Obama is a Muslim, Communist, Nazi, Peacenik. Not. Or... when Nazism really IS the right analogy

Writing a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, I read up their page of tips on letter-writing style, which has something along the lines of “we take the view that the first person to make a comparison with the Nazis has lost the argument”.

This rather caught my attention.  For sure my letter (about Wikileaks) contained no such analogy -- no matter how tempting the thought that the prissy blond pissant Julian Assange does rather remind one of the good Aryan lads of the Third Reich --  and the next day it was duly published [here].

But I’ve continued to think about that stricture of the Herald’s sub-editors.
For sure there are many cases of the inappropriate analogy of [name your hated ideology here] and the Nazis.  There’s even a Facebook  page on it here.  Obama has been likened to Hitler.  Then again, he’s also been likened to Mao and Peaceniks, and said to be a Muslim.  As the Facebook page says, “make up your mind, he can’t be all four”.

Then there’s Hamas’ criticism of Israel’s policies in Gaza: equating them with the Holocaust.   That’s clearly waaay beyond the pale.  “Genocide”?  You’re kidding.

A more subtle one has lured many an Islam apologist onto its rocks: the suggestion that Muslims are being targetted today, just like the Jews of the 1930s.  Sounds powerfully reminiscent, right?  Well, no.  The analogy does not stand the most cursory scrutiny (See Christopher Hitchens on it here), though it does exert a strong allure to bien pensants, who believe that Muslims are being unfairly targetted.  But there is no analogy between Jews being targetted for extermination for purely fabricated reasons, and Islam, Islam the ideology, being questioned and challenged for its clearly and unequivocally bigoted tenets.

But what if the analogy with Nazism is correct?  In the case of Islam, I came to the thought that it was a theocratic equivalent to Nazism quite independently and purely on the basis of its documents, its actions, its teachings.  And reading, not just the Koran, Hadith and Sira (life of Muhammad), aka “The Trinity of Islam, but also books such as “Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam” by Dalin and Rothman.[1]  This is the story of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem before, during and after WWII right up to his death in 1974. 

Al-Husseini met Hitler and shared the latter’s dream to rid the world of Jews.  He offered Muslim troops for the task and offered to be the Fuehrer’s tool to exterminate Jews in the Middle East. This is documented fact.  In offering his services to Hitler, al-Husseini was punctilious to state -- both to the Fuehrer and on his regular radio addresses to Muslims broadcast from Berlin -- that in carrying out the proposed genocide, he was carrying out the wishes of Allah and his "prophet", carrying out, in other words, the demands of Islam.

Other similarities between Islam and Nazism:

• Supremacism: the belief that there is only one true ideology and that it should conquer the world
• Belief in one supreme leader: Hitler and Muhammad
• Warlike: both Hitler and Muhammad waged war against “unbelievers”
• Hatred of “bourgeois” art
• Rabid anti-Semitism: see above.
• The salute: Hamas and Hezbollah have chosen – quite deliberately, one assumes – the Nazi salute as their token of obedience to the supreme leader.

Hezbollah shows its true colours

Ways in which they are not alike:

Islam is non-racist cf Nazism.  Though Islam does make a clear distinction between true believers and non-believers, or kuffars, much as Nazism did between the Aryan race and non-Aryans.

So, let’s say that I wanted to write something to the Herald and chose to make the – correct – analogy of radical/orthodox Islam to Nazism.  Would I then be blackballed by the sub-eds for having broken their stricture?  Seems rather unfair to me, that simply because so many Nazism analogies are wrong, they assume, in their arrogation, that all such comparisons are wrong.  Rather a case of “you vill obey orders”, nein?

Just like the Nazis.

Related:
"The Madonna in the Tortilla", Roland Shirk, Jihad Watch, 20 January 2011. Here.
"On the furphy that Muslims are the new Jews", Peter at 12 October 2010. Here.
"Cathophobes on the march", Peter at 14 September 2010. Here.
"Free Exercise of Religion? No, Thanks", Christopher Hitchens, Slate, September 6, 2010. Here.

==========================================

[1] Another book on the mufti:  “The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini”, Chuck Morse, Universe, 2003.  Here.

HAMAS: calling a Nazi a Nazi

REPOSTING this post from 2011, in which I look at the issue of calling everyone a “Nazi”. Which is kind of what happens these days. And which I’ve steered clear of. Except, back in 2011, in the case of Hamas. Because they really are modern Nazis. Arguably worse: the Nazis of Germany were ashamed of their Holocaust. They hid it. The modern Nazis, Hamas, are proud of what they do. They celebrate it. And they have fellow followers, in academia, in the media, in even, I’m sad to say, amongst friends. 

