RUTHFULLY YOURS

At a time when many classical musicians are scrambling to book trendy alternative venues (mostly bars and clubs), the Israeli mandolin virtuoso Avi Avital is doing exactly the opposite—taking his folk instrument to concert halls around the world to perform with musicians more typically at home in such places.

Last September, Mr. Avital, age 38 and based in Berlin, made his debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performing Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” for an audience of around 10,000 at the Hollywood Bowl. In December, he appeared with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, performing both a concerto he commissioned from Avner Dorman in 2006 and one by Vivaldi. Later that month, he joined the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for two concerts of Baroque music at Alice Tully Hall in New York.

On Thursday, he and the harpsichordist Kenneth Weiss perform a nearly all-Baroque program at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, right before Mr. Avital and the Dover Quartet resume a tour that sandwiches three appearances on the West Coast between dates in Toronto on Saturday and Vancouver on Feb. 19. The programs include arrangements of six miniatures by the Georgian composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze, a favorite of Mr. Avital’s, and a 23-minute piece from 2013 written for mandolin and string quartet by David Bruce, which Mr. Avital and the Dover plan to record. In addition, Mr. Avital will perform a transcription of the Chaconne from Bach’s Second Partita for Solo Violin.

Mr. Avital first gained wide attention in 2012, when Deutsche Grammophon, with whom he now has an exclusive contract, released an album of Bach transcriptions he produced himself. His arrangement there of Bach’s First Violin Concerto makes a compelling case for his instrument’s ability to lend welcome new textures to familiar music without compromising the score’s integrity. That principle received ideal expression on his second album: the aptly titled “Between Worlds,” a gratifying compendium of folk-inflected music by composers as diverse as Béla Bartók, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Manuel de Falla, Astor Piazzolla and Ernest Bloch. His third and most recent CD, an all-Vivaldi record, returned him to the classical mainstream, albeit in music largely adapted for his instrument—the fecund composer having written just two works expressly for mandolin. (Mr. Avital’s next album, “Avital Meets Avital,” arriving this spring, pivots in another direction, pairing him with the jazz bassist and composer Omer Avital, no relation, in music that pays homage to their shared Moroccan heritage.)

On the face of it, the anti-normalization campaign appears driven by political motivations. However, it turns out that there is also a powerful Islamic angle to this campaign of hate, which is aimed at delegitimizing Israel and demonizing Jews.

The Palestinian anti-normalization “enforcers” do their utmost to conceal the Islamic aspect of their campaign. They are not eager for the world to know that Islam supplies much of the ideology and justification for their anti-Israel activities.

Fatwas (Islamic religious decrees) and statements issued by leading Muslim scholars and clerics have long warned Muslims against normalization with the “Zionist entity.” Such normalization, they have made it clear, is considered an “unforgivable crime.” The authors of these hate messages are not opposed to normalization with Israel because of settlements or house demolitions, but rather because they believe Jews have no rights at all to any of the land.

In 1989, more than 60 eminent Muslim scholars from 18 countries ruled that it was forbidden for Muslims to give up any part of Palestine.

The vicious campaigns to boycott Israel and Jews, while political in dress, are in fact deeply rooted in Islamic ideology.

These campaigns are patently not a legitimate protest. They are not even part of an effort to boycott Israeli products or politicians and academics. The real goal of the campaigns is revealed in the words of the Muslim leaders: that Jews have no rights whatsoever to the land, and must be targeted through jihad as infidels and enemies of all Muslims and Arabs

Settlements, checkpoints and fences are irrelevant; Muslim scholars want Jews off what they define as sacred Muslim land. Supporters of BDS and the anti-normalization movement would do well to consider this fact. Failing to do so is tantamount to aiding and abetting Muslims to destroy Israel, and kill as many Jews as possible in the process.

Muslim scholars have feverishly citing chapter and verse from the Quran and the hadith, the words of the Prophet Mohammed, in their efforts to encourage Arabs and Muslims to avoid normalization with Jews.

At the heart of its call for peace and justice, however, lies a profound imbalance. We might say that Ionians, like Quakers and many other Christian groups, are naïve innocents let loose in the real world. There is a role for idealists in limited situations. But problems arise when such do-gooders do not properly understand what lies behind mutual hatred, enduring antagonism between people, and conflicts in the name of one cause or another. And here, the Iona Community falls down spectacularly.

Kairos is built on an Islamic, not a Christian narrative. Under Islamic law, territory once conquered by Muslim armies becomes sacrosanct and can never be forfeited to non-believers. If non-Muslims take control of formerly Muslim land (for example, Spain or Portugal), then Muslims are bound to reconquer it through renewed military action.

Kairos, significantly, does not refer to the fact that Jews lived in and ruled in the region long before the Arab conquests.

