The Dialectic of American Islam

A conference on the dialectic of American Islam would probably be a good thing because there is an interesting situation forcing a rapid evolution of the American Muslim community:

• the orchestrated Islamophobia coming from extremist Jews and Zionists and
• the sheer diversity of the American Islamic community, which probably exceeds that of any previously existent Muslim state or empire.

The Khilafa Movement in India arose in response to the vivisection and dismantling of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of WW1, and the lack of a comparable intellectual center has troubled the Islamic world ever since.

American Islam may be destined to take a leadership role influencing Islam throughout the world as the Ottoman Empire did in the 18th and 19th century but perhaps even more strongly.

Maybe we will see a restoration of the Ottoman Caliphate in a spiritual sense when American Islam reaches maturity.

The subtheme of the conference could be the evolving American Caliphate or Imamate. It would drive the Islamophobes wild and might be best held in December or January before the inauguration of the next president.

A correspondent wrote in response to the suggestion:

I am not sure of this. The Ottoman empire was an extraordinary conglomeration of coincidences, combining superb geographic centrality as a meeting of three continents, a virtually unmatched Islamic empire, and the inheritance of a sophisticated Byzantine bureaucracy.

There is clearly need for some time of a reawakening/deepening/revival (whatever metaphor one wishes to use) of Islam, but it is not likely that this is going to be linked to an Islamic empire. In some ways, we will have to build our institutions without the benefit of a Muslim empire, and quite possibly we might have to do so as a persecuted minority population.

In reply, I offered:

I was not referring to the politics of the Ottoman Empire but to its spirituality and scholarship. I can't guarantee the statistic, but I have read that 60-70% of all Islamic texts were produced within the Ottoman Empire.

Haim Gerber of Hebrew University has argued that the Ottoman legal system by the late 19th century was comparable to those of Germany or of the UK in providing the basis for a Rechtstaat.

My correspondent possibly makes the point better than I if I modify his statement:

The Ottoman empire was an extraordinary conglomeration of coincidences, combining superb geographic centrality as a meeting of three continents, a virtually unmatched Islamic empire, and the inheritance of a sophisticated Byzantine bureaucracy.

Here is the modified version:

The American Empire is an extraordinary conglomeration of coincidences, combining superb geographic centrality (between the Occident and the Orient) as the meeting place of the peoples of six continents (including every Muslim ethnic group and religious sect), an unmatched empire, incomparable scholarship, and the inheritance of sophisticated European bureaucracy, which is itself the heir of the Romano-Byzantine bureaucracy.

In point of fact, as an Imperial system, the USA probably through homologous evolution is probably closer to Ottomanism than any of the 19th century European Empires. It is worth noting that toward its end the Ottoman Empire was depoliticizing the Caliphate as it introduced democracy.

What the British Empire untimely ended is being reborn in the USA even if the Caliphate or the Imamate is never reintroduced in a personal sense. I cannot think of any other plance that could serve as the primary world center of Islamic thought in the 21st and 22nd century. Of course, the development may never complete, and there is certainly a wealthy, influential segment of the American Jewish community that is trying to strangle American Islam in its crib so to speak as the movie Obsession shows.

I briefly discussed the possibility of a non-personal Caliphate in What is the Islamic Caliphate? (in the comments).

If you have any thoughts about the desirability of a conference on The Dialectic of American Islam, please let me know by commenting on this blog entry or by sending me email.

Thanks,

Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

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Islam in Europe: Bulgaria: Claims of new radical Islam

This article shows the combination of older Balkan anti-Islamism/anti-Ottomanism with more modern Zionism-based Islamophobia in its discussion of The Coming Balkan Caliphate: Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West by US journalist Christopher Deliso.

Zionist Islamophobes are working hard to recast the Islamic Caliphate as a substitute for the International Jewish Conspiracy of traditional anti-Semitic propaganda.

Unholy Terror: Bosnia, al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad by Marko Attila Hoare reviews John Schindler's book of the same name in addition to that of Christopher Deliso.

Deliso also provides his own elaboration of the Zionist Islamophobic mythology of the Bosnian Handzar SS regiment. Despite the demonization the unit's main achievement was desertion.

There was also a (semi-)forced recruit N. African Arab regiment in Yugoslavia. The Mufti of Jerusalem almost certainly hung out more with the N. Africans more than with the Bosnians if only because he could probably communicate with the N. Africans.

Here is the complete review.

Summer 2008

Unholy Terror: Bosnia, al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad

by John R. Schindler
Zenith Press, 2008, 368. pp.

Marko Attila Hoare

Also under review: Christopher Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West, Praeger Security International, 2007; Shaul Shay, Islamic Terror and the Balkans, Transaction Publishers, 2007.

The role of al-Qa'ida and the foreign mujahedin in the wars in the former Yugoslavia of the 1990s remains controversial, but the controversy is not over whether the phenomenon was a positive one or not. Reading some of the coverage of the subject, one might be forgiven for thinking that the wars fought in Bosnia and Kosova were merely individual fronts in something much bigger: the global struggle between the warriors and opponents of radical Islam. Yet as is so often the case, it is the smaller, local struggle that is more bitter and protracted than the global one, and that inspires the greater loyalty and commitment. The recently published books by John R. Schindler and Christopher Deliso, Unholy terror: Bosnia, al-Qa'ida, and the rise of global jihad and The coming Balkan caliphate: The threat of radical Islam to Europe and the West respectively, are really books about the Balkans more than about radical Islam; and it is the rights and wrongs of the Balkan conflicts, more than the threat posed by radical Islam, that motivate the authors. Schindler and Deliso share a hostility to Islam and to the politics of Western liberal interventionism which goes far beyond any mere concern with the alleged Islamist threat in the Balkans.

Deliso's thesis of a 'coming Balkan caliphate' embraces Bosnia, Albania, Kosova, Macedonia and Turkey. Deliso's animosity in particular is directed against the Albanians, and he faithfully upholds anti-Albanian stereotypes popular among the Balkan Christian peoples. He writes of 'the opportunism they [the Kosovo Albanians] have shown in siding at various times with the Turks, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Mussolini, Hitler, and, most recently, NATO' (p. 51), thereby repeating the myth popular among Serbian nationalists, of the Albanians as stooges of repeated foreign invaders, though the Kosova Albanians' record in this regard is absolutely no worse than that of other Balkan peoples. He attributes the emigration of Serbs from Kosova in the decades before 1999 to the fact that they were fleeing 'from a culturally and socially incompatible land dominated by clan-based Muslim Albanians' (p. 37). He complains of the high birthrate of the Balkan Muslims, writing 'it seems that Muslims, already outright majorities in some countries and political "kingmaker" minorities in others, are still expanding and will thus continue to enjoy all of the political, social, and economic benefits that this position entails.' And while Deliso recognises that the Balkan Muslim birthrate may eventually fall, he fears that 'these processes take considerable time and may take effect only after it is "too late" for the Christian populations to avoid returning to their Ottoman status – that is, second class citizens in their own countries.' (p. 113). Deliso also complains about mosques being too noisy, on account of the call to prayer from the minaret: 'Although it is not terribly politically correct, the term "sonic cleansing" is an apt one to describe the process by which aggressively visible and audible Islam gradually grinds away at non-Muslims, who gradually move out of what become, essentially, ghettoes by choice.' (p. 86)

Deliso makes many sweeping statements about the dangers allegedly posed by the Balkan Muslim peoples, which are then refuted by his own account. Hence, he writes that 'the most fundamentally surreal dimension of the West's Balkan misadventures must be that specific policies have directly benefited Islamic fundamentalism, as attested by the Western support for Muslim-dominated secessionist movements and paramilitaries with demonstrable ties to terrorists and mafia groups in Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, and Macedonia'. Indeed, it is self-determination and democracy that are themselves apparently to blame for the alleged Balkan Islamist threat: 'Ironically, the creation of liberal democracies in docile, pro-Western nation-states also enables the rival development of radical Islam within them.' (p. 143)

However, throughout his book, Deliso mentions that the fundamentalist version of Islam, as put forward by the Wahhabites, was rejected by ordinary Muslims in Bosnia, Kosova, Albania and Macedonia and by their political leaders, and was out of keeping with their native tradition (e.g. pp. 54-55, 58, 84-85). In one passage, he describes bearded Islamists in the Kosovar town of Pec attacking Albanians holding a candlelit vigil to mourn the American victims of 9/11 (p. 60). Deliso's account of the aggressive way in which the Wahhabite movement is attempting to penetrate the Balkans, and the lack of receptivity on the part of native Muslims to it, is not uninteresting or uninformative. This is an important subject, and it is a pity that it is drowned in a sea of unsubstantiated propaganda directed against the Balkan Muslims and against Western policy, propaganda which his account of Wahhabite activities actually undermines. For why should self-determination for Muslim peoples, or their high birth-rates, be a problem if they anyway popularly reject radical Islam?

