

7. See Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 256-258. The minutes of the meeting from which these quotations are taken, as well as the text of the draft and final articles, are in Rohan Butler and J.P.T. Bury, Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939, First Series, Vol. 8 (London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1958), pp. 156-185.

8. Balfour's letter to Lord Rothschild was dated November 2; the text was published in the Times on November 9, after probably being communicated to the press by the Foreign Office on November 8.

9. Butler and Bury, p. 177.

10. See Allan Gerson, Israel, the West Bank, and International Law (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 43. This was the language used by Judge Moore in the Mavrommatis case heard by the Permanent Court of International Justice.

11. Grief, p. 39.

12. Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 10.

13. "Tentative Recommendations for President Wilson by the Intelligence Section of the American Delegation to the Peace Conference," January 21, 1919, in Hurewitz, pp. 132-36.

14. FO 371/5114, Bols to Lord Curzon, June 7, 1920, reprinted in Isaiah Friedman (ed.), The Rise of Israel: Riots in Jerusalem-San Remo Conference, April 1920, Vol. 12 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), pp. 212-221.

15. Times, May 1, 1920, reproduced in Friedman, p. 222.

16. FO 371/5118, Geddes (Washington) to Foreign Office, May 3, 1920, and editor's introduction, in Friedman, p. 224.

17. Peace Treaty of Sèvres - World War I Document Archive, http://bit.ly/SevresTreaty.

18. Treaty of Lausanne - World War I Document Archive, http://bit.ly/TreatyofLausanne.

19. The Avalon Project - The Palestine Mandate, http://bit.ly/PalestineMandate.

20. Legally, a "recital" is "the repetition of some former writing, or the statement of something which has been done. Recitals are used to explain those matters of fact which are necessary to make the transaction intelligible." http://bit.ly/RecitalDefinition, at lectlaw.com.

21. Grief, pp. 143-146.

22. http://unispal.un.org/pdfs/Cmd5479.pdf, (ch. II, para. 19, p. 24), cited in Mansdorf, "Is Israel a Colonial State?"

23. Peel Report, paragraph 23, p. 25, cited in Mansdorf, "Is Israel a Colonial State?"

24. For important views on the historical development of Palestinian identity, see Muhammad Muslih, The Origins of Palestinian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1918-1929 (London: Frank Cass, 1974); Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

25. Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein, Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 38.

26. http://bit.ly/Resolution_181.

27. It was clear why the term "Arab" and not "Palestinian" was used for the Arab state. The Mandate for Palestine had included both Jews and Arabs, and the use of "Palestinian" only for the Arabs would not have made semantic sense at the time.

28. Yakobson and Rubinstein, p. 2; http://bit.ly/Resolution_181.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., p. 41

31. Ibid., pp. 41-42, and quotation from the report therein.

32. http://bit.ly/Resolution_273.

33. http://bit.ly/EU_Working_Defintiton_of_Anti_Semitism; U.S. Department of State, Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism, http://bit.ly/state_anti_semitism. I thank Prof. Amnon Rubinstein for these references.

34. Sean Murphy, "Democratic Legitimacy and the Recognition of States and Governments," International and Comparative Law Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3 (July 1999), pp. 545-581. I thank international law expert Dr. Amichai Magen for discussing this issue and providing me with this reference.

35. Ruth Gavison, "The Jews' Right to Statehood: A Defense," Azure (Summer 2003), pp. 70-108 (pp. 101-102 quoted), http://bit.ly/9TRRjm.

36. See Daniel Gordis, "Acceptable in Polite Society," commentarymagazine.com, September 7, 2010, http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/acceptable-in-polite-society-15527. The online version of the TIME article is significantly abridged and edited and does not give the full effect of the print version.

37. Daniel Gordis, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End (Hoboken: Wiley, 2009), pp. 136-137.

38. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

39. See Daniel Hannan on "Europe's Antagonism to Israel," Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, February 14, 2010, http://www.jims-israel.org/.

Joshua Teitelbaum, Ph.D., is Principal Research Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He holds research positions at the GLORIA Center, IDC Herzliya, and the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. He also holds visiting positions at the Hoover Institution and the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, both at Stanford University.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

It’s Not About Settlements

by Jennifer Rubin


Giora Eiland isn’t impressed with the happy talk coming from the Obama team. George Mitchell may coo all he wants about getting down to “substantive issues,” but the Palestinians show no sign they are willing to accept the most basic element of a peace deal: recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Eiland explains why this is an essential component of any accord:

The Palestinians make a distinction between recognizing the fact that the State of Israel exists and the recognition that it has the right to exist. The camp that supports Mahmoud Abbas has no qualms with the first definition: “Israel exists, and it’s apparently worthwhile to recognize it diplomatically; this is the way to guarantee for the Palestinians what only Israel can give. This agreement is fit for the present, but as to the future – who knows.” …

The entire concept of “Hudna” (long-term ceasefire) is based on an approach that espouses compromise in an effort to elicit what can be achieved now, without abandoning the intention to fight and get much more in the future. The way to curb future demands, especially in respect to the refugee issue, is to create a Palestinian obligation to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

The Obami, like the rest of the cottage industry of peace processors, operate on a myth: that both sides want peace and the issue is where to draw lines and how to halt and then uproot those darn settlements. It is as if the entire period between 1948 and 1967 never occurred. The Palestinians and their Arab enablers didn’t accept the Jewish state in 1949 (only an armistice was agreed to), didn’t accept the Jewish state in 1967, and still don’t. While Obama is quibbling about settlements in 2010, the Palestinians are still hung up on 1948.

Eiland points to another reason why recognition of the Jewish state is critical:

Should the future Palestinian state not recognize the State of Israel as the Jewish people’s nation-state, there is no chance that the Palestinians residing in Israel will accept it. If we fail to insist on this now, we may find ourselves within a generation or two in a situation where Arab Israelis demand (possibly through violence) equal national rights.

The Palestinian state would support this automatically, and may even view this issue as a reason to breach the peace treaty. The way to minimize this risk, or at least to create a situation where the states of the world support us, is to clearly define (in a manner agreed upon by all sides) the State of Israel as the Jewish people’s nation-state.

The Obami and much of the media fail or are unwilling to concede that what is standing between the parties and peace is more fundamental than a housing moratorium. In short, until the Palestinians cease regarding a “peace” deal as a brief interlude in the struggle to remove the Zionist undertaking from the region, there can never, by definition, be peace. Peace is not a cease-fire; it is an agreement to end hostilities permanently and completely. That the Palestinians won’t do.