ADDED: I no longer think Julian Assange is a “prissy blonde pissant”. I now think he’s a hero and martyr to free speech. There. I admit my wrong.  

REPOST:

Writing a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, I read up their page of tips on letter-writing style, which has something along the lines of “we take the view that the first person to make a comparison with the Nazis has lost the argument”.

This rather caught my attention.  For sure my letter (about Wikileaks) contained no such analogy -- no matter how tempting the thought that the prissy blond pissant Julian Assange does rather remind one of the good Aryan lads of the Third Reich --  and the next day it was duly published [here].

But I’ve continued to think about that stricture of the Herald’s sub-editors.
For sure there are many cases of the inappropriate analogy of [name your hated ideology here] and the Nazis.  There’s even a Facebook  page on it here.  Obama has been likened to Hitler.  Then again, he’s also been likened to Mao and Peaceniks, and said to be a Muslim.  As the Facebook page says, “make up your mind, he can’t be all four”.

Then there’s Hamas’ criticism of Israel’s policies in Gaza: equating them with the Holocaust.   That’s clearly waaay beyond the pale.  “Genocide”?  You’re kidding.

A more subtle one has lured many an Islam apologist onto its rocks: the suggestion that Muslims are being targetted today, just like the Jews of the 1930s.  Sounds powerfully reminiscent, right?  Well, no.  The analogy does not stand the most cursory scrutiny (See Christopher Hitchens on it here), though it does exert a strong allure to bien pensants, who believe that Muslims are being unfairly targetted.  But there is no analogy between Jews being targetted for exterminationfor purely fabricated reasons, and Islam, Islam the ideology, being questioned and challenged for its clearly and unequivocally bigoted tenets.

But what if the analogy with Nazism is correct?  In the case of Islam, I came to the thought that it was a theocratic equivalent to Nazism quite independently and purely on the basis of its documents, its actions, its teachings.  And reading, not just the Koran, Hadith and Sira (life of Muhammad), aka “The Trinity of Islam, but also books such as “Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam” by Dalin and Rothman.[1]  This is the story of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem before, during and after WWII right up to his death in 1974. One of the worst men in history.

Al-Husseini met Hitler and shared the latter’s dream to rid the world of Jews.  He offered Muslim troops for the task and offered to be the Fuehrer’s tool to exterminate Jews in the Middle East. This is documented fact.  In offering his services to Hitler, al-Husseini was punctilious to state -- both to the Fuehrer and on his regular radio addresses to Muslims broadcast from Berlin -- that in carrying out the proposed genocide, he was carrying out the wishes of Allah and his "prophet", carrying out, in other words, the demands of Islam.

Other similarities between Islam and Nazism:

• Supremacism: the belief that there is only one true ideology and that it should conquer the world
• Belief in one supreme leader: Hitler and Muhammad
• Warlike: both Hitler and Muhammad waged war against “unbelievers”
• Hatred of “bourgeois” art
• Rabid anti-Semitism: see above.
• The salute: Hamas and Hezbollah have chosen – quite deliberately, one assumes – the Nazi salute as their token of obedience to the supreme leader.

Hezbollah shows its true colours

Ways in which they are not alike:

Islam is non-racist cf Nazism.  Though Islam does make a clear distinction between true believers and non-believers, or kuffars, much as Nazism did between the Aryan race and non-Aryans.

So, let’s say that I wanted to write something to the Herald and chose to make the – correct – analogy of radical/orthodox Islam to Nazism.  Would I then be blackballed by the sub-eds for having broken their stricture?  Seems rather unfair to me, that simply because so many Nazism analogies are wrong, they assume, in their arrogation, that all such comparisons are wrong.  Rather a case of “you vill obey orders”, nein?

Just like the Nazis.

Related:
"The Madonna in the Tortilla", Roland Shirk, Jihad Watch, 20 January 2011. Here.
"On the furphy that Muslims are the new Jews", Peter at 12 October 2010. Here.
"Cathophobes on the march", Peter at 14 September 2010. Here.
"Free Exercise of Religion? No, Thanks", Christopher Hitchens, Slate, September 6, 2010. Here.

==========================================

[1] Another book on the mufti:  “The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini”, Chuck Morse, Universe, 2003.  Here.

Hitler's Mufti: “Arabs! Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.”

This day (March 1) in 1944, Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini (below with Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler) broadcast one of his many anti-Jewish rants to the Arab world from the Nazi capital Berlin: "Arabs! Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion."

Captain Allen (@CptAllenHistory) x.com

Amiin al-Husseini should be much more widely known. I've posted something about him from a long time ago. I read the book about him called "Hitler's Mufti".

