Hatred, Lies, and Violence in the World of Islam

Raphael Israeli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351516181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Hatred, Lies, and Violence in the World of Islam examines the torrential flood of anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish, and anti-Zionist propaganda that permeates many Muslim societies. Raphael Israeli locates the source of this anti-Semitic sentiment in the inadequacies and insecurities of Muslim states. By demonizing and delegitimizing Israel and Jews, they seek to eliminate a successful counterexample of their own failures, thus putting an end to their own "humiliation." Beyond mapping the distribution of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda in the Arab and Islamic worlds, Israeli uses case-studies to illustrate the premises of this study: the Palestinians, who have a direct stake in battling Israel; Turkey, which now claims leadership of the Arab and Sunni Muslim worlds; and Shi'ite Iran, which provides a more extreme example of both hatred and disregard for fact and history while threatening to destroy Israel. Israeli documents the worldwide collaboration between Jew-haters of all sorts, explaining the exponential growth of Jew-hatred on the Internet, with thousands of new hate sites added every year, outpacing Jew-hatred in the traditional media. He places anti-Semitism in a broader tradition of political lies and political deceit. In the final chapter, Israeli considers the possibility of reversing anti-Jewish agitation in Muslim countries, which he finds unlikely because so many of the region's regimes are built on foundations of anti-Semitism.

1

Lies Generated by Hatred: Political and Religious Sources

In matters of hatred toward Jews, Arab children and many other Muslim infants for that matter are imbued with large doses of it through their mothers’ milk. The infamous passage from the Book, which is cited in sermons in mosques throughout the Muslim world and repeated by Muslim clerics and political leaders, like President Mursi of Egypt, and which depicts Jews as “descendants of pigs and monkeys,” a-priori lends justification to any monstrosity attributed to Jews. We understand today that Prophet Muhammad had pronounced those derogatory words for the Jews when they rose against his authority in Medina at the outset of his political career there. But today, when they are repeated ad nauseam throughout the Muslim world in Friday sermons by journalists and politicians out of any context, they serve no other purpose than disparaging the Jews and insulting them. What is that if not hatred toward the Jews, irrational as it may be and anchored in religious belief, which renders it immutable? That derogatory reference in the Book, which is seconded by many others,¹ has had a profound and lasting impact on Muslim thinking, behavior, social norms and the education of their children, and not necessarily in areas of conflict with Israel or adjacent to them, sometimes even in parts of the world that have never seen a Jew.

The blind hatred and contempt toward Jews in the world of Islam has also instigated Muslims to manufacture lies, to weave conspiracies, and to cultivate delusions, among them the most incredulous which only Muslims can believe them. Examples abound: after the September 11 horrors, Muslims across the globe, including those in the United States and the most educated among Muslims, seized upon the rumor that the Mossad or the CIA were the authors of that act of terror to cling to it and to produce “evidence” to that effect: that Muslims “are not able to commit something terrible like that”; that most of the employees in the Towers, who happened to be Jewish, were absent that day because they had been tipped off by the perpetrators, or that the control towers at the airports had been taken over by Israeli or Jewish elements. On another occasion, Israelis were accused by Egyptians of having attracted sharks to the Sharm al-Sheikh waters off Sinai in order to ruin the Egyptian tourist industry; or they were charged of distributing toys loaded with explosives to kill children, or that they infiltrated an aphrodisiac chewing gum into Arab and Muslim countries in order to corrupt feminine morality there; or that they fought Palestinians with ammunition made of depleted uranium, or that they massacred Arabs and Muslims or tried to hurt the productive organs of their youth so as to sterilize them, and an entire series of unlikely stories of the ‘aja’ib genre². Modern times and instant mediatic technology permitting to verify every claim on the spot did nothing to blunt their appetite for these stories or to tire from fabricating them. Absurd as they sound to Western ears, they are much in demand in the world of Islam, where they are manipulated into propaganda, incitement, and indoctrination.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the now famous Somalian Muslim refugee who immigrated to the Netherlands and was instantly catapulted to prominence there when she was elected to Parliament, recounted in one of her many press interviews the religious indoctrination process she underwent in her country of origin in her youth. Her history teacher, Sister Aziza, used to take the class for an outing to the Iranian embassy and to promote a Muslim revolution. Gradually, the girls in her class started to physically cover themselves. She herself took to wearing the hijab and to admire the Muslim Brotherhood. Aziza started to use the “yahud” (Jews) word. One day she said: “You all sit up and listen” She showed the girls a magazine from Iran (a Muslim Shiite, not an Arab Sunni country) with pictures of dead people, piles of bodies and blood, and said: “look what the yahud have done to the Muslims”. The pictures were Iranian propaganda. They were taken from the Iran-Iraq war, showing Iraqi soldiers killing Iranian citizens. “This is what the Jews have done, and Saddam Hussein was an agent of the Jews,” Sister Aziza taught. She instructed the kids how to pray: “You hold your hands together, and you say: ‘Allah please protect us from evil, Allah please keep us healthy, Allah please take care of my mother and my father, Allah please destroy the Jews.’” Hirsi Ali pursued her tale:

