Sunday, June 04, 2006

Jews and Muslims Clash


My whole life, but particularly the last few years of my life, I have dedicated myself to unearthing the truth about the matters of the Earth, and it is here, my little corner in the Internet, where I share them.

I came upon this realization when I was driving one night a few days ago. Since America was established, and particularly in the last hundred years or so, Jews have grown quite comfortable in the States. America, being a Christian entity housing Jews the way that it does rightfully gives the Muslims of the Arab world the impression that the Jews and Christians have struck up an alliance. Therefore, Arab Muslims (and some Arab Christians) see themselves as fighting both Christendom and Jewry, rolled up nicely and tightly as Israel.

Christians aside, this is a war between Jewish and Muslim sovereignty of the holiest site of the Jewish religion and people. It is a declaration by Muslims that the only people whom have the right and obligation for sovereignty in the Middle East are the Muslims, which goes directly against the Jewish right and obligation for our sovereignty there. It is a clash of civilization, but not between the West and Islam, but between Judaism and Islam, and it's time that this clash be brought to the foreground and understood. This clash has been in effect for nearly 1,400 years, since Islam sprouted forth from the deserts of Saudi Arabia in the 7th Century and pushed its presence into the daily living of everything and everyone there.

Ultimately, and equally hard for many to swallow, it is a clash of respective value systems that each religion desires the world to embrace. The difference is how they go about this spread to occur. The truth is that Islam wants the world to embrace Islamic values and Islam. Judaism wants people to embrace G-dly concepts as well, but they are not necessarily Jewish concepts for Gentiles, for the Jewish understanding conceptualizes a world where Jews follow Torah and Gentiles follow a monotheistic ethical and Divinely communicated Law, which precedes the giving of the Torah. This is called the Law of Noach (Noah), or the Seven Noachide Laws. So there is a clash of values between Islam and Judaism; Islam wants all people to be Muslims and Judaism wants all people to be G-dly. This of course, means that Muslims can be Muslims in the Jewish view, but the Muslim view insists stubbornly that Jews must become Muslim, and it is the problem with Islam's supersessionist theology. In other words, there is no harmony in the world with Islam.

Ironically, Muslims regard Ishmael, Isaac's half-brother and the first born of Abraham and Hagar to be the progenitor of Muhammad and the Muslim religion. The Torah says that Ishmael will be made into a great nation as well, but that he will be a "wild ass of a man" and "his hand will be on everybody and everybody's hand will be on him." This is a strange thing for the Torah to say when today we see that Muslim groups are indeed acting out wildly and spreading hostility to many parts of the world, all the while attempting to dominate the functions of societies in which they live. Further, the extremism espoused by these Muslim groups has not been kept in check, neither from the outside nor the inside, and the extremist forms of Islam have slowly and surely leaked (as they have been for decades) to the average civilian population. What we see is an entire Muslim civilization being tainted by extremism; everybody becomes an extremist. We should nto doubt that such a thing can occur; we've seen both the mob rule of the South in America and the Nazi propaganda of Germany control entire populations.

Muslims are Noachides and pure monotheists, but they do not understand the concept of harmony between monotheists and therefore, there can only be peace when their paradigm is wiped out and replaced with something else. Does Islam really hold the key for G-dly harmony in the world? It seems that Muslim scholars have failed to advance such a proposition, something I feared was not possible for Islam years ago.

As an entity, Islam is quite predictable. A few years ago, and this is ingetrally related to 9/11, certain "rogue" Muslim scholars were attempting to moderate Islam without fudging its basics and without liberalizing it to fit the standards of other people. The truth is that, for a religion like Islam, with a vibrant and intellectual ability to meet the needs and challenges presented to its adherents given particular circumstances, through the work of its learned scholars it is able to direct and guide adherents in the proper direction. 9/11 served as an opportunity for Muslim leaders to present this crossroads to the Muslim people. I realized a few years ago that changes were beginning to occur in Islam and that only Muslims could affect the change and nobody from the outside. But the Muslim leaders never rose to the challenge, they never presented the crossroads, and it was the "outsider" Muslims, the liberal vagabonds who then took up the mantle to affect change in Islam. This left moderation and intellectual conceptualization of Islam's role in the world to Muslims other than the religious leadership. Since the religious leadership didn't take up this mantle, the calls for the necessary changes that had to occur within Islam were not recognized by mainstream Muslims and were immediately categorized as attempts to disparriage Islam from the inside. In other words, these Muslims were "self-hating Muslims," like Nonie Darwish, Walid Shoebat, Irshad Manji, and others.

The funny/sad/enraging irony here is that right wing Muslims had long been growing comfortable making alliances with left wing Jews; they were able to "see the good" in liberal Jews but only saw the demonic in left wing Muslims. In an act enough to drive a self-esteemed Jew to hysteric anger; they expected Jews, out of the kindness of their Jewish hearts, to espouse liberal opinions towards Arabs. They championed them as "good Jews" but were fickle and violent when it came to expecting or even accepting liberal opinions from their own brethren and sistren. The "bad Jews" were those Jews that stood up for Jewish rights, for example, to the State of Israel and to not give in to every Arab whim. It was always the bad Jews that were worthy of expulsion and murder, such as those Middle Eastern Jews living in Arab countries as the State of Israel was being established. All Arab Jews showing any support for the State of Israel's establishment were promptly, violently, and thorougly expelled from their (supposedly egalitarian) societies in 1948; even those not in support were expelled -- to belong to the people who did support Israel was enough. In the end, the good Jews suffered with the bad Jews, because of their identity and because one cannot gain respect from another after defending his enemy's rights time after time and neglecting his own.

More and more do we see how the Arabs take on the form of the Nazi's, but refuse to grant them this role because Muslim societies traditionally "aren't as bad" as the European Jew-hatred from which the seeds of the Nazi war machine grew into solid trees. Perhaps the dulled moral sensitivity many societies suffered as a result of the Holocaust only makes sense that another holocaust-type mentality of large proportions would be allowed to flourish later. It is not ironic nor an accident that it is occuring to the same people (the Jews, and to others, such as in Darfur), and BY the same people, "Arabized" Muslim Africans. Truly, Ishmael is bucking up, refusing any yoke. This type of martyrdom, the defense of the enemy, is not noble; it is self-righteous, self-hating suicide. Good Jew or bad Jew, in the end they all are not worthy of dignity, life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Alright, so we're not exactly compromising to be seen as "three fifths" of a human being, but we'll at least try to haggle you up to four.