He is almost single handedly responsible for the vicious Jew-hatred in the middle east. He was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, but spent WW2 in Berlin putting out anti-Jew propaganda for the Nazis, and set up a special force of Muslims to kill Jews rounded up in Eastern Europe. 

A horrid man. Who, by the way, had a familialrelationship with Yasser Arafat. Some kind of distant cousin relationship. He was certainly an inspiration for Arafat. 

This day (March 1) in 1944, Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini (above with Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler) broadcast one of his many anti-Jewish rants to the Arab world from the Nazi capital Berlin: "Arabs! Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion."

The first person to make a comparison with the Nazis has lost the argument. Yes, but...

Click above for video

Looking back over fourteen years of this blog, I’ve not gone that route: comparing this or that to the Nazis. I’ve only mentioned the Nazis in historical context. 

As in this post I wrote back in 2011. Which is pertinent to today. 

As an aside: note what I said about Julian Assange then: I didn’t like him much. I respect him more now and consider him a hero not a villain. That’s changing one’s mind. It’s remarkable how many people hold the same views throughout their lives on important issues, and are proud of it. But as John Maynard Keynes said “I change my mind when the facts change; what do you do?” Not that the facts about Assange changed; rather my understanding of the facts changed. I understood more about what he was doing. Anyway, that’s all peripheral to the main point of this post which is: Hamas really can be compared to the Nazis. And I said so in specific terms in this post. They even use the Nazi salute! Their ideology is explicitly Jew hatred; in their Charter, to exterminate all Jews, not just Israel. 

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a poisonous Jew-hater, who worked with Hitler on the actual Holocaust. Which we must now call Holocaust 1.0, because it is now updated with graffiti on our streets as “Holocaust 2.0”. How can it get any more Nazi like? Al-Husseini was a mentor to (and distant relative of) Yasser Arafat, head of PLO and the progenitor of Hamas. It all ties together, all with Nazi connections. 

Good on Sky News Australia for talking more about al-Husseini, the Grand Nazi of Jerusalem. 

Bad on the Hamas luvvies, marching on our streets, calling for “One Solution”, today’s version of the “Final Solution”, Holocaust 2.0. 

But don’t mind that, says Rashida Tlaib, the US Palestinian congresswoman, “From the River to the Sea” is just “aspirational”. Right. Just like “Arbeit macht Frei” above Auschwitz is just a call for a good work ethic. 

Hypocrisy, writ large.  People we know, marching in London, in Sydney, in New York, calling for the murder of Jews. And we used to wonder “how could it have happened” in sophisticated Germany of the 30s? Well, here it is happening in sophisticated west of the 2020s. In front of our eyes. With the complicity of the MSM and of family and friends. Who are so caring about “the children of Gaza” (we all care!) that they countenance Holocaust 2.0. 

“Whither the Muslim Brotherhood”

Letter to the International Herald Tribune, the international edition of the New York Times:

TARIQ Ramadan is wrong to imply that the Muslim Brotherhood was strongly critical of the fascist governments in Germany during the Second World War (“Whither the Muslim Brotherhood”, IHT, Feb 9).
Hassan al-Banna, Ramadan’s grandfather and founder of the Brotherhood, together with Banna’s brother in arms, the execrable and murderously anti-Semitic Mufti Amin al-Husseini, were excited by the Third Reich’s battle with Britain the hated colonialist, and the Nazis’ grand aim of exterminating all Jews.  An early Muslim Brother, al-Husseini wrote for the Brotherhood’s magazine, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun throughout the war, in enthusiastic support of the Third Reich.


THE Mufti decamped to Berlin during the war from where he broadcast messages to Muslims supporting Germany’s fight against Britain and promoting Hitler’s holocaust.  He raised a Muslim brigade to fight for the Reich in Europe and promised to be Hitler’s dedicated agent for genocide of the Middle Eastern Jews after the presumed defeat of the Allies. [1]
The Brotherhood was so driven by anti-colonialism, in other words, that it supported Germany against Britain. And –  by happy coincidence –  the Nazis shared the Brotherhood’s hatred of Jews and its plan to exterminate them.
IT is possible, as Ramadan suggests, that the Brotherhood is now a soft puppy, a warm agent of social change.  It is possible that it eschews its early anti-Semitic origins and forswears its basic aim, which in al-Banna’s own words is "to dominate . . . to impose its laws on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet."[2]  We should be open to that possibility that the Brotherhood, in Ramadan’s words, is now driven by a vision of “democratic freedom”.
BUT we’d be wise to keep our eyes open and not let them be wooled over by the likes of Ramadan’s apologia for his grandfather Hassan al-Banna.   If the Brotherhood remains true to its aims, they are profoundly anti-western and violently anti-Semitic.
Yours, etc.


