I explained to a Facebook friend that, for centuries, for millennia, the Jews have had land stolen from them, their territories occupied by foreign powers. Colonized and conquered by Egyptians, Romans, Arabs, to name a few, Jews have been forced into exile, taken captive, enslaved, and exterminated. The Jews are so loathed by so many that many don’t believe they have any claim to land they have continually inhabited for 3500 years despite all that has befallen them as a people.
My friend insisted that the conflict is caused by the behavior of the Israeli state. But nothing Israel has ever done justifies October 7. October 7 is justified by those who perpetrated the act—and those who celebrate it and support the cause of the perpetrators—by one thing: Jew-hatred. The rest is rationalization. She objected that it is typical of the defenders of Israel to smear its critics as antisemites, when in truth they are only anti-Zionist. I noted that antisemitism has a long history of being coded that way.
She then wanted to assure me that Muslims helped Jews during the Holocaust. I responded that Arabs and Muslims are not monolithic groups. Yes, a small number of Muslims sheltered Jews (a few dozen Albanian Muslims, for example). But that doesn’t negate the fact of widespread Jew-hatred in the Arab-Muslim world. In fact, the evidence for eliminationist antisemitism among Arab-Muslims populations is well documented.
Remember when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, visited Hitler in Berlin in November 1941? He sought the Axis powers public approval for an Arab state and the end of the proposed Jewish homeland in the region then called Palestine. He wanted this approval as a condition for the uprising in the Arab world allied with the Axis powers. Hitler was sympathetic, but declined to give al-Husseini the public approval he sought. We know what they discussed because we have the transcripts of the meeting.
(I will be referencing the official German record of the meeting between Hitler and al-Husseini, on November 28, 1941, at the Reich Chancellory in Berlin. Here is the full transcript.)
Amin al-Husseini began first by conveying to Hitler that the dictator was “admired by the entire Arab world,” and thanked him for “the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and especially the Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear expression in his public speeches.” He then declared that the Nazis and the Arabs shared the same enemies: “the English, the Jews, and the Communists.” The belief held at the time, by Nazis and Arabs alike, was that both the British Empire and the Bolsheviks were instantiations of the Jewish control over the world. “Therefore they were prepared to cooperate with Germany with all their hearts and stood ready to participate in the war, not only negatively by the commission of acts of sabotage and the instigation of revolutions, but also positively by the formation of an Arab Legion.”
al-Husseini proposed an Arab revolt across the Middle East to fight the Jews, as well as the English, who governed Palestine and controlled Iraq and Egypt, and the French, who controlled Syria and Lebanon. al-Husseini explicitly expressed his eagerness to stop the reestablishment of the Jewish state, which was the likely outcome of the British having secured a mandate for Palestine at the Paris peace conference in 1919. Indeed, throughout the conversation, it was recognized by both parties that Palestine, so named in the second century AD by the Roman Empire (Syria-Palestine), was the Jewish homeland. al-Husseini asked Hitler to declare publicly, as the German government had privately, that it favored “the elimination of the Jewish national home” in Palestine.
Hitler told al-Husseini that Germany stood for “uncompromising war against the Jews.” Hitler told al-Husseini that Germany was presently engaged in “a life and death struggle with two citadels of Jewish power: Great Britain and Soviet Russia.” He argued that this “naturally included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine, which was nothing other than a center, in the form of a state, for the exercise of destructive influence by Jewish interests.” He insisted that, while England was capitalist and Russia communist, “Jews in both countries were pursuing a common goal.” Ideologically, “the war was a struggle between National Socialism and the Jews”—the struggle echoed by the Arab world; in that case, National Socialism’s analog was the clerical fascism of Islam. What al-Husseini wanted from Hitler, which Hitler did not agree to, was permission to launch a revolt against the colonial powers in the Middle East to eliminate the Jewish population in Palestine. In due time, Hitler assured him.
“The Fuhrer then made the following statement to the Mufti, enjoining him to lock it in the uttermost depths of his heart:
1. He (the Fuhrer) would carry on the battle to the total destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire in Europe.
2. At some moment which was impossible to set exactly today but which in any event was not distant, the German armies would in the course of this struggle reach the southern exit from Caucasia.
3. As soon as this had happened, the Fuhrer would on his own give the Arab world the assurance that its hour of liberation had arrived. Germany’s objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power. In that hour the Mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the Arab operations, which he had secretly prepared. When that time had come, Germany could also be indifferent to French reaction to such a declaration.”
The Jews have been conquered and oppressed for centuries—the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, the Roman Empire. During the rise of Islam, a plagiarism of Old and New Testaments, Jews living in the Arabian Peninsula were massacred and driven out. Since, Persian Jews have been driven out of Iran, the country with the largest proportion of Jews in the region outside of Israel. There was an exodus of Jews from Iran in the 1950s, and then another wave of out-migration during and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Jewish population had been reduced to approximately 80,000 prior to the Revolution. During the Revolution, the number dropped to fewer than 20,000. That this is the largest population of Jews anywhere in the Middle East and Central Asia will give you a good sense of how inhospitable that part of the world is to the Jews.
What explains the pervasive antisemitism? Jews are hated because they have been a remarkably successful people despite continual persecution and outsider status. Successful ethic groups are envied and resented by emotionally stunted cultures and subcultures (see, for example, in black American hatred of and violence towards Asians). The Arab-Muslim world remains backwards, fraught with primitivisms. In addition to Jew hatred, Muslims are profoundly misogynistic and heterosexist. Jews are also hated because they are westernized. Islam hates the West because it’s liberal and secular. Muslims hate the West also because their first attempt to colonize Europe was thwarted by Christendom. Their second attempt to Islamize the West is proving much more successful, as western nation-states have invited the barbarians to reside inside the city walls. But that’s for another thread.
What motivates Hamas is the desire to build an Islamic world. Hamas is an instantiations of the sharia supremacist movement. What also motivates Hamas is Jew hatred. They seek the elimination of Jews from those territories they control or seek to control. This was Hitler’s motivations: build a global national socialist world and eradicate all Jews in it.
As I have shown, the motivations of the Islamist have been recoded as a struggle for justice under cover of an academic pretense, namely postcolonial studies and related fields. But Israel’s struggle against Islamism is not to be understood, as Barack Obama wishes it were, as a result of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. There is a lot to criticize there, but it is irrelevant to what Hamas is doing. This is not a struggle over land. This is a struggle for the type of government people in Israel—and the world—will live under. Will Israel be a free state or will it be a totalitarian one? That is the question. Hamas could care less about Palestinian or any other lives. Hamas is an expression of clerical fascism.
Israel is not only defending herself today, but defending tomorrow for the West. Israel’s struggle is our struggle. To be sure, many the students on campus and the mob on the streets don’t understand this, but it doesn’t matter; they hate the West. Even if they understood the struggle, they would still side with Hamas—and many of them because they understand what this is about. They think they want this. Moreover, whether they grasp this or not, they have become a conduit through which the latent antisemitism that runs through Western culture is manifest (itself the legacy of the same force that saved the West from Islam, namely Christendom). The indoctrination centers that go under the label “education” prepared them to be ethicists and racists whose hatred and loathing is already trained, with Jews, whites, and Asians in the crosshairs.
What they don’t understand was well put by my friend Kevin Bobout: “The blind side of their hatred of our current system is they will be slaughtered by the same hands they empower.”
freedom and reason 