No Hebrew Please - This is Europe

Disturbing insights about the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe. Must read. - R.O.

No Hebrew Please - This is Europe
By: Bruce Bawer
Jan. 7, 2013 -- FrontPageMag.com

I wrote about it here recently: Israel’s ambassador to Denmark and the head of Copenhagen’s Jewish community have both warned Jews in that city that if they don’t want to be roughed up on the street by anti-Semites, they’d better not wear anything that would identify them as Jews – and, for good measure, they should also lower their voices when speaking Hebrew. The other day, in a supremely depressing article for Israel National News, Giulio Meottiprovided a round-up of similar developments from around Europe.

For instance: a Jewish theological seminary in Potsdam has asked its rabbis not to wear yarmulkes in public. Pupils at a Jewish school in Berlin have been warned to speak German, not Hebrew, on school trips – and to wear baseball caps over their yarmulkes “so you don’t give stupid people something to get annoyed about.” Jews at Rome’s main synagogue now remove their yarmulkes when leaving services; so do Jews in Malmö, Sweden. A Jewish teacher at an adult education center in Kristiansand, Norway, has been told “that wearing the star could be deemed a provocation towards the many Muslim students at the school.” And so on.

The reason for all this cautious behavior, of course, is to avoid the fate of people like the Paris Metro passenger who, Meotti noted, was recently beaten unconscious by a mob who pegged him as Jewish because he was reading a book by Paris’s chief rabbi.

Even Meotti’s laundry list didn’t come close to covering the full range of despicable anti-Semitic outrages, and reactions thereto, that have occurred in Western Europe of late. One example: in early December, it was reported that in the wake of episodes at Edinburgh University in which an Israeli diplomat was “mobbed” and a speech by Israel’s ambassador was “disrupted by chanting students waving Palestinian flags,” many Jewish students, fed up with the “toxic atmosphere” (and, in some cases, scared to publicly identify as Jewish) had left for other colleges – and other countries.

Meotti is among the few journalists who have been sounding the warning for some time about the rise of Jew-hatred in Europe. The last few weeks, however, have seen a flurry of articles on the topic in relatively high-profile places. Can it be that the see-no-evil approach to this international catastrophe is finally giving way under the increasingly heavy weight of reality?

For example, Haaretz, which in late December ran an article entitled “France’s Jews on High Alert,” followed it up on New Year’s Eve with a piece by one Joel Braunold, who – after recalling that as a Jewish kid in London he found Americans’ and Israelis’ comments about anti-Semitism in Europe “hyperbolic,” ignorant, and almost racist – admitted that Europe does indeed have “a serious anti-Semitism problem” now, and that “the number of safe European capital cities has shrunk to a tiny number.” To make matters worse, Europe’s governments “are not taking the issue seriously”: either they dismiss anti-Semitism as a far-right pathology, or they blame it on Israel. This, Braunold says, won’t do:

As Europe’s demography changes, governments have to start systemically educating their citizens that hating Jews is not ok, and that it is unjustifiable. This means going beyond Holocaust education and getting into touchy, hard topics such as Israel and Palestine. If the hate, fear and loathing come from today’s political situation, states have the obligation to make sure their citizens are not being brought up on a diet of racism. That starts with educating each and every child.

Nowhere in Braunold’s piece, incidentally, does he mention Islam or Muslims. There’s nothing unusual about this, of course: this is the New Reticence, to which millions around the world now devoutly subscribe. Yet I would submit that this reticence – this readiness to acknowledge the offense but not name the offenders – is an essential part of the problem that Braunold claims to be determined to help overcome.

Also on New Year’s Eve, the website of Public Radio International ran a pieceheadlined “Anti-Semitism a growing problem in France.” Noting that France has Western Europe’s largest Jewish and its largest Muslim populations, and that the Toulouse school shootings last March were only the most widely reported of “an alarming number of anti-Semitic attacks across France this year,” PRI quoted anti-Semitism expert Sammy Ghozlan as saying that French Jews now “avoid going out late, going to certain neighborhoods, wearing yarmulkes.”

PRI also interviewed a rabbi who travels around France with an imam, meeting young Muslims and trying to talk them out of their Jew-hatred. The rabbi explained that many Muslims justify their prejudice by citing Israel’s purportedly brutal treatment of Palestinians. Curiously – but, alas, not very surprisingly – the rabbi, instead of informing his Muslim interlocutors that they’ve been fed lies about Israel, said that he tells them not to think about Israel, but to focus rather on France. Sigh.