References:
[1] Icon of Evil, Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam, John Rothmann and Alan Dershowitz, Transaction, August 2009
[2] "A Hundred Years of War?", Clifford D. May, Assyrian International News Agency, 4 Oct 2008.

Al-Aqsa Mosque Conflict: Palestinian Leaders Manufacture Senseless Violence | National Review

Palestinian youth attack Israelis who are defending their right to pray....

Just now on BBC World Service Radio, the anchor was trying hard not to reveal to listeners her bias, her clear hatred of Israel and the recent increased security at the Temple Mount, in response to the killing of Israeli soldiers there.

But, as this article at the National Review notes:

The current spate of violence started last week, when Palestinian terrorists smuggled guns into the Temple Mount. The guns were then used to murder two Israeli-Arab police officers guarding one of the entrances to the al-Aqsa mosque. Afterward, the attackers ran back to the Temple Mount plaza to engage in an open gun battle. (This was all the more shocking since the Temple Mount, home to al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock, is considered the third-holiest site for Muslims and the holiest site for Jews.)

In response, the Israelis temporarily closed the Temple Mount for a police investigation. The site was later re-opened with metal detectors and security cameras installed at its entrances. That Israeli response — not the Palestinian smuggling of weapons, not the Palestinian attack, not the shooting that followed — was then deemed an outrageous desecration of the holy site by Palestinians and their leaders. [my emphasis]

And then, just to spur the violence a touch more, these votaries of the "religion of peace" recommend:

Abbas's Fatah party told its followers to "Set out for the al-Aqsa Mosque" on Facebook, initiating riots and clashes with Israeli police. Videos, however, showed large crowds of Palestinians chanting slogans against President Abbas, who is widely perceived as weak. Eager to fight that perception, Fatah's Revolutionary Council, chaired by Abbas, escalated the situation by declaring Wednesday a "day of rage," calling for mass demonstrations at al-Aqsa and throughout the suburbs of Jerusalem. Abbas has since placed responsibility for the resulting violence on the Israeli government, of course.

Remember, these are the Palestinian "moderates." 

More of the "anything Israel does is wrong-criminal, anything the Palestinians do is correct-justified" narrative.

Article follows below the fold:

"The original abyss between Israelis and Palestinians"; back to the Mandate? | James Carroll

James Carroll's interesting article, in the liberal The Boston Globe on 12th July, copied below in full.  [I've numbered the paras for ease of reference].

His key thesis in para [5]: 

"...the Israeli and Palestinian stories are not contradictory but parallel. Jews and Arabs did not dig the ditch that keeps them apart.

"To shift the analogy, Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a corner. But the walls of that corner were constructed by someone else — an unacknowledged third party. Those walls are anti-Semitism and colonialism...".

It raises a number of questions for me:

Key thesis: anti-semitism is defined as European. What about Muslim anti-semitism, which has history back to the beginning of Islam and was rife in the Middle East well before the times covered here?  See Andrew Bostom's seminal scholarly work on the issue: The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History.

Para [9]:  Is it correct that the rest of the world should have accepted (as it has) that the "Palestinian Arabs" should claim, in the 1930s, a nationality as "Palestinians" distinct from Arab, or Southern Syrians, as they had been until then.  And if so, why?

[9] and [10]: 5,000 Arabs in Palestine were killed by the British colonialists.  Noone can think this is trivial, but is it "eradication", when the number of Arabs in the area at the time was somewhat over 600,000.   [note to self: read more about the "brutal" British response to the Palestinian "resistance" in the 1930s]

[13] Mention of the old, now deceased, fraud, Edward Said.  And, of course, therefore, the creation of a moral equivalence: "...both bear a brutal legacy for which neither is responsible." Which always brings to mind the non-equivalent statement for me: "if Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if Israel lays down its arms it will be annihilated".

Other: no mention of the British Mandate of Palestine, supported by all 50+ members of the League of Nations, and thence the United Nations, which allowed/encouraged the migration of Jews to the region
No mention of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem at the time covered below. He spent the war in Hitler's Germany of which he was a fanatical supporter. He offered to raise a Muslim army for Hitler, to kill Jews in the Middle East. 

Amin al-Husseini alone was responsible for turning Arabs against the Jews in Israel. There's a strong case that if he hadn't poisoned the politics in the region they would have had 60 years of working together (as Carroll hopes for here) instead of the destruction and hatred they have in fact experienced.  History is not predetermined.  Husseini was indeed the "Icon of Evil".