Peculiar, isn’t it, that Hillary’s and Obama’s public comments don’t mention that. Well, not peculiar at all, for to concede there is such a fundamental barrier to peace would be to let on that Obama’s entire Middle East policy was misguided and naive. Can’t let that get around.

Jennifer Rubin

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Specter of Muslim Disloyalty in America

by Raymond Ibrahim

Islamist enmity for infidels, regularly manifested in the jihad, is by now moderately well known. Lesser known, however, but of equal concern, is the mandate for Muslims to be loyal to fellow Muslims and Islam — a loyalty that all too often translates into disloyalty to all things non-Muslim, including the American people and their government.

This dichotomy of loyalty to Muslims and enmity for infidels — which, incidentally, corresponds well with Islamic law's division of the world into the abode of war (deserving of enmity) and the abode of Islam (deserving of loyalty) — is founded on a Muslim doctrine called wala' wa bara' (best translated as "loyalty and enmity"). I first encountered this doctrine while translating various Arabic documents for The Al Qaeda Reader. In fact, the longest and arguably most revealing document I included in that volume is titled "Loyalty and Enmity" (pgs.63-115), compiled by Aymen Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's number two.

I say "compiled" because most of the words are direct quotes from the Koran, the Muslim prophet Muhammad, and Islam's jurists (i.e., this doctrine is not an "al-Qaeda" phenomenon but rather permeates the Islamicate worldview). Those interested are urged to read the whole treatise. For our purposes, however, a few key scriptures must suffice:

Koran 5:51 warns Muslims against "taking the Jews and Christians as friends and allies … whoever among you takes them for friends and allies, he is surely one of them," i.e., he becomes a non-believing "infidel," the worst thing in Islam. According to authoritative Muslim exegete, al-Tabari, Koran 5:51 means that the Muslim who "allies with them [non-Muslims] and enables them against the believers, that same one is a member of their faith and community." Similar scriptures include Koran 3:28, 4:89, 4:144, 5:54, 6:40, 9:23, and 58:22; the latter simply states that true Muslims do not befriend non-Muslims — "even if they be their fathers, sons, brothers, or kin." Conversely, according to Muhammad, "A Muslim is the brother of a Muslim. He neither oppresses him nor humiliates him nor looks down upon him…. All things of a Muslim are inviolable for his brother in faith: his blood, his wealth, and his honor" — precisely those three things Islamic law singles out as not being vouchsafed to free infidels.

The problem here is that these scriptures are not mere words; American Muslims act on them. Consider the ongoing case of Nasser Abdo, an infantryman assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, who refuses to deploy to Afghanistan: "I don't believe I can involve myself in an army that wages war against Muslims. I don't believe I could sleep at night if I take part, in any way, in the killing of a Muslim…. I can't deploy with my unit to Afghanistan and participate in the war — I can't both deploy and be a Muslim." And why is that? "Abdo cited Islamic scholars and verses from the Quran [no doubt such as the above] as reasons for his decision to ask for separation from the Army." Indeed, his loyalty to foreign Afghani Muslims is such that, if he does not get discharged, "he will, apparently, be facing a prison sentence."

Rather than going quietly to prison, major Nidal Hasan went on the infamous Fort Hood killing spree, slaying thirteen Americans. Maintaining that "Muslims shouldn't kill Muslims," he was, like Abdo, adamant about not being deployed to a Muslim nation, his "worst nightmare." He was also "very upfront about being a Muslim first and an American second," thereby showing where his true loyalty lay. Tabari's words come to mind: the Muslim who "allies with them [e.g., Americans] and enables them against the believers, that same one is a member of their faith and community," i.e., he too becomes an infidel.

And of course there was sergeant Hasan Akbar, who was convicted of murder for killing two American soldiers and wounding fourteen in a grenade attack in Kuwait: "He launched the attack because he was concerned U.S. troops would kill fellow Muslims in Iraq." Previous to the attack, he confessed to his diary: "I may not have killed any Muslims, but being in the army is the same thing. I may have to make a choice very soon on who to kill."

Nor is Muslim loyalty simply limited to the fear of killing fellow Muslims; rather, it is loyalty in the tribal sense (not surprising, since Islam transferred the tenacity of Arab tribal loyalty onto the umma, whereby Islam became a "super tribe," transcending race and language). Thus, for helping convict five Muslims who were plotting to kill American soldiers in the Fort Dix terrorism trial, Mahmoud Omar has been ostracized by the Muslim community. Why? Because "in a twisted way…their [the terrorists'] actions are understandable in the Muslim community." Omar adds, "For Muslims, we are all brothers, and I betrayed a brother"— echoing Muhammad's injunction: "A Muslim is the brother of a Muslim."

Prominent American Muslim jurists have further proclaimed that "It is forbidden to work for the FBI or for U.S. security services because these harm Muslims." Another Muslim jurist said it is permissible for Muslims to serve in the U.S. military — provided they are not "involved in fighting, harming, or even bothering Muslims at all." Similarly, the authoritative Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America issued a fatwa stating that it is "not permissible" for American Muslims to send aid, even food, to American troops serving in Muslim countries.

At this point, one may justly ask: if Muslim disloyalty to non-Muslims is a ubiquitous phenomenon, why are most examples limited to the military? Simple: Islam is primarily concerned with actual deeds; and the military is one of those rare institutions that requires people to demonstrate their loyalty through action, such as, by going to the frontlines and, if need be, combating America's enemies — even if they be one's coreligionists. It is therefore only natural that Muslim loyalty/disloyalty is primarily revealed in military related scenarios, including instrumental support via food or other aid. Concerning this latter, Muhammad said, "One [Muslim] who equips a person on his way to raid [the enemy's camps] in Allah's path [jihad] is considered to have the same status as the raider [jihadist]." The willing Muslim financial enabler of the infidel American soldier thus acquires the same infidel status.

As for all other instances that require Muslims to indicate their loyalty, the doctrine of taqiyya, which revolves around deceiving non-Muslims, offers relief, and is in fact essential for Muslim minorities living in America who want to uphold the doctrine of loyalty and enmity. Indeed, the Koran's primary justification for deception is in the context of loyalty: "Let believers not take for friends and allies infidels [non-Muslims] instead of believers. Whoever does this shall have no relationship left with Allah — unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions" (Koran 3:28). Tabari explains this verse: "Only when you are in their [non-Muslims'] power, fearing for yourselves, are you to demonstrate friendship for them with your tongues, while harboring hostility toward them. But do not join them in the particulars of their infidelities, and do not aid them through any action against a Muslim."

