August
2, 2002, 8:45 a.m. Culture
of Hate
A racism which
denies the history and sufferings of its victims.
By Bat Yeor
t
the dawn of the new millennium, the world is being confronted with an
absolute culture of hate, characterized by paroxysms of international
terrorism against civilians, and religious intolerance. This culture of
hate has multiple heads from Algeria to Afghanistan, to Indonesia, via
Gaza and the West Bank, Damascus, Cairo, Khartoum, Teheran, and Karachi.
It scatters the seeds of terrorism from one end of the earth to the other.
This hate, which
suppresses freedom of thought, and condemns difference, calls itself "Islamic
jihad." It draws on religious texts whose interpretation other Muslims
dispute. Moreover, because these moderate Muslims challenge this interpretation
of jihad, wishing to live in peace with the non-Muslim peoples and nations
of the world, their lives are threatened. There is constant bloodshed
in Algeria. Jihad is disseminating death and terror in Israel. In Southern
Sudan, jihad has caused the death of some two million people, generated
an even larger number of refugees, lead to the enslavement of tens of
thousands, and produced deadly famines.
In Indonesia, some
200,000 deaths resulted from jihad violence in East Timor. Christians
have been pursued, and massacred, and their churches burned down by jihadists
in the Moluccas and other Indonesian islands. The death toll in these
violent attacks is over 10,000, while an additional 8,000 Christians have
been forcibly converted to Islam, including many who were circumcised.
Atrocities are also being committed by jihadists in both the Philippines,
and some northern Nigerian states. Hundreds of innocent people died when
jihad struck at the Jewish Community Center of Buenos Aires in Argentina,
and the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In Egypt, jihadists have
massacred Copts in their churches and villages, and murdered European
tourists. Christians in Pakistan and in Iran live in terror of accusations
of blasphemy, which, if "proven," can yield a death sentence.
And a cataclysmic act of jihad terror resulted in the slaughter of nearly
3,000 innocent civilians of multiple faiths and nationalities in New York,
on September 11, 2001. None of these victims were guilty of any crime.
They were murdered and mutilated out of hate.
It is this hate that Israel is fighting. The Durban World Conference Against
Racism — where the culture of hate was rehabilitated, not condemned
— ended only three days before the jihad terror attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. When proposals were made condemning Zionism,
this conference was encouraging jihad, the culture of the war against
infidels, while ignoring the principles of freedom and human rights. This
was negationist racism. The word "Zion," which designates the
land of Israel and its capital Jerusalem, exists in texts dating back
almost three millennia. It was the Emperor Hadrian who first called the
country Palestine in 135. In this Palestine, Arabic was not the common
language, the Bible and not the Koran was taught, and the population was
mainly Jewish. Palestine was colonized five centuries later by the Arab
armies of the Islamic jihad. Many Jews were massacred at that time, others
deported to Arabia as slaves, the whole population expropriated and reduced
to the condition of dhimmis,
as were all indigenous Jews and Christians in the south Mediterranean
countries conquered by jihad, including those in many European countries.
Should these countries
conquered by Islam — Portugal, Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, Crete, and
the southern regions of France and Italy, for example — still be
considered Arab Muslim lands? Turkish jihad conquests imposed the sharia
as far north as Hungary and southern Poland, and, on all of central Europe
within the Ottoman Empire, including regions of Greece, former Yugoslavia,
Romania, and Bulgaria, until the end of the 19th century. Are those countries
also to be identified as Muslim lands, in which non-Muslim inhabitants
must return to the condition of dhimmis, whose testimony concerning Muslims
is rejected by Islamic courts? Will they again be required to don discriminatory
garments such as the Taliban demanded of the Hindus, or be subject to
the continuing prohibition on building and renovating their churches,
like the Copts in Egypt?
If the liberation
movement of the Jews in their ancestral homeland is interpreted as racism,
then all the movements of liberation from expropriation and servitude
imposed by jihad are racist. Such a stance reinstates the imperialism
of the Islamic jihad, which has claimed millions of victims over three
continents during more than a millennium, deported an incalculable number
of slaves, and annihilated entire peoples, destroying their history, their
monuments, and their culture. Have the Copts of Egypt a right to their
history and their language? Do the Kabili of North Africa have a right
to theirs? We must acknowledge all the victims of the racism that jihad
creates, a racism which denies the history, sufferings, and memories of
those conquered.
Arab racism consists
of calling the Land of Israel, Arab land, whereas no Palestinian province,
village, or town, including Jerusalem is mentioned either in the Koran
or in any Arabic text before the end of the ninth century. On the contrary,
these locations are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, which represents the
religious and historical heritage of the Jewish people. The Bible, which
tells the history of this country, tells it in Hebrew, the language of
the country, and not in Arabic. Palestinian racism consists of asserting
that the whole history of Israel, biblical history, is Arab, Islamic,
and Palestinian history. The kings and prophets of Israel were Arab, Palestinian,
and Muslim kings and prophets, as were Jesus, his family, and the apostles.
This Arabization and Islamization of the Bible thus robs not only the
Jews but also the whole of Christianity of their history. New theologies
of substitution are developed, transferring Israel's heritage to Arab
and Muslim Palestine.
The imperialism of
jihad consists of appropriating the whole history and identity of the
peoples who were conquered and thrown into the nonexistence of dhimmitude.
This is a total negation of the other, a refusal to acknowledge him as
an equal. Israel's battle is not a battle of colonists, as some European
political circles like to claim, because Europe itself had a colonial
history on all continents, which it projects on to Israel. Similarly,
Europe projects its own history of Nazism on to the Israelis, thereby
revenging itself on the revelations of historians. Israel's battle is
not a battle against the Muslim world, it is a battle against the unbridled
hate of jihad. Israelis are struggling to maintain their liberation from
the yoke of dhimmitude, which was imposed in order to eradicate the Jews
in their indigenous homeland. That is why Christians who reject the new
theologies of substitution are joining Israel in its fight, as are Muslims
who refuse to allow the values of Islam to be perverted by the ideology
of jihad. It is through this common effort that reconciliation between
peoples can be achieved, replacing the culture of hate with a culture
of friendship.
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t
the dawn of the new millennium, the world is being confronted with an
absolute culture of hate, characterized by paroxysms of international
terrorism against civilians, and religious intolerance. This culture of
hate has multiple heads from Algeria to Afghanistan, to Indonesia, via
Gaza and the West Bank, Damascus, Cairo, Khartoum, Teheran, and Karachi.
It scatters the seeds of terrorism from one end of the earth to the other.