THE ARTICLE:

[1]  THE DIFFICULT gets done immediately. The impossible — well, so far it has taken almost a century. How long before the Israelis and the Palestinians reach the true peace agreement that has eluded Jews and Arabs since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I? In separate meetings in the Oval Office recently, President Obama pressed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift from the “proximity” talks enabled by ever-shuttling US special envoy George Mitchell, with support from former British leader Tony Blair, to the direct negotiations which alone can lead toward resolution. Mitchell and Blair have made valiant efforts. But as great-power diplomats, they represent more than they know. The American and the Englishman, while putting themselves forward as the solution, embody the oldest problem.

[2]  Across generations that saw political reconciliation replace ferocious enmity between France and Germany, England and Ireland, and even Moscow and Washington, why has the Israeli-Palestinian conflict proved so intractable? Assuming direct talks do resume between Israel and Palestine, what obstacles must negotiators overcome? 

[3]  Immediate issues are obvious: the borders of a Palestinian state, the status of Jerusalem, security arrangements, the question of “settlements,” the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli concern about ongoing incitement to violence, the place of Hamas. Before Netanyahu arrived at the White House last week, a senior US official said, “The gaps have narrowed. And we believe there are good opportunities to further narrow those gaps.”

[4] But in addition to immediate obstacles, however thorny, the Israelis and Palestinians face each other across not a gap but a yawning ditch, the width and depth of which are insufficiently measured. Deep history is the abyss in which so many Middle East hopes are buried. Direct talks are necessary, but for talks to succeed, so is a direct reckoning with the theological and political strata that underlie that history.

[5]  Against the usual perception, the Israeli and Palestinian stories are not contradictory but parallel. Jews and Arabs did not dig the ditch that keeps them apart.

[6]  To shift the analogy, Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a corner. But the walls of that corner were constructed by someone else — an unacknowledged third party. Those walls are anti-Semitism and colonialism, each of which is thought to be well understood. But their recombination begets something new — a lethal feedback loop, as the historic hatred of Jews mixes explosively with the contempt for native peoples that defined imperial expansion.

[7]  Now Europe, together with its legacy culture America, sends representatives, such as Mitchell and Blair, claiming to offer disinterested “help” to the stubbornly warring parties. Yet that broader culture is fully complicit as the source of the two momentous animosities. Because that complicity is never reckoned with, energetic diplomatic interventions, going back past Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger to successive British “white papers,” have come to nothing.

[8]  If the past is remembered as a tapestry, take only a single thread, one that leads back through World War I. The arrival in Palestine of the British under Lord Edmund Allenby in 1917 established the permanent pattern. The overlord method of British imperialism was to ignite conflict within local populations, and the new rulers made contradictory promises to Arabs and Jews alike. This double game would last a full generation.

[9]  When Palestinian Arabs, claiming a national identity distinct from Pan-Arabism, finally mounted resistance in 1936, the British response was brutal, involving more royal troops in Palestine than there were in the entire subcontinent of India. Zionist fighters struck at Arabs, too, but overwhelmingly this was a London-ordered colonial war. In three years of fighting, more than 5,000 Arabs were killed. Whole villages and neighborhoods were destroyed. Political institutions and economic systems were devastated. The Palestinian social fabric was ripped asunder, never fully to be restitched again.

[10]  This crippling of Palestinian hope in its infancy partially explains the Zionist complaint at the lack of local leaders on the other side with whom to deal. If Palestinians seem invisible, as they often protest, the phenomenon begins not with willfully unseeing Jews, but with British eradication. Thus, the Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi writes that the Arab defeat of 1948 was “no more than a postlude, a tragic epilogue to the shattering defeat of 1936-39.” Who remembers that today?

[11]  Of course, those were the precise years in which European anti-Semitism was reaching its grotesque boil with the Nazi assault on Jews. Juden raus! Of the nearly 500,000 Jews who lived in Palestine in 1939, most had arrived in that decade.

[12]  The return to the land of Israel was momentous for people who had prayed for most of two millennia, “Next year in Jerusalem.” From the Arab point of view, however, Zionism could only be taken as a manifestation of the colonialism that native Palestinians had by then every reason to detest. Just as it is wrong to take Zionism as colonialism, it is wrong to take Palestinian hatred of Jewish arrival — and, even more pointedly, of Israeli occupation — as anti-Semitism.

[13]  It makes the point to note that even a fierce partisan like the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said saw the double-ruff connection between anti-Semitism and colonialism, how both peoples bear a brutal legacy for which neither is responsible. Said described “orientalism,” which he defined as Europeans’ colonialist contempt for the “East,” especially the Arab East, as “a secret-sharer of Western anti-Semitism.” Indeed, the empire-enabling European (and American) denigration of indigenous peoples, especially the Muslim “infidel,” was itself patterned on Christian contempt for the Jew.