In other words, when necessary, Muslims are permitted to feign friendship and loyalty to non-Muslims, or, in the words of Abu Darda, a pious companion of Muhammad, "We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them." Nearly fourteen-hundred years after these faithless words were uttered, American Muslim Tarik Shah, who was arrested for terrorist-related charges, echoed them in boast: "I could be joking and smiling [with infidels] and then cutting their throats in the next second."

At any rate, such is the symbiotic relationship that Islam's doctrines share: when the deceit, the charade is to no avail and the lives of fellow Muslims, whom are deserving of loyalty, become endangered, Muslims must then stand their ground, come what may. Thus an Akbar, Hasan, or Abdo may appear as perfectly loyal American citizens, until being required to prove their loyalty against Muslims. As Zawahiri puts it in his treatise, the Muslim may pretend, so long as he does "not undertake any initiative to support them [non-Muslims], commit sin, or enable [them] through any deed or killing or fighting against Muslims" (The Al Qaeda Reader, p.75).

The ramifications of this doctrine are clearly troubling, especially since far less than .1% of America's Muslims will ever be required to enlist in the U.S. military and deploy to Muslim nations. Yet this is the only scenario that determines whether Muslim loyalties lie with fellow Muslims or with fellow, albeit infidel, citizens. Moreover, it is one thing if the average American Muslim harbors loyalty to fellow Muslims, including terrorists such as al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah. It is quite another if that Muslim happens to be in a position of authority in the United States. This observation naturally leads to a president who up to 24% of Americans and many Muslims believe is a clandestine Muslim and who at least appears to have been raised a Muslim: Barrack Hussein Obama.

While there is no proof that he is a Muslim — indeed, no less an authority than Jeremiah Wright, the fellow who used to bellow "God damn America!" recently vouched for Obama's Christianity — the point here is simple: if an American president was a secret Muslim, and if he was lying about it, and even if he was secretly working to subvert the U.S. to Islam's advantage — not only would such an approach comport with Islam's doctrines on loyalty and deception, but it would have ample precedents, stretching back to the dawn of Islam. Such as when Muhammad commanded one Na'im bin Mas'ud, a convert from an adversarial tribe that refused to submit to Islam, to conceal his new Muslim identity, go back to his tribe — which he cajoled with a perfidious "You are my stock and my family, the dearest of men to me" — only to betray them to Islam.

Raymond Ibrahim

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Turkey: Islamism's Consequences for the West

by Steven Simpson


The "good times" between Turkey and the West seem to be over. As the Erdogan years in Turkey have attempted to turn Turkey from a once-secular country into a de facto Islamist country, the West and Turkey seem to be on a collision course, or at best, an impasse.

The questions now to ask include: What to do about an Erdogan-ruled Turkey that appears intent on reshaping the Middle East in its own Islamist and nationalist image and agenda; the response of America and the West (particularly NATO) if Turkey breaks diplomatic relations with Israel; and what how to adjust the US-Turkish relationship in light of Turkey's friendly relationships with the dictatorships of Iran and Sudan.

Also of paramount concern is how Turkey might react toward an autonomous Kurdistan in the north of Iraq. Turkey has constantly rattled its scimitar against the PKK guerillas, and crossed the border into northern Iraq under the guise of pursuing Kurdish guerillas. It has also talked about protecting the Turkmens, relatives of the Turks, who just so happen to live in the oil rich city of Kirkuk, a city contested by Arabs, Kurds, and Turkmens alike. Once America has withdrawn from Iraq, would America and NATO turn the other way to a possible Turkish occupation of Iraqi-controlled Kurdistan? Keeping silent about internal Turkish matters may be one thing, but a failing to respond to Turkey's foreign policy moves - especially military moves - could bring about an even further destabilized situation in the Middle East, affecting an already fractured Muslim world.

It is also possible -- especially in light of Europe's reluctance to admit Turkey into the European Union -- that Erdogan is just waiting for a West-NATO confrontation with Turkey: Erdogan might use such an incident to whip up Turkish passions -- both nationalist and religious -- and once again show himself as a Muslim leader willing and able to stand up to the West. Turkey would no doubt bring up Turkish "grievances" -- claims that it is just trying to right the supposed wrongs of the past, and claims that will encompass not only Turkey's national complaints, but those of the rest of the Muslim world (sans Kurdistan) towards the West.

The irony of Turkey and its relations with the West cannot be lost in light of the fact that Barack Obama started his "outreach" to the Muslim world last year while giving a speech in Turkey's parliament. If Obama's feckless response to Iran's brutal crackdown on demonstrators last year over the "re-election" of Ahmadinejad is any indicator, one should certainly not expect Obama to react any differently vis-à-vis Turkey and its Islamist agenda. This not only applies to Israel, in that it seems unlikely that the current American administration will come to the aid of Israel in its deteriorating relations with Turkey, but also to Kurdistan and the rest of the Muslim world. The apparent obsession on the part of Obama with "repairing" relations with the Muslim world, even at the expense of Muslims trying – and even dying – to break the shackles of their totalitarian regimes, may signal that America no longer has the will or desire to confront Middle Eastern dictators. If such a scenario plays out, a major void will have been created in a region of monumental strategic importance to the West – a void which countries like Russia, China, and Iran could seek to exploit and replace.

Although the one institution that could prevent Turkey from becoming an Islamic republic is the Turkish army, it remains a question if the army could -- or would -- act. If it did, how would the Turkish people, as well as the West, react to such a situation? A new Turkish coup would be the fifth one in fifty years, and could open the military to charges of interfering in the democratic process. No doubt, Erdogan and the AKP appear to be "using democracy in order to destroy democracy."

And as the referendum on reforms to Turkey's constitution passed overwhelmingly on September 12th, with 58% of the vote, many critics say that this will only strengthen Erdogan and his AKP, further eroding the strength of the military and judiciary. Of course, Erdogan has said the opposite, and that the constitutional reforms will only strengthen Turkey's "democracy." However, Erdogan has already stated that a new constitution is needed, stoking further fears of an AKP Islamist takeover.

Erdogan's only real opposition is the CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi) otherwise known as the Republican People's Party. Ironically, this party was founded by Ataturk in 1923. Recently, it has been mired in a sex scandal forcing its leader, Deniz Baykal, to resign. It is currently led by Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a left-of-center politician.