When Christians choose to ignore the rights of Jews, they deny their own origins in the land. Jesus was a Jew. The first Christian community was made up of Jews who adhered to Jewish law. All Christian churches recognize the Jewish Bible as part of their own scriptural, and the New Testament is a clear record of Jewish existence in the first Christian century.

There never was a “historic Palestine”, and it is disturbing to find a Christian community buying into the modern Islamic narrative. and the “Palestinian” inhabitants of the Mandate are a combination of the descendants of the 7th-century Arab invaders.

In Israel, Jewish, Arab, Christian, Druze and other citizens, regardless of race or religion or any other circumstance, have exactly the same rights under law to form political parties, serve in parliament, seek employment. Why does the Iona Community single Israel out?

Why is the Iona Community seemingly uninterested in the fate of their fellow Christians in the Palestinian territories yet determined to accuse Israel of enormities, when in fact, Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the Christian population, instead of diminishing, has grown since the establishment of the state?

Why, then, does the Iona Community join forces, not with the people who support Christians but with Palestinian Muslims who seek to destroy Israel and who will, in due course, treat the Christians as badly as they are treated in other Arab Muslim states?

The Israelis have never stalled in the peace process: they have made offers and the Palestinians have turned them all down. There has never been peace because Israel has no partners for peace. That a so-called Christian organization should misrepresent history in this way is an appalling dereliction of truth and honesty on its part.

When will the Iona Community come to terms with its far-left bias, its anti-Semitism, its own reputation, and the harm it is doing to any real hope in the Holy Land for peace?

The Iona Community is a famous ecumenical Christian community with three centers in Scotland, two on the island of Iona in the beautiful Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland and another on the nearby Isle of Mull. But the community is also a far-flung body, with members across the globe. These include people from many denominations, from Presbyterians and Anglicans to Lutherans, Roman Catholics and Quakers, not forgetting members who do not belong to any church.

1. Saudi columnist Siham Al-Qahtani: Jews should no longer collectively be blamed for all disasters throughout history
2. “No Jewish plot against Arabs, without Arab knowledge”
3. Muhammad Al-Sheikh: Only political ignoramuses advocate armed resistance; the two-state solution is the only feasible option
4. Al-Sheikh criticized by Al-Jazeera presenter
5. Prominent Saudi Journalist: West Jerusalem is part of Israel; moving the U.S. embassy there as part of a peace agreement could herald the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
6. Kuwaiti journalist: I support relocating the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem
7. Saudi Cleric Awadh Al-Qarni: 9/11 was “fabricated”
8. Assad welcome in London, Trump not?

In April 2016, a video by Hamas was exposed showing “hysterical children in the company of exorcising preachers. It is a humiliating and invasive rite practiced at the Al-Nil School in Gaza City.” It is, however, hardly a surprise for people who have followed this never-ending child abuse, as this video exhorts the children to become “warriors” in the jihad or holy war against Israel and the infidels.

These children are taught to hate. Yet, when the French historian of Moroccan heritage, George Bensoussan, stated that “[i]t is a shame to deny this taboo, namely that in the Arab families in France, and everyone knows it but nobody wants to say it, anti-Semitism is sucked with mother’s milk” he was put on trial for saying this.”

As Khaled Abu Toameh explains “[Palestinian] children do not dream about becoming doctors, pilots or engineers; an entire generation of Palestinians, particularly those in the Gaza Strip, has been raised on the glorification of suicide bombers and anyone who kills a Jew.”

In fact, “what is happening to the Palestinian people, who have forever been led by leaders who care nothing for their well-being, is a tragedy of national proportions.” And, of course, the first victims are the children.

Since 1996, the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), under the direction of Itamar Marcus, has exposed the schoolbooks and propaganda material used to brainwash Palestinian children. In 2015 a report issued by PMW highlighted the Palestinian Authority’s teaching its children to “reject Israel’s right to exist, encourag[ing] them to view Jews as evil and direct[ing] them to embrace terrorist murderers as role models. This report exposes a world of demonization, incitement and hate that Palestinian children are urged to adopt.”

When shown the hateful material emanating from the PA, then Senator Hillary Clinton “condemned the PA’s messages to children and stated that the official PA TV broadcasts were ‘a clear example of child abuse.'” In fact, the textbooks “do not give Palestinian children an education; they give them an indoctrination. When viewed . . . in combination with other media that these children are exposed to, we see a larger picture that is disturbing… because it basically profoundly poisons the minds of these children.”

Common themes running through the hate-filled messages include:

Israel has no right to exist.
Israel will disappear and be replaced by Palestine.
Violence — “armed struggle” — is legitimate to fight Israel.
Muslims must fight an eternal Islamic war against Israel.
Killers of Israelis are heroes and role models.
Martyrdom or death for Allah is the utmost honor.
Jews are “monkeys and pigs.”
Jews are “enemies of Allah.”
Jews are the “most evil of creations.”