Historical Religion Versus Religious History
Vacuousness has characterized most of the articles discussing whether Barack Obama practiced Islam as a child.
Here are the most important of the crop:
None mentioned the important distinction between abangan (apathetic) and santri (devoted) Islam in Indonesian Islam. Santri Muslims can take conservative, moderate, modern, liberal or radical positions with regard to Islamic theology or practice.
Disappointed in Obama
Obama's reaction to the discussion has been disappointing. He should have just responded to the question of childhood practice of Islam with something like "So what if I practiced Islam?"
Applying a religious test for office is simply un-American.
At one time Zionists might have worried that Obama was anti-Israel, but at this point Obama has sworn fealty so much and so often to the Jewish state that he has been conditioned reflexively to believe he loves Israel even if he had no such feelings before the start of the campaign.
The Jewish Bigots
Watson's article looks like an expression of genuine interest in the biography of a presidential candidate, but the two articles by Pipes expressed ignorance that can only be explained by lying or conscious misrepresentation.
Pipes writes:
Further, all children born with an Arabic name based on the H-S-N trilateral [sic] root (Hussein, Hassan, and others) can be assumed to be Muslim, so they will understand Obama's full name, Barack Hussein Obama, to proclaim him a born Muslim.
Despite the assertion, Arabic Christians and Jews just like Arabic Muslims commonly used names like Hussein, Hassan and other variants of the H-S-N trilitteral root.
Many Muslim groups and practically all Arabic speakers use their father's personal name as a middle name (ibn, son, and bint, daughter, are implicit).
Because Pipes is supposed to have studied Islamic thought and history at Harvard, he should know that quoting Islamic law codes often gives little indication of the actual historic practice.
In theory Christian and Jewish religious legal systems punish apostates with death just as Islam does, but the requirement has long been honored more in the breach than in the observance (but see
Honor Killing in Iraq?).
When Christian or Jewish apostates have been executed, they were usually perceived as traitors joining the enemy in a time of war or communal crisis.
In his article, Luttwak confuses Islam with the Jewish religion in which he grew up. He claims incorrectly:
As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother's Christian background is irrelevant.
Islam like Christianity but unlike Judaism is not inherited at birth but instead requires a declaration of faith.
By publishing Luttwak's nonsense, NY Times is indicating that it has reached the point of no longer doing any elementary fact checking in the case of an Islamophobic op-ed.
The world is changing, and yesterday's noble decision by the Times editors was in fact licensed by us, by Jimmy Carter, by Walt and Mearsheimer, by the stirring shifting spinning tectonic plates of the discourse...
Weiss may be overinterpreting exceptional individual editorial initiative made possible by a split in Zionist opinion both within Israel and also among import American Zionists.
Internal Zionist division may result from a need to regroup because of the antipathy that Jewish Neocons acting as a Jewish special interest have evoked throughout the American public.
Zionist Realists Replacing Jewish Neocons in Government
The appearance of a Luttwak column in the NY Times may presage an attempt by the Jewish political economic elite to replace Jewish Neocons in the American political power structure with Jewish Zionist faux-realist foreign policy scholars.
Descriptions of Luttwak are careful to point out:
- that he is an ex-friend of Norman Podhoretz,
- that he dislikes not only the corporatist military but also humanitarian interventions in general, and
- that he has little interest in Friedmanite neoliberal business or economic considerations.
Because Luttwak is of Eastern European Yiddish background without the more circumspect tendencies of a German Jew like Henry Kissinger, he has been quite open in his Zionist Jewish bigotry.
Refugee Nations
The most disinterested of all interventions in war—and the most destructive—are humanitarian relief activities. The largest and most protracted is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It was built on the model of its predecessor, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA), which operated displaced–persons' camps in Europe immediately after World War II. The UNRWA was established immediately after the 1948–49 Arab–Israeli war to feed, shelter, educate, and provide health services for Arab refugees who had fled Israeli zones in the former territory of Palestine.
By keeping refugees alive in spartan conditions that encouraged their rapid emigration or local resettlement, the UNRRA's camps in Europe had assuaged postwar resentments and helped disperse revanchist concentrations of national groups. But UNRWA camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip provided on the whole a higher standard of living than most Arab villagers had previously enjoyed, with a more varied diet, organized schooling, superior medical care, and no backbreaking labor in stony fields.
They had, therefore, the opposite effect, becoming desirable homes rather than eagerly abandoned transit camps. With the encouragement of several Arab countries, the UNRWA turned escaping civilians into lifelong refugees who gave birth to refugee children, who have in turn had refugee children of their own.
During its half–century of operation, the UNRWA has thus perpetuated a Palestinian refugee nation, preserving its resentments in as fresh a condition as they were in 1948 and keeping the first bloom of revanchist emotion intact. By its very existence, the UNRWA dissuades integration into local society and inhibits emigration. The concentration of Palestinians in the camps, moreover, has facilitated the voluntary or forced enlistment of refugee youths by armed organizations that fight both Israel and each other. The UNRWA has contributed to a half–century of Arab–Israeli violence and still retards the advent of peace.
If each European war had been attended by its own postwar UNRWA, today's Europe would be filled with giant camps for millions of descendants of uprooted Gallo-Romans, abandoned Vandals, defeated Burgundians, and misplaced Visigoths — not to speak of more recent refugee nations such as post-1945 Sudeten Germans (three million of whom were expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1945). Such a Europe would have remained a mosaic of warring tribes, undigested and un-reconciled in their separate feeding camps. It might have assuaged consciences to help each one at each remove, but it would have led to permanent instability and violence.
In Luttwak's world view only Jews are allowed to maintain resentments over long time periods, and the belief that Jews should be able to plunder and kill with immunity appears to act as a basic principle of his foreign policy "realism."
In
The middle of nowhere (
Prospect, May 2007), he works even harder for a synthesis of realism and Zionist prejudice. First Luttwak belittles the importance both of the conflict over Palestine and also of the consequences of attacking Iran. Then to make sure all bases are covered, he adds some traditional Orientalist Islamophobia:
Softliners make exactly the same mistake in reverse. They keep arguing that if only this or that concession were made, if only their policies were followed through to the end and respect shown, or simulated, hostility would cease and a warm Mediterranean amity would emerge. Yet even the most thinly qualified of middle east experts must know that Islam, as with any other civilisation, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. That fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence, and reveals the futility of the palliatives urged by the softliners.
The Defensive Reaction
Luttwak's anti-Muslim nonsense inspired Ali Eteraz to make a reply that gets the main point correct: "Luttwack's article is solid fear-mongering."
Eteraz continues:
Third, people that appear to be Muslims, but don't follow Islam and choose another religion, are permitted under Islamic law to leave Islam without penalty. A
major case in
Malaysia recently handed down -- a woman who was Muslim for some time in order to marry an Iranian was permitted to go back to Buddhism -- is an example. Obama, unlike the Malaysian woman, didn't even make a profession of faith to Islam, so it makes even less sense for him to be considered an apostate.
...
Those who actually study Muslims see that there are millions of inter-religious marriages -- between Muslim men and Hindu women for example -- in which the children are being raised as pantheists, or even, Hindu. When these children grow up, they aren't killed for being apostates (though some Muslims do thumb their noses at the father for "allowing" his children to be raised non-Muslim).
In Eastern Europe (Poland), the Balkans, and the Czarist Empire, where Muslims and Christians have long coexisted, the situation has been similar except during time periods when confessionally Christian governments have undertaken programs of ethnically cleansing Muslims as part of some sort of nationalist or expansionist agenda often quite similar to that which Jews from those lands have been carrying out in Palestine since the end of the nineteenth century.
Unfortunately Eteraz misses the real issue when he concludes, "I recommend that we begin calling the Islam smear what it really is: smearing immigrants."
The Lies of Israel Advocates
The real goal of Islamophobes like Pipes and Luttwak is even more sinister. They are desperate to disqualify Muslims as legitimate participants in American society by scare-mongering because they fear that Arab and Muslim Americans might successfully open a discussion whether the US should continue to maintain an alliance with a racist Jewish state in the ME to the detriment of fundamental US interests.
The Mission Statement of an Israeli Advocacy organization named the David Project makes the issue clear:
The David Project develops and strengthens Jewish leaders who will mobilize the community to effectively advocate for Israel and support the Jewish people; take back the campus by diminishing the impact of Israel's detractors, increasing the support of Israel on campus, and reclaiming the moral status of Zionism; strengthen the pro-Israel and pro-Jewish forces within the churches; and partner with Jewish schools across the country to incorporate Israel advocacy and leadership skills into their core curricula.
The historical record of African and Arab Islam shows the shamelessness of lies that Israel Advocates use in pursuit of their mission.
The Historical Truth
"Salme (later known as Emily Ruete; 1844-1924) was the daughter of the Sultan of Zanzibar. After his death she participated in an ill-fated conspiracy for control of the island, then fled to Germany and married Heinrich Rudolph Buete.*" She converted to Christianity on the way to Germany in the English Christian Church at Aden.
Nineteen years later Emily Ruete returned to Zanzibar with a German mission. She writes (on pp. 295-297 of the Ghani translation) in her memoirs:
When I arrived at Zanzibar I was doubtful of the reception I should meet with there, but confident, too, that my brother would not delay in carrying out the expressed wishes of Germany, and I was not mistaken. He would, at all events, out of respect for Germany, tolerate me. But the bad treatment that my other brothers and sisters had experienced at his hands could hardly lead me to expect any friendly advances on his part; and, as for the rest of the inhabitants, it gives me the greatest pleasure to state that they gave me tokens of their kindly feelings only. Arabs, Hindoos, Banyans, and natives repeatedly entreated me to remain in Zanzibar for good, which could only strengthen my belief that there was no religious aversion felt to me. One day I met two Arabs, with whom I entered into conversation. Hearing from a third person that they were relations of mine -- I had not recognized them -- I told them afterwards. I should not have addressed them had I been aware of this, as I knew my relations were not all inclined to be friends with me. But they both replied at once that, whatever happened, they could never forget that I was the daughter of my father. And when I touched upon the religious question, one of them said "this fate had been destined to me from the beginning of the world." "The God who has served you and us from our home is the same God whom all men adore and revere. His mighty will has brought you back to us, and we all rejoice at it. And now you and your children will stay with us henceforth, will you not?"
Proofs of affection and love like these, and the deep and indescribable joy of beholding my native land once more, will always associate that voyage with some of the sweetest hours of my life.
But an hour for parting came at last and found me oh! so loath to say a long farewell once more to the few but very dear friends I had still. They fully shared my grief, and perhaps I could convey its expression best to my readers, and thereby put a fitting close to my book, by giving the English rendering of a letter that they jointly sent to me after I had reached Germany again. But its sweet tenderness and originality I cannot reproduce: --
You went from us without a word at parting;
This has torn my heart, and filled my soul with sorrow.
O! that I had clung to your neck when you departed hence,
You might have sat on my head, and walked on my eyes!
You live in my heart, and when you went
You poured grief into my soul such as I ne'er felt before;
My body is wasted, and my tears fall fast
One after one down my cheek like the waves of the sea.
O Lord of the universe, let us meet again ere we die!
Be it only one single day before death.
If we live, we meet again;
When we are dead, the Immortal One remains!
O! that I were a bird to soar to thee on wings of love;
But how can the bird soar whose wings are clipped?
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