At the end of the day, it appears that Turkey's last hope of staving off an Islamic Republic and a confrontation with the West is in the scheduled election of July 2011: voting Erdogan's party out. However, with Erdogan riding high after his constitutional referendum victory, this likelihood does noit, at present, appear to be likely.

A short background:

For close to ninety years now, the Republic of Turkey has been officially a secular state. The reforms implemented by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the 1920's, turned Turkey from an Islamic Sultanate/Caliphate into a modern Western-style secular state. When Ataturk overthrew the Sultanate under Mehmed (Mohammad) VI Vahideddin in 1922, he was signaling a global shift in Turkey's thinking, attitude, and way of life. (The Caliphate was abolished in 1924 when Abdul Mecid II, was forced into exile. Thus, the reign of the Ottomans, who had ruled Turkey, much of the Middle East, and a portion of Europe since the foundation of the empire in 1517, officially ended.)

Ataturk's reforms were so great – and stringent – that the term "Kemalism" is used to describe the tremendous transformation that Turkey went through from the age of the Ottomans to the age of the Kemalists. Ataturk was intent on reshaping Turkey; throwing off its Islamic past, and steering it toward the West. Among his major reforms were not only abolishing the Sultanate and Caliphate, and officially declaring the country a secular republic, but also, in 1928, banning of the fez and hijab, and replacing the Turko-Arabic script with that of the Latin alphabet. For a while, Ataturk was so intent on "de-Islamizing" Turkey, that he forbade the muezzin (prayer caller) from using Arabic when calling Muslims to prayer. As many know, Muslim prayers must be said in Arabic only; the banning of Arabic prayer was too much for the religious Muslims, and eventually even Ataturk had to relent and allow its reinstitution.

As the decades went by, Turkey weathered weak governments; army coups; right wing and left wing terrorism; and a host of other problems -- and, most notably, a Kurdish insurrection that continues to this day and has from time to time spilled over into Iraqi-administered Kurdistan.

In 1996, Necmettin Erbakan, leader of the Refah (Welfare Party), became Prime Minister; he was the first "post-Kemalist" prime minister who openly and unabashedly proclaimed his Islamist tendencies. After much controversy, the Turkish army -- the guardians of the secular state – diplomatically pushed Erbakan aside; and it appeared that Turkey had weathered its short term dalliance with an Islamic renaissance.

The situation, however, changed in the elections of 2002 when a new Islamist party – the Justice and Development Party – (Adaltet Kalkinma Partisi, or AKP) emerged with the largest number of seats in parliament. Its leader, the former mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was a devoutly religious Muslim. Erdogan had been a follower of Erbakan; while still mayor of Istanbul in 1997, he was arrested for "religious incitement" due to a poem that he recited which hinted in part at a return to a militant brand of Islam:

"The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers."

Aside from the metaphors, it must have come as a shock to the secular authorities that the mayor of such a cosmopolitan city as Istanbul, would be as brash as to recite such a poem that no doubt was a strong hint of his views on religion and the state. Eventually, Erdogan was brought up on incitement charges in 1998, but served only 4 months of a ten month sentence.

After the debacle of Erbakan's rule, and Erdogan's own brush with the secular authorities, Erdogan became more subtle in his attempts to re-Islamize Turkey. After Refah was banned in 1998, he became instrumental in forming the AKP in 2001, which de-emphasized -- at least publicly -- its Islamist ambitions.

In the November 2002 national elections, the AKP won only about 34% of the vote, but emerged with the most elected representatives (363 out of 550) in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (the Turkish parliament). Because of Erdogan's prison sentence, he was not allowed to assume the role of prime minister; it went to his right-hand man, Abdullah Gul. Through parliamentary maneuvers, however, Gul and his allies were able to change the law so that Erdogan could become prime minister in March 2003. Erdogan assured his country – and the West – that he was committed to a secular government - although his chimerical nature was revealed in a New York Times article, in May 2003, in which he was quoted as saying, "Before anything else, I am a Muslim." In the same article, though, he stated that "A political party cannot have a religion. Only individuals can." At the very least, this shows an apparently conflicted opinion on religion and secularism. The article also related a very chilling comment about Erdogan's opinion of democracy when he was still Istanbul's mayor: "Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off."

That same month, while America was planning "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and the removal of Saddam Hussein from power, Washington asked permission from Turkey to allow U.S. forces to open a northern front against Iraq from Turkish territory. While Erdogan and Gul did not openly say no to the request, the Turkish parliament rejected it. Washington was stunned.

As the years passed, Erdogan continued to cultivate a moderate image in the West, while quietly espousing Islamist causes in Turkey -- most notably by appointing members of the judiciary and government ministers who were religious conservatives, and thereby changing the landscape of Turkey's secular foundations. Paradoxically, he appointed a supposedly avowed secularist as his new military chief of staff, Mehmet Ilker Basbug, in 2008; but on August 30th, Basbug retired and was replaced by Land Forces Commander Isik Kosaner, who promised to uphold the secular character of Turkey.

Earlier this year, however, the Erdogan government had forty military officers arrested, claiming that they were planning to "destabilize" the government. Many critics saw this as another step in Erdogan's attempt to do away with the Kemalist republic and neutralize the once staunchly secularist military.

Erdogan's apparent "good cop/bad cop" approach extends also to his relations with Washington. While professing friendship for America and the West, in 2006, Erdogan was quite vocal in his approval of the notoriously and viciously anti-American and anti-Israeli movie "Valley of the Wolves." The movie portrayed American soldiers in Iraq as murderers, and included a Jewish doctor harvesting Iraqi organs for sale in Tel Aviv. Even Erdogan's wife, Emine (a conservative Muslim who is always seen wearing a traditional Turkish hijab) also chimed in about the movie, praising the actors, and stating that she was "so proud" of them. More recently a thirteen part – and virulently anti-Semitic -- series was aired on Turkish TV, entitled "Separation: Palestine in Love and War," which aired to rave reviews in parts of the Arab world as well as in Turkey. This series, despite Israeli protestations, led to a further poisoning of Turko-Israeli relations. Ironically, some Arabs decried the series as well, but not out of defense of Israel. Apparently, the reason was that the Turkish series showed the Palestinians as killing their daughters after having been raped by Israeli soldiers, something the Palestinians object to as defaming them.

Contrary to the myth among many Jews and others who see a good portion of Turks as at best indifferent to Israel and Jews, "Mein Kampf" reached the best sellers list in Turkey in 2005. The book was subsequently banned -- in part through German efforts -- but it probably should give the reader pause for concern if average Turks make "Mein Kampf" a best seller.

Meanwhile, internal recriminations continued to simmer in Turkey between the Kemalists and the Islamists, with new Turkish elections held in 2007. This time, the AKP received over 46% of the vote – almost 12% more than in 2002 -- and 341 seats. Ironically, while garnering an overall higher percentage of the vote than in the previous election, the AKP lost twelve seats, which went to other parties. A short time later, Abdullah Gul became president after three rounds of voting in the Turkish parliament, again causing controversy, with many Turks seeing Gul's election as another victory for the Islamists. Like Prime Minister Erdogan's wife, Gul's wife, Hayrunissa, also wears a headscarf -- which has now become a symbol of the clash between secularists and Islamists.

After the AKP's second victory, and Gul's ascension to the presidency shortly thereafter, Erdogan began to become more outspoken in his criticism of the West, and especially Israel, as was seen by his eruption against Israel's president, Shimon Peres, at a January 2009 meeting at Davos, Switzerland, when Erdogan launched into a vitriolic verbal assault against Israel, stating to the shocked Peres that "when it comes to killing, you know well how to kill," and then stormed off the stage. Unfortunately, like a true "dhimmi" [second-class citizen according to Sharia Law], Peres phoned Erdogan, apologizing to the prime minister if there might have been any misunderstanding regarding the verbal dispute between the two leaders in light of Israel's offensive against Hamas in 2008.

Turkish anti-Americanism began to increase as well. Even as President Obama was beginning his "apology tour" by visiting Turkey in April 2009, anti-American demonstrations were well underway, with demonstrators chanting slogans against both Obama and America. Much of the anti-American feeling had to do with the American invasion of Iraq and perceived American "atrocities;" and no doubt, the constant anti-American and anti-Israeli media barrage in the Turkish government-controlled press played a large role in the average Turk's opinion of both America and Israel.

After the uproar in June 2010 over the "activist flotilla," Turkey announced cancellation of military exercises with Israel, as well as the cancellation of military contracts between them. Turkey also recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv and strongly hinted at breaking diplomatic relations with Israel. Turkish officials have spoken of "Turkish honor" and "Turkish pride" regarding events vis-à-vis Israel, yet it appears that the terms "Israeli honor" and "Israeli pride" -- let alone "Israeli self-defense" -- are words that do not exist in the Turkish lexicon. Even a "moderate" Islamist as Fethullah Gullen, also no friend of Israel, criticized the Turkish led "flotilla" fiasco. Yet where is "Turkish pride" and "Turkish honor" when the tyrant from Tehran, Ahmadinejad, refused to visit Kemal Ataturk's mausoleum? At one time in Turkey, such a display of diplomatic arrogance and contempt for Ataturk would have been met with outrage by a secular Turkish government and military. Apparently, in today's Turkey, that is a thing of the past.

There is another telling sign in Turkish-Israeli relations of how far Turkey has veered from its one time alliance with Israel: Turkey's recent appointment of Hakan Fidan, as head of Turkey's National Intelligence Organization. It has been rumored that Fidan might have played a role in the flotilla incident, and might also have relations with the Islamist dominated IHH (Insan Hak ve Hurriyetleri ve Insani Yardim Vakfi (The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief), which orchestrated the Marmara flotilla.

Turkey's vitriolic statements and actions on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs by Prime Minister Erdogan has come as a shock. But while Erdogan still vehemently condemns Israelis as "murderers," and calls Israel a "festering boil in the Middle East," he hypocritically refuses to address the Armenian genocide, even though it was perpetrated under Ottoman rule close to a century ago. Further, while Erdogan supports his Muslim "brothers" in "Palestine," he continues in implacable hostility toward his own Kurdish Muslim minority, and especially towards a quasi-independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq. Apparently, "Islamic solidarity" is fine with Turkey, as long as the Kurds play no role in Turkish affairs other than to be subservient to Ankara's desires. One final aspect to ponder is: if Turkish officials call Israelis "murderers" and Israel a "festering boil in the Middle East" while still having relations with Israel, what will their rhetoric and actions be if and when they break relations completely with Israel? Perhaps, unlike the Islamic Republic of Iran which openly calls for Israel's destruction, Turkey may wish to foster a more "moderate Islamist" façade, and call for the repeal of United Nations Resolution 181 of November 22, 1947 which ultimately led to the establishment of modern day Israel. At present, this may seem unfathomable, if not absurd, but a short time ago, the notion of Turkey rejecting Kemalism and establishing itself on an Islamist path was also thought unfathomable.

As Turkey escalated its Israel-bashing barrage, it also courted the Arab world and Iran. This appears to be not only for political reasons, but for economic reasons as well. The Turkish budget deficit has swollen tremendously over the last few years, doubling in just the last year alone. Oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran will gladly aid Turkey economically, which will only increase their political and possibly religious influence as well. Meanwhile, Turkey also tried to patch up differences with Greece and Armenia, long time Eastern Christian foes. The Cyprus issue, however, will no doubt remain a continuing thorn in Greco-Turkish relations, not to mention Turkey's support of the Azeris over the Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.

Further, there is the intractable dispute over Kurdistan. If ever an ethnic minority in the Middle East -- other than the Jews -- has been mistreated and betrayed, it is the Kurdish nation. From the Treaty of Sevres in 1920, to the first Gulf War and beyond, the Kurds have been victimized by Arabs, Persians, and Turks alike. All the while, the West has turned a blind eye. It is not unthinkable that after America's withdrawal from Iraq, Turkey will seek a pretense to occupy Iraqi Kurdistan under the guise of protecting their Turkmen "brothers" from Kurdish "aggression." Additionally, the northern city of Kirkuk is oil rich; control of it by Turkey would strengthen Turkey economically.

For now, Turkey, still a powerful member of NATO, and still presumably a friend of America, teeters between East and West. A "neo-Ottoman" Empire -- like a "neo-Czarist" Russia that appears in the making -- is something that America, the West, and Israel, should take seriously.

In the Middle East, the past is never forgotten and never forgiven. The future in the Middle East often consists of the merging of the present with the past. The West might therefore be well advised to prepare for the day that a once pro-Western secular Turkey no longer exists. The once "sick man of Europe" of the 18th and 19th centuries has now become the 21st century "strongman of the Middle East." While the secularist Kemalist ship is sinking in the Straits of the Bosporus, the neo-Ottoman Islamist ship of Erdogan is docking at the port of Istanbul.

