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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Is Alan Dershowitz good for the Jews?
Philip Weiss, who has been discussing Jewish dual loyalty, recently started a discussion of Alan Dershowitz. (See http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2007/07/dershowitz-once.html) The report below provides background.
Dershowitz' Talk at Eitz Chayim in Cambridge, MA
by Joachim Martillo
thorsprovoni@aol.com
9-29-2005
On September 18, 2005, Alan Dershowitz gave a talk on his new book, The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can be Resolved at Congregation Eitz Chayim (Tree of Life) in Cambridge, MA (see below).
This reform Temple located in a charming Cambrigeport neighborhood has a heymish atmosphere more usually associated with Eastern European Orthodox synagogues. It feels a lot like the Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring in Brookline, and the two memberships probably have a lot of cultural similarity and overlap. If the audience for Dershowitz' presentation is typical, the members are becoming older and grayer, have a left-wing or radical intellectual heritage, but are moving toward the right along with the entire American Jewish community even if they want to think of themselves as progressive activists. The membership of Eitz Chayim never had as many reservations about Zionism as one might find at the Arbeter Ring, which once upon a time belonged to the tradition of the Jewish Bund, but at one time the synagogue probably a fairly strong anti-Zionist (or at least Zionism-critical) contingent. It was not in evidence at Dershowitz' lecture.
Dershowitz gave his talk in the temple auditorium in front of the Aron Hakodesh, where the Scroll of the Torah is housed. The hall was practically full (probably more than 100 people). A reporter for The Boston Globe attended, but no article has appeared in that paper as of September 27.
Dershowitz did not present much material not contained in his book, and reading the book is probably more efficient than actually making the effort to see him in person. The Boston Public Library has at least eleven copies of it (but only six copies of Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah, which provides careful analysis of Dershowitz' claims in The Case for Israel). Dershowitz told the audience that the profit from the sale of this new volume in Dershowitzian oeuvre will go to assist needy college students in the purchase of textbooks.
Of course, as far as can be determined, Dershowitz has never made the payment that he promised for finding factual errors in The Case for Israel.
Dershowitz did not present any new ideas in his talk. He merely made frequent assertion that the vast majority of reasonable Palestinians accept the self-evident rationality of his two-state plan. After reading the five basic elements of Dershowitz' framework for peace (pg. 2, The Case for Peace), no one should be surprised that Dershowitz is unable to provide the name of any Palestinian that agrees with him.
Here are elements 2 and 5 (the quote marks belong to Dershowitz):
2. Some symbolic recognition of the rights of Palestinian "refugees," including a compensation package and some family reunification, but no absolute "right of return" to Israel of the millions of descendants of those who claim refugee status -- a questionable "right" whose exercise would produce the great wrong of returning the Jewish state into yet another Muslim Arab state. All Palestinians should have the right to "return" to what will become the Palestinian state.
5. An end to the singling out of Israel for demonization and delegitimation -- and to the hatred directed against the Jewish state and its citizens and supporters -- by international organizations, many academics, religious leaders, and media pundits; and the normalization and acceptance of Israel as a full and equal member of the international community.
Dershowitz' bigoted refusal to acknowledge that ethnic Ashkenazi Eastern Europeans uprooted the native Palestinian population when they stole the territory of pre-1967 Israel makes it impossible for him to use the term refugees without quote marks.
Dershowitz' peace proposal reduces to forcing the ethnically cleansed Palestinian population to forfeit basic human rights of property and residence and to find homes elsewhere while murderous genocidal racist thieves and interlopers go unpunished, and the rest of us are not even allowed to discuss the villainy of Dershowitz, of his fellow racist Ashkenazi Americans and of murderous militaristic Zionist colonizers, who routinely use Palestinian children for target practice (according to the casualty statistics supplied by Israeli and non-Israeli human rights organizations).
For Dershowitz "peace" means that all the stolen property should remain in the hands of robbers, that the criminals should be granted amnesty, not only for past outrages but for what they are going to do. His "peace" puts native non-Jews in open-air prisons surrounded by tanks and checkpoints. His "peace" requires that all non-Jews in the US and in Palestine should accept second-class status to Jews while racist anti-Arab anti-Muslim Neocons dictate governmental policy, which includes using American youth to commit genocide and torture throughout Arab and Islamic countries, despite the wishes of the majority of the American population.
When Dershowitz elaborates his solution, he consistently places the onus of the conflict on the native population, whose right to democratic self-determination was thwarted by the British Mandate for Palestine with the connivance of the racist Zionist leadership. He insinuates that the native Palestinian population is guilty of some sort of original sin for rebelling against Zionist colonization, for ineffectively seeking aid from the Germans during the 40s -- something the Zionists did very effectively during the 30s, for very infrequently stating the facts of Zionist ethnic cleansing/re-folking (Umvolkung) in Palestinian Authority textbooks(*), and for reacting violently to Zionist depredations during the post-1967 occupation.
Occasionally, Dershowitz admits flaws in Zionist behavior (like the "relatively minor" prejudice and bigotry found in Zionist textbooks). Yet he is certain of the moral superiority of ethnic Ashkenazim and Zionist colonizers, and Dershowitz asserts that in response to every violent act that Palestinians commit (almost invariably in reaction to some Zionist outrage) Israel has the right (or maybe even the absolute obligation) to steal even more land in addition to the territory that Zionist colonizers stole in 1947-8. The Zionist occupation forces generally do much worse than steal more land when Palestinians reply to Zionist provocation. The IDF shoots up towns, bombs residences, kills civilians, destroys farmland, and walls up towns. The situation in the Occupied Territories approximates Nazi-Occupied Poland just before the mass murders began.
While discussing Finkelstein, Dershowitz made a very obscure claim that he really did not justify collective punishment against Palestinians of the sort that German Nazis applied to the Czech village of Lidice, and he also tried to prove that he really was not anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian because he intervened with the Harvard administration so that a student organization would be able to fly a Palestinian flag on Harvard campus last winter. Dershowitz expects his readership to overlook the vicious murderous Eastern European völkisch racism that underlies the Dershowitzian ideas, argument and proposal.
While American Poles, American Italians and Americans of other ethnic groups generally do not manipulate or exploit America for the sake of their racist tribalism, racist ethnic Ashkenazim like Dershowitz and his Harvard colleagues, President Lawrence Summers and Professor Ruth Wisse, have no problem with the sacrifice of American values and principles for the sake of militant Jewish exceptionalism and aggression.
Rarely does Dershowitz allude to the bigger picture like the anger of the whole world against the US for pandering racist ethnic Ashkenazi Americans in supporting Israel. Can anyone take the US government seriously when the US proclaims support for democracy, anti-racism, and human rights but supports a perverted criminal ideology like Zionism, which is inherently antidemocratic, racist and opposed to the very concept of human rights?
Dershowitz made a point of condemning the Somerville Divestment Project (SDP) for singling out Israel, and he parroted the ridiculous and vacuous logic of the subversive and racist Boston Israel Action Committee of the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC). Dershowitz is apparently unaware of the traditional activism and history of Somerville, which led in the anti-slavery movement and which has divested from other human rights abusers in the past. Dershowitz never explained how his support for undermining American democracy would lead to "peace" in the Middle East, nor did he explain why he thought that Americans should be forced against their will to pay the tab for Israel's existence.
Dershowitz' reply to a questioner during the discussion period betrays the true nature of Dershowitz' "solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The attendee, who claimed to have worked in Israel for the last decade and to have witnessed many human rights violations, pointed out that the organized Jewish community and many individual American Jewish scholars have condemned American individuals and corporations for being invested in 1930s Germany, which was a human rights violator not much different from Israel today. He concluded by asking Dershowitz whether it was wrong to reject a standard for Israel that Jews want to apply to non-Jews. Dershowitz rather lamely replied that Israel was not like Nazi Germany and therefore should be exempted from the human rights yardstick. Dershowitz accords to Israel a privileged status that excludes it from the scrutiny of non-Jews. Dershowitz's answer is a good summary of the book, whose whole purpose is a justification for preserving the privileges of Jews shamelessly living on stolen Palestinian property.
Are the only parties to the conflict the native Palestinian population and the criminal Zionist colonizers or should we perhaps be asking whether an ethnic fundamentalist state whose ideology differs little from that of 1930s Germany (except for the obvious ethnic substitutions) should be permitted to exist in the twenty-first century? The US destroyed Baathist Iraq in a matter of weeks. The US could probably abolish the Zionist state of Israel in a similar timeframe with no comparable negative consequences and at much lower cost.
Dershowitz made it clear several times during his talk that he reserves special enmity for intellectuals like Tony Judt, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky and Susan Blackwell who work to undermine the legitimacy of the racist ethnic Ashkenazi exceptionalist mind set. There is probably an element of self-preservation in Dershowitz' hatred of these people. If the anti-exceptionalist point of view becomes dominant in the USA, Dershowitz, Summers, Wisse and their intellectual bedfellows could find themselves the next generation of denizens of Guantanamo and similar concentration camps, where they could be interrogated or tortured according to Dershowitzian principles to determine the extent of their anti-American conspiracy to support Zionist terrorism.
(*) PA textbooks rarely deal with the issue at all. Dershowitz does not read Arabic and is simply repeating the standard Zionist disinformation and demonization that racist ethnic Ashkenazim disseminate in the USA. See http://www.ifamericansknew.org for a study of Palestinian textbooks.
ORIGINAL ANNOUNCEMENT
Congregation Eitz Chayim's Adult Education series continues Sunday, September 18, from 10:30-12 noon (come early for bagels and coffee) with Alan Dershowitz speaking on his latest book, The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can be Resolved. President Bill Clinton has this to say about Prof. Dershowitz's new book: "The simple chord that resonates through the complex scenarios described in The Case for Peace is one of decency and respect -- for Palestinians, for Israelis, and, ultimately, for humanity itself. . . Hopeful and wise, the blueprint for stability presented in this book is among the best in recent years." Alan Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a leading appellate lawyer in the defense of individual liberties. His many books include The Case for Israel (2003), the #1 New York Times bestseller Chutzpah, and The Vanishing American Jew. His talk is cosponsored by Porter Square Books as part of the new Cambridge Jewish Community Authors Series. After Prof. Dershowitz's presentation, all are invited to stay for coffee and good conversation with Eitz Chayim leaders and members, to learn about our long-time Cambridge non-denominational, egalitarian community, children's school, celebrations, membership, and more! Eitz Chayim is located at 136 Magazine Street, Cambridge (in Cambridgeport). For more information, call, email us, or visit our website. All are welcome!
136 Magazine Street Cambridge MA 617-497-7626 info @ eitz.org http://www.eitz.org/