To its credit, PRI didn’t try to hide the fact that the problem at hand is, indeed, anti-Semitic prejudice and violence by Muslims. On the other hand, it did what it could – in familiar mass-media fashion – to spread the guilt around, as it were, making references to intercultural “tensions” and suggesting that the answer lies in “mutual understanding.” Needless to say, anyone who understands Islam understands that those whose mantra is “mutual understanding” just don’t understand at all.

Another article, on December 18, sought to sum up recent developments in Western Europe that have negatively affected people of faith. The authors referred in passing to bans on kosher and halal slaughter and to efforts to outlaw circumcision – matters, in short, of concern to both Jews and Muslims. But anti-Semitic violence? Not a word. Not even the Toulouse massacre rated a mention. On the contrary: the article’s main thrust was that a certain religious group – not Jews – is currently the object of cruel, widespread, and systematic attack:

• “France and Belgium now ban people from publicly wearing full-face veils while Switzerland, the Netherlands, and other European states have debated similar prohibitions. Islamic dress restrictions for teachers exist in some Swiss and German states.”

• “The distinctive dress of conservative Muslims has fueled a fear of ‘the other’ …The increasing restrictions on religious practice and expression in Western Europe both arise from and encourage a climate of intolerance against religious groups, especially those with strong truth claims and vigorous demands on their members. Muslims, in some instances, clearly are being targeted. This increasingly hostile atmosphere in turn triggers private discrimination, and sometimes even violence, against members of these groups.”

The authors’ conclusion: “If the lamp of liberty is to remain lit, Western Europeans must accept that the age of conformity to an official monoculture – secular or religious – is at an end. In the coming year, their countries should embrace their religiously diverse future and accord religious freedom to all.”

Where did this mischievous, duplicitous piece of nonsense appear? In theNational Interest, no less. And who wrote it? Two members of an “independent, bipartisan, federal body” called the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF): Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard law professor and former American ambassador to the Holy See who was appointed to the commission by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, andAzizah al-Hibri, a lawyer and philosopher who writes about “women’s issues, democracy, and human rights from an Islamic perspective” and who was named to the commission by President Obama.

In other words, the very arm of the federal government that should be joining Meotti and others in raising the alarm about the crisis of Muslim anti-Semitism in Western Europe would seem to be making a very explicit point of pretending that the crisis doesn’t exist at all – and of pretending, moreover, that the perpetrators of faith-based violence are, in fact, its victims. The grim truth about the plight of Jews in Europe, then, is starting to be articulated here and there – but U.S. authorities are doing their best, apparently, to turn that truth on its head.

We Ignore Islamism at Our Own Peril

For any avid foreign affairs reader, the distinction between Islam and Islamism is critical to properly understanding the drama of the Middle East. Moreover a full appreciation of what it is that defines these concepts will facilitate a much broader understanding of the threat facing Western and Arab powers alike. As we watch the violence unfolding in Syria, and the protests rising in Egypt, read the following article and carefully assess the distinction. - R.O.

Headlines to watch:
- Egyptian President's Defiant, Confrontational Speech
- Syria loads chemical weapons into bombs; military awaits Assad's order
- Islamic Fighters in Northern Syria Not United
- Assad faces life or death choice
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Islamology 101: What's the difference between Islam and Islamism?
By: Clifford D. May - Dec. 6, 2012 - National Review Online

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan

Google “Islamist” and you’ll get more than 24 million hits. Google “jihadist” and you’ll get millions more. Yet I bet the average American could not tell you what it is that Islamists and jihadists believe. And those at the highest levels of the U.S. government refuse to do so.

Why? John Brennan, the top counterterrorism adviser in the White House, argues that it is “counterproductive” to describe America’s “enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.” To describe terrorists using “religious terms,” he adds, would “play into the false perception” that the “murderers” waging unconventional war against the West are doing so in the name of a “holy cause.”

I get it. I understand why it would be useful to convince as many of the world’s more than a billion Muslims as possible that Americans are only attempting to defend themselves against “violent extremists.” By now, however, it should be obvious that this spin — one can hardly call it analysis — has spun out. The unpleasant fact is that there is an ideology called Islamism and, as Yale professor Charles Hill recently noted, it “has been on the rise for generations.”

So we need to understand it. We need to understand how Islamism has unfolded from Islam, and how it differs from traditional Islam as practiced in places as far-flung and diverse as Kuala Lumpur, Erbil, and Timbuktu. This is what Bassam Tibi attempts in his most recent book, published this year, Islamism and Islam. It has received nowhere near the attention it deserves.

