RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last Friday, during a closed-door meeting with a room of influential world leaders, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry opined that if Israel failed to accept his latest “peace formulation,” the country risked becoming an “apartheid state with second-class citizens.”

This statement was redolent with Kerry’s trademark mental and moral cretinism. For over a decade, the disputed territories in Gaza and Judea-Samaria under Fatah, and/or Hamas control have been under a real, not a theoretical system of Islamic Sharia-based religious apartheid.

After more than thirteen centuries of almost uninterrupted jihad in historical Palestine, it is not surprising that a finalized constitution proposed for a Palestinian Arab state declared all aspects of Palestinian state law to be subservient to the Sharia, in harmony with the popular will (i.e., 79.9 percent of Palestinians want the PA to follow the Sharia—Islamic religious law— including 68.6 percent who wanted the Sharia as the exclusive code of law, according to data published by the Palestinian Center for Research and Cultural Dialogue, March 3, 2005). Moreover, contemporary Palestinian Authority religious intelligentsia openly support restoration of the oppressive system of dhimmitude within a Muslim-dominated Israel as well.

During a Friday sermon broadcasted live on June 6, 2001 on PA TV, from the Sheik ‘Ijlin Mosque in Gaza, Palestinian Authority employee Sheik Muhammad Ibrahim Al-Madhi reiterated these sentiments with regard to Jews:

We welcome, as we did in the past, any Jew who wants to live in this land as a Dhimmi, just as the Jews have lived in our countries, as Dhimmis, and have earned appreciation, and some of them have even reached the positions of counselor or minister here and there. We welcome the Jews to live as Dhimmis, but the rule in this land and in all the Muslim countries must be the rule of Allah.

An assessment of such anachronistic, discriminatory views was provided by the Catholic archbishop of the Galilee, Butrus Al- Mu’alem, who, in a June 1999 statement, dismissed the notion of modern dhimmis submitting to Muslims:

It is strange to me that there remains such backwardness in our society; while humans have already reached space, the stars, and the moon . . . there are still those who amuse themselves with fossilized notions.

Eleven years ago (i.e., in 2003, prior to Hamas’ electoral victory in 2006), during a briefing for a visiting United States congressional delegation, then Vatican representative to Israel, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, informed US lawmakers that the Palestinian Authority’s new approved state constitution, funded by the US Agency for International Development, provided no juridical status for any religion other than Islam in the emerging Palestinian Arab entity. The Papal Nuncio warned, in addition, that the Palestinian Authority (PA) had adopted Sharia as the overarching guiding principle of their legal code, thus mandating the absolute supremacy of Muslims over non-Muslims as a matter of law. (Archbishop Sambi also initiated a study of the new PA textbooks, which the Vatican deemed to be brazenly Antisemitic.)

The Hamas contingent at the municipal council of Bethlehem confirmed (as reported by Karby Legget in the December 23, 2005, edition of the Wall Street Journal, p. A1) the organizations plan to reinstitute the humiliating jizya, and such policies, even their threatened implementation, will likely exacerbate the ongoing Christian exodus from Arab-controlled Judea/Samaria, especially Bethlehem. An early April 2006 Reuters report indicated that one thousand Christians per year were leaving these areas due to Muslim depredations, including assaults on Christians, uprooting their olive trees, and scrawling graffiti that depicts nuns being raped. After Hamas issued a warning to the YMCA of Qalqilya to close its offices and leave town, as reported on April 21, 2006, a Qalqilya Christian leader lamented:

The face of the new Hamas government is coming to the forefront now that they finally took over and have a lot more confidence. They want to create a territory free of Christians and Jews.

Just over three weeks ago (April 8, 2014) speaking at Uppsala University, a remarkably intrepid 26 year old Palestinian woman, Christy Anastas gave a forthright lecture (video here) “update” about the ongoing human rights abuses (predictably) engendered by this Sharia-based system of “law” adopted by Fatah-Hamas, including:

• The forced payment of the Koranic poll-tax (per verse 9:29), or jizya (i.e., from the etymology of the word, per Edward Lane, the great 19^th century Arabic-English lexicographer, “the tax paid in lieu of being slain”). Anastas explains, “if you are a non-Muslim, a Jew or a Christian, you have to pay protection money” (to those she aptly terms, “mafia”)…”My uncle had to pay this protection money.” Her uncle stopped making his jizya payments, whereupon he was accused of being a “traitor,” imprisoned, and then executed, right in front of his own home.

• The grotesque violations of women’s rights (Anastas proclaims, “women don’t have rights there [in Fatah-Hamas controlled areas];” “women are treated as possessions there”), resulting from application of the Sharia, including legally sanctioned polygamy and honor killings.

• The sheer absence of freedom of speech—another hallmark of the Sharia: “Israel doesn’t threaten to kill us (Christians) for sharing our views, Palestinians do!”

John Kerry should have viewed Christy Anastas’ lecture before belching forth his latest calumny. But I doubt it would have chastened him.