Deliso manages to overcome such contradictions and construct his bogey of a 'coming Balkan caliphate' through multiple conflation. He conflates nationalism with religious chauvinism; moderate Balkan Muslim national leaders with the radicals operating in their midst; Sunni al-Qa'ida with Shiite Iran; al-Qa'ida with the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates; quiet Saudi Wahhabite proselytising with al-Qa'ida terrorism – all these diverse, conflicting elements are thrown together to make a single indeterminate green Islamic stew. Thus, we get passages such as this one, concerning the involvement of the Islamic world in the 'Bosnian jihad' of the 1990s:

According to a former Sudanese intelligence agent, Osama bin Laden's operations in Sudan during the early 1990s involved an "advisory council" made up of some 43 separate Islamic groups, contraband arms depots, and several terrorist camps. Since the Saudi government preferred to keep its hands clean, supplying mostly money and logistical supplies, Iran would play the key role in importing the fighters and military equipment through the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the national intelligence service, SAVAMA... Weapons shipments from Iran via Sudan, overseen by intelligence officials of both countries and utilizing al Qaeda-linked charities like the TWRA, also picked up in 1993 and 1994. (pp. 8-9)

Out of this stew, Deliso draws multiple non-sequiturs, such as this one:

...Alija Izetbegovic's single dream was the creation of an Islamic state in Europe. This vision was honored in December 2001, when he was awarded one million dirham ($272,480) prize for his services to Islam by the Crown Prince of Dubai. Only two months earlier, however, the terrorist attacks on America had revealed how complicit he and his government had been in allowing al Qaeda to expand in Europe, through the Bosnian jihad.' (p. 5).

Or this one:

...the Clinton administration was planning for a second war to save yet another allegedly endangered Balkan Muslim population, this time the Albanians of Kosovo, and thus could not openly admit that it had already made a huge mistake in Bosnia – despite a reality of increasingly spectacular Islamic terrorist attacks against American interests globally, like the June 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia and the East Africa embassy bombings of August 1998. (pp. 10-11).

As the reader will note, the various assertions of motive and causality in these two passages are neither substantiated with evidence nor support each other, while the assertion that al-Qa'ida attacks in Saudi Arabia, East Africa and New York were the result of the 'Bosnian jihad' is completely out of the blue.

Deliso conflates the mainstream Bosnian Army struggle against Serb and Croat forces with the activities of al-Qa'ida and the foreign mujahedin to create a single 'Bosnian jihad', ignoring the fact that existing works on the Bosnian Army and the mujahedin, by authors such as Evan Kohlmann, Esad Hecimovic and myself have comprehensively demolished the case for such a conflation. Yet Deliso admits that it was the police of Izetbegovic's supposedly 'Islamist' state that arrested a terrorist cell on 19 October 2005 that had allegedly been planning to blow up the British Embassy in Sarajevo (p. 14). He interviews a military intelligence analyst who tells him that, apart from the US embassy, 'nearly all diplomatic facilities in Sarajevo lack even the most rudimentary protection against attack... all the others remain vulnerable to truck bombs or determined individuals wearing suicide vests' (p. 23), making the failure of the Islamists to carry out a single successful terrorist attack against a Western target in the supposed Bosnian centre of world jihad all the more remarkable. Even Deliso's questionable 'expert' witnesses admit that Islamist terrorist training camps 'mostly don't exist' in Bosnia (p. 161). The facts simply do not fit Deliso's thesis. In scraping the bottom of the barrel to find some that do, he complains that 'Bosnian President Sulejman Tihic assured a gathering of dignitaries in Qatar that his country considered the American occupation of Iraq illegal', something that Deliso attributed to the 'Islamic factor' in Bosnian politics (p. 22). But an 'Islamic factor' was scarcely a prerequisite to considering the Iraq invasion to be illegal.

Deliso draws upon some highly dubious sources in support of his thesis about the importance of Bosnia in the development of the global jihad. One such is 'terrorism expert' Darko Trifunovic of Belgrade University, whom Deliso quotes about ten times in support of his argument. The 'terrorism expert' Trifunovic makes statements such as 'what the West seems to have forgotten is that long before the [2001] terrorist attacks against America, the Bosnian Serbs were fighting against jihad, a literal jihad ordered and funded by Osama bin Laden, in their own country. Former mujahedin have told me that bin Laden personally ordered them to fight Christians in the Balkans – and later, to expand in Europe, especially Italy and Spain. The West is now paying the price for supporting the mujahedin against the Serbs.' (p. 143) A comment of this kind might raise suspicions as to its author's objectivity in even the most naive observer – even one who did not already know that Trifunovic had been expelled from participation in the 11^th European Police Congress after the organisers learned that he was a Srebrenica denier who reduced the figure for the Srebrenica massacre to less than one hundred, and who, in an email correspondence with two Bosnian Muslims posing as a Serb, said of the Srebrenica Muslims that 'I wish Mladic had killed them all'.

Another of Deliso's sources is a certain Nebojsa Malic, whom Deliso describes as a 'native Bosnian political analyst'. Deliso quotes Malic as saying: 'Izetbegovic's vision of Bosnia was not a multi-ethnic democracy, but a multi-caste hierarchy of the kind that existed under the Ottoman Empire, the memories of which were still fresh at his birth in 1925.' (p. 25) Deliso does not mention that this particular 'native Bosnian political analyst' was a signatory of the petition of the 'International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic' which describes Milosevic as a 'Serbian patriot' whose 'crime was to set an example to the world by resisting NATO aggression'. Malic supported the neo-Nazi Tomislav Nikolic in this year's Serbian presidential election; after Nikolic's defeat, he complained that the Serbs had just proven that they 'don't have the guts' to fight over Kosova.

While quoting the most raving Serb bigots as though they were objective experts, Deliso has consulted few genuine scholarly works on the Balkans, and his references to Balkan history contain some real howlers. Thus, he writes: 'Both Croatia and Muslim Bosnia had served as fascist puppet states for the Nazis, during the Second World War' (p. 7) – there was, of course, no Bosnian fascist puppet state during World War II. Deliso describes Yugoslavia as a country that had 'sided with the United States in two world wars' (p. 41) – unlikely, given that Yugoslavia did not exist until after World War I, whereas in World War II, Yugoslavia signed an alliance with Nazi Germany but was then invaded and occupied by it – all while the US was still neutral.

Deliso's account of recent events in the Balkans is no more accurate. He describes Izetbegovic's close ally Hasan Cengic as 'a veteran of the World War II SS Handzar Division who reincarnated the unit while serving as Bosnia's deputy defense minister in the early 1990s.' (p. 8) It is unlikely that Cengic was a veteran of the SS Handzar Division or of World War II – given that he was born in 1957. Nor does Deliso provide any evidence at all to support his assertion that Cengic 'reincarnated' the SS Handzar Division in the 1990s. As I have written elsewhere, claims that a 'Handzar Division', named after the SS unit from World War II, was 'reincarnated' by Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s appear to rest on a single piece of 'evidence': an article by British journalist Robert Fox, published in Britain's Daily Telegraph on 29 December 1993. Fox's article is based solely on second-hand information and contains factual inaccuracies. Fox himself did not actually meet anyone who belonged to the alleged 'Handzar Division', but merely reported its existence on the basis of what unnamed UN officials on the ground told him. But even this weak source, which Deliso cites, does not implicate Cengic in the Handzar Division's alleged 'reincarnation'.

