They Won’t Stop at the Jews

British international law expert Natasha Hausdorff noted that, when it comes to Israel, a great many people are “desperately ignorant, yet highly opinionated”. Nowhere more so than when it comes to the history of the region, and the length and depth of Islamic anti-Semitism.

For too many prating ninnies, the history of Israel apparently only began in 1948. Forget the previous 7,000 years of occupation by the indigenous Jewish peoples. This is the sort of addle-brained short-sightedness spouted by the odious Greens’ MP Mehreen Faruqi, who gibbers that Israel is a “coloniser”.

What the Pakistani Muslim Faruqi also glosses over is the long history of anti-Semitism in Islam. When Muslims bellow, “Jews, remember Khaybar”, it’s a reminder that Muhammad and his armies slaughtered the Jews of that town.

That’s just the start of Islam’s beef with the Jews. The Koran fairly drips with invective against Jews. The daily Muslim prayer, al-Fatiha, explicitly condemns Jews as having invoked Allah’s wrath (Christians get off lightly, being merely “led astray”).

Much misunderstood, too, is the Islamic practise of dhimmitude, which modern apologists like to pass off as “tolerance”. In fact, it was barely that.

Almost everywhere, the harshest restrictions on “dhimmis” – that is, non-Muslims – applied to Jews.

Particularly in the Arab lands, to be a Jew was to experience a lifetime of humiliation. Umar said the pact “gave dhimmis a place consistent with the abject lowliness God has imposed on them”; travelling through North Africa in 1876, the French writer Joseph Halevi described it as “reminding Jews that their Arab masters could do whatever they wanted” – including killing them, with Jews being four times more likely to be murdered in 19th century Morocco than Muslims.

Yet precisely because the presence of Jews allowed even the poorest Muslim to enjoy a sense of social superiority, dhimmitude was never inherently exterminationist. However, new pressures, which came into play in the second half of the 19th century, dramatically altered that picture.

In the mid-19th century, global changes engendered a new, violent, and virulently anti-Semitic Arab nationalism.

Arab nationalism, as it took shape over the period from 1890 to 1940 […] it was almost always infected by anti-Semitism, attempting to cement a largely artificial ethnic or national identity by opposition to (among others) the “arrogance” of the supposedly all-mighty Jews; its more widely prevalent religious versions added an apocalyptic imaginary to their fury, foreshadowing a jihad that would lead to Islam’s global ­triumph and the Jews’ complete extirpation.

The result was a transition from dhimmitude’s anti-Semitism of subordination to an anti-Semitism of extermination.

Unsurprisingly, a wave of massacres and anti-Semitic riots swept the Middle East — long before Zionism had an presence in the province of Palestine. When European anti-Semitism culminated in the Third Reich, Hitler found a congenially anti-Jewish like mind in the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini. The Nazis, who generally despised Arabs, were nonetheless pleased with al-Hussaini’s fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes. Hitler dubbed him an “Aryan”.

When the Nazis and their plan to exterminate Jews were exterminated, Arab Muslims vowed to carry on.

Typified by the Muslim Brotherhood’s pledge in 1946 that it would “repeat the German massacres and destroy (the Jews) entirely”, and the Arab League’s proclamation soon thereafter of “a war of extermination which will eclipse the massacres of the Mongols”, Islamic exterminationism defined a mindset that both ensured war without end in the Middle East and became increasingly extreme with every ­calamitous Arab political failure and military fiasco.

Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime are merely that mindset’s latest incarnation.

This is what the “peacemakers” utterly fail to comprehend: that the Palestinians don’t want peace. They want the Jews dead.

And that would be just the start.

They view Israel’s destruction and the massacre of its people as the crucial prelude to the coming of the Islamic millennium.

The Australian

An Islamic millennium in which all infidels, including the fatuous Greens in keffiyehs and the suicidal idiots of “Queers for Palestine” would be eradicated just like the Jews. In the words of senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar:

Truly, as former Australian PM Bob Hawke said, “If we allow the bell to be tolled for Israel, it will have tolled for us all”.