RUTHFULLY YOURS

“We must revolutionize our religion,” — Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, December, 2014.

“A Muslim is to hate what Allah hates and love what Allah loves. Allah hates the Kafir, therefore, a Muslim is to act accordingly.” — Dr. Bill Warner, “Sharia Law for Non-Muslims,” a publication of the Center for the Study of Political Islam.

“The point is not that these things are written in Islamic scripture, but that people still live by them.” — Bruce Bawer, author.

On April 21, the French daily Le Parisien published a “Manifesto against the new anti-Semitism,” written by Philippe Val, a co-founder and former director of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the target of the 2015 terrorist attack that left 12 employees dead.

The declaration — signed by more than 250 prominent French intellectuals, artists and politicians, among them former President Nicolas Sarkozy – calls on Islamic theologians to remove the verses of the Quran that call for the killing and punishment of Jews, Christians and Muslim non-believers.

The manifesto reads, in part:

“Anti-Semitism is not the business of the Jews. It’s the business of all of us. The French, who have demonstrated their democratic maturity after each Islamist attack, are living through a tragic paradox. Their country has become the arena for murderous anti-Semitism.

“We demand that the fight against this democratic failure that is anti-Semitism becomes a national cause before it’s too late. Before France is no longer France.

Palestinian human rights organizations such as Al-Mezan, along with their many supporters abroad and even within a substantial part of the Jewish diaspora, have turned the very concept of human rights on its head.

Although genuine and widely praised for their advocacy of human rights internationally, even Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation for Human Rights and the humanitarian relief body Oxfam International have reputations of extreme bias against Israel.

What are any of these people doing actually to help the Palestinians — such as creating jobs, assuring good governance, establishing schools, hospitals, health care and dental clinics, safeguarding legal standards, stopping the arrests of journalists or others who dare to criticize the current governments and so on? Rather, the issues they address seem more a rationalization to destroy Israel.

We have seen in Part One of this article how far Western standards of human rights differ from those guaranteed by Islam. One obvious outcome of this disparity is, of course, that citizens of Muslim countries are accorded fewer rights than their counterparts in liberal democracies. Thus, women, girls, gays, members of religious minorities, “blasphemers”, bloggers (notably in Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia) reformers and others may be subjected to partial or total deprival of what the rest of the world considers to be unquestionable or God-given rights. Women may be forced to dress in all-encompassing clothing or hijabs. Minorities may be imprisoned or killed. Women even alleged to have committed adultery – but often just the victims of rape – may be flogged or else stoned to death. LGBT individuals may imprisoned or killed, while bloggers, reformist intellectuals, moderate Qur’an interpreters face flogging and murder by mobs.

How committed is the German government to protecting its Jewish citizens?

Last month’s anti-Semitic beating in Berlin of a yarmulke-wearing, 21-year-old Arab-Israeli student who was testing for himself whether hatred of Jews was rising in Germany prompts questions. Namely, 75 years after the Holocaust, are Jews safe in Deutschland, and how committed is the German government to protecting its Jewish citizens?

When Hitler rose to power in 1933, 500,000 Jews lived in Germany. Today, only 100,000 reside there, and Jewish leaders have warned Jews not to wear kippot to avoid being attacked. Felix Klein, recently appointed by Chancellor Angela Merkel to deal with the surge in anti-Semitism, admits that “Germany has a problem with hatred of Jews.” He adds that regardless of the refugee influx, “around 20% of Germans hold anti-Semitic views, a statistic that has remained stable for years and has never gone.”

Germany’s modern-day incarnation of anti-Semitism exists primarily, but not exclusively, in the demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state. German organizations support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) of Israel despite official statements that condemn BDS as Jew-hatred. In November, NGO Monitor, a watchdog organization that analyzes and reports on NGO activities, discovered that the German government was donating millions of euros to groups promoting BDS, including some groups with ties to a designated terrorist group, the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Meanwhile, at the same time, the German organizations were providing generous entitlements to Muslim refugees, even though the refugees include ISIS-supporters and 13% of them believe that suicide bombings are justified, according to a Pew Research poll.