[14]  When Palestinian and Israeli negotiators finally face each other across one table, these common notes of experience should be paramount — but only for the sake of moving beyond them. Two peoples who have each defined themselves positively by negative hatred of the other have been at the mercy of a broad culture that created this very habit of mind. Jews and Arabs can renounce this history without renouncing themselves. Each can then receive the other’s account of the past, and, perhaps for the first time, hear it respectfully.

[15]  That, more than anything else, is the prerequisite to peace. The Palestinian and Israeli negotiators need the diplomatic support of outside powers. But in this long history, the West has not been a disinterested bystander. By naming it as a secret-sharing third party to the conflict, historic creator of the double-sided trap of Jew hatred and colonial contempt, Israelis and Palestinians can leave the trap to find the way forward. They can focus on what remains between them, which is enough.

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe. This is the first of six special columns, which will appear every other week. His new book, coming early in 2011, is “Jerusalem, Jerusalem: The Ancient City that Ignited the Modern World.’’  

Jeremy Corbyn and the hard left are wilfully blind to the evils of Islamist Nazis

On the vexed question of why the left supports the horrid ideology of Islamism. In sum: because they hate the west and especially the US. Because they are colonialists, imperialists and repressers of poor minority people. 

All copied in case it disappears behind a paywall:

Many people watching Jeremy Corbyn's interview on Marr last Sunday will have been shocked by his remarks about the need to begin a 'dialogue' with the leadership of the Islamic State. 'I think there has to be some understanding of where their strong points are,' he said.

Afterwards, when these comments were widely reported, Corbyn's supporters said they'd been taken out of context — the standard defence whenever he is criticised for saying something positive about Islamist terrorists, such as describing Hamas and Hezbollah as his 'friends' or the death of bin Laden as a 'tragedy'. But there are only so many times this excuse can be used to explain these apparently supportive remarks. It's beginning to look as though the Labour leader really does sympathise with terrorists.

It's particularly difficult to make allowances for Corbyn when you take the broader context into account — the historical links between the hard left and Islamism. I'm currently reading The Flight of the Intellectuals by Paul Berman, which, in large part, is about the failure of the European left to see Islamism for what it is: namely, a Middle Eastern form of fascism. Berman documents in painstaking detail how Islamism was transformed into a mass movement by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s to foment anti-British insurrection in the Middle East and as an instrument for carrying out the extermination of the Jews.

The evidence linking Hassan al-Banna, the intellectual architect of Islamism and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, to Nazism is substantial. For one thing, he singled out Hitler as a political role model in one of his political tracts. For another, he was a close ally of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who helped set up a Muslim division of the Waffen SS in the Balkans. The Nazis gave the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies a good deal of resources, including a network of radio stations that the Grand Mufti used to disseminate pro-German propaganda. In 1942, one of these stations broadcast a speech telling all Arabs: 'You must kill the Jews before they open fire on you. Kill the Jews who appropriated your wealth and who are plotting against your security. Arabs of Syria, Iraq and Palestine, what are you waiting for?'

Initially, the hard left had no difficulty in condemning Islamism. Tony Cliff, the founder of the Socialist Workers Party, wrote a pamphlet in 1946 drawing attention to the fascist nature of the Muslim Brotherhood. But various Trotskyist sects began to warm up to Islamism in the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in a full-blown coalition in the run up to the Iraq war. In mass protests organised by the Socialist Workers Party and its European counterparts in 2003, Islamists carrying the banners of Hamas and Hezbollah marched with veterans of the European internationalist left, including Jeremy Corbyn. For the most part they got on well, although there were occasional flare-ups. For instance, during an anti-war demo in Paris a gang of Islamists broke off to beat up a group of yarmulke-wearing Jews, even though the Jews had turned up to support the cause.

One reason for the hard left's change of heart about Islamism was straightforward political expediency. Here was an anti-western political movement boasting huge support among disadvantaged groups of young Muslims in Europe's major cities. If Trotskyist front groups like the Stop the War Coalition could harness these disaffected youths to their cause, it might lead to a much-needed injection of energy and resources. And to a limited extent, that tactic succeeded, with new hybrid political groups springing up, such as Respect.

But as Paul Berman points out, it was also an expression of a wilful political blindness. The hard left had so much in common with the Islamists — a history of fighting colonialism, a hatred of Britain and America, a contempt for liberal democracy, a romantic attachment to revolution and a willingness to countenance violence as a tool of political change — that they were prepared to overlook some of their less savoury beliefs, such as virulent anti-Semitism. They were also prepared to make excuses for the activities of their more radical elements, such as the Taleban and al-Qaeda.