For me, “yahud” [Jews] was not the same as human. It’s the enemy. It’s Satan. I remember a joke, well, it wasn’t even a joke, from the time I was a very little girl. We were in Riyadh and Jedda when the oil boom started. They were trying to build an oil pump; the construction project went on forever. At last, when the project was done, they opened the top of the pump, but instead of oil, water came out. And I remember my mom saying: “See, the Jews are at it again.” And I think about the three most horrible insults you could think of in my world. The insults were “yahud,” “shuri,” and “hanis.” “Shuri” means a communist. “Hanis” means gay. You guys are used to laughing at it, but it’s really not a laughing matter. Because it’s no longer just the Saudis who think like that. These ideas are spreading throughout Islam and all over the world to people who never met Jews, who know nothing about Israelis or what Israel represents. In 1993 I went to Antwerp with a friend. The friend said, “We are now in the Jewish neighborhood” and pointed at an Orthodox Jew. And I lost my breath and said: “Jewish?! Is he Jewish?! Wait, where? Where?” You see, I needed to visualize this huge fantasy of evil that I had in my head. And then he showed me a few people walking around and asked, “What exactly were you expecting?” I looked around and said, “Can you tell me, if a kid has two hands and two legs and he’s walking, are there children who are Jewish as well?” And my friend responded: ‘Yes, there are Jewish children as well. At that moment I felt something else inside me, that said it was shameful to voice what I had felt. I had to suppress that. So in 1993 I didn’t talk about it again. It was in 1994, during history class, when I first saw pictures of what happened in the Second World War. I was coming from Somalia, and similar things started to happen in my country, along with Rwanda, Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone … There are many things I learned at that time in history class, but the story of the Holocaust made the biggest impression on me. I went to all the Holocaust museums. I’ve been to Yad Vashem twice. As I understood it, the Holocaust wasn’t just the story of the Jews … I don’t know if this goes for everyone, but knowledge enlightened me … As a Muslim, I belong to the universal tribe. Every human individual, regardless of his beliefs, faith, sex, deserves to live and is equal. My criticism is of religion, especially Islam, and not of Muslims. Therefore, my criticism of Islam is not a rejection of Muslims. It is the idea of race that makes us destroy each other. You have to change your mind and learn to accept the other. My case is to convince fellow Muslims. I call myself Muslim not because I believe in Allah any longer, but I come out of that culture, and I want to fight to modify that culture, and create a culture of love and human rights …³

If this was the case for remote Somalia, which has had other more serious problems to tackle and many more important values to impart to its miserable children, how much more so for Arab, Turkish, or Iranian children who are exposed, day in day out, to the bombardments of hatred and lies in their state schools, among their families, on their media and in their streets. Hirsi Ali’ s enlightenment after her move to Holland, puts in perspective much of the education to hatred to which those innocent children are exposed in the Muslim world and which bears no necessary relationship with deprivation or poverty (Hirsi was from a well-to-do background). Add to that the universality of anti-Semitism in Islam (she heard the same derogation of the Jews in Saudi Arabia and then among European Muslims); the power of stereotypes and cultivated myths (Hirsi had never seen a Jew in either Somalia or, even much less likely, in Jedda); the fallacy of attributing these attitudes to the Arab-Israeli dispute (Somalia never was a party to it); and the lumping together of Jews and Israel as an inseparable entity, Muslim protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, and one begins to comprehend what we are talking about. Hirsi later also understood the systematic Holocaust denial current among Muslims, became a perennial visitor to Israel and to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, and grew to castigate Muslims for the atmosphere of Jew hatred that they cultivate in their midst. Much of the virulence against Jews in the Muslim world is attributable to the constant flow of hatred and lies propagated among Islamic societies.⁴

