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The
Boston Globe (May 19, 2005)
published an op-ed Why Islam is disrespected, by Jeff
Jacoby. Here is my response:
The Guilty Lamb
by Israel Shamir
Muslims can’t be respected if a simple
come-on like wasting of the Koran works them up into a frenzy,
exclaims
Jeff Jacoby , and they go around murdering innocent folk;
while “decent people”, Catholics, Jews and Buddhists take it
easy if “someone has offended their religious sensibilities”.
If that were the case, we still may respect
the Muslim world. Our indifference to sacrilege and their
awareness of things sacred would imply that our profaned
civilisation is doomed to extinction to be replaced by the
Muslim one, alive and vibrant.
But it is not the case at all. Jacoby is
speaking through his hat. His piece
reminded me, an Israeli writer from Jaffa, of a Jewish joke: “Is
it true that Katz won a million dollar in a lottery?” “Yes, it
is true, but it was poker, not a lottery; ten dollar, not a
million, and he lost, not won.” Every statement in Jacoby's
piece is wrong, and it is not a small achievement.
Jacoby notes “widespread
Muslim rioting… brutal threats and the slaughter of 17 innocent
people” and exclaims: “decent people do not resort to murder
just because someone has offended their religious
sensibilities”. How true! But it is not that the Muslim fanatics
murdered seventeen innocent American investigators. Other way
around, peacefully protesting Muslims were killed by American
occupation forces and their auxiliaries in Afghanistan, Gaza and
Andijan. The slaughtered innocents were Muslims, while the
slaughtering brutes were paid for their deed by the US taxpayer.
Jacoby offers a positive
example: “Jewish communities [didn’t] erupt in lethal violence
in 2000, after Arabs demolished Joseph's Tomb, torching the
ancient shrine and murdering a young rabbi who tried to save a
Torah.” Again, all wrong. Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus is an old
Muslim shrine; it was not demolished but rebuilt by the Muslim
Nablus municipality; the only Israeli that died at the fighting
at the Tomb was not “a young rabbi who tried to save a Torah”,
but a Druze mercenary. Jewish community, otherwise known as the
Jewish state of Israel, indeed erupted in lethal violence:
Israelis killed over twenty Muslims at the shrine and hundreds
more elsewhere.
 Jacoby
writes: “It would be unthinkable for a mainstream rabbi to
demand that a blasphemer be slain.” However, this ‘unthinkable’
happens daily: many mainstream rabbis issued a fatwa amounting
to a death sentence to a person involved in the ‘sacrilege’ of
Gaza disengagement. It worries our Chief of Security Services;
he spoke of it on the national TV. Jacoby could read of it in
our Haaretz and elsewhere. The calls to “exterminate Muslims”
are quite common, too; witness this graffiti on a wall in
Israel-occupied Hebron.
Moreover, every case of
sacrilege against Jewish holy places – graffiti on a synagogue’s
wall or in a cemetery, - causes hundreds of thousands Europeans
and Americans to march in solidarity, while Kofi Annan calls up
a special meeting of the UN General Assembly and the heads of
states fly into Jerusalem to swear their full support of the
Jews. Thus Jewish religious sensitivities are well protected; in
addition, Israeli law allows for snatching and trying in Israel
of every person who committed such an act anywhere on earth. If
it is not enough, France, Germany and a few other states have a
special law punishing an offence given to Jewish sensitivities
by long imprisonment, and there are a few dozen offenders
languishing presently in European jails for this misdeed.
However, Muslim
sensitivities are protected neither by the UN, nor by national
law, nor by mass demonstrations of Europeans and Americans. I
doubt the US interrogators guilty of offending the Muslims will
land in jail next to Ernst Zundel who offended the Jews. This
week, the Jewish state did not allow the Muslim retired leader
Mahathir Muhammad to pray at the holy al-Aqsa mosque in occupied
Jerusalem – and this flagrant breach of freedom of worship did
not bring the UN into an emergency meeting. So much for Muslim
sensitivities and for our concern!
The reasons offered by
Jacoby as to “why Islam is disrespected” collapsed as a house of
cards in the fresh wind of reality. May I venture a better
reason?
Islam is disrespected –
not by us, but by Jacobys of this world because it has
little influence; because it is peaceful and non-aggressive;
because the Muslims still do not understand why they are
attacked in the Globe and tortured in Guantánamo. Islamic
militancy never had deep roots in the Muslim world – this was
created from scratch by the CIA in order to fight Russians in
Afghanistan and Chechnya. Pro-American Muslim activists were
surprised to find themselves framed as The Enemy, when, after
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War,
the US proclaimed them ‘the main threat to world peace’. The
Muslims were as guilty as the lamb in the La Fontaine fable,
guilty for the Wolf was hungry. The US military complex needed
an enemy to justify its expenses; the pro-Zionist media needed
an enemy to justify multi-billion transfers to the Jewish state;
and the Islamic world was chosen for the role of the Villain.
It was not prepared for
this role; wealthy Muslims invested in the US stocks and bought
the US hardware; they stay in the dollar zone and spend their
dividends buying Western goods. Even now, ten years after the
beginning of the War to Islam, they can’t understand the problem
and respond.
They have means, and
perfectly peaceful, too. The Muslims may put pressure on dollar
and on US securities. They may buy up the US media and turn the
tables on Jacobys and his kin. But it does not happen: the
Muslims do not assert themselves in the media and do not act on
the financial markets. Apparently, they are satisfied with
sitting in their sitting rooms, thumbing the Boston Globe and
pondering, “why Islam is disrespected?’
Israel Shamir
Jaffa
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