Caroline Glick wrote a column this month to explain what she calls “Israeli indifference to democratic currents in Arab societies” — an apparent paradox, it seems, to American naifs who believe that a functioning ballot box is all a society needs to join the fraternity of enlightened nations where individual rights are protected in the enshrinement of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the blessed like. But what if there are masses who want, yearn and are animated by something entirely different, something antithetical to life as we know it, liberty as we enjoy it, and the pursuit of happiness in accordance with individual desire?
Glick writes:
The fact is that Israeli indifference to democratic currents in Arab societies is not due to provincialism. Israelis are indifferent because we realize that whether under authoritarian rule or democracy, anti-Semitism is the unifying sentiment of the Arab world. Fractured along socioeconomic, tribal, religious, political, ethnic and other lines, the glue that binds Arab societies is hatred of Jews.
Let’s become simultaneously broader and more specific: Anti-Semitism is the unifying sentiment, the glue that binds the Islamic world. Don’t take my word for it. But try making your way even part way through Andrew Bostom’s compendium, The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, and coming to any other conclusion.
I was thinking about this in light of a key detail in the heinous attack on CBS’s Lara Logan, the subject of this week’s upcoming column. “Jew! Jew!” yelled the attacking throng. The detail hangs like a sore thumb in the context of the see-no-anti-Semitism MSM reporting of the Tahrir protests. But as John Rosenthal has amply catalogued at Pajamas Media, anti-Semitic iconography was widely evident on the streets of Cairo. And widely ignored.
Now we are venturing into dark psychological territory (in many ways, is the subject of the book I am currently working on, The Hollow Center). Quoting again from Caroline Glick, I want to illustrate where such self-censorship on the part on non-Islamic populations leads — to dhimmitude.
Glick writes:
In the midst of Tunisia’s revolution last month, the Jewish Agency mobilized to evacuate any members of the country’s Jewish community who wished to leave. Until the end of French colonial rule in 1956, Tunisia’s Jewish community numbered 100,000 members. But like for all Jewish communities in the Arab world, the advent of Arab nationalism in the mid-20th century forced the overwhelming majority of Tunisia’s Jews to leave the country.
Arab “nationalism” = ethnic cleansing. Now Arab “democracy” = mortal threat to Jewish micro-minority. I think we need to change the word “Arab” to “Islamic” (and fast) to understand the doctrinal basis for all of this.
Today, with between 1,500 and 3,000 members, Tunisia’s tiny Jewish community is among the largest in the Arab world. So far, six families have left for Israel. Many more may follow.
Equal parts pathetic and outrageous.
Two weeks ago, Daniel Cohen from Tunis’s Jewish community told Haaretz, “If the situation continues as it is now, we will definitely have to leave or immigrate to Israel.”Since then, Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahda, has returned to Tunisia after 22 years living in exile in London. He was sentenced to life in prison in absentia on terrorism charges by the regime of ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
Then on Monday night, unidentified assailants set fire to a synagogue in the town of Ghabes and burned the Torah scrolls. In an interview with AFP, Trabelsi Perez, president of the Ghriba synagogue, said the crime was made all the more shocking by the fact that it occurred as police were stationed close by.
Monopoly of evil. But here’s the point
The day after the attack, Roger Bismuth, president of Tunisia’s Jewish community, disputed the view that the scorching of Torah scrolls had anything to do with anti-Semitism.
To the uniniated, this is a brain-tangler. Kenneth Levin breaks down the psychological mindset in The Oslo Syndrome; Bat Ye’or, of course, in everything she has ever written on dhimmitude. It is the condition of a conquered people, a diminished people, a people beaten by fear and hopelessness. An Islamic subject-people. The dhimmi.
Poor Roger Bismuth knows the drill all too well:
[Bismuth,] the man responsible for representing Tunisia’s Jewish community before the evolving new regime, told The Jerusalem Post that the attack was the fault of the Jews themselves, “because they left [the synagogue] open…
“This is not an attack on the Jewish community.”
It never is. Notice the absence of Islam as a factor. Pitiful.
But how different is this, psychologically speaking, from what Western media and elites do every single day?
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