Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (30 page)

Many of the fabrications about Israel allege insidious plots to murder non-Jewish children. Again, looking further into the Arab mind, here are a few truly repulsive examples of the lies about Jews and Israel spread and believed in the Arab Muslim and even Arab Christian world:

• For ritual religious purposes, Jews use the blood of Muslim (and Christian) children in Passover matzoh and Purim pastries. Jews and Israelis are literally “vampires” and “bloodsuckers."
  ²
  
• Israel is sending AIDS-infected prostitutes to spread the disease by seducing and infecting innocent young Muslim boys.
  ³
  
• According to Palestinian Authority officials, Israel brought two hundred tons of strawberry-flavored chewing gum intentionally spiked with sex hormones into the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This allegedly sexed-up Israeli chewing gum “was sold 'only at the gates of primary schools or kindergartens' because Israelis 'want to destroy [the Palestinians'] genetic system' by giving sex hormones to children before their bodies can cope with them."
  ⁴
  Samples provided by Palestinian “health officials” were analyzed in tests commissioned by the
  Washington Post.
  According to the scientific analysis, the gum contained no contaminants whatever.
  ⁵
  
• "The Jews” build “ovens” to “bake” Palestinians.
  ⁶
  

Sometimes the
same
crazy, ugly lies are told about both Israel and the United States. For instance, on December 13, 2004, the Iranian Sahar 1 TV station began broadcasting a series entitled
Zhara’s Blue Eyes.
This series asserts that Israelis steal the organs of Palestinian children for transplant into Israeli medical patients. In the first episode, the beautiful eyes of the title character, a little Palestinian girl, are stolen for transplant into the son of an Israeli army officer.
⁷
In the second episode, (first broadcast on December 20, 2004), the audience is informed that the president of Israel “is being kept alive by organs stolen from Palestinian children."
⁸
In an interview, the producer of the series stated that “Zionists” kidnap “children only one or two years old” raise them to teenagers on “a white ship sailing the oceans . . . under constant physical monitoring and supervision” so that they (the Israelis) can steal “the heart, the kidneys, and their other organs. . . . This story is a collection of facts. As I mentioned, we conducted research and reached conclusions, and we have turned them into this film to make the world aware of what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians."
⁹
Did this fellow get a peek at the screenplay for the movie
The Island,
in which people are raised for spare body parts, or did he just catch a preview of coming attractions? As Goebbels said: “If you repeat a lie long enough it becomes truth.” That’s
taqiyya
at its best. Or worst, depending on your moral compass.

Less than a week after the broadcast of the first episode of
Zhara’s Blue Eyes,
Saudi Arabia produced a variation on this ugly lie and applied it to the United States. On December 18, 2004, the Saudi Arabian government daily newspaper
Al Watan
published an article which accused the United States of stealing eyes and other organs from dead and wounded Iraqis. According to this official Saudi newspaper, “[a] secret team of American physicians follows the troops during their attacks ... to ensure quick operations for extracting some organs and transferring them to private operations rooms before they are transported to America for sale. . . . These teams offer $40 for every usable kidney and
$25
for an eye."
¹⁰
This story was immediately picked up and repeated in government-controlled newspapers in Iran and Syria.
¹¹

Now for some real award-winning
taqiyya.
This is about both Israel’s and the United States' responsibility for the 9/11 terror attacks. According to numerous Arab government officials and “journalists,” the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated and perpetrated by Israel, the Mossad, the Jews, the international Zionist conspiracy, the United States military, the CIA, the FBI, conservative Christians, a conspiracy headed by President George W. Bush and then-secretary of state Colin Powell,
¹²
and/or the “World Council of Churches, which was enacting the Vatican’s plan to eradicate Islam and Christianize the world."
¹³
Choose your own cast of conspirators. This insanity is repeated at the highest levels of Arab governments
¹⁴
more than four years after 9/11, even after Osama bin Laden acknowledged that al Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
¹⁵

Why would anyone spread and believe such crazy, ugly lies? Because they want to be America’s friends? Because they are willing to live in peace with Israel (if only Israel would withdraw to the 1967 border)? No, they spread and believe these atrocious lies in order to perpetuate hate and to justify the real terrorist atrocities that they themselves commit in their jihad against America and Israel. Israel has been on the front line of the war against international terrorists since before the Arab-Israeli conflict became one of the fronts in the worldwide jihad of radical Islam. In order to understand more clearly the direct connection between the terror war against Israel and the terror war against the United States, it is necessary to understand how the Arab-Israeli conflict began, and how it evolved.

Many scholars believe the Arab-Israeli conflict did not start out as a war between religions, but as a territorial dispute between two competing groups—Jews and Arabs—with
nationalist
claims and aspirations, and that religion was one of the characteristics that identified the competing nationalist groups. I will agree that that is what it might look like on the surface. But for these two particular groups whose religion, at least for the Muslims, is a significant daily part of their lives, it is hard to believe that religious beliefs do not influence their thinking and aspirations. All you have to do is read a few scriptures from the Koran about the Jews and hear the holy book recited weekly in every mosque and you’ll begin to understand where this resentment is coming from, regardless of what country this hate verbiage is coming out of. The major difference between the religions is that Judaism does not aspire to convert the world as Islam does. Jews can live within the context of a different society without seeking converts. Jews do not go to temple every Friday and read that God’s will is victory over all Muslims. They do not read that all Muslims are apes and pigs because they are cursed by Allah, which is what Muslims teach about Jews in their mosques. Muslims are out to convert everyone. Once they have the upper hand, they want to run the whole show and subject everyone to their own rules.

Growing up in the Middle East, I came to find out that Arab children are taught hatred of the Jews from their mother’s milk. From a young age, Arab children are constantly bombarded with stories and information presenting Jews as barbaric, conniving, manipulative, warmongering people. Meanwhile, Jews teach their children patience, humility, service, tolerance, understanding of others, and charity to all. They call it
tikkun olam,
"to repair the world."

The Arab-Israeli conflict has remained intractable because the Arab world refuses to accept the right of a Jewish state to exist autonomously in the middle of the Muslim Middle East. At first this refusal was based on what appeared to be pan-Arab nationalism, and then on Palestinian nationalism. There is a lot of bluster, pride, and honor among Arabs, which supports the nationalism angle. But as a Lebanese Christian looking at it from ground level and willing to blow the whistle on the hatred that Arabs harbor and teach their children against Jews, I can tell you that religious hatred, humiliation, and resentment are the driving factor behind the Israeli-Arab conflict. As a Christian who was raised in a country where people were shot at checkpoints because their ID card said “Christian,” I see it differently. I think that with the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and especially after the rise of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) during the 1987 intifada, the world is seeing the true reason for the Arab world’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist: radical Islamic supremacism. It has come to the surface, overshadowing the nationalist rationale and moving on, seeking bigger game in the West.

Israel has become one of the most innovative and technologically advanced countries, contributing to the world’s improvement in fields from medicine to communications. It is a successful, modern, educated, Western-thinking society in the midst of a sea of Arabic failure, corruption, backwardness, and ignorance. Israel’s success in turning a desolate desert land into an oasis blossoming with Western culture and wealth irks its failing neighbors. It is in contrast to everything they are not and cannot be because of their culture, values, and religion, which suffocate the individual and drown out human rights.

Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees per capita in the world, while most of the Arabic world still wallows in ignorance. About one-third of Arab men and half of Arab women are illiterate.
¹⁶
This simple fact about Israel is a reflection of the society and its hunger for education and growth and has nothing to do with America’s financial support. Money doesn’t buy brains or a desire to learn and be informed. Israel has the highest average living standard in the Middle East. Its $100 billion economy is larger than all of its immediate neighbors combined despite the fact that it is in a constant state of war trying to defend itself and doesn’t have a drop of crude oil to sell.

Israel has more than three thousand high-tech companies and start-ups, giving it the highest concentration of high-tech companies in the world apart from Silicon Valley. Voice-mail technology, the first PC antivirus software, and the cell phone were developed by Motorola, which has its largest development center in Israel. Four young Israelis developed the technology for AOL Instant Messenger.

What have the Arabs contributed to the world other than suicide bombing and terrorism? Where is their contribution to science, medicine, technology? If Israel did not exist, the Arabs would have to invent something like it to blame their failures on. It is their fundamental ways of thinking and own culture that hold them back, not the Jews.

In a region that shuns outsiders and other religions, Israel stands out like America, a free society, a melting pot of people who came from all around the world and brought their rich cultures with them. Israel is one of the most multiracial and multicultural countries in the world. More than a hundred different countries are represented in its population of 6 million. Consider how the Israeli government spent tens of millions of dollars airlifting more than forty thousand black Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1984 and 1991. Since 2001 Israel has reached out to help others, taking in non-Jewish refugees from Lebanon, the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, Liberia, and Congo, and even Bosnian Muslims. How many such refugees have the twenty-two states in the Arab League taken in? The Arab world won’t even give Palestinian refugees citizenship in their host countries. Remember, Jews can’t live in the neighboring Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But Arabs are living as citizens in Israel. What does that tell you about their respect for other cultures?

Over 1 million Arabs are full Israeli citizens. An Arab sits on the Supreme Court of Israel. There are Arab political parties expressing views inimical to the State of Israel sitting in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Women are equal partners in Israel and have complete human rights, as do gays and minorities. Show me an Arab nation with a Jew in its government. Show me an Arab country with half as many Jewish citizens as Israel has Arab citizens. Show me freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and human rights in any Arabic country in the Middle East the way they exist and are practiced in Israel. It is those same freedoms that the Muslims resent as a threat to Islam and that they are fighting against, be it in Israel, Europe, or the United States.

Regardless of their hatred and disapproval of Israel’s existence in the Middle East and their desire to seek its destruction, Israel has a historical, legal, and moral right to exist as a Jewish state. Let me crunch a lot of history, laws, and deal making by world powers into a few paragraphs.

According to the Arab-Palestinian-Muslim narrative, Israel is an alien colony, recently planted in the Arab world by American and European imperialism. This narrative recognizes no history prior to the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880s, and emphatically denies any ancient historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. This is the central lie, the
mega-taqiyya,
offered to justify uncompromising opposition to Jewish national rights. It’s almost as if they honestly expect people to think the word “Israel” was invented in modern times. The alarming truth is that their seemingly successful revision of history has taken hold in some minds.

The truth is carved in Egyptian stone. According to a well-known hieroglyphic inscription, the tribes of Israel were a significant, established presence in Canaan no later than 1212 BC.
¹⁷
There is a vast body of archaeological evidence that demonstrates the ancient Israelite/Jewish presence in Israel/Judea as far back as 925 BC.
¹⁸
This historical presence is verified in the ancient records of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim empires. The Arab conquest did not occur until AD 638. An exercise in elementary arithmetic reveals that the Jewish people were there
eighteen and one-half centuries
before the arrival of the Arabs. Despite being conquered many times, the Jewish people have had a constant, uninterrupted presence in the land of Israel for over thirty centuries.
¹⁹
The Arabs and Islam have been there less than fourteen centuries.
²⁰
It has conveniently been forgotten that the Jews and Christians were there first.