GOODBYE WASHINGTON POST

A little late to the story, but I was stunned to come across this article highlighting an astonishing point of view from my own local paper. How did I miss this one? The atrocity, the madness, the upside down worldview that parades around as journalism today, uh, leaves me speechless to my core. But in a splendid case of serendipity, if mem'ry serves, I believe that the WP article in question was published about the same time I finally picked up the telephone to cancel my subscription to the Post after 25 years of readership.

Good riddance. Here's the FrontPage complaint:

IN A BOUT OF JOURNALISTIC MALPRACTICE, The Washington Post ran a story Tuesday declaring that officials had uncovered the true motivations of the Mumbai terrorists: 400 years of persecution by the West and the existence of Jews, especially in Israel. WaPo reported:

...Indian officials suspect that the group allegedly behind the attack, Pakistan-based Lashkar-i-Taiba, draws support from security and intelligence forces within that country and is fueled by a growing list of grievances that stretch from the 17th century to the subcontinent's partition in 1947, which created the independent nations of India and Pakistan.

The Post quotes one of the murderers who telephoned officials as simply asking that the destruction of mosques and "killings" be stopped—and that all imprisoned terrorists be set free to kill again.

In addition to presenting the terrorists as a justifiably aggrieved population, laboring under 400 years of "grievances," the Post notes Western provocations against Mohammedans did not end 60 years ago in the postwar world. "The grievances also include India's increasingly warm ties with the United States and Israel, counterterrorism experts say."

During the three-day siege that claimed the lives of more than 170 innocent people, one of the terrorists, Imran Babar, called an Indian television station to discuss his motives. After breaking into the city's only Jewish center, the Chabad House, and killing six people including its spiritual leader, Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, Babar used the slain rabbi's cell phone to call and complain about the Jewish state. Babar voiced outrage that Israeli Major General Avi Mizrahi visited Kashmir in September to discuss counterterrorism with Israel's democratic ally, India:

"You call their army staff to visit Kashmir. Who are they to come to J and K?" Imran told the anchor, referring to the disputed Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. "This is a matter between us and the Hindus, the Hindu government. Why does Israel come here?"

[And yet all of the Muslim world rises up in outrage over the Israeli-Arab conflict. Does the Post detect the double standard? Not on their life. Same tired rhetoric. End of story.]

Like Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, a pretext was fitted to an act of premeditated violence. Nor is this the only incident of blatant provocation the Post could find:

India and Israel have had a defense alliance since 1992, when diplomatic relations between the countries were established. India has become a major purchaser of Israeli weapons, which has angered some of India's Muslims. The visit by the Israeli general was kept secret for days, news reports said, for fear of riots by Muslims in Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim area patrolled by more than 300,000 mostly Hindu Indian troops.

Once again, Jewish merchants and interlopers are setting off waves of Muslim violence around the globe by, being Jews. Inevitably, the very existence of Israel as a state was introduced near the end of the piece, as a summary of the Pakistani terrorists' case:

"Kashmir is a symbol, like Palestine, of a sense of injustice. It is a rallying cry for a much larger anger at India and the West," said Bruce Riedel, author of "The Search for al Qaeda."

Thus, the real problem in India is the existence of Israel. And Kashmir, Kosovo, Andalusian Spain, and any other province that strains against the pressures of Islamic irredentism.

In fairness, the Post story does mention the force of Islamofascism, though, needless to say, not by that term. Lashkar-i-Taiba radicalism is mentioned, though it is given less space than passages that present the terrorists as victims:

"Lashkar has a very specific pan-Islamic vision: the recovery of all Muslim lands once ruled by Muslims, including India, Central Asia and Spain. And they've gone after those countries that they believe were usurped from traditional Muslim rulers," said Ashley J. Tellis, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has been tracking Lashkar since 2001. "The goal is very apocalyptic and simple: attack these enemies and the symbols of those enemies," he said.

It is this apocalyptic vision that has led Lashkar to kill hundreds of Indians, at times dressed as Hindu holy men. Whatever the immediate goals of (LIT), the ultimate goal of Islam is worldwide submission to Shari'a law. "No babe is born but [as a Muslim]," said Mohammed. "It is his parents who make him a Jew, or a Christian, or a polytheist." This universal compulsion explains all expressions of Islamic jihad. The recounting of centuries of oppression, overlooking centuries of their oppression of others, explains the depth of self-pity and victimization in the Muslim mind. To place this self-pitying narrative alongside Jewish arms merchants and Indian self-defense is an abrogation of journalism at the highest level.

HUGH FITZGERALD ON MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM

MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM DID NOT grow "uniquely Muslim roots" over the past three decades (as was recently suggested by an idiot mainstreamer). Muslim antisemitism was always there, within Islam. It was not virulent, because the Jews were weak, despised, and unlike the Christians, had no possible strong outside powers that could pressure Muslims in order to protect their co-religionists within Dar al-Islam. But then the Jews re-established their ancient Jewish commonwealth, despite Arab terrorism that started early against Jews settling on land they had bought (Joseph Trumpeldor at Tel Hai). That Arab terrorism continued throughout the 1920s (a decade that begins with murderous mobs killing Jews in Jerusalem in 1920, and then massacring every last Jew Hebron in 1929) and then through the 1930s, especially during the so-called Arab Revolt.

During that revolt, the Mandatory Authority officials in Jerusalem expelled Captain Orde Wingate for the crime of having taught Jewish settlers how to defend themselves. Meanwhile, Arab terrorism continued. Then there was the attack on the nascent state of Israel by seven Arab armies, and the period of terrorism by Egyptian fedayin (and by Jordanians too, until terrorism from Jordan was ended by a retaliatory raid led by Colonel Ariel Sharon and his Unit 101).

It is the refusal of the Jews of Israel to surrender, to relapse into the status that they deserve—according to the Shari'a—of dhimmis, living on Muslim sufferance, according to Muslim dictates, in a state of permanent humiliation and degradation and physical insecurity, that in the twisted worldview of Muslims becomes a constant, gnawing source of anguish for them, of their humiliation, their degradation, their physical insecurity.

And because of this, the texts pertaining to Jews, and the anti-Jewish animus that always was to be found in Islam, and that resulted in the mistreatment of Jews that has been so well-documented, and the texts and tenets that explain the 1350-year mistreatment of Jews, an antisemitism different in its promptings from that found in Western Christendom, was revived with special fervor. That mistreatment of Jews was not unique; Christians, too, were mistreated as dhimmis (unless one takes the ahistorical view that the dhimmi condition was benign, that as "protected peoples" dhimmis had a good thing going), but there was a special animus, with textual authority in support, toward Jews.

They were always regarded, however, as weak, and no threat. And indeed, they had their uses, for example as doctors (the Padishahlar or Ottoman Sultans, for example, always relied on Jewish doctors). But this should not be confused with the condition of the Jewish community, one which the scholar S. E. Goitein described as far worse than he had realized, over many decades of close study, until he finally spent years studying the contents of the Cairo Geniza, which led him to reconsider his underestimate of the burden on the Jews of, for example, the Jizyah, the poll-tax for dhimmis specified in Qur’an 9.29.

Of course the mistreatment of non-People of the Book, such as Hindus and Buddhists, was more atrocious than that endured by Jews. Possibly some may find consolation in that fact. But then, all kinds of people try to make all kinds of mental salti mortali to convince themselves that antisemitism in the Islamic world is an import, and not native. That view, of course, requires that one ignore a mountain of evidence, of the kind collected by Georges Vajda—whose work Bernard Lewis includes in both his notes and his bibliography but, one can only assume from his misleading treatment of Jews under Islam, did not read, or did not comprehend, or did not wish to comprehend.

Did Lewis read Vajda? Did he read Vajda's translation of Al-Magili? What did he get out of Vajda? Or out of many others who wrote on the Jews under Islam?

It is true that the Mufti of Jerusalem was anti-Jewish and found much to his liking the views of Adolf Hitler. But his views preceded those of Hitler, and came from another source: the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira. One of the reasons all the Arabs favored the Nazis is that the Nazi antisemitism echoed, or provided a variant on, familiar and welcome hatreds. Lewis and this new report come perilously close to maintaining, and Lewis certainly gives the impression to many, that Islam "borrowed" European antisemitism because it had no homegrown variety. But it did, and the borrowings were not essential.

Does anyone think that the Saudi textbook remarks on the Jews are due to the Nazis or the antisemitism displayed, at different levels in different places and times, of Western Christendom? Or that what Ahmadinejad thinks of Jews, and the need to wipe Israel out, comes from Hitler and not entirely from another source closer to home?

Read it all.