A Koret Foundation Senior Fellow at Stanford University, Tibi describes himself as an “Arab-Muslim pro-democracy theorist and practitioner.” Raised in Damascus, he has “studied Islam and its civilization for four decades, working in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa.” His research has led him to this simple and stark conclusion: “Islamism is a totalitarian ideology.” And just as there cannot be “democratic totalitarianism,” so there cannot be “democratic Islamism.”

Brennan and other American and European officials are wrong, Tibi says, to fear that “fighting Islamism is tantamount to declaring all of Islam a violent enemy.” As for the Obama administration’s insistence that “the enemy is specifically, and only, al-Qaeda,” that, Tibi writes, “is far too reductive.”

Tibi also faults Noah Feldman, the young scholar who advised the Bush administration, and who insisted, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that sharia, Islamic law, can be viewed as “Islamic constitutionalism.” Feldman failed to grasp the significance of the “Islamist claim to supremacy (siyadat al-Islam),” the conviction that Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists are inferior and that their inferiority should be reflected under the law and by government institutions.

Tibi makes this important distinction: All jihadists are Islamists, but not all Islamists are jihadists. In other words, not all Islamists are committed to violence, including terrorism, as the preferred means to achieve their goals. He asks: “Can we trust Islamists who forgo violence to participate in good faith within a pluralistic, democratic system?” He answers: “I believe we cannot.”

Chief among Islamist goals, Tibi writes, is al-hall al Islami, “the Islamic solution, a kind of magic answer for all of the problems — global and local, socio-economic or value-related — in the crisis-ridden world of Islam.” Islamists ignore the fact that such governance has been implemented, for example, in Iran for over more than 30 years, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, in Gaza under Hamas, and in Sudan. It has never delivered development, freedom, human rights, or democracy. As for Turkey, Tibi sees it as “not yet an Islamist state” but heading in that direction.

Tibi makes some arguments with which I’d quarrel. For example, he views Saudi religious/political doctrines as a “variety of Salafism (orthodox, traditional Islam) not Islamism.” I would counter that Salafism is a variant of Islamism, albeit one based not on the writings of Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, but on nostalgia for the glory days of the seventh century.

Nevertheless, the debate Tibi is attempting to initiate is necessary — and long overdue. During the Cold War there was a field of study known as Sovietology. It was taught in our most elite universities with strong U.S. government support.

Why isn’t Islamology — not Islamic theology, or “Muslim-Christian understanding,” or “Islamic thought” — a discipline today? For one, Tibi observes, because to “protect themselves against criticism, Islamists have invented the formula of ‘Islamophobia’ to defame their critics.” (How did Stalin not come up with Sovietophobia or Russophobia?) And of course if such slander fails to intimidate, there are other ways to shut people up: Tibi has “survived attempts on my life by jihadists.”

A second reason for the absence of Islamology: The U.S. government cannot back the study of an ideology it stubbornly insists does not exist. Finally, those who do fund anything to do with Islam on campus — for example, the Gulf petro-princes who have given tens of millions of dollars to Georgetown and Harvard — have a different agenda, one that does not include free and serious inquiry. We ignore what they are doing — and what Tibi is telling us — at great peril.

— Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security.

Westerner's who fuel the Muslim world's grievance culture

As violent protests rage across the Middle East at the "Innocence of Muslims" film, this article challenges Western condemnation of the film and poses one simple truth: "It stands to reason that those who are genuinely enraged by this film have a choice about their behaviour. To suggest otherwise is to paint Muslims as backward people who cannot respond to insults except by the sword or the bomb." So then why does the West continue to bow to medieval extremists bent on igniting violence by condemning the film as much as the protesters? - R.O.   (Update: Another excellent article.)

Westerner's who fuel the Muslim world's grievance culture
Condemning the "grievance" as much as the perpetrator is fast becoming the default response to mass Islamist violence. This must not be allowed to stand.

By: Jeremy Havardi

Rather predictably, The Guardian this week argued that the wave of violence sweeping the Middle East was a spontaneous reaction to the anti Islamic film, "The Innocence of Islam". The film, we were told, set off a "long fuse that led to an explosion of violence that killed the US ambassador to Libya".

The Independent adopted a similar line with its article headlined: "An incendiary film –and the man killed in the crossfire". It added: "The mob enraged by film mocking Prophet Mohamed kills US ambassador in Benghazi rocket attack".