Back in the 1940s, few would have predicted that this bastard child of Nazism would find an ally in the leader of the Labour party. But it looks increasingly as though that has happened and I doubt if Labour will ever recover.

http://life.spectator.co.uk/2016/01/the-islamist-nazis-and-corbyns-wilful-blindness/

Sent from my iPhone

“Why won't Israel accept the right of return for Palestinians?” |Michael Davison

Arabs and Jews left their lands. Only the Arabs continue to claim refugee-hood

“Why won't Israel accept the right of return for Palestinians?”

Because there is no “right of return” for Palestinians. The phrase in UNGAR 194 about the return of refugees states in part:

“11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date,…”

The operative phrase that remains unfulfilled by the Palestinians is: “and live at peace with their neighbours”. To date there has been little evidence that any self-styled Palestinian is willing to “live at peace with their neighbours”. No country can be expected to accept a massive intake of a hostile population that has only one objective: destroying the country they claim they want to “return” to.

Article 11 goes on to say that:

“compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;”

A/RES/194 (III) of 11 December 1948 

The entire Arab League, along with the Higher Arab Committee for Palestine, which was the representative of the Arabs of Palestine at that time, rejected UNGAR 194 in its entirety when it was published in December 1948. You cannot come back 45 years later (1993) and say, “Hey, you remember that offer you made back in 1948? I’d like to take you up on that!”

As for compensation, there are very few Arabs from Palestine who can actually demand compensation for the simple fact that only about 8% (including land owned in the West Bank and Gaza, which would only be eligible for compensation if Israel annexed the same parcels of land) of the Mandate land was actually owned by local Arabs, and several thousand claims have already been adjudicated since 1948. How many can possibly be left?

Then there’s the issue of compensation, which “should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;”, which includes the Arab League governments and the Higher Arab Committee for Palestine, who “advised” and in many cases threatened Arabs to leave their homes:

“The Arab exodus, initially, at least, was encouraged by many Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem exiled by the British for siding with the Germans in WWII, and by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine. They viewed the first wave of Arab setbacks as merely transitory. Let Palestine Arabs flee into neighboring countries. It would serve to arouse the other Arab peoples to greater effort, and when the Arab invasion struck, the Palestinians could be compensated with the property of Jews driven into the sea.” Kenneth Bilby, an American correspondent covering Palestine during the war. (1940- “New Star in the Near East”, New York, 1950, pp. 30-31)

And: 

“I do not want to impugn anybody but only to help the refugees. The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the Arab States in opposing partition and the Jewish State. The Arab States agreed upon this policy unanimously, and they must share in the solution of the problem.” Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, the official leader of the Palestinian Arabs, in a Beirut newspaper, also reported in the Daily Telegraph on September 6, 1948.

And:

“The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war.” General Glubb Pasha (the British officer who helped build the Transjordanian Army) wrote this in the London Daily Mail (August 12, 1948).

And:

“The Arab Exodus …was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by the Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews. …For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs ... By spreading rumors of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy.” – The Jordanian daily newspaper Al Urdun, April 9, 1953.

And:

“The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in.” A refugee quoted in Al Difaa (Jordan) September 6, 1954.

And:

“The wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boasting of an unrealistic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of some weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab states, and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and re-take possession of the country.” – Edward Atiyah (Secretary of the Arab League, London, The Arabs, 1955, p. 183)

Even Mahmoud Abbas blames the Arab League states for their part in today’s status of the self-styled “Palestinians”:

“The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe.

“The Arab states succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They did not recognize them as a unified people until the states of the world did so, and this is regrettable.” – The Current President of the Palestinian authority- Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), from the official journal of the PLO, Falastin el-Thawra (“What We Have Learned and What We Should Do”), Beirut, March 1976, reprinted in the Wall Street Journal, June 5,2003.

As for compensation, there’s also the “minor detail” of compensating the 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands, with all their possessions confiscated, since they were also a result of the same war. The Arab League states, so humiliated over losing the 1948 war, expelled all their Jewish populations and stole their possessions. 

If the “Palestinians” deserve compensation, then so do the Jews, whose families lived in those lands for a thousand years or more before Mohammed invented Islam, deserve the same consideration… and it’s several times larger than any accumulated Palestinian claims could ever be.

From Michael Davison.

REPOST: “Why won’t Israel accept the right of return for Palestinians?"

Arabs and Jews fled. Only the Arabs still claim refugee status

 I repost this from August 2018. It remains as true now as it was then. 

