Last week I wrote about the phone call from an Italian friend who asked me whether Islam and Muslims were characterized by fascist tendencies or beliefs. His query came as a result of US President George W. Bush’s unfortunate and ill-considered use of the phrase “Islamic fascists.”
Inaccurate and incorrect as the phrase is, it was not born from the brain of Bush — or even from the brains of his speechwriters. It was first used soon after Sept. 11, 2001, by Christopher Hitchens, a former diehard Marxist who is now a mainstay of the American neocons.
As a neocon, Hitchens enjoys great privileges and is a member in good standing of the media group which regularly attacks Muslims and Islam. His popularity is great in both neocon and Zionist circles. Included among those he is close to are Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, David Horowitz — all closely associated with the American administration and its destructive and internationally unpopular policies over the last few years.
The word “fascist” seems to have been used because the Bush administration and its sycophants (the neocons, evangelists, extreme right-wingers and the Zionist lobby) have this false and preposterous idea that Islam wants to take over the world. They are convinced that Muslims want to conquer the entire world by force and convert everyone to Islam by the sword!
Have they drawn this conclusion based on what they know of the terrorists’ beliefs and practices or on the beliefs and practices of the 99.99 percent of Muslims who are not terrorists? And while, as always, our Arab media focuses on trivialities, their media is slowly and insidiously planting negative ideas about Arabs and their alleged anti-Semitism.
How, I wonder, can Arabs be anti-Semitic? They are in fact themselves Semites; the word derives from one of the sons of Noah — in English Shem — who was the ancestor of both Jews and Arabs. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “Semite” as “people who speak a Semitic language, including in particular the Jews and Arabs.” In other words, it would be highly unusual for Arabs to be anti-Semites though they might well be anti-Zionists. But that is not the same thing.
In order to combat the lies and half-truths about Islam and Muslims, we need our own researchers. And we have very few indeed. We Arabs, for whatever reasons, are not known for funding or encouraging research unless we are fairly sure what the end result will be. Nor do we have enough people who are fluent in other languages. For example, how many Arabs are fluent in Hebrew? Nowhere near the number of Israeli Jews who are fluent in Arabic.
Of people who say they have doctorates from this or that university, we have many. Unfortunately, the holders of such doctorates can do little except demand special consideration because of their alleged academic excellence.
We need researchers who are able to state — and back up the statement with facts and evidence — that “Zionists are often anti-Semites.” Because that is a fact. The Zionists, by and large, are Ashkenazi Jews which means they are of Central or Eastern European descent. The great majority of Israeli Jews today are Ashkenazi and it is they who control the country and, in the past, it was they who made the rules and regulations and government policies. They do not always consider their Sephardic brothers — Jews of Spanish, Portuguese, North African or Middle Eastern descent — their equals.
After World War II, the Ashkenazi Jews poured into Palestine, dreaming of a new life and brainwashed by traditional myths and legends; it was of no importance to them that the land they poured into was populated by Arab Semites who had lived there for thousands of years. At one point, during the British Mandate in Palestine, there was surprisingly only one Jewish family in Jerusalem.
A British researcher, Tanya Hsu, who has done a great deal of work in this field and has suffered a lot in the process, believes that an approach using accurate information would go a long way toward opening people’s minds. “I am always surprised when talking with people in the West who do not understand that one cannot become Semitic by merely learning Hebrew,” she says. “If I speak Arabic, am I now a Semite also? Until the late 20th century, Hebrew was a dead language, revived by Zionists seeking to claim the land of Israel. Most Israeli Jews do not even appear to understand this fundamental flaw in their arguments.”
Unless we have a credible research center to highlight all this and to focus on the forced demographic changes in Palestine because of transplanting people from the ghettoes of Europe, we will never convince the poor, gullible Americans who have fallen victim to this web of lies. As Dresden James said: “When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.”
This unfortunately is what appears to have happened in America in the last 25-30 years. The media, Hollywood and any other means are used to create the picture of a country under attack, living in a “bad neighborhood” protecting its democracy “by having to suppress and kill women and children,” making the desert green (by stealing other people’s water) and a number of other things.
The latest attacks in Lebanon, the killing of 1,400 women and children, the callous destruction of property and infrastructure has all exposed these unsubstantiated claims and allegations for what they really are. Let our researchers do some work and expose them even more.