In the Arab and much of the Muslim worlds, there has been no let up in this regard. Their publics are permanently inundated by biased information and one-sided propaganda emanating from their authoritarian governments, who have not educated them to think freely, to gather information from many sources, and make judgments for themselves. And the official version of news in those countries, where propaganda takes precedence over knowledge, universally, exclusively, and constantly transmits and diffuses the versions crafted by the governments in place, which invariably demonize the Jews-Israelis-Zionists, impute to them the most horrible monstrosities, heap on them the most horrible accusations, and attribute to them the most evil intentions. History is also re-written and tailored to suit the evil nature of the Jews in daily columns, in “scientific” books, encyclopedias, not to mention Friday mosque sermons and political speeches made by unscrupulous clerics, “scholars,” politicians, and writers. Citations are invented that have no source to draw from, without concern for the false reporting to the readers or the distortion of the minds of children and youth who will grow in error, bereft of intellectual curiosity and fortitude, and accustomed to their “narrative” instead of to the truth. Arab media generally have no compunction about distorting reports, inflating negatives, and attenuating positives when Israel or Jews are concerned, lest the stereotypes they are harnessed by their governments to propagate be corrected. Rumors and accusations that Israelis are “killers of children” spread diseases around (this is particularly ironical due to Israel’s world-famous medical care aid brought to developing countries, especially in Africa, while the blaming countries are themselves sunken in disease), undermine governments and diffuse corruption, and are quick to travel in the Islamic world and adopted, lock stock and barrel, without critique or verification. Confirmed reports about a scientific invention by Israelis or Jews, an Israeli sports team that won a medal or a championship, or any international distinction awarded to Israel, like a Nobel Prize, or aid brought by Israel to Arab patients and children, is sure to disappear from the Arab news reports lest, Allah Forbid, Jews might appear in a positive light and contribute toward the attenuation of the Arab and Muslim hatred toward them.

No wonder then that children in kindergartens in Gaza are prone to vow for Islamikaze careers when they grow up, and for their mates to watch television programs of the official Palestinian Authority, or of Hamas Television, in which even popular international cartoon figures render Palestinian kids heroes who devote their lives to fight the “Zionist enemy,” and the latter are dubbed the “scum of the earth” whose sacred duty of all Palestinians it is to blowup. The infamous Muhammed al-Dura case, which became cause celebre in France during the Second Intifada (2000–2003), after it was proved in court that it had been jointly staged by a French Television channel and the Palestinian Authority, with a view of demonizing Israel, provides ample evidence of this manifestation of hatred. In Arab lore, Jews and in consequence Israelis and Zionists are accused of racism, bigotry, corruption, undermining the world order, wielding international power on the media and finances, desecrating Muslim holy places, occupying Arab lands, and discriminating against their own new immigrants; their leaders are seen as devious monsters, their foreign policy as aggressive and expansionist, threatening the peaceful Arab nation and Muslim world, accumulating a dangerous nuclear arsenal, and striving for the demise of the Arabs and Islam. As regards the Palestinians specifically, not only is usurpation of their rights invoked, together with the claim of their occupation, their exploitation, and their persecution, but false genocidal accusations are also occasionally raised against Israel. In the meantime, Israel and Zionism are routinely charged of eliminating Palestinian culture in order to replace it by the Jewish-Zionist one, and of diminishing the Islamic prevalence in Palestine and other occupied territories.⁵

This image of the Jews, Zionism and Israel, which is cultivated in the Arab and many Muslim media worldwide, at the exclusion of anything positive that may be said about them naturally channels public opinion toward a very deep-seated hatred toward those entities, which is becoming gradually irreversible, even in the countries that have signed peace with Israel, like Egypt and Jordan, or used to be Muslim moderates, like Turkey, Qatar, Morocco, and the Emirates, which sharply shifted their relative openness toward Israel the moment the first reports of Israel’s “atrocities” in the Gaza War (2009) started to filter out. It seemed that the infrastructure of hatred entrenched in the Islamic world toward Israel was there all the time, and all it needed was a trigger to re-launch it with ever greater vigor. Admittedly, even in many European countries where that same sort of anti-Israeli hostility was aired on the same occasion of the Gaza War, it was connected, at least in part, with the wrath of the Muslim minorities in the West, which are fed by the same disinformation, hallucinations, and hatred that they brought with them from the Islamic world, and continue to “update” their background “education” from the Arab and Muslim media or from the anti-Semitic European media. In sum, the Jews, who were traditionally depicted in despicable terms in Islam, continue to be portrayed stereotypically in Arab and Muslim writings, in cartoons, and in the electronic media, with the related extreme expression of disgust and hatred. Two brief illustrations will make the point:

1. I am in no way preaching hatred or praising it as a way of human behavior. But the hatred individual or society must examine themselves so as to understand why it is this way, since no society or individual can be hatred in such a way [as the Zionists] for no reason … I will give you an example of how hatred for the Zionist entity takes root in the soul of the Arabs … I once attended an international conference on road accidents in the military, held in Paris … With me was my colleague … whose mood changed when he was informed that a man who stood next to us … was a transportation officer of the detested Zionist entity … My colleague raged, swearing that he would not stand next to this criminal, talk to him or enter the hall in which he was sitting … He did not calm down until I swore to him that I did not know the nationality of that man, because he was in the company of officers from all over the world, and I myself was incapable of standing next to someone whose hands were dripping with the blood of innocent Arabs …

These are our enemies and our hatred towards them is rooted in our souls, and the only thing that can remove it is their departure from our lands and the purification of their defilement of our Holy Places …⁶

2. An editor of the Egyptian weekly, al-Usbu’, described a dream he had had, in which he was delegated by the Egyptian government to serve as the bodyguard of Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, on his official visit [also in the dream] to Cairo. The scene of the dream, starting with a “pig” [pointedly abhorred by Jews and Muslims alike] took place at the airport: “After a short while the pig landed; his face was diabolical; his hands soiled with the blood of women and children; a criminal who should be executed in the public square. Should I remain silent as many others did? Should I guard this butcher on my homeland’s soil? All of a sudden, I forgot everything: the past and the future, my wife and children” and I decided to do it. I pulled my gun and aimed at the cowardly pig’s head. I emptied all the bullets and screamed: “Blood vengeance for the [Egyptian] POW’s! Blood vengeance for the martyrs!” The murderer collapsed under my feet. Then I realized the meaning of masculinity and self-sacrifice. The criminal died. I stepped over the pig’s head with my shoes and screamed from the bottom of my heart: “Long Live Egypt ! Long Live Palestine! Jerusalem will never die, and never will the honor of the nation be lost!” I kept screaming at the top of my lungs until my wife put her hand on me. I woke up from this most beautiful dream and decided not to surrender to humiliation …⁷

These perceptions of Israel also dictate the choice of items that the Arab and Islamic press publishes about the Zionist state as well as the interpretations they lend to them. Political controversies as well as political factions in Israel, for example, are seen not as arising from political conflicts within a democratic system, but as a sign of dissent, disintegration, and failure to achieve unity. Former generals serving in the Israeli government do not signify a normal and legitimate way for people to move from one sphere of activity to another, like Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, Haig, and Powell in the United States, but are “proof” of the “militarization” of Israeli society or the “martial mentality” of its leaders. The careful screening of “facts” and outright fabrication of “data” that fit their negative image of Israel, sometimes generate contradictions that the Arab media choose to ignore. For example, while the Arabs keep repeating that neither Arab or Muslim tradition ever called for hatred of Jews as such, their verbal and graphic depictions are the most contemptible one could imagine; while they assert that the Jews in their midst had “always enjoyed equal rights,” their leaders are exhorted to improve the treatment of their erstwhile Jewish minorities to allow for their return to their native lands, which they had abandoned in favor of immigration to Israel. When Israel develops industry in the Arab sector under her rule, she is accused of scheming to alienate Arabs from their lands, but Israel is also accused of preventing industrial development in that sector in order to keep it backward. When Israel takes a firm stand against Palestinian terrorism, she is accused of oppression, but when she shows leniency and flexibility, the Arabs claim that this was a maneuver to gain world sympathy for its occupation of Palestinian land.

As long as matters are not settled to their tune, the Arabs and Muslims feel humiliated. This is the reason why every time they are close to the conclusion of a set of negotiations after Israel ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: The Nature of Lies: Hoaxes, Wishful Thinking, Envy, Denial, Self-Righteousness, and Conspiracy Theories
• 1 Lies Generated by Hatred: Political and Religious Sources
• 2 Truth-Bending Propensities of Politics and Political Ideologies
• 3 A Sample of Manufactured Libel against the Jews in the Arab and Muslim Media
• 4 The Distribution of Lies and Hatred: Mosques, Education, the Media, Internet, Poetry, and Folk Songs
• 5 Distribution of Libel, in Defense of Lies
• 6 The Palestinians as the Arab Prototype of Lie Manufacturing
• 7 Iran: The Extremist Shiite Example
• 8 Turkey: The Non-Arab Muslims Entering the Fray
• Conclusion: Are Hatred and Lie Propagation Reversible?: Summary Reflections
• Bibliography
• Analytical Index