Warning about the dangers of 'radical Islam' by former Islamic terrorists offends Muslims but preaching extreme hatred and violence by Imams doesn't.
Three former Islamic militants from the Middle East, Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem, and Zachariah Anani, now reformed and warning the West of the danger of radical Islam, were to speak at the University of Michigan yesterday (30th January) in a public forum, billed as "The 3 Ex-Terrorists." They have fought for the militant wing of PLO in Palestine and had participated in acts of violence and terrorism against Israel. Shoebat is reported to have had bombed an Israeli Bank as a teenager. Anani was a teen militia fighter, where he was trained to kill Jews and claims to have killed 223 people, according to 3xterrorists.com.…
Article comments
26 - Zedd
Alamgir
Is your article against people who practice Islam or is it against terrorists. These are two very different things.
Most white supremacists are Christians. Should we lump all Christians with the KKK?
27 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
These reformed terrorists you talk about were terrorists who attacked Israel and who attacked Jews. Their goal was the death of my people.
How and why humanity struck them, and why they turned I cannot ask. It is G-d who directs us, and these former terrorists are attempting to do repentance by their acts. But why did Jews come to the idea to return to Israel?
Let's try to explain this to you in a few paragraphs and not make it too complicated. About 700 years ago, the duchies that comprised Poland and Lithuania invited Jews to come and settle there. They came, mostly from Germany, bringing their lingua franca, Yiddish, which is based on German. For the most part, Jews did well in Poland, and when Poland and Lithuania united into one kingdom after the fall of the Mongols, it was a huge country that covered all of modern Poland, White Russia, the Ukraine and of course, Lithuania. Jews prospered in this country and the country prospered as well. And for as long as Poland prospered, Jews were free of the vicious anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred of the Catholic church and the Russian Orthodox church. Google up va'ad arba artzos, or council of four lands...
In 1648, a Ukrainian named Hmielnitzky led a rebellion of Ukrainian peasants against the Poles and particularly against Jews. This was the first time you really hear of "pogroms." These riots desolated the Jewish community of Poland and it began to fall into decline, slowly adopting a dog-eat-dog culture of exploitation and hatred and self-hatred that plagues us to this day, particularly in Israel.
The last time the Kingdom of Poland played an important role in European history was in the late 1600's when King Jan Sobieski sent his army to save Vienna from the Turks who nearly captured it. From that time on, the Kingdom of Poland was slowly gobbled up by its neighboring powers, Austria, Prussia and Russia. By 1795, it no longer existed.
But the Jews did not leave. The area they lived in became known as the "Pale of Settlement" - the term "outside the Pale" comes from this - and Jews were not allowed to leave the Pale of Settlement without special papers. Russians hated Jews and made their life unbearable. Jews could not own land, could not get a decent education. If you transpose all the restrictions of the Colour Bar in India upon Jews in the Pale of Settlement, and add official religious hatred to it, and you begin to have an idea of what life was like there.
It was in this sick environment that the idea of walking out took root. At first, the idea was to run to western Europe, and then to the Americas, Australia and South Africa, but a small minority developed the idea of an independent Jewish state in the virtually empty Turkish provinces of what had been Israel millennia before. This concept became known as Zionism - Mt. Zion is a hill in the city of Jerusalem.
It was not genocide that inspired the Zionist movement, it was the desire to escape misery and persecution. There had been one genocidal experience in our history, that of the Roman savages in destroying ancient Judea, but the fact that it was a genocidal experience did not register at the time. It barely registers as such today, even though it shaped the nation in quite a number of ways...
So it is not an issue of how many Jews died under the hands of the Russians, it was an issue of how many were trying to run away. What would now be called "ethnic cleansing" was a regular part of the Russian treatment of Jews, as the Empire steadily reduced the size of the Pale of Settlement, seeking to make more and more of Russia "Jew-free". But one Russian official did give voice to Russian policy concerning Jews - one third were to die; one third were to convert; one third were to emigrate. In this atmosphere, the Russian government stirred up pogroms - anti-Jewish riots - for the purpose of driving Jews from the country, and for the purpose of deflecting criticism of the Russian empire by the peasantry and developing proletariat.
Indeed, the stories of Sholem Aleichem are comedies based on the events occurring in Czarist Russia at the time. Some of these stories, about a dairyman named Tevye, were pushed together into a musical called "Fiddler on the Roof" forty-two years ago, starring Zero Mostel, one of the great comedians of the Yiddish theatre. This was later made into a movie of the same name.
28 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
I wrote you just a few paragraphs in the previous comment to attempt to make a point. The flight of Jews from Czarist Russia and other places in Europe was not a flight from genocide. It was a flight from misery. Thousands of Jews died in Russia, Poland and the rest of Europe in riots and persecutions of various types, and as the Turkish Empire began to rot and stink in its own delayed decay over the entire 19th and early 20th centuries, there was more and more anti-Jewish violence there. The riots in Damascus in 1840 are just one example. But Jews fled to escape misery and persecution, not genocide. The Russian empire just was not efficient enough to accomplish a genocide...
My father, may his memory be for a blessing, lived in Poland during the opening years of the 20th century and lived through WWI. He (and many others) were underfed at best in Poland, and during that war he had to forage for vegetables and roots and beg German soldiers for bread from the bakeries that fed the imperial German army invading the Russian empire.
HIS memory of Germans was that of decent guys who gave bread to the hungry refugee kids that came begging for food. He recounted for me what happened when he was examined at Ellis Island, NY, when he and his siblings and my grandmother arrived there in 1921. They all had huge tapeworms that had been living inside of them for G-d only knows how long. So every Jewish kid (and every other kid as well) who came from war torn Europe in those years was always hungry.
Although there are many books I can refer to on this subject, Jewish misery under the Czar is a subject I know all too well from living in a family that had suffered from it.
The Jewish situation in Europe was indeed complicated, but the point here is that complicated as it was, Jews were not fleeing genocide, they were fleeing misery.
It was only a very small minority of people who sought to go to Eretz Yisrael at first. The Turks were not particularly welcoming, and unless their palms were generously greased, they could be counted on to only raise obstacles - that appears to be the way business has traditionally been done in this part of the world, at least under Arab or Moslem rule, and that appears to be what had happened in the late 19th century when the first large group of Jews settled who were not specifically there for religious reasons only, but for reasons of setting up a Jewish entity here.
A second wave came in the very early 1900's after the wave of pogroms that exploded across Russia in 1903, and again in 1905 upon the defeat of Russia at the hands of the Japanese, and the revolution that nearly overthrew the Czar. This group grew until WWI when immigration stopped due to hostilities between Turkey and Russia.
In the aftermath of WWI, thousands of Jews were killed as banditry and civil war became the rule in what had been the Pale of Settlement (see comment #27). Eventually the Red Army established its supremacy in the Ukraine, White Russia and Russian parts of the Pale of Settlement, and they forbade Jews from leaving. Jews continued to leave Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as all these countries, alleged democracies, were anti-Jewish in their policies.
When America shut her door to immigration in 1922, Jews went elsewhere, like Canada, Cuba, Brazil, Australia and for those who had been exposed to the idea, Israel. There was an economic depression here in the early 1920's, so few immigrated here then. But when that depression eased later in the 1920's more Jews arrived. After a renewed depression in the 1930's and the growth of the Nazi movement in Germany, even more Jews arrived. This despite Arab riots that massacred the Jewish community in Hebron in 1929, and drove Jews out of what is now called Ir David in Jerusalem.
But this is getting to the specifics of this country's history, as opposed to reasons that Jews came here.
What validated the view of the Zionists in persistently warning of a massive level of persecution of Jews were the policies of the Nazis and the fact that most countries closed their doors to Jewish refugees from Nazi threats of persecution, and later the reality of Nazi persecution.
That persecution turned out to be genocide - but few in the early 1930's realized what would happen.
The persistent Arab line of propaganda - pushed so hard and accepted so readily by so many, particularly in Europe and the South Asian subcontinent - is that the situation of the Arab refugees who fled the war of independence in 1947-49 is the same as that of the Jews in the DP camps, and for Israel to keep them from returning home is the equivalent of genocide, a form of racism and racist persecution. Perhaps, if there were not such a strong terror movement among the Arabs this might have validity. Perhaps if the Arab countries had made serious efforts to absorb these refugees, an argument of justice could be made. But neither of these things occurred.
The Arab states surrounding Israel kept the refugees from the War of Independence locked in camps in Lebanon, Gaza and Judea and Samaria, until Israel liberated these territories and began improving the situation of Arabs living there. They have sought war and the destruction of this country since its inception and the self righteous whining of Arab supporters on this site and elsewhere do not change that fact.
29 - Zedd
Ruvy because you are a supporter and benefactor of Apartheid we don't expect much from you regarding any issue regarding Arabs or Muslims.
30 - Arch Conservative
You're more of a raving anti-semite than Ruvy is a supporter of apartheid Zedd.
31 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Bing, thanks for the back-up. It's long past time for Jews to move beyond the holocaust - similarly, it is long past time for South African emigrants to move beyond seeing an Afrikaner cop demanding "waar jou pass" in every regime they don't like.
Put your past in your behind Zedd... The world is not one big "Republiek van Suid Afrika".
32 - Aku
Back to a point related to the article, If some moslems take to the street proteting three ex-terrorists, why did they not do so when terrorists (Hamas, etc.) did come to the University of Michigan? Saying I want to kill Jews is ok to them, but I don't want to kill Jews is not?
33 - Alamgir Hussain
[If some moslems take to the street proteting three ex-terrorists, why did they not do so when terrorists (Hamas, etc.) did come to the University of Michigan?]
Aku, this is a point no body bothers to take note. There are loads of useful idiots amongst the westerners making too much noise about moderate Muslim but when real action needed they have no visibility. And of course, these are people who joined the protest the typically moderates.
This should bode well for the future with increasing Muslims population in the West. Think about their body-count now and the reaction. Future.. have to wait & see.
34 - Lili
Where did foot soldiers come from?
Can you tell me that in it short.