Sunday 15 February 2015

Why do Muslims keep murdering Jews?

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As everyone knows, an attempt to replicate the Charlie Hebdo murders took place in Copenhagen yesterday, a meeting with the cartoonist who drew Muhammad as a dog was attacked and one person murdered. A security guard died in a separate attack at a nearby synagogue.

Is it stupid to ask why Muslim fanatics keep murdering Jews? Is it about Palestine? If so, why not kill Indians because of Kashmir? Or Serbs because of Bosnia?

A friend of mine, who is a member of the Liberal Democrat Party in England and holds achingly politically correct views on everything, especially the Middle East, shocked me a couple of days ago. He said he assumed Israelis would not find employment in Azerbaijan because it is a Muslim country. I wondered whether, as sometimes happens, I had missed something. And even odder, my friend, like most British people, considers racism a sin of sins and islamophobia another sin of sins. I wonder how he squares these circles. I should ask him except that I know I wouldn't get a clear or useful answer.


By the way, I imagine Azerbaijan and other ex-Soviet Muslim countries are not anti-Jewish, or no more so than anywhere else in the former USSR, but that's not what I want to write about.

In the murder spree in Paris last month a kosher supermarket was attacked. In May last year a Muslim gunman opened fire at the Jewish museum in Brussels, killing four Jews. 
In the 2008 terrorist attacks in Bombay the terrorists found the one small, obscure synagogue in the mega-city, where they tortured and murdered the rabbi and others. And so on and so on.

Mehdi Hasan, a prominent British Muslim left-wing journalist, wrote in 2013:

‘It pains me to have to admit this but anti-Semitism isn’t just tolerated in some sections of the British Muslim community; it’s routine and commonplace. Any Muslims reading this article – if they are honest with themselves – will know instantly what I am referring to. It’s our dirty little secret.’
Mehdi Hasan was congratulated by other journalists for his courage in writing that. Had someone from UKIP said it he would have been denounced. Had someone from EDL said it... oh my fur and whiskers!

One or two British Muslims I have known loathed Jews - one Bengali friend, when I pressed him hard, turned out to be Hitlerian on the subject - and I wish I had asked them why. I suspect they did not hugely esteem other white British people but they did not say so to me. One or two British Jews I have known returned the favour. But then they disliked all non-white immigrants and colour prejudice is a separate issue. I really do not understand this Muslim dislike of Jews. Can anyone explain? 

And why are people not asking this question? It's the elephant in the drawing room.

Whatever the explanation, what a hole we find ourselves in because of post-war mass migration into Europe, including the huge movements of people in the last fifteen years. The first law of holes is: when in one, stop digging. But few people seem to be saying this, either. It's another elephant in an increasingly crowded room.

The Arabs' huge anger is their great political strength in their conflict with Israel. Perhaps the anger is not just against Israel but against the modern world. This anger is shared by many Muslims who are not Arabs.  My best guess at why Muslim terrorists like to kill Jews is that Jews in Israel represent modernity, as they did in Europe in the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth.

46 comments:

  1. Why do Jews in the West keep pushing for more immigration?

    Why do Hewish elites in America keep pushing more wars in the middle east?

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    1. This does not explain why Muslims are killing Budhists in Thailand, Hindus in India, Catholics in the Phillipenes, Christians in Nigeria and Sudan, Hans in China, Copts in Egypt and Libya, French in Paris, Danish in Denmark, Americans in Fort Hood, TX.

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  2. have you read the Qur'an??

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  3. Answer obvious. Anti-Semitism undergirds both Islam & Christianity, Islam in historical quagmire & so lashes out violently

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    1. Christianity is utterly Jewish. Islam utterly Semitic too. But both are in crisis.

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    2. Both are in crisis - exactly. Thank you P.V.E.Wood. I do not claim to be an expert on the crisis in the MIddle East however, we must first recognize that these are 'cousins' fighting; if you go back far enough in history. Secondly, there is 'class warfare' going on in the world right now. Jews have an upper hand economically and historically, especially in France [Paris] Malians and Arabs have done the dirty work. They are the underdog economically and have not be on the 'inside' of power and money making in Europe. Whenever and wherever there is economic inequality there will be problems, i.e, the U. S. where Blacks do work, but are economically deprived due to a structured institutionalized racism. We must look past the obvious of 'different' religious beliefs and look deeper. Thank you. Renee Moore

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    3. I do not believe economic inequality causes problem necessarily. In 1920s England you had great economic inequality and a very cohesive deferential society. The class system made society cohesive rather than being decisive.

      Economic inequality always exists, except in an authoritarian system like Bolshevism and in fact even under Bolshevism it existed.

      I see no reason why Malians and Jews or any other groups of people should be economically equal. However where you have different racial or religious groups side by side problems usually occur.

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  4. "During the early seventh century, Medina was inhabited by two types of population: the Jews and the pagan Arabs. The Jews there had three principal clans – Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nazir, and Banu Qurayza. The Arab pagans had two tribes – Aws and Khazraj. At that time, the Jews there had the upper hand with their large settlement and huge property" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(Islam)#cite_note-Shibli1-14
    And they said, "Our hearts are wrapped." But, [in fact], Allah has cursed them for their disbelief, so little is it that they believe. http://quran.com/2 (Surah 2:88)
    The Jews rejected Mo as a false Prophet. Hence the diatribe against them in Surah 2 that lasts pretty much the whole Surah but v88 is key.

    Mo had issues. I expect like most Arabs he couldn't quite work out why the Jews are their moral, intellectual and technological superior (it's not difficult its called discipline allied to education). Even today a tiny nation of 8m people can produce more Nobel prize winners than the entire Islamic world of 2Bn. If that were true of my country I too would be somewhat ashamed and perhaps, if as badly educated, find an outlet in violence mandated by a 'religious' book.
    Unhappily for the Jews the Arabs outnumber them and are quick to violence. In the 8th Century with no external checks and balances this meant Muslims could and did happily rape rob and kill Jews, except the lucky ones who got Dhimmi status.
    Its not such easy pickings today and having been armed and given some support the Jews also show themselves superior in military affairs.
    It must be really galling for the almost 2Bn 'believers' that the only success they have in killing these disbelievers is to send people with mental and or psychotic illness into essentially civilian areas and murder some non combatants.
    Allah is indeed great. A great myth.

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    1. I always wanted to go to Trinity College, Cambridge but my headmaster advised me against it and I still regret it. Trinity men always point out that they have won more Nobel prizes (32 in fact) than France. The Arabs have produced six Nobel prize winners, of whom three were given the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to bring peace to the Middle East and one for campaigning for human rights in Yemen. (Romanians by contrast have won four and Magdalen College, Oxford nine.)

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  5. Of course it is about Palestine! As long as walls continue to be built, with settlements taking over more and more territory, and constant acts of violence on the Palestinian people, then the 'eye for eye' mentality will continue. Mary

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    1. Mary,
      I am not completely convinced. Why do they not kill Indians because of Kashmir? Or Chinese who come down with a heavy hand on their Muslims?
      This is a list of conflicts linked to religious differences. The overwhelming majority, tellingly, involve Muslims.

      http://www.religioustolerance.org/curr_war.htm

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    2. I can't see it as being entirely about Palestine. Maybe Muslims just hate the West and see the Jews as being responsible for the things they dislike most about the West. Or maybe it's their dislike of the US which they see as being Jewish-dominated (I'm not saying the US is Jewish-dominated but they may be how Muslims perceive it).

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  6. An interesting blog post by Douglas Murray makes the point

    "For the time being we are all meant to say how racist it would be to talk about immigration restrictions, and so countries like Sweden continue to commit a form of cultural suicide."

    http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/02/how-many-more-terror-attacks-until-we-have-a-serious-discussion-about-offending-religions/

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  7. dude, don't worry much, because for every Jew killed (not necessarily by Muslims) about 2,000 muslims die only in Gaza.

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    1. And how many Yazidis? But no Muslims march in protest about ISIS.

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    2. ISIS is designed by non Muslims to kill Muslims in the name of Islam. Read history before you read the news. It repeats itself.

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  8. because israel is on the arab peninusla (i.e. the 'heart' and of 'muslim territory').

    i think quite a lot of muslims kill hindus in india actually (and vice-versa)

    muslims in china don't get a lot of media attention

    not sure why muslims don't care seem to care about bosnia...maybe because it's a faraway country in europe.

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    1. 23 Arab countries is in the Jewish lands.

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  9. great churchill comments on bucharest life

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  10. There's a world of difference between Israel/Palestine & India/Kashmir. Don't get me started.
    But one obvious one is that the Israel issue involves Jerusalem, which is ALMOST as holy to the Muslims as the Jews.
    Religion f**** everything up, doesn't it?

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  11. Little was heard about how holy Jerusalem was to Muslims in the centuries when it slumbered as a backwater of the Ottoman Empire. It does come third after Mecca and Medina, apparently, but a very long way third indeed. Good religion is a very good thing indeed but bad religion is very bad, though not as bad as such atheist ideologies as Communism or as the kind of things that happened in the pagan Ancient World. Though I suppose paganism was a religion too. Homo homini lupus est.

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    1. The name pagan, or atheists, Christian, Jew, Muslim, doesn't make a person. As Mark Twain said it's the person's nature not their religion that makes that person good or bad.

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  12. The Islamic extremist tendency to eliminate Jewish people can be viewed as decadent and historically-unprecedented. Tolerance - even coexistence - was the rule during the period preceding the decline of the Ottoman Empire. With these incidents in Europe of late, we are dealing with partially-educated fringe representatives of a tiny minority of Muslims. Most Muslims that criticize Jews are more concerned about the status of Israel, not the rights of Jews to exist as a religious-ethnic entity, but the discourse has become entropic and has begun to conflate the two identities. This intolerance is mirrored in diametric antithesis by a recent wave of mindless racial elitism as proselytized by ethnocentric Likud/Shas politicians in Israel, which itself is a corruption of founding principles, as Israel was founded by secular socialist-Zionist atheists, by and large - ironically. Realize, the destruction of Jewish people is doctrinally-anathema according to the Qur'an, at core - all murder of the "faithful," those peacefully following the precedent of Moses and Abraham, is prohibited. Jews, Muslims and Christians alike have indulged in extreme ethnic cleansing sprees, with Christians responsible for most killings - and most victims, as is well-known, were "heretical" sectarians who espoused trivial Christological differences with Catholic orthodoxy, as it were. Mongols killed entirely due to political reasons, and to wield the advantage of terrorism, despite practicing and tolerating virtually ANY religious creed (Kublai Khan's mother was a Christian; