What makes Islam so easy to hate?
By Bradley Burston
This ought to begin with the usual disclaimer.
It ought to begin with a Berkeley-strength apology to Muslims everywhere. It should acknowledge their concerns, recognize their oppression, identify with their struggles, endorse their just goals.
It ought to begin with a plea for understanding of suicide bombings, 9/11, 7/7, forced female genital mutilation, honor killings, Jew hate, Holocaust denial, selective Islamocentric morality - all in the context of Western blindness to Muslim suffering.
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Not this time.
Just this once, let's come out with it.
There is a reason why Islam has become so easy to misinterpret, so easy to fear, so easy to hate: those who speak evil and do evil and order others to perform acts of evil in the name of its God and His Prophet.
Iran is as good a place as any to start. The president there has decided that the Jews - not just some Israelis, not just Israel - must be punished. He's decided that the crimes of all Jews everywhere are so heinous, that they must be punished using a weapon so obscene, so horrible, that it would reach every last Jew everywhere: using the Holocaust itself as a weapon.
Soiling the honor and the memory of six million people executed in horrible deaths for the sole crime of being Jewish. Punishing their living relatives.
This month, Iran marked the first commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day by condemning Israel for "routinely attempting to exploit the suffering of the Jewish people in the past as a cover for its crimes being perpetrated today against Palestinians in the occupied territories."
The code is clear, and it is communicated to a billion Muslims the world over - these Jews, these are the Nazis now. They are candidates for erasure. Tomorrow, 50 years from now, the time frame is not the issue.
There is an outcry, of course, but from where? The West - the Great Satan and his satraps. Which only serves to prove President Ahmadinejad's point.
The code is clear: There are a billion of us, barely a dozen million of them, and we're the victims. Every crumb of anti-Semitic crud will be resurrected and marshalled for this effort.
Congratulations, Islamists. you've put yourselves in the company of imbecile skinheads who hate you only a little less than they hate us.
You, Mr. President, know very well why Holocaust denial and denigration hurts the way it does. But just in case someone's forgotten, it goes like this:
They tried to make us extinct. Only a few years ago.
They tried to make us extinct. They nearly succeeded.
You obviously have some idea how much it hurts. That's why you do it, to the delight of many. They're coming out of the woodwork now, the professorial twits with their statistics and their pronouncements about the lack of proof of gas chambers and the German Jews Who Supported Hitler and the Only A Small Number Were Killed.
Too bad, from the deniers standpoint, that Hitler didn't succeed in killing all of us, every last one.
Then there would be no proof that a Holocaust took place at all.
Let's take another example, the Hamas Charter. The charter which, Hamas has assured us, will not be changed as much as one jot or tittle.
# "The Nazism of the Jews does not skip women and children, it scares everyone. They make war against people's livelihood, plunder their moneys and threaten their honor. In their horrible actions they mistreat people like the most horrendous war criminals."
# "A society which confronts a vicious, Nazi-like enemy, who does not differentiate between man and woman, elder and young ought to be the first to adorn itself with this Islamic spirit.
Our enemy pursues the style of collective punishment of usurping people's countries and properties, of pursuing them into their exiles and places of assembly. It has resorted to breaking bones, opening fire on women and children and the old, with or without reason, and to setting up detention camps where thousands upon thousands are interned in inhuman conditions."
# "The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!"
What's that you say? Why should you have to condemn this?
What's that? The Jews justify their acts, too?
Do we do bad things to Palestinians? Yes - often. Look where you're reading this. We pillory ourselves, expose our failings, castigate ourselves to the point of masochism, even, on occasion, do the right thing to correct it.
Do some Jews exploit the Holocaust for their own gain? Of course. Just this week, Benjamin Netanyahu chose the Park Hotel in Netanya - where a suicide bomber burst into a Passover seder in 2002 to kill dozens of people, many of them aged Holocaust survivors - to compare the Hamas election victory to the rise of Hitler.
Through it all, though, fundamentalist Muslims, and not only fundamentalists, are the first to tell us Jews to search our souls, while they magically wipe their consciences clean with the wand that is the word Occupation.
There is a depth of self-pity here that even we Jews can't top.
While they're at it, they have redefined genocide for the benefit of us Jews. They have also redefined occupation for the rest of the world. At this point, the only real occupation that exists is when Jewish people here or Christian people there in Iraq, occupy Muslim people.
They have also redefined the modern nation-state, having made it an article of their faith in congregations from London to Indonesia that of all the countries in the world, one and only one lacks any right to continue to exist.
Does all this work? Does it ever.
Referring to his public declaration that Israel should be wiped off the map, Tehran City Council Chairman and presidential adviser Mehdi Chamran told the New York Times: "He raised the question in Mecca and he received a huge amount of praise. The people living in these countries, within their hearts, they are happy to hear these statements.
"If we can strengthen ties with the people that is most important. When we hear the Egyptians take him as a role model, this is a real sign he has reached the people." |