Steven Simpson

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Germany Debates Muslim Immigration

by Soeren Kern


A national debate is raging in Germany over Muslim immigration. The issue is drawing attention not only to Germany's broken immigration system, which for many decades now has failed to integrate Germany's Muslim population, but also to Germany's demographic time bomb, which is significantly accelerating the pace of Muslim immigration.

The debate is also exposing deep rifts between Germany's politically correct elites, who for years have tried to silence discussion about Muslim immigration, and vast numbers of ordinary Germans, who are becoming increasingly uneasy about the social changes that are transforming Germany, largely due to the presence of millions of non-integrated Muslims in the country.

The debate over Muslim immigration is being fuelled by an explosive new book titled "Germany Does Away With Itself." The best-seller, authored by 65-year-old Thilo Sarrazin, a prominent German banker who is also a long-time member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), has broken Germany's long-standing taboo on discussing the impact of Muslim immigration by highlighting painful truths about the current state of affairs.

Apprehension about the future explains why Sarrazin's concerns over Muslim integration are resonating with the German population at large. (Sarrazin's book has topped the bestseller list on bookseller Amazon's German website since its publication in late August, and book tour dates are sold out across the country.) Polls show broad public support for Sarrazin's anger that many Muslim immigrants shut themselves off from Germany, do not speak German and do not share the German and European worldview.

According to a recent survey conducted by TNS Emnid pollsters, around 20 percent of German voters would back a hypothetical political party led by Sarrazin. Another poll conducted by the mass-circulation Bild am Sonntag shows that 89 percent of those surveyed say Sarrazin's arguments are convincing. "For them, Sarrazin is somebody who is finally saying what many are thinking," according to Emnid.

This worries the uppity guardians of German political correctness, who have tried to silence Sarrazin by getting him removed from the board of the German central bank, the Bundesbank, and expelled from the Social Democratic Party. Infuriated by Sarrazin's audacity to question the status quo of German multiculturalism, the bulk of Germany's political and media class has been working overtime to delegitimize Sarrazin as a "racial arsonist."

Excerpts from the book, which is written in a highly confrontational style, include the following:

"In every European country, due to their low participation in the labor market and high claim on state welfare benefits, Muslim migrants cost the state more than they generate in added economic value. In terms of culture and civilization, their notions of society and values are a step backwards."

"No other religion in Europe is so demanding and no other migration group depends so much on the social welfare state and is so much connected to criminality."

"Most of the cultural and economic problems [in Germany] are concentrated in a group of the five to six million immigrants from Muslim countries."

"I do not want my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live in a mostly Muslim country where Turkish and Arabic are widely spoken, women wear headscarves and the day's rhythm is determined by the call of the muezzin."

"If the birthrate of migrants remains higher than that of the indigenous population, within a few generations, the migrants will take over the state and society."

"I do not want us to end up as strangers in our own land, not even on a regional basis."

"From today's perspective, the immigration of guest workers in the 1960s and 1970s was a gigantic mistake."

The roots of Germany's current problems with Muslim immigration can be traced back to October 30, 1961, with the signing of a labor recruitment agreement between West Germany and Turkey. At the time, West Germany's post-World War II economy was booming and similar treaties with Greece, Italy and Spain were insufficient to supply Germany's seemingly endless demand for labor. By the end of 1969, more than one million Turkish "guest workers" had arrived in Germany to work in the "host country's" industrial zones.

The initial idea was that the Turkish labourers would return home after a period of two years, but the so-called "rotation clause" was removed from the German-Turkish treaty in 1964, partly due to pressure from German industry, which did not want to pay the costs of constantly training new workers. The predictable result was that many Turks never returned home.

Today, the Turkish population in Germany has mushroomed to an estimated 3.5 million, and Turks now constitute the largest ethnic minority group in the country. Demographers expect that the Turkish population in Germany will increase exponentially in coming decades, largely due to a high birth rate and Germany's continuing high demand for foreign workers.

Germany's demand for foreign labor is being fuelled by a demographic crisis, in which the German population is not only ageing, but also shrinking, at a rapid clip. According to recent projections by the German Federal Statistics Office, Germany's current population of 82 million, the largest in the European Union, is set to decline by as much as 20 percent, to 65 million, over the next five decades. At the same time, 34 percent of the population will be older than 65 and 14 percent will be 80 or more by 2060, up from 20 percent and 5 percent respectively in 2009.

The twin challenges of depopulation and aging will have major consequences for the financial sustainability of Germany's cradle-to-grave social security system. For example, the number of pensioners that will have to be supported by working-age people could almost double by 2060, according to the Federal Statistics Office. While 100 people of working age between 20 and 65 had to provide the pensions for 34 retired people in 2009, they will have to generate income for between 63 and 67 pensioners in 2060.

Germany's grim demographic future will also have implications for its export-driven economy. According to the Mannheim Research Institute for the Economics of Aging, industrialized countries such as Britain and France "will overtake Germany in the future" because of their ability to combine higher birth rates with an inflow of qualified immigrants. "Germany will clearly decline as an economic power, especially in comparison to up-and-coming nations such as China and India." In fact, in 2009, Germany lost its cherished title of world export champion to China, heightening fears of a declining stature and importance globally.

All this implies that in the future, Germany will become more, not less, dependent on immigrants. And Turks will continue to be a major source of labor, considering that the birth rate among Turkish immigrants in Germany is 2.4, nearly double that of the native German population (which at 1.38 is far below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per couple). At this rate, the number of native Germans will be cut in half in around six generations, while the number of Muslim immigrants in Germany will more than quadruple.

At the same time, the German left is struggling to come to terms with the fact that many Germans simply are not buying into the political elite's postmodern vision for an Islamicized Germany. The left-wing magazine Der Spiegel, in an article titled "Why Sarrazin's Integration Demagoguery Has Many Followers," asks: "In what country are we living? After the 2006 World Cup, it seemed that Germany had become cheerful and cosmopolitan. But the popular approval of Sarrazin leads us to question whether there isn't an underlying xenophobia after all."

Elsewhere, Der Spiegel refuses to accept the fact that many ordinary Germans do not share the political opinions of the media class, and summarily declares alternative viewpoints as racist. Lamenting the broken relationship between the political and journalistic class with the rest of the country, the magazine asks: "Do citizens feel abandoned on the question of integration? Or, asked another way, does Germany have a fertile breeding ground for the kind of populist right-wing party that is already par for the course in many European countries?"