Then on BBC Newsnight on Thursday, ex-Foreign Office mandarin Sir Jeremy Greenstock waded in. The film, he declared, was definitely the "immediate, proximate cause" of the bloodshed.

Nor was this a British reaction alone, for in the US Hilary Clinton made the same causal linkage. The Guardian's Andrew Brown went even further. "The Innocence of Islam" was an "incitement to religious hatred" that deserved to be banned.

Those who blame this murderous mayhem on an obscure film miss the point by the proverbial country mile. The killing of the ambassador appeared to be the result of a carefully planned assassination by jihadist extremists, such as the violent Sunni group, Ansar al Sharia, rather than a mere spontaneous act of anger.

Far from being an expression of Muslim protest in Libya, it was a deranged act of militancy from radicalised Muslims for whom America and all western influences are mortal enemies. The same can be said for much of the violence sweeping every major Arab capital right now. Reducing murderous violence to "protest" risks legitimising behaviour or at least failing to understand its true motivations.

Certainly, one can understand why this amateurish production, a 13 minute clip of which appeared on YouTube, was insulting to Muslims. Its depiction of Muhammad as a pervert and child molester was certainly designed to be intensely provocative. But so are the venomous anti-Semitic and anti-Christian cartoons and images that proliferate in the Middle East. These too cause outrage but we never see mosques or the embassies of Muslim states torched as a result, and rightly so.

It stands to reason that those who are genuinely enraged by this film have a choice about their behaviour. To suggest otherwise is to paint Muslims as backward people who cannot respond to insults except by the sword or the bomb.

It attributes to them a complete inability to defuse their rage by more democratic forms of protest, effectively viewing them as savages from which little better can be expected. Such a view panders to the Islamist grievance culture rather than demanding that Muslims, like everyone else, behave better.

But condemning the "grievance" as much as the perpetrator is fast becoming the default response to mass Islamist violence. In 2002, Muslim mobs went on a murderous rampage in Nigeria, following newspaper comments that Mohammed would have approved the Miss World pageant which was being held in that country. Afterwards, some commentators condemned the organisers of Miss World in more forthright terms than the violent jihadists.

In 2006, there was a prolonged and outrageous display of global violence following the publication of satirical Danish cartoons in Jyllands-Posten. Some of the cartoons depicted the prophet Mohammed in unflattering terms though again, much of the violence was stoked up by local agitators using these cartoons as an excuse.

But as well as condemning sword bearing, embassy burning fanatics, former British Foreign Minister Jack Straw and some of his European counterparts condemned "irresponsible" Danish newspaper editors for publishing the material.

There was another global outpouring of Muslim rage following a speech by the Pope in September 2006 in which he quoted an obscure medieval Emperor, Manuel II. Manuel had condemned Muhammed’s command to "spread by the sword the faith he preached" and the Pope noted, quite correctly, that Islam had a history of using force to spread and defend the faith.

Indeed the instant frenzy of anti-Christian violence was evidence for that very point. Again, many non-Muslims made the mistake of criticising the Pope’s comments, rather than condemning the illegitimate responses of the extremists. Some media outlets gave airtime to the outrageous and incendiary comments of the Islamist Anjem Chaudhry who argued that "capital punishment" would be an appropriate punishment for the Pope.

Lumping offensive remarks or publications with barbaric behaviour excuses the latter while nurturing the extremists’ own victim mentality. But in one sense, this already mirrors the Zeitgeist in liberal Europe. Islamic fanaticism and its terrorist offshoots are seen as the understandable response of a minority aggrieved at "unjust" foreign policy. It is our "provocative" policies in Iraq, Afghanistan or "Palestine" that cause a violent reaction among Muslims.

Hence, it is necessary both to condemn the terrorism and address its "root causes" in foreign policy. As well as being an intellectually false argument, it is morally dubious because it suggests that there is only one inevitable way for enraged Muslims to respond to "our" behaviour. Terrorism remains a choice, and a highly illegitimate one.

Certainly, "The Innocence of Muslims", like the Danish cartoons, is provocative and, for most Muslims, blasphemous. But mob terror and the slaughter of innocents is the preserve of those with an unyielding hatred for western values.

To truly defend those values, our leaders must uphold a system in which we can be offended and, in turn, give offence. The alternative is that we cease to be a magnet for those fleeing from repressive and backward societies.

Jeremy Havardi is a journalist and the author of two books: Falling to Pieces, and The Greatest Briton