The main point: in 1948, the Arabs living in the land that was to be called “Israel”, were told by their Arab neighbours to flee, so that they, the Arab armies, could be left free to slaughter the Jews. The local  Arabs -- now called “Palestinians” -- would then be allowed to return. In triumph, presumably. 

That never happened, because the Arab armies lost to the newly-born Israel Defence Forces. 

And the Arabs have never got over it. And never forgiven the Jews. Whose initial “error” was to laugh at Muhammd, way back when he was just a budding saviour and warlord. 

You don’t get to rewrite history because you lost. The post I did back then, which remains relevant: 

“Why won't Israel accept the right of return for Palestinians?”

Because there is no “right of return” for Palestinians. The phrase in UNGAR 194 about the return of refugees states in part:

“11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date,…”

The operative phrase that remains unfulfilled by the Palestinians is: “and live at peace with their neighbours”. To date there has been little evidence that any self-styled Palestinian is willing to “live at peace with their neighbours”. No country can be expected to accept a massive intake of a hostile population that has only one objective: destroying the country they claim they want to “return” to.

Article 11 goes on to say that:

“compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;”

A/RES/194 (III) of 11 December 1948 

The entire Arab League, along with the Higher Arab Committee for Palestine, which was the representative of the Arabs of Palestine at that time, rejected UNGAR 194 in its entirety when it was published in December 1948. You cannot come back 45 years later (1993) and say, “Hey, you remember that offer you made back in 1948? I’d like to take you up on that!”

As for compensation, there are very few Arabs from Palestine who can actually demand compensation for the simple fact that only about 8% (including land owned in the West Bank and Gaza, which would only be eligible for compensation if Israel annexed the same parcels of land) of the Mandate land was actually owned by local Arabs, and several thousand claims have already been adjudicated since 1948. How many can possibly be left?

Then there’s the issue of compensation, which “should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;”, which includes the Arab League governments and the Higher Arab Committee for Palestine, who “advised” and in many cases threatened Arabs to leave their homes:

“The Arab exodus, initially, at least, was encouraged by many Arab leaders, such as Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem exiled by the British for siding with the Germans in WWII, and by the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine. They viewed the first wave of Arab setbacks as merely transitory. Let Palestine Arabs flee into neighboring countries. It would serve to arouse the other Arab peoples to greater effort, and when the Arab invasion struck, the Palestinians could be compensated with the property of Jews driven into the sea.” Kenneth Bilby, an American correspondent covering Palestine during the war. (1940- “New Star in the Near East”, New York, 1950, pp. 30-31)

And: 

“I do not want to impugn anybody but only to help the refugees. The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the Arab States in opposing partition and the Jewish State. The Arab States agreed upon this policy unanimously, and they must share in the solution of the problem.” Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, the official leader of the Palestinian Arabs, in a Beirut newspaper, also reported in the Daily Telegraph on September 6, 1948.

And:

“The Arab civilians panicked and fled ignominiously. Villages were frequently abandoned before they were threatened by the progress of war.” General Glubb Pasha (the British officer who helped build the Transjordanian Army) wrote this in the London Daily Mail (August 12, 1948).

And:

“The Arab Exodus …was not caused by the actual battle, but by the exaggerated description spread by the Arab leaders to incite them to fight the Jews. …For the flight and fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs ... By spreading rumors of Jewish atrocities, killings of women and children etc., they instilled fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs in Palestine, until they fled leaving their homes and properties to the enemy.” – The Jordanian daily newspaper Al Urdun, April 9, 1953.

And:

“The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in.” A refugee quoted in Al Difaa (Jordan) September 6, 1954.

And:

“The wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boasting of an unrealistic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of some weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab states, and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and re-take possession of the country.” – Edward Atiyah (Secretary of the Arab League, London, The Arabs, 1955, p. 183)

Even Mahmoud Abbas blames the Arab League states for their part in today’s status of the self-styled “Palestinians”:

“The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe.

“The Arab states succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They did not recognize them as a unified people until the states of the world did so, and this is regrettable.” – The Current President of the Palestinian authority- Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), from the official journal of the PLO, Falastin el-Thawra (“What We Have Learned and What We Should Do”), Beirut, March 1976, reprinted in the Wall Street Journal, June 5,2003.

As for compensation, there’s also the “minor detail” of compensating the 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands, with all their possessions confiscated, since they were also a result of the same war. The Arab League states, so humiliated over losing the 1948 war, expelled all their Jewish populations and stole their possessions. 

If the “Palestinians” deserve compensation, then so do the Jews, whose families lived in those lands for a thousand years or more before Mohammed invented Islam, deserve the same consideration… and it’s several times larger than any accumulated Palestinian claims could ever be.

From Michael Davison.