ROGER KIMBALL: THE LINE OF THE DAY
http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/01/26/the-line-of-the-day-from-andrew-mccarthy/
I think Andrew McCarthy wins the line of the day contest this morning with the opening of his National Review essay “Apes, Pigs, and F-16s [1].” The F16s, as anyone following the news knows, are the advanced U.S. fighter jets that we’re crating up and sending to our good friend Mohammed Morsi, the president of Egypt and Muslim Brotherhood hater of America and Jews.
Does that strike you as “extreme”? Does it sound “impolitic”? Yet another instance of Kimball’s errant right-wingery? Forget I said it then. Let’s go straight to the horse’s mouth, i.e., to President Morsi’s description of Israelis [2] — “Zionists” — as “blood-suckers,” “warmongers,” the “descendants of apes and pigs.”
As Andy points out, the menagerie is actually quite large: “When Mohamed Morsi dehumanizes [2] Jews as ‘the descendants of apes and pigs,’ there’s an elephant in the room.”
The elephant in question is drawn from that bestiary know as the Koran, speifically Sura 5:60, where we read that
Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil — these are many times worse in rank, and far more astray from the even Path!
(Andrew Bostom has assembled a trove of other examples of how the religion of peace views Jews here: “‘In Context’: Muhammad Morsi’s (Islamically Correct) Jew-Hatred [3].”) The point, as Andy McCarthy notes, is that
Contrary to the fairy tale weaved by apologists for Islamists on both sides of America’s political aisle, Jew hatred is not a pathogen insidiously injected into Islam by the Nazis. . . . Nor did the ummah come by it through exposure to other strains of anti-Semitism that blight the history of Christendom. Jew hatred is ingrained in Islamic doctrine. Consequently, despite the efforts of enlightened Muslim reformers, Jew hatred is — and will remain — a pillar of Islamist ideology.
And it’s not only Jews, of course. As Lela Gilbert points out in her new book Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner [4], Muslims are equal-opportunity haters. Hence the slogan “Saturday people, Sunday People,” a popular Islamic saying whose fuller version is: “First we eliminate the Saturday people (i.e., the Jews), then we eliminate the Sunday people (yep, you guessed it).”
But back to the elephant. Back in the evil Mubarak days — back, that is to say, when Egypt was an ally of the U.S. and a conspicuous guarantor of Israel’s security — we had a deal to get some tanks and planes to Egypt. As Samuel Goldwyn put it, we’ve passed a lot of water under the bridge since then, but no matter: the Abrams tanks and F16 fighters are still going to Cairo. Why? The result of what is mis-characterized by the Left (but not only the Left, alas) as the “democratization” of various Middle Eastern Islamic regimes has been a rapid rise in Islamic triumphalism and a corresponding rise in vicious intolerance and the more barbaric aspects of Islamic law, aka Sharia. “The answer to this challenge,” as Andy McCarthy points out, “is to take the Islamists head-on. It is to show them for what they truly are: enemies of civil rights, totalitarian tormentors of women and non-Muslims.” But we have eschewed that answer and have decided instead on the path of accommodation, arming our enemies with advanced American weaponry. It’s worthy of a fresh entry in Kipling’s Copybook Headings [5]:
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace,
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
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