But many German media outlets (on both the political left and right) have come out in support of Sarrazin. For example, the center-left newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung agrees that Sarrazin has "addressed a problem that will remain long after the waves of outrage have subsided: the enormous integration deficit of the Muslim minority in Germany, or at least of disturbingly large parts of it."

Elsewhere, Süddeutsche Zeitung writes: "A large section of the political elite wants to send Sarrazin away to the Sahara or wherever the Saracens come from, the ones who once gave his family its name. Yet many of those distancing themselves from Sarrazin aren't using arguments. They find it all simply so distasteful. For too long Germans thought they could leave it to immigrants to decide how far to integrate themselves or whether they want to do so at all. That has led to grievances that Sarrazin has correctly described."

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes: "As a martyr of freedom of opinion and a chief witness to charges made by broad swathes of the population, Sarrazin will haunt [Germany's political class] for a long time. Indignant comments from the likes of the interior minister that the problems described by Sarrazin have long been known sound like mockery in the ears of many people: if the problems have been known that long, why has so little been done to deal with them?"

The center-right Die Welt writes: "The breadth and depth of the support in opinion polls for Sarrazin's theses make clear how uneasy Germans are across the political spectrum with the current integration situation…. Thanks to Sarrazin the debate on integration has now received the prominence it deserves."

Soeren Kern

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Lawfare in the UK : Who Is Behind It This Time?

by Shiraz Maher

Britain's pernicious libel laws are in the spotlight again: recently the Spectator, a weekly publication focusing on politics, culture and the arts, settled an ongoing dispute with IslamExpo following legal threats. The organizers objected to an article by Stephen Pollard (editor of the Jewish Chronicle) which drew attention to the nature, background and politics of IslamExpo's organizers.

Documents registered with Companies House – a legal requirement for all incorporated companies in England and Wales – reveal that Mohammed Sawalha, Azzam Tamimi, Ismail Patel and Anas al-Tikriti are the registered directors and/or company secretaries.

It is worth, therefore, exploring these individuals in more detail.

Mohammed Sawalha is a Palestinian who fled to London in 1990 after discovering the Israeli authorities wanted to arrest him. An authoritative investigation for the BBC by John Ware – a formidable and robust journalist – made a series of startling revelations about Sawalha; they alleged that Sawalha "master minded much of Hamas political and military strategy" from London; then went on to describe him as a "fugitive Hamas commander."

Sawalha never sued the BBC over those allegations; instead he chose to focus on the substantially smaller resources of the Spectator. Of course, there is little for Sawalha to actually complain about when the Muslim Brotherhood's own website, IslamOnline, describes him as "manager of the political committee of the International Organization of the Brothers [i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood] in Britain."*

Last year Sawalha also signed the "Istanbul declaration" after Israeli military action in Gaza during operation Cast Lead. In itself, it is a damning document. Framed as a "statement" addressed to "all rulers and peoples concerning events in Gaza." it condemns those who have "given up the choice of jihad in the way of Allah as an effective means in defeating the occupation."

It also urges Arab governments to open their border crossings with Gaza:

...so that they are able to live and perform the jihad in the way of Allah Almighty. The closure of the crossings or the prevention of the entry of weapons through them should be regarded as high treason in the Islamic Nation, and clear support for the Zionist enemy.

Not stopping there, the document also issued a number of "legal judgements," which include:

7. The obligation of the Islamic Nation to regard everyone standing with the Zionist entity, whether countries, institutions or individuals, as providing a substantial contribution to the crimes and brutality of this entity; the position towards him is the same as towards this usurping entity.

8. The obligation of the Islamic nation to regard the sending of foreign warships into Muslim waters, claiming to control the borders and prevent the smuggling of arms to Gaza, as a declaration of war, a new occupation, sinful aggression, and a clear violation of the sovereignty of the nation. This must be rejected and fought by all means and ways.

Hazel Blears, then Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, interpreted this as a veiled threat against the Royal Navy after Gordon Brown had offered to deploy British warships off the Gaza coast to stop Hamas from smuggling weapons.

Further, there is Britain's arguably best known Hamas supporter: Azzam Tamimi. An interview with the BBC's "Hard Talk" program revealed this extraordinary exchange:

TIM SEBASTIAN: And meanwhile you advocate the suicide bombing. You said on an internet chat forum early in 2003: "For us Moslems martyrdom is not the end of things but the beginning of the most wonderful of things." If it's so wonderful to go and blow yourself up in a public place in Israel why don't you do it?

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: Martyrdom is not necessarily suicide bombings as you call them. Martyrdom is …

TIM SEBASTIAN: No, please answer my question. It was a serious question.

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: I'm trying to answer it …

TIM SEBASTIAN: Why don't you do it?

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: I'm trying to answer it because this is a concept. Unless it is explained, how can you answer it? Because martyrdom means giving / sacrificing yourself for a noble cause. Now these bombings, the human bombs …

TIM SEBASTIAN: Are you prepared to do this or not?

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: I am prepared, of course.

TIM SEBASTIAN: You would [go] and blow yourself up?

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: No. I'm trying to explain to you …

TIM SEBASTIAN: Ah – so it's okay. So that's just for the poor and the disillusioned to go and blow themselves up? You would not be prepared to do it …

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: Most of the …

TIM SEBASTIAN: … you advocate other people to do it?

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: Unless you give me a chance to explain …

TIM SEBASTIAN: Please … Please …

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: Not a single person of those who bomb themselves, bomb themselves because they are desperate or poor. It doesn't happen because of this. They do it because they want to sacrifice themselves for a cause after all avenues have been closed before them. If the Palestinians today are given F16s and Apache helicopters …

TIM SEBASTIAN: No – please come back to my question. Please come back to my question. Why if it is so glorious and honourable to do this, why don't you do it?

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: I would do it …

TIM SEBASTIAN: When?

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: If I have the opportunity I would do it …

TIM SEBASTIAN: When are you going to do it?

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: When? If I can go to Palestine and sacrifice myself I would do it. Why not?

TIM SEBASTIAN: So what's stopping you?

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: I cannot go to Palestine. I cannot go to Palestine.

TIM SEBASTIAN: You simply can't get in?

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: No, I cannot get in.

TIM SEBASTIAN: Why not?

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: I cannot get in because I am not counted as a Pales[tinian]. When my home town was occupied I was outside Palestine and I just wasn't counted. I'm not considered by the Palestinians as a legitimate Palestinian / by the Israelis as a legitimate Palestinian. So as much as they don't recognise me I don't recognise them.

TIM SEBASTIAN: So this is the reason – the only thing that is holding you back from strapping on a suicide belt is the fact that you can't get back to the Palestinian territories?

DR AZZAM AL-TAMIMI: You see sacrificing myself for Palestine is a noble cause. It is the straight way to pleasing my God and I would do it if I had the opportunity.

Since then, Tamimi has gone on to repeat his murderous desire time and time again.

During a talk at the School of Oriental and African Studies earlier this year, Tamimi told the audience:

Today Hamas is considered a terrorist organization because that is what the Americans and Israelis and cowardly politicians of Europe want, but what is so terrorist about it?

You shouldn't be afraid of being labelled extreme, radical or terrorist. If fighting for your home land is terrorism, I take pride in being a terrorist. The Koran tells me if I die for my homeland, I'm a martyr and I long to be a martyr.

[...]

If the world felt so guilty about the Holocaust, the Jews should have been compensated, not brought to my country at the expense of my people.

Israel does not belong to my homeland and must come to an end. This can happen peacefully if they acknowledge what they did — or we will continue to struggle until Israel is no more.

The following month when a Pakistani Sufi cleric issued a comprehensive fatwa (religious edict; this one was over 600 pages long) against suicide bombing and terrorism – in all circumstances, including against Israel – Tamimi went on the BBC to ridicule the author.

Tamimi started by saying that suicide bombings are valid in cases of "self defence" before going on:

Then there is the question of utility and whether this is actually good for the cause or bad for the cause and in most cases it is not good for the cause. And I think this is the argument we need to push forward rather than resorting to fatwas because for every fatwa, there is a counter fatwa.

British young Muslims; I would advise them against resorting to any of these tactics because they are counterproductive. But I cannot apply the same thing for people who are defending their country and defending their homes and for people whose families have been wiped out completely by coward pilots flying F16's and Apache helicopters.

For Tamimi, then, suicide bombings in Israel are not just to be welcomed – but actively encouraged. By contrast, his opposition to bombings in the West appears to be based merely on the fact that such a move would be "counter-productive." Presumably, for him, 9/11 and the 7/7 terrorist attacks are wrong because they are misguided, rather than monstrous.

That much was confirmed by Tamimi in an interview he gave to the Spanish Newspaper, La Vanguardia, in November 2001:

Headline: "I admire the Taliban; they are courageous."

Tamimi begins by assuring the interviewer that "everyone" in the Arab world cheered upon seeing the Twin Towers fall. "Excuse me," says the interviewer, "did you understand my question?" Tamimi: "In the Arab and Muslim countries, everyone jumped for joy. That's what you asked me, isn't it?"

An entire book could be dedicated to Tamimi's indiscretions, although this sample adequately illustrates his opinions.

Next is Ismail Patel, who founded "Friends of al-Aqsa" in 1997. In addition to being connected to Tamimi and Sawalha through IslamExpo, he is also a spokesman for another one of their groups. the British Muslim Initiative (BMI). The BMI regularly plays an important role in organizing and leading anti-Israel demonstrations in the UK. Many of its placards bear slogans like: "Stop the Holocaust in Gaza." During operation Cast Lead, Patel told a rally in London:

Hamas is no terrorist organization. The reason they hate Hamas is because they refuse to be subjugated, occupied by the Israeli state, and we salute Hamas for standing up to Israel.

[…]

…to the state of Israel: you no longer represent the Jewish people. You have no moral authority to speak for the Jewish people when thousands of Jews are against what you are doing. And finally, to the British Jewish Board of Deputies, shame on you, to work, to promote the genocide of the Palestinian people and the war crimes of the Israeli government. You do not speak for the British Jewry who today have signed in the Guardian against the Jewish government, what it is doing to the Palestinian people. Shame on the British Jewish Board of Deputies.

At another rally he told the audience:

To the Palestinian resistance, we say we will support you until you gain your freedom!

Finally, there is Anas al-Tikriti. During a "live dialogue" session with Islam Online, al-Tikriti explained:

The struggle of the Iraqi people, militarily and politically must continue until the occupier leaves and a true patriotic and democratic government is elected, In sha'a Allah...

When asked whether this meant he supported the insurgency, he replied:

I am all for the effort and struggle to free Iraq and end the occupation. I would rather that happen without any spillage of blood on any side, the coalition forces or the Iraqis. If there are political avenues that are efficient and would work, then they must be exhausted. However, to expect to rule people with guns and missiles and not expect a reaction in kind is extremely foolish and naive. Also, to occupy a people and expect them not to retaliate is also unrealistic. Even the United Nations recognizes the right of an occupied people to free themselves using any means and methods, and the Iraqis aren't exempt from that liberty. However, my wish is that not one single Iraqi is killed, not one single American or British soldier is killed...and Iraq is freed from occupation. If that can be achieved, then I'm all for it.

[...]

[The Iraqi people] have been wronged for far too long, but now they are fighting for their freedom and future. I can only remind them that it is with unity and standing together that we can achieve our goals and realize the objectives that have been beyond us for so long. Also, if anything, we have learnt from the dark era of the Ba'ath regime, never ever to allow injustice to go unpunished and unchecked. We must never ever allow a tyrant to flourish or a wrong-doer to get away with any in the future.

It is not the first time al-Tikriti has espoused such views. A report on the Muslim Brotherhood's official English language website says:

Al Tikriti called upon members of the Iraqi resistance to embolden its true patriotic image before the world and refrain from killing for the sake of killing but only to resist the occupation. He concluded by reaffirming the right of the Iraqis to engage in legitimate resistance against foreign occupation abiding by the international laws and traditions.

Al-Tikriti has also been critical of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) after it reversed its decision to boycott Holocaust Memorial Day services in the UK. For al-Tikriti this was a betrayal of the MCB's "previous[ly] principled stand."

Surveying the repeated encomiums heaped on Hamas, terrorists, and suicide bombers by the quartet behind IslamExpo is a journey into the very worst of what British Islamists have to offer. That they could have used Britain's arcane libel laws to attack the Spectator reveals just how urgent the case is for reform. The new Conservative-Liberal alliance has promised a review of libel legislation -- and not a moment too soon.

Shiraz Maher

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.