Al-Zawahiri, in his latest communique, doesn’t have a word to offer about the “legitimate rights” of the soi-disant “Palestinian people.” He notes that the perfidious Jews, or Israelis, have attacked Gaza. And so they have, in scrupulous fashion, in their attempt to end the rain and reign of rockets over Israel’s southern cities. For Al-Zawahiri it is “the Muslims” who have been hit and “the Muslims” who must avenge these attacks. There is not a secular or nationalist word in his speech.But, some will claim, the “Palestinians” themselves are quite different. They truly, really, deeply, madly are interested not in Islam, or the triumph of Islam, but only in that “state” that will bring them, bring Israel, bring all of us, that “solution” we all -- don’t we? -- equally long for. And wasn’t Arafat, they will say, “secular”? Wasn’t he interested only in a “Palestinian” state, in the cause of “Palestinian” nationalism? Why do you try to transform, in your analysis, the completely “secular phenomenon” (see Rashid Khalidi, see Edward Said, see see see) of “Palestinian nationalism” into a Muslim, Islam-prompted phenomenon? Or are you doing this just to sinisterly transform, for your own purposes, what is so clearly “secular” in nature, into something Islamic? Just look at Fayyad, the technocratic accountant, or all those others, including Mahmoud Abbas, and all the other terrorist henchmen of yore, now carefully suited and tied, or fit-to-be-tied, just to show their Jizyah-demanding and Jizyah-receiving bonafides? Send your billions to us, those suits and ties and speeches about “we have chosen peace as a strategic option” tell us. “You can trust us, there’s nobody here but us accountants.”
It’s true. Arafat was a Muslim, but not fanatical about it. He had imbibed the attitudes of Islam, however, even if he was not a great mosque-goer. He was famously corrupt and even more famously (so famously, in the Arab world, that everyone managed to keep his little secrets from the Western world and Western press for almost his entire life) had a particular taste for blond German boys. The kinds of recreation he favored were not likely to go down well among Muslim clerics. But he was forgiven, he was even protected, because, you see, for the “good of the cause” – the cause of opposing the Infidel nation-state of Israel – he had to be. As Magdi Allam said in his letter to the Corriere della Sera, Islam encourages dissimulation and lies.
Of course, in one important sense, Arafat was indeed “a nationalist.” What was that sense? It was simply this: he wanted his very own state that he, Yassir Arafat, could rule over. Or rather, when put to the test, he didn’t really didn’t want that very own state, because having that very own state would have limited his travel (and the ease of orgies with those blond German boys), and would have involved such tiresome things as arranging to have the garbage picked up, and having to collect taxes, when it was so much more fun to have the Infidels keep sending those infusions of cash, (and so much easier, in that form, to divert it, as Arafat did by the billions, into off-shore and Swiss accounts). It was important to keep up the patter about the “Palestinian people” (invented circa late 1967, after the Six-Day War), for that was the surest way to Western hearts and Western diplomatic support and Western pocketbooks. The throw-Israel-into-the-sea rhetoric of Ahmad Shukairy, though admirable in its sincerity, hadn’t been convincing, so why not limit that kind of threatening, and sincere, rhetoric only to Arab and Muslim audiences and speak differently to Western audiences eager to hear this kind of thing?
The patter about the “Palestinian people” could then justify first indifference to Israel’s plight (too painful to consider, especially in the light of guilty consciences all over Western Europe -- or, put more accurately, a little residual guilt about not having sufficiently guilty consciences). Then it would lead to not merely indifference, but active hostility, a hostility fed by the most outrageous kind of press coverage of Israel and of its attempts to defend itself.
Indeed, no one paid much attention to what Arafat continued to say, never stopped saying, to Arab and Muslim audiences. Those who knew the truth, those in the government who had access to those blue-papered FBIS reports (Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service) containing transcripts of radio and television programs, were few. And those few often, in their positions, were willing to skew the material, and certainly not to push it forward. Not the least of the reasons that the Western world, and American policymakers, are in the fix they are in, is that they did not, decades ago, begin to comprehend the nature, the meaning, the menace, of Islam and Jihad, for they were not permitted to find out, and they were monomaniacally preoccupied with the threat of Soviet Communism. For people at the mental level of the Dulles brothers, Turkey was an “ally,” and Saudi Arabia was apparently doing us a favor -- as Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s fulltime propagandist, insisted -- by selling us oil. (And besides, hadn’t King Saud met Roosevelt on shipboard?) Saudi Arabia was therefore also an “ally.” And between Pakistan and India there was no contest. Pakistan’s ramrod-straight terry-thomassed moustachioed generals were so much more to the liking of American generals and civilians than Nehru and especially the anti-American Krishna Menon, both of whom were seen as so dangerously left-wing. Islam, you see, was just fine, indeed was admirable, because it was “a bulwark against Communism.” That it was also a collectivist, even totalitarian Total Belief-System, in the end far sturdier and therefore far more threatening than Communism, was never understood.
And the Western policy-makers, and the Western publics, did not know what Arab and Muslim reality was all about. It was the apologists who were the “experts.” The few Orientalists who were alarmed did not, in the 1950s and 1960s, especially when Muslims began to be allowed to settle deep within Europe, get any attention. Had the people of Western Europe understood Islam, had those among the political and media elites capable of understanding this been listened to, rather than ignored or pushed to one side, then a much stricter immigration policy would have been instituted, and the present woes, and future conceivable disasters, avoided.
And the same is true with the war on Israel. Had Israelis themselves not been so desperately eager to “make peace” and therefore to engage in a “Peace Process” (a phrase that should immediately raise suspicion) they might have been able to pierce the “Palestinian-people” veil, focus attention on Islam. In so doing, they might not only have saved themselves. The unintended beneficiaries of such consciousness-raising about Islam might have been those in Western Europe who, in the 1960s and even into the 1970s, had not yet been replaced by others with shorter memories and less experience of life, and had not yet been brainwashed into accepting either the “Palestinian-people” business or the monstrous misrepresentation of Israel, and could have stopped it. How did all those Turks come to Germany? Those Algerians to France? Those Moroccans to Spain? Those Pakistanis to England? It was all based on the assumption, or a series of assumptions, in some cases about people coming to work and then returning home (those Gastarbeiten in Germany), but also about the nature of those immigrants, whose problems, whose un-assimilability, whose hostility, were at first likened to the problems that “all immigrant groups,” we were told, present or endure, and that eventually things would settle down, and like other immigrants, recent and not so recent, adjustment would be difficult but in the end achievable. No one realized that Muslims carried with them in their mental baggage not merely an alien creed, but an alien and a hostile creed, or that while the first generation was willing to work, and was of course unacquainted with all the benefits of a welfare state, which their children and grandchildren have learned to exploit to the hilt, and then some. But the first generation would not immediately present such a problem, and one might, if one did not know more about Islam, make all kinds of dreamy assumptions (assumptions that are still being made, not least in France, whenever Sarkozy talks about government-funded mosques and other vain attempts at large-scale “integration”—as if the handful of Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslims in his cabinet were representative of the 6-8 million Muslims in France already).
But the Israelis, though in the midst of the Muslim world, were too wedded to finding a partner for peace.” The people in the political class were so busy fighting day to day, that they never allowed themselves the necessary time to study and to think. And in the universities, the real scholars of Islam, the ones who were the earliest to warn, were not heeded, for their message was a disturbing one, one that no one wished to believe.
Let’s go back, back before Al-Qaeda, back before Hamas, and Hizballah, and the redundantly-named Islamic Jihad. Do we, indeed, see that there was a time when there was true secularism, true nationalism that was the impulse for the Arab effort, or was Islam always there, Islam disguised when necessary, but still the subtext, or substratum, of that supposed “nationalism” and “secularism”?
Start further back, back before Arafat, and look at the statements of his predecessor as the spokesman for the local Arabs (the ones who have been carefully renamed the "Palestinians" or "the Palestinian people"), Ahmad Shukairy, and see if you find rhetoric that is "secular" or rhetoric that comes straight out of Islam.
Go back further. Go back to the leaders of the Arab Revolt (not the "Palestinian" revolt) of 1936-1938 and look at their rhetoric, at what moved them against both "the Jews" and "the British." Is it the language of secular nationalism, or the language, the imagery, the impulse, the promptings, the attitudes, the atmospherics, of Islam?
Go back further still, to the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el Husseini. He was from one of the powerful local families. What did he say, in 1920? Or in 1930? Or in 1940, when he was in Berlin, offering Hitler his support and encouragement for the "Endlosung," the Final Solution, and talking not about "Palestinian nationalism" but about "the Arabs" and "the Muslims." When Hajj Amin el Husseini raised Muslim S.S. brigades in Bosnia, or when he went to Iraq to spread his message of hate that contributed to the Farhood, or massacre of the Jews in June 1-2, 1941, it was not in order to win points for some non-existent "Palestinian people," but rather to whip up, by appealing to the texts of Islam and the attitudes that were a natural result of those texts, those who might be made to take their Islam to heart, and then to act on it.
Long before there was a “Palestinian people,” Arabs, in Mandatory Palestine and in the Ottoman-ruled areas that made up “Palestine,” were deeply opposed to Jews returning to, and buying up land, and starting farms, and making that desert bloom. They were opposed not because of any desire for a “Palestinian state,” for they were quite content to continue under Ottoman rule, which meant rule as well by local (and absentee) Arab landlords, in the “ruin” and “desolation” that centuries of Muslim desertification -- with nomadic grazing, not farming -- had brought to what had been described in the Bible as a “land of milk and honey.”
Arafat, in his heyday, carefully presented to the West a “secular” and “nationalist” face for his war against Israel. But under the rhetoric aimed Westwards, he continued to reveal his true intentions. He did so in such things as his astonishing admission that “Palestine itself” is merely a tiny part of the “Arab domain” “from the Atlantic to the Gulf” in the early 1970s, and continued to do so right through to his statement to an audience of Muslims in Johannesburg, just a few weeks after signing the Oslo Accords, that he knew what he was doing, no one need worry, and then he mentioned the Treaty of Hudaibiyya -- and his Muslim audience knew exactly what he meant.
Al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden have in the past week both demonstrated an eagerness to use the Lesser Jihad against Israel, yet again, as a focus or prompt for the Greater Jihad. That Greater Jihad is the one that is not limited, in time or in space. It continues forever, until all obstacles to the spread, and then the rightful dominance, of Islam, have been removed. That Greater Jihad -- and its constituent Lesser Jihads -- employs methods that non-Muslims have no difficulty defining as “terror,” but which Muslims and Muslim clerics (see Sheikh al-Azhar Tantawi, see Al-Qaradawi, see those 40,000 Saudi imams about to be “re-educated” mainly about their belief that the benevolent Al-Saud might be considered targets for “Jihad”) define as qital or legitimate combat in the cause of Islam. But the focus of Infidels on “terror” alone distracts from the more effective and insidious instruments of that Greater Jihad: the Money Weapon (and all the mosques, madrasas, propaganda, armies of Western hirelings it pays for), carefully-targeted campaigns of Da’wa, and demographic conquest that inexorably weakens from within the Camp of Infidels.
It would be good, even at this late date, for the Israelis, and for others, to come to their senses about the meaning, and menace, of Islam, beginning with a recognition that the passing “secularism” of passing “Palestinian” nationalism, merely disguised, for a brief while, the Islam that lay underneath. Al-Zawahiri’s message brings to the surface, yet again, what should be fully understood, in its implications not for Israel alone but for those, for example, who are prepared for the folly of handing out still more green cards to Muslims, or to limiting still more the free exercise of Western liberties by Western men in Western countries in order to placate Muslims, or for the folly of doing almost nothing to diminish Muslim oil revenues by raising taxes on oil, or for the folly of Infidel funding, by the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, those Arabs and Muslims who forgot to be born with oil deposits under the surface of the territories they control.
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