Deliso's book is not merely a piece of bad scholarship – although it is undoubtedly that. He engages in the sort of atrocity denial and conspiracy theorising that characterises supporters of the former regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Thus, in writing of the Serbian massacre of Albanian civilians at the village of Racak in January 1999, Deliso writes: 'An alleged Serbian "massacre" at the Kosovo village of Racak, later proved by a UN forensics team to have been a place of legitimate battle, provided the necessary justification for Clinton to start the bombing.' (p. 43) The nonsense statement 'proved by a UN forensics team to have been a place of legitimate battle' is a case of Deliso fluffing his denialist lines.

Schindler's subject matter is narrower than Deliso's, being confined essentially to Bosnia. It is less a study of the role of al-Qa'ida and the mujahedin in Bosnia and more a diatribe against the Bosnian Muslims and the Bosnian cause. Despite the author's claim to having had a youthful flirtation with Islam (p. 13), he is clearly hostile to the religion and views the Bosnian war on this basis: 'Bosnia's Muslims were really Muslims, and some of them adhered to a faith that was deeply hostile to Western concepts of freedom, democracy, and human rights.' (p. 19) Furthermore, 'Muhammad himself endorsed, and practiced, the violent spreading of the faith and considered it the obligation of every Muslim'; consequently, 'As devout traditionalist Muslims, Izetbegovic and the SDA [Party of Democratic Action] leadership adhered to the ideology of jihad that stands at the center of their faith.' Schindler considers the term 'fundamentalist' meaningless when applied to Islam, because '[a]ll truly believing Muslims are, from a Western viewpoint, "fundamentalists"' (pp. 116-117). This hostility to Muslims and Islam appears to be the guiding motive behind Schindler's book.

In this book, al-Qa'ida and the mujahedin play only supporting roles. After the introduction, the first third of the book makes no mention of them; it instead constitutes a polemic against the former regime of Bosnia's Alija Izetbegovic and against the supporters of Bosnia in the West. Indeed, Schindler follows the well trodden revisionist road that was long ago laid down by supporters of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic and of the Great Serbian cause – of which the British magazine Living Marxism was perhaps the most notorious – of a Western media conspiracy to demonise the Serb side in the war and fabricate Western atrocities. Schindler puts the term 'concentration camps' in quote marks when referring to the Serb camps of Omarska, Manjaca and Trnopolje, claiming that all media reports of such camps were 'poorly sourced and based on second- and third-hand information, much of which was flat wrong' (pp. 83-84); and he accuses the Bosnians of staging massacres of their own civilians in order to incriminate the Serbs (pp. 92, 186).

Schindler revises the death-toll of the Srebrenica massacre downward to 'as many as two thousand Muslim men, mostly soldiers' (p. 231) – although, in one of several internal contradictions in this book, he earlier put the figure at about seven thousand (p. 227). He argues that '[w]hile this was unquestionably a war crime, it is difficult to term it genocide' (p. 231) – though it was not so difficult for the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, both of which formally described the Srebrenica massacre as 'genocide'. Instead, Schindler portrays the Srebrenica massacre as Serb revenge for earlier Muslim attacks on Serb civilians, and employs a gross racial stereotype in the process: 'To Mladic's troops, who like all Bosnians believed in blood feuds and payback, this was simple revenge.' (p. 231).

Schindler describes the siege of Sarajevo as a 'siege manqué' (p. 189) and as a 'faux-siege', where 'conditions were much more normal than the Western media was willing to portray' (p. 203), despite the Serb besiegers' killing of thousands of people in Sarajevo during the war. Perhaps most tellingly of all, he claims (erroneously): 'Ethnic cleansing, though unpleasant, was no more than the counterinsurgency doctrine learned by three generations of JNA [Yugoslav People's Army] officers, who were trained in hunting down "fifth columnists" and "terrorists" by expelling sympathisers as well as fighters.' (p. 82) He then endorses a CIA report, according to which: 'The Bosnian Serb Army undertook these ethnic cleansing operations because it believed the Muslim population posed an armed threat or could act as a "Fifth Column" during the war with the Bosnian Government.' (p. 82).

If the above citations suggest whose side Schindler is on, they do not properly convey the sheer extent of the deception in which he engages. He writes: 'Milosevic wanted Bosnia and Hercegovina to remain in Yugoslavia, but failing that he would settle for a partition that would leave the ethnically Serbian parts under Belgrade' (p. 63). Anyone who has looked at a map of the areas of Bosnia occupied by Serb forces in the early weeks of the Bosnian war, while they were still under the control of Belgrade and Milosevic, knows that this is untrue; they occupied huge areas in eastern and northern Bosnia in which the Muslims and/or Croats were in the majority. Schindler writes that 'the [Yugoslav] army in the months leading to war in most cases tried to place itself between Serbs and Muslims and defuse tensions' (p. 66), suggesting he has not read, or has simply ignored, the books by authors such as Norman Cigar, James Gow, Smail Cekic, myself and others that detail the unity of purpose between the JNA and the Bosnian Serb nationalists in the preparations for war.

Schindler writes that 'Belgrade sought to arm the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, fearing that Yugoslavia was headed for dissolution' (p. 68) – ignoring the fact that Belgrade was itself engineering Yugoslavia's dissolution, as revealed in sources such as the published diary of Milosevic's close collaborator Borisav Jovic, former president of Yugoslavia and of the Socialist Party of Serbia. Schindler then writes: 'The JNA General Staff was not brought into the plan' of arming the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia (p. 68) – again, he has either not read, or has ignored, the memoirs of Veljko Kadijevic, the most senior figure in the JNA during the war in Croatia, who describes in detail the JNA's role in arming Serb forces in Croatia and Bosnia. Schindler continues, 'Belgrade saw this concept [of arming the Serbs] as defensive, a plan to protect Serbs outside Serbia – and, in extremis, to prevent another genocide against Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia' (p. 68) – leading one to ask why Belgrade showed so little interest in protecting the substantial Serb populations of cities such as Zagreb and Split, while devoting so much energy to conquering territories such as eastern Slavonia, where Serbs were a small minority.

Schindler portrays the 'Muslim' (i.e. Bosnian) side as being the one that was initiating preparations for war, while the JNA was merely responding (p. 72). In order to make a case for this blatant falsehood and the arguments that flow from it, Schindler simply avoids mentioning almost all the acts of aggression carried out by the JNA in the first weeks of the war: the conquest of Zvornik, Foca, Visegrad, Kupres, Doboj, Derventa, Brcko and other towns; and the shelling of Mostar and Sarajevo. He consequently portrays the Bosnian military's action as coming out of the blue, enabling him to portray it as the aggressor – not very convincing to anyone who knows the history of the war, but enough to deceive an uninformed reader. Having failed to mention all these coordinated Serbian acts of conquest, he then describes 'two unprovoked Muslim attacks on the JNA that fatally poisoned relations between the army and the SDA': the Bosnian attack on the JNA in Sarajevo on 3 May and in Tuzla on 15 May. Well, yes, the attacks were 'unprovoked' if you do not consider a military assault on your country, the conquest of many of your towns and massive atrocities against your civilian population to count as a 'provocation'. Schindler claims the attack on the JNA in Sarajevo 'caused lasting bitterness among the Serbs', and describes the attack on the JNA in Tuzla as a 'killing spree' and a 'massacre' (pp. 80-81). Yet the JNA was a military target, and attacking a military target was, presumably, a reasonable thing to do in war. By contrast, Schindler does not mention the Serb and JNA massacres of Muslim civilians that had been taking place all over Bosnia, or whether they might have 'caused lasting bitterness' among the Muslims. Similarly, Schindler mentions attacks on Serb civilians carried out by Naser Oric, the Bosnian Army commander in Srebrenica, between May and December 1992, claiming that it was '[s]mall wonder that the Bosnian Serbs thirsted for revenge against the Muslims of Srebrenica' (p. 228). But he does not mention the Serb attacks on Muslim civilians all across East Bosnia that preceded Oric's actions.

While whitewashing the role of the Milosevic regime and Yugoslav army in engineering the war, Schindler suppresses or misrepresents evidence in order to make his case: that Izetbegovic and his fellow SDA politicians were radical Islamists. He therefore makes claims against the Bosnian leadership that anyone with a cursory knowledge of the subject knows to be untrue. This involves attempting to portray Izetbegovic and his SDA as being unwilling to share power with the Bosnian Serbs. He claims that following the fall of the Communist regime in Bosnia in 1990 and the emergence of free political parties, the Serb nationalist leader Radovan Karadzic offered Izetbegovic and his party a coalition, but that the 'Muslims expressed no interest' (p. 63). In fact, Izetbegovic and the SDA did indeed form a coalition with the Karadzic's Serb nationalists, and with the Croat nationalists, that resulted in posts in the Bosnian government, presidency and administration being equally divided between the three groups of nationalists, with key posts going to the Serbs – including the command of the Bosnian Territorial Defence. Schindler then misrepresents the plan negotiated between Karadzic and the dissident Muslim politician Adil Zulfikarpasic in August 1991 as a 'power-sharing plan' (p. 71), omitting to mention that Serbs and Muslims already shared power in Bosnia, and that the plan was in fact aimed at keeping Bosnia within Milosevic's Serbian-dominated rump Yugoslavia. Schindler, indeed, argues that Izetbegovic and his party wished to deny the Bosnian Serbs full citizenship – but produces no evidence to back up his claim, other than an unsupported assertion by the Belgrade historian Aleksa Djilas (p. 64).

Schindler relies on extremely dubious source material to make his case against Izetbegovic and the SDA. One eyewitness whom Schindler quotes approvingly several times is Fikret Abdic (pp. 198, 203, 217). Abdic is certainly very liberal in his denunciation of Izetbegovic, but Schindler fails to mention that Abdic is a convicted war-criminal who staged an armed rebellion against his own democratically elected government, and fought against it on the side of Serb forces invading from outside Bosnia, from Serb-occupied Croatia. Another eyewitness in support of Schindler's case against Izetbegovic is Aleksandar Vasiljevic, head of Yugoslav military intelligence (p. 72-73) – Schindler takes everything he says about Izetbegovic at face value. A third is the former US State Department official George Kenney (p. 86), who resigned in protest at US inaction over Bosnia, but then changed sides, becoming one of the most vocal enemies of the Izetbegovic regime. Schindler does not mention the extent of Kenney's conversion, or the fact that Kenney wrote to Milosevic, while the latter was in prison in The Hague, to assure him that he considered him innocent of all charges against him, and that he considered his trial to be a 'show trial'.

So dubious, indeed, is Schindler's source material, that it is difficult to believe that he is using it innocently, or that he is attempting to convince anybody but the most naive of the merits of his case. He claims that Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic declared an 'Islamic holy war' on Bosnian TV in July 1995 (p. 200) – his source for this is the Belgrade news agency SRNA. He claims that the Bosnian Army murdered the Bosnian Croat commander Vlado Santic (p. 214) – his source for this is the Bosnian Croat newspaper Dnevni list, which is linked the nationalist Croat Democratic Union. He tells of mujahedin snuff videos, in which Bosnian Army commander Sakib Mahmuljin allegedly boasts of having sent a gift of twenty-eight severed Christian heads to Izetbegovic and twenty-eight more to Iran, and of Serb prisoners being made by the mujahedin to kiss the severed heads of other Serbs that were nailed to trees (pp. 166-167) – but Schindler has not actually seen any of these videos; his only source is one Croatian and one Serbian newspaper article. Schindler even endorses the view of the intelligence services of Franjo Tudjman's Croatia concerning the alleged Islamic threat, arguing that 'the unheeded warnings from the Croatian intelligence services about the unwisdom of entering an alliance with radical Islam and the likes of al-Qa'ida had been prescient.' (p. 215).

Schindler describes Osama bin Laden as having been one of Izetbegovic's 'friends' (p. 239), though he has no evidence for this. He cites several sources in support of his claim that bin Laden was in Bosnia during the war; the one he describes as 'most credible' being the German journalist Renate Flottau, who claims to have met bin Laden in the foyer of Izetbegovic's office in the early 1990s (p. 123). Izetbegovic's staff told Flottau that bin Laden was 'here every day and we don't know how to make him go away' (p. 124). As I mentioned in my own book on the Bosnian Army, Izetbegovic himself never ruled out the possibility that he may have met bin Laden, but stated that he had no recollection of having done so; he pointed out that he met thousands of foreign Muslim visitors during the war. Izetbegovic was, of course, visited by many people during the war who were certainly not his 'friends', and many who were not Muslims, but Schindler jumps from providing evidence that bin Laden may have visited Izetbegovic to claiming that bin Laden was Izetbegovic's 'friend'. Other evidence that he produces on this score is similar in character: e.g. the claim of one of Izetbegovic's domestic opponents, the Social Democrat Sejfudin Tokic, who 'attested that photos exist of Izetbegovic and bin Laden together' (p. 125) – photos which, needless to say, Schindler has not seen. Most of Schindler's case against Izetbegovic and the SDA is based upon this sort of unsubstantiated rumour. Like Deliso, Schindler claims that Bosnian Muslim radicals during the war established a military unit named the 'Handzar Division', named after the Nazi SS division of the same name that had existed during World War II. And like Deliso, he bases this claim on the solitary, tendentious newspaper article by Robert Fox.

One of the more amusing of Schindler's blunders concerns the scientific calculation of the figure for Bosnian war-dead carried out by Mirsad Tokaca's Research and Documentation Centre in Sarajevo, which placed it at about one hundred thousand. Schindler seems to endorse this figure wholeheartedly, seeing it as proof that earlier estimates of Bosnian war-dead had been 'grossly exaggerated', and complaining that Tokaca's result 'got minimal attention in Bosnia or abroad' (p. 317). The reason this is amusing is that Tokaca's figures disprove several of the figures for Serb dead at the hands of Bosnian forces that Schindler himself cites. Thus, Schindler claims that 'more than 3,000 Bosnian Serbs, some soldiers but at least 1,300 unarmed civilians, had been killed by Muslim forces based in Srebrenica' (p. 228). Yet according to Tokaca's calculation, only 849 Serb civilians were killed in the whole of Podrinje – the region that includes Srebrenica, and where Oric's alleged crimes occurred – in the whole of the war. Likewise, with regard to the Serb victims of the Sarajevo Muslim warlord Musan Topalovic-Caco, Schindler claims: 'By the war's end, it was clear that at least two thousand Sarajevo Serbs had fallen victim to Caco's gang, though the civic association representing the city's Serbs claimed the true figure was closer to five thousand' (p. 105). Yet according to Tokaca's figures, only 1,091 Serb civilians were killed in the whole of the Sarajevo region during the war, and this includes those killed by the Serb siege. Schindler claims that 'at least 1,500 Croatian civilians were killed in the fighting' between Muslims and Croats (p. 99), yet according to Tokaca's figures, in the two regions of Bosnia encompassed by the Muslim-Croat conflict, Central Bosnia and Neretva, only 786 Croat civilians were killed during the entire war, including those killed by Serb forces. So when Schindler writes that Tokaca's figures 'got minimal attention in Bosnia or abroad', he is probably referring to himself.

Schindler claims that the SDA had 'helped establish the beginnings of an Islamist statelet in Europe' (p. 253), but scrapes the bottom of the barrel to find evidence for this. He admits that 'Izetbegovic and the party leadership, for all their waxing Koranic to improve public morality, were careful to never speak openly about their plan for implementing a fully Islamic society.' (p. 196) But if Schindler is unable to find evidence for Izetbegovic's alleged Islamist plans in what he said, neither is he able to find it in what he and his party did. He mentions an SDA election poster of 2000, entitled 'Beautiful like Sarajevo girls', showing three female faces – 'two in Western makeup, one in hijab', and notes: 'This was the SDA's new Bosnia, forged in a terrible war, and it had many wondering which worldview – Western and secular or Islamist and radical – the party really stood for.' (p. 274). Yet an election poster that shows two Western-style women coexisting with a woman in hijab cannot by any stretch of the imagination be taken as evidence of a radical Islamic world-view.

Likewise, concerning the unproven allegation that Izetbegovic collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, Schindler writes: 'Even out of office, the SDA founder continued to deny allegations that he had been a Nazi collaborator as a young man and had served in the Bosnian Muslim 13^th Handzar Division of the Waffen-SS. Though no evidence emerged to tie him directly to the Nazis, it was nevertheless significant, observed a Sarajevo pundit, that Izetbegovic continued to feel the need to publicly deny rumors that had existed for many years.' (p. 276) – an argument so feeble that it defies comment. Schindler admits that Bosnia engaged in a 'modest participation in the American-led war on Islamist terrorism' but complains that this provoked 'open resentment among Bosnian Muslims', and that 'local newspapers regularly carried attacks on America and its leader "the state terrorist Bush."' (p. 293). Damning evidence indeed – most of Christian Europe was probably 'Islamist' by this standard.

Most instances of supposed 'Islamist terrorism' in the post-Dayton period that Schindler cites in his book turn out simply to be cases of former mujahedin attacking Croat or Serb civilians, above all refugees trying to return to their former homes (pp. 263-264), much as Serbs and Croats likewise attacked returning refugees from other communities – though Schindler does not mention the latter. Schindler explains away the absence of genuine Islamist terrorism in Bosnia by claiming that 'most mujahidin were wary of targeting US or Western interests in Bosnia – anywhere else was fair game – because they appreciated that NATO gave them a de facto safe haven after Dayton.' (p. 266). So Bosnia was free of Islamist terrorism because the type of Islamist terrorists based there did not like to attack Western targets. It therefore perhaps did not matter so much that, according to Schindler, 'the Muslim police underperformed when it came to tracking down wanted holy warriors.' (p. 262). Yet Schindler, like Deliso, mentions the Bosnian police arresting on 19 October 2005 an armed terrorist cell that was planning to attack the British Embassy (p. 318) – somehow the police of the 'Islamist statelet' had managed to overcome their reluctance to act against Islamists and staved off an attack against a Western target.

There are so many factual errors and internal contradictions in Schindler's book that it is impossible to list them all, so what follows are just some examples. Schindler claims that 'reliable analysis concludes that between five thousand and six thousand Islamic fighters came to Bosnia during the war' (p. 162) – having previously written that 'there were probably four thousand foreign Islamists who fought for Sarajevo during the civil war' (p. 119). He claims that the Bosnian Serbs 'made up most of the agricultural population in Bosnia, and therefore controlled a disproportionate share of the land to be cleared of non-Serbs', which is simply rubbish – more agricultural land in Bosnia was owned by Muslims than by Serbs before 1992. Schindler claims that 'Ustasha' means 'uprising' (p. 33), when in fact it means 'insurgent'. He claims that Dzafer Kulenovic was made vice-president of the 'Independent State of Croatia' in November 1941 (p. 33); in fact, he was made deputy prime-minister. Schindler claims that during World War II 'the Serbs of Bosnia and Croatia were also the only Yugoslav nation exposed to actual genocide' (p. 60) – he is either unaware, or chooses to ignore, the work by two leading Yugoslav historians of the World War II genocide, the Serb Vladimir Dedijer and the Croat Antun Miletic, entitled Genocide of the Muslims,1941-1945: Collected documents and testimony (Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1990), which provides evidence of the wartime Serb Chetnik genocide of the Muslims.

Schindler claims that 'alone among Bosnia's peoples they [the Muslims] had made no real contribution to Allied victory, and their collaboration with the Nazis had been unsurpassed' – another fabrication, since nearly a quarter of all Bosnian Partisans had been Muslims; their readiness to join the Partisans compared favourably with that of the Bosnian Croats; their contribution to the anti-Nazi struggle was, for a nationality of their size, a significant one; and their readiness to speak out against Nazi crimes in 1941, and protect the victims of genocide, was virtually unparalleled in Nazi-occupied Europe. Schindler claims that the senior Bosnian Muslim Communist Osman Karabegovic was expelled from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in 1972 for Muslim 'exclusivism' and 'nationalism' (p. 43); this is the opposite of the truth – Karabegovic was expelled because he was too much of a Yugoslav centralist; he would later become one of the most prominent Bosnian Muslims to support Milosevic. The text 'Virtuous Muslim State', published in Tuzla in 1993, was not the 'SDA's manifesto', as Schindler claims (p. 95), but merely a proposal put forward by a senior SDA member from Tuzla. Schindler writes of the Bosnian Serb JNA officer Jovan Divjak, that he 'sided with Izetbegovic and the SDA when war broke out. It was a decision he would regret.' (p. 102). This is again untrue: Divjak never supported the SDA; he supported his country – Bosnia – in the war, and would never regret having done so. Nor is it true that the anti-nationalist Bosnian Serb journalist Gojko Beric had been 'an ardent supporter of the SDA' during the war (p. 310).

When all the rumours, unsubstantiated allegations and outright falsehoods are taken away, Schindler's case against Izetbegovic and the SDA evaporates. We are left with a picture of a secular Bosnia-Hercegovina under an SDA regime that was undoubtedly highly corrupt and frequently brutal to its political opponents, but that supported the US-led 'War on Terror', arrested Islamist terrorist suspects and was essentially free of genuine Islamist terrorist outrages on its soil – certainly more free than the US, Britain, Spain or Turkey. The most that can be said for Schindler's portrayal of Bosnia as a centre of global jihad is that, yes, some of the foreign mujahedin who fought in Bosnia would subsequently go on to engage in acts of terrorism and jihad elsewhere, some with the dubious benefit derived from possession of Bosnian passports – scarcely a free pass throughout the Western world, as anyone in the West who has Bosnian friends knows. In other words, none of the evidence presented here suggests that the global Islamist jihad would look significantly different today had the Bosnian war never taken place.

One other malevolent error of which both Deliso and Schindler are guilty is their portrayal of the Clinton Administration as being hawkishly pro-Muslim and anti-Serb. You would not know, from reading either of these books, that Clinton had enforced the arms embargo against Bosnia for the best part of the war; that he had come under massive fire from Congress for his unwillingness either to break the arms embargo or to carry out air-strikes against Serb forces; that he had forced the Bosnian Army to halt its victorious advance against Serb forces in the autumn of 1995, leaving half of Bosnia in Serb-rebel hands; that the Clinton-imposed Dayton Accords engineered the recognition of the 'Republika Srpska' incorporating nearly half of Bosnia, with a much smaller share of territory going to the Muslims; and that after Dayton, the Clinton Administration avoided arresting the Serb war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Authors incapable of properly analysing Islamism are equally incapable of analysing US foreign policy.

After reading two such inaccurate, unscholarly, poorly researched and politically motivated works of propaganda, it actually comes as a relief to read a book that is merely very bad. Shaul Shay, unlike Deliso and Schindler, has no Balkan agenda or axe to grind; he is a former Israeli intelligence officer, and he genuinely comes at the Balkans from the perspective of someone primarily interested in radical Islam and the Islamic countries, rather than vice versa. His book contains some rather endearingly naive sentences, such as 'Yugoslavia is [sic] a mountainous country in the northern Balkans' (p. 19) and 'Bosnia-Herzegovina is a mountainous country in the Balkan [sic] that is divided into two historical geographic regions – the Bosnia region in the north and the Herzegovina region in the south' (p. 39); he elsewhere describes Bosnia as having 'a Muslim majority and a Serb minority' (p. 24).

Shay's run-of-the-mill-first-year-undergraduate-quality potted history of the Balkans repeats some of the historical and other factual errors made by Deliso and Schindler, in particular at the expense of the Bosnian Muslims, and there are numerous misspellings of names (Alija becomes 'Ilia', Cengic become 'Kengic', Vojvodina becomes 'Wivodena'), and so on. Having gone into the errors of Deliso and Schindler in detail, I'm not going to bore the reader further by listing Shay's; his are by far the most innocent of the three. In fact, he appears to be the sort of person that books of the Deliso-Schindler variety might be written to target. If one simply ignores everything Shay's book has to say about Balkan politics, then one can glean a few nuggets of information from it concerning the politics of radical Islam globally and of the Muslim states of the Middle East. But this is not enough to recommend this book when there are much better treatments of these topics available.

Radical Islam is a genuine problem facing Europe, and although it is actually less of a danger in the Balkans outside of Turkey than it is in Western Europe, this does not mean it is not a problem facing the Balkans as well. We need objective, scholarly analyses of the activities of Wahhabites and other radical Muslims in the Balkans if we are to understand and confront the problem. Unfortunately, this will not happen so long as writers simply use the issue to make propaganda to fight Balkan wars that, ultimately, have little to do with radical Islam.

Marko Attila Hoare is an Advisory Editor of Democratiya. Formerly a Research Fellow in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, he is now a Senior Research Fellow at Kingston University, London. His latest book is The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (Saqi). He is the author of How Bosnia Armed, a short history of the Bosnian Army, also published by Saqi Books in 2004. His second book, Genocide and Resistance in Hitler's Bosnia: The Partisans and the Chetniks, 1941-1943, was published by the British Academy in association with Oxford University Press in 2006.

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Third Jihad No Longer Hosted!

Please Thank SnagFilms

[I sent the following commendation through Snag Films's feedback and suggestions form.]

Dear Sirs:

I am an expert in Jewish Studies. I run the website and organization entitled Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel. We educate Jews and non-Jews in order to provide them with intellectual tools to stand up to Zionist intimidation and manipulation.

The information contained in The Third Jihad is more or less distorted from start to finish.

The tragedy at Bezlan did not result from Islamic fundamentalism or Islamism but had roots in the devastation of Chechnya by the Russian army during the most recent Chechen attempt to achieve independence and the almost two centuries of struggle of Chechens against Russian domination of their homeland.

In addition to such misrepresentations, The Third Jihad uses a lot of the techniques of the German Nazi quasi-documentary propaganda film entitled Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew).

As propaganda both films are intended to end or to prevent genuine discussion.

Just as the German Nazi film was meant to distract from German Nazi ideology and the evil it represented, The Third Jihad is meant to create an obstacle to any real political debate in the USA about Zionism, Israeli policies, and the alliance between the USA and the State of Israel.

In a standard tactic of anti-Judaism, a "good Jewish informant" discloses "the real dirt" about Judaism to gentiles. The script of The Third Jihad brings this technique to Islamophobia with the substitution of Islam for Judaism and Muslim for Jew.

In this particular instance Syrian American Muslim Zuhdi Jasser serves as the primary "good Muslim informant."

I doubt that SnagFilms really wants to get enmeshed in the effort of extremist Jews to incite Islamophobia according to the model of traditional anti-Semitism.

I discuss The Third Jihad at Clarion Fund Snags Coup. For more info about The Clarion Fund, see list of Obsession-related blog entries at the end of Chabad (Lubavitch), Putin, Russian Oligarchs.

Thanks for showing good judgment,

Joachim Martillo
President
Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel Sphere: Related Content

Making the US Islamophobia Central

 

Far too many Jewish and Israeli advocacy groups are working hard to convince Arabs and Muslims that the USA is Islamophobia central right when America desperately needs Arab and Muslim investments to provide some relief for the economic damage caused by policies crafted by Zionist Neocons acting as a Jewish special interest.

 

Here is a recent example of Jewish bigots trying to drive out developers and investors for issues of race and religion.

• Jewish lobby threatens Candy brothers' US deal
• People: Candy brothers told to come clean on sheikh
• Strange Candy

Because the third item accuses the Arabic newspaper al-Watan of anti-Semitic cartoons because it is anti-Israel (as all decent people should be), I have included below some fairly typical anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-Iranian and anti-Palestinian cartoons appearing in US newspapers so that the reader may contrast them with the ADL selection in Strange Candy.

 

I included the Ramirez "Hate" cartoon not because it was bigoted but because Ramirez is fairly infamous for right-wing Zionist prejudice. Yet in this cartoon, he considered it reasonable to identify the stereotypical Jew (or Jewish Israeli) via traditional Eastern European Hassidic garb. Big or hooked noses are also used as stereotypical of Arabs and Muslims as much as of Jews as the cartoons below show.

 

Last time I looked, the US Constitution did not require Americans to support Zionism, and I am becoming sick and tired of pro-Israel thought control coming from Israel advocates and the organized Jewish community.

 

From Seattle Washington Post Intelligencer

 

 

Iranians as cockroaches spreading out from a sewer

 

 

Ramirez in the LA Times ("Worshiping their God -- Hate")

 

 

Chuck Asay 8-26-06

 

Ramirez, 2-12-07 (Newspaper reads Congress undercuts war effort.)

Paul Nowak, 4-1-07

 

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Zohan Offends for One State

Sandler Succeeds Where Spielberg Failed

Followup: Renouncing Brutality by Renouncing Israel?

by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com) and Karin Friedemann

 

Political Meaning of You Don't Mess with the Zohan

 

Adam Sandler and his co-writers constructed a screenplay from You Don't Mess with the Zohan from elements consisting of

• the exhausted Israeli assassin theme,
• the Israeli-Jewish Palestinian Romeo and Juliet plot, and
• comedic or action-adventure routines from various Israeli, American, Jewish, and British films. 

Not only is the movie above average for an American comedy -- laughs, and lots of them for Americans -- not just a chuckle, but it is also exceptionally political, for the screenwriters injected many liberal Zionist ideas into the script possibly as part of a strategy to get it past Zionist Jewish gatekeepers in the American film industry.

 

With the exception of an allegorical reading of the remake of Planet of the Apes, Zohan is possibly the best Hollywood movie out there on the Palestine-Israel conflict and even implicitly advocates a one-state American-style equal rights democracy albeit under the aegis of a secular leftist ideology of "working class unity" against bigoted redneck Second Amendment fanatics, who carry out false flag operations on behalf of an implausibly gentile NY real-estate developer named Walbridge in a barely concealed reference to the Walton family.

 

The movie is full of pre-adolescent sex jokes from start to finish and loaded with anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian stereotypes.

 

Any religious person offended by sex jokes will be offended by this movie.

 

Because the film superficially obeys unwritten Hollywood rules that invariably require the hero to be a Jewish Israeli stud while the best Palestinian males must be ineffectual by comparison, Palestinian reviewers generally hated Zohan. (See Remi Kanazi's al-Jazeera article below.)

 

The grief that Spielberg and Kushner received for giving at best 20 seconds to the Palestinians point of view in Munich suggests that no other approach would have guaranteed successful distribution and exhibition.

 

Working within the Hollywood rules, Sandler subverted the Hollywood narrative. Zohan made it with about 2000 women over the age of 65 while all the women hanging on the Palestinian "villain" were under 18 including the pile of wives sharing his bed. Zohan's Palestinian archenemy wears a cap stiched with his nom de guerre of al-Shabah or in English the Phantom.

 

The whole shtik of sexually servicing middle-aged and elderly women seems to combine material from The Producers (2005, Stroman) and Melech LeYom Ehad (King for a Day, Assi Dayan, 1982). The former is a musical remake of the older Mel Brooks Zero Mostel version of The Producers (1968, Brooks) while the latter is a comedy focusing on false self-representation. While he was growing up, Sandler almost certainly saw both films as part of the cultural material with which Jews indoctrinate themselves.

 

Throughout the movie the Phantom proves to be a more successful and better person than his Israeli Jewish opponent. While Zohan feeds some bikini clad babes on the beach and uses the fish for some stupid butt crack antics, the Phantom feeds Lebanese and Palestinian orphans with fish killed during his battle with Zohan.

 

The movie is full of liberal Zionist slogans and delusions like:  "We are all just a bunch of people trying to get jobs." It is a sort of self-serving gutter Marxism. Before the Zionist invasion Palestinians were mostly peasant farmers and not just a bunch of people trying to find jobs. According to Marxist or Socialist Zionist analysis destroying Palestinian traditional culture is a necessary first step before Palestinians and Israelis can be united in the working class revolution.

 

In a particularly offensive scene a Palestinian cab driver in the presence of his humiliated wife negotiates with the Phantom about a reward for capturing Zohan, and he settles for something really gross and insulting. The negotiation may have been an imperfect metaphor for the Oslo Accords and every agreement in which ordinary Palestinians get less than nothing.

 

In other regards the film is exceptional for Hollywood in attempting to depict Palestinians as real human beings and not as psychopathic killers. In a reprise of the 20 Palestinian seconds in Munich, the Phantom calls Israeli Jews land stealers, and Zohan replies, "You're right. My ancestors never stepped foot in this land." In addition, Zohan may be the first Hollywood movie to show hijabs correctly. No other Hollywood (or Israeli) dramatic feature film ends with a marriage where the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian couple lives happily ever after.

 

Sandler can get away with failing to depict the genuine abuse and suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Zionists because very little of the film actually takes place in Palestine.^* Thus, You don't mess with the Zohan is not as dishonest as West Bank Story (2005, Sandel) even if it is some sort of weird male fantasy to think that a Palestinian (or Jewish) gal would want a guy, who poked so many women in her presence.

 

The film Seres queridos (2004, Harari and Pelagri -- Only Human), which was also a highly gimmicky comedy, addressed Palestinian Jewish (not Palestinian Israeli-Jewish) intermarriage but far more superficially.

 

Waiting for Quds (2005, Blachor) provides a more serious documentary approach to the topic from an Israeli standpoint as does Forbidden Marriages in the Holy Land (1995), which was an Israeli television documentary directed by the Palestinian director Khleifi.

 

Torn Apart (1989, Fisher) is the archetypal Israeli Jewish Palestinian Romeo and Juliet film, in which the Palestinian gal is killed under circumstances such that Palestinians could be blamed. Hamsin (1982, Wachsman) and A Very Narrow Bridge (1985, Dayan) also address the topic.

 

In many scenes Zohan has a massive codpiece to suggest Israeli Jewish power and potency, but eventually Zohan admits that it is really all Bush as if to say that Israel's might is not real but actually derives from decisions of President Bush.

 

The pubic hair shtik may also be an allusion to Austin Powers chest-hair joke as well as a subtle reference to the visual effect of Ronit Elkabetz' impressive pubic fur in Hatuna Meuheret (2001, Koshashvili -- Late Marriage), which addressed tensions in sexual relations among various Jewish communities within Israel.

 

Sandler borrowed scenes from Rocky and several other American films. The disillusioned assassin plot with metrosexual subthemes probably indicates familiarity on Sandler's part with Walk on Water, (2004, Fox) 

 

You don't mess with the Zohan was noteworthy

• for not mentioning the Holocaust, 
• for mocking Israeli achievements in the 1967 war, and
• for implicitly ridiculing Neocon scare-mongering.

The movie ended somewhat weirdly, for the Palestinians and Israeli Jews build their own "Peace and Harmony Mall" after they defeat Walbridge's plan to destroy their neighborhood to make space for his mall. It appears to be a metaphor for the one-state solution. [West Bank Story implied a similar outcome for its protagonist couple also consisting of a Palestinian Female and Israeli Jewish male.]

 

Cultural Implication of You Don't Mess with the Zohan

 

As the old Eastern European-based Jewish humor loses meaning in contemporary America, Sandler's film may presage a new Jewish humor that develops comedic themes by using Israel and Israeli Jewish Palestinian relations in combination with a few surviving familiar Hollywood Jewish humor devices like Zohan's patently American very not Israeli Jewish parents or the feygele (fag) jokes.

 

The Nanny television series showed an early weakening of traditional Jewish humor themes in that the key comedic element lay in the tension between the British father and the American nanny, who happened to be Jewish, and not in tensions between Jews and Gentiles. In a few episodes the writers attempted to introduce more purely Jewish comedy by using Israel as the location.

 

The Buffy the Vampire-Slayer television series provides more evidence of the demise of traditional Jewish humor in that Sander Harris and Willow Rosenberg occasionally mention their Jewish heritage, but the writers never managed to develop any plots, themes or comedy as a result of this Jewish background.

 

The Spielberg production of the Farrelly brothers remake of The Heartbreak Kid is the smoking gun for the death of traditional Jewish humor in that the Farrelly brothers as directors completely eliminated all the Jewish subthemes that were so important in the original Elaine May version of the story. In contrast, my rewrite of The Heartbreak Kid experimented with creating a new Jewish humor in the context of the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.

 

[Zohan also introduced a new vocabulary to replace traditional Hollywood Yiddish. See The "You Don't Mess With the Zohan" glossary.]

 

Other Movies From Which Zohan Borrowed Important Elements

 

Wanted Dead or Alive -- proving hero's decency by disinterested intervention to resolve a conflict to which the hero has no connection, similar story, plot structure, and scene breakdown

 

The Naked Gun -- some Leslie Nielsen comedy routines 

 

Long Kiss Goodnight -- false flag operation to blame Arabs

 

Black Sunday -- exhausted Israeli agent that wants out of the service

 

Borat -- see Kazakhstan is here - Israel Opinion:Ynetnews and The Jewish Chronicle - Borat: the backlash starts here

 

Coneheads -- where Coneheads used French, Zohan uses Australian -- routine also appeared in a Star Trek:TNG time-travel episode in which Data explains his paleness by French origin

 

Little Drummer Girl  -- exhausted Israeli agent that wants out of the service

 

Note

 

^* Sandler probably could not have created effective humor if the predominant locale had been in Palestine while putting most of the dramatic action within the USA increases American audience identification.

 

You Don't Mess With the Racism

28/06/2008 03:19:00 PM GMT

Sandler's new flick takes Hollywood chicanery and stereotypes that denigrate Arabs to an unprecedented level. By Remi Kanazi   I love Adam Sandler. From Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore to the Chanukah Song, the predecessor of the Superbad generation has effortlessly conquered the domain of slapstick comedy and inappropriate jokes. But damn you Scuba Steve! If you're going to propagate misinformation about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, do it quietly—or at least in your non-comedic life.   You Don't Mess With the Zohan, Sandler's new flick, takes Hollywood chicanery and stereotypes that denigrate Arabs to an unprecedented level—surpassing hit flicks like the Kingdom, the Siege, and every Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris movie that came before it.   I group Zohan with other shamelessly racist action movies because a film should at least be minutely funny to be categorized as a comedy. For the Sandler diehards and hilarity-loving skeptics, I should clearly state: using race and prejudices to engender laughter is not the problem.   Mel Brooks and the creators of South Park exploit stereotypes far beyond anything Sandler has ever done, but unlike Zohan, I don't think insidious propaganda and underlying racism drive their comedy. After all, if this hebetudinous clunker was just comedy, Sandler and company wouldn't have, as the New York Times reported, sought out Arab actors to give the movie "legitimacy." Their search was successful and a few token Arabs showed their presence to innocuously inform the public that it is okay to vilify the crazy towel-headed terrorists once again.   What makes this movie even worse than many of the unfavorable movies made post-9/11 is Zohan's disarming presentation; it is a comedic approach to understanding the inner workings of the substandard Arab people. Like the job stealing Mexicans, the liquor store robbing Blacks, and the HIV infested gays, negative stereotypes in Zohan strip down the Arab people to RPG wielding animals that senselessly thirst for Jewish blood.   From the start of the film, Sandler's character, Zohan, is positioned as the altruistic hero—an Israeli Mossad agent who reluctantly kills Palestinian "terrorists," while forgoing his real dream: to cut hair in the US for Paul Mitchell. Zohan is "brave," "lovable," and "funny," and even his stereotypical chauvinism is eaten up by women (and men) throughout the movie—including his eventual Palestinian love interest, Dalia.   The Israeli narrative is interwoven into the fabric of the film, including propagandistic reminiscences by Zohan's father who recalls the oft-repeated myth of being surrounded "on all sides" by powerful enemies during the Six Day War—a war in which Israel preemptively struck and dominated those "enemies." In line with Israeli and Western intelligence, Israel won the war in six days (and five hours, as Zohan's father dutifully reminds us)—so much for existential threats and heroic narratives.   Other historical revisions include a reference in a verbal battle between a Palestinian and Israeli shop owner, in which the Palestinian proclaimed, "Give it up, like you gave up the Gaza Strip!" This biting taunt, while not as blatant as the common stereotype, infers that Israel "gave up" the Gaza Strip and further insinuates that Israel had claim to it. The "humorous" jeer glosses over the glaring reality: Israel still occupies Gaza's borders, airspace, imports and exports, and has economically strangulated and suffocated 1.4 million Palestinians in the world's largest open-air prison.   But rewriting history (and regurgitating jokes from 1996) is hardly the movie's worst crime. The portrayal of Palestinians as ugly, dirty, incompetent, stupid, goat loving terrorists was jammed down the viewer's throat more times than Zohan's lame hummus jokes. It becomes obvious to the audience why these good looking, suave, kindhearted Israelis have to kill these evil Palestinian "terrorists"—because they hate Jews more than they hate soap.   The most egregious grievance by a Palestinian "terrorist" throughout the film was the stealing of a pet goat. Israel has killed more than 4,000 Palestinians since the start of the second intifada, including nearly a 1000 children, yet the main gripe of these rabid "terrorists" is a stereotypical love for hillside animals. This "inoffensive" scenario is the equivalent of a scene in a Hollywood "comedy" made by a Palestinian filmmaker stereotypically portraying Jews as pissed off about being sent to Auschwitz because they found out that Hitler was going to make them pay for the train ride.   A particular scene in Zohan went beyond comprehension: Sandler's casting agency rounded up a handful of children to play Palestinians throwing rocks at Zohan. What does Zohan do in response to the actions of these soon-to-be terrorists? He gleefully catches the stones and turns them into the equivalent of a balloon animal.   One is supposed to toss aside any arising sensitivities and overlook the many instances Israeli snipers and soldiers have shot Palestinian children in the head or taken their eyes out with rubber bullets because of these rocks Zohan takes with a smile.   The posturing of the noble and affable Mossad agent is a slick attempt to humanize Israel and make the Mossad (an outfit that has engaged in countless operations of state terrorism) look like the valiant GI Joe force in the Middle East combating jihadi thugs in the name of good. But Sandler's character is not only a hero, he's also a humanitarian. There are multiple scenes where Zohan informs the audience that Israelis do their best to minimize the loss of innocent Palestinian life, when an examination of the conflict by Israeli human rights organizations exposes quite the opposite.   Other stereotypes saturate the movie. The Palestinian salon that Zohan gets a job at is described as a dump, Palestinians constantly cheer for the "terrorists," a crowd of Palestinians applaud the death of "heroic" Zohan (which he faked), and the "terrorists" are so stupid and illiterate that they purchase Neosporin instead of liquid nitrogen to make their bomb to kill Zohan.   There is no distinction made between Hezbollah and Hamas. Furthermore, the film conveniently illustrates how Israelis in the U.S., as "fellow" natives of the Middle East, suffer the same discrimination and tribulations as Arabs in a post-911 world. Oddly, Israelis are passed off as "brown" and "other" like the Arabs in the film, yet Zohan's parents look like European Ashkenazi Jews.   Moreover, while Israelis are shown as native hummus loving Middle Easterners, Zohan's family is portrayed distinctively differently from the backwards Arabs. Zohan's parents are sweet, comforting, reasonable and accepting from beginning to end, not rigid like their Arab counterparts.   Even when Zohan finally captures Dalia's heart, his parents show up in America and warmly embrace their relationship without question—while Dalia and others resist the notion of a courtship between the two and tells Zohan that her family would never accept him. Ah, if only all Arabs could just get to know Israelis and see how kind, generous, and amorous they all are, the sooner we could all sit in a circle singing Kumbaya over s'mores and unfunny Zohan hummus jokes.   The worst dialogue throughout this 102 minute laughless action flick is made by Dalia (played by Emmanuelle Chriqui), Zohan's eventual Palestinian love interest. She serves at the omnipotent propagandist—blaming the troubles of the conflict on "extremists" and "hate" on both sides. She endlessly and vaguely laments about how much "hate" there is "over there," and describes to Zohan that things are "different here."   As any knowledgeable American knows, Palestinians and Israelis love each other here in the U.S.; they frequently have bake sales together; they form sit-ins for blind coexistence on college campuses; and have Palestinian/Israeli karaoke nights where they sing their favorite Beatles tunes like Give Peace a Chance. What Sandler, and co-writers Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel, fail to understand is that before there was Hamas, Yasser Arafat, Fatah, the PLO, or any resistance movement, there was the dispossession of the Palestinian people, whereby 780,000 indigenous Palestinians were displaced from their homeland by Jewish gangs and terror groups.   Flash forward 60 years and the Palestinian people are living in squalor in demolished towns and refugee camps enduring a 40 year occupation that strangulates their economy and diminishes any semblance of normalcy or a proper life. What we are to believe by watching this film is that if everyone would just stop "hating" (which Israelis are depicted as clearly willing to do, while Palestinians resist it vehemently) Israelis and Palestinians could effortlessly live together in harmony. But "hate" has little to do with a conflict rooted in a people's desire for basic human rights and an end to oppression.   In the end, everything ends up happy and joyful: Zohan gets the girl, he saves the block from a conniving mall developer, and the "terrorists" stop terrorizing. But the jovial ending left a sour taste in my mouth. As nearly a dozen "nameless" Palestinians were killed by innocent and heroic Israeli soldiers last week and another report of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza went unnoticed in the US press, people were laughing all over the country at how stupid, feeble, violent and backwards Arabs are. A diehard Sandler fan proclaimed: "He's making it for 13 year old boys. It's Critic Proof." That's what scares me most of all.   -- Remi Kanazi is the editor of the forthcoming anthology of poetry, Poets For Palestine, which can be pre-ordered at www.PoetsForPalestine.com. Remi can be contacted at remroum@gmail.com. -- Middle East Online

 

You Don't Mess With the Zohan
Copyright © 2008 Sony Pictures

In You Don't Mess With the Zohan, a comedy from screenwriters Adam Sandler, Robert Smigel (Triumph the Insult Comic Dog), and Judd Apatow (Knocked Up), Sandler stars as Zohan, an Israeli commando who fakes his own death in order to pursue his dream: becoming a hairstylist in New York. Dennis Dugan directs.

Dennis Dugan (dir.)
Adam Sandler
John Turturro
Emmanuelle Chriqui
Nick Swardson
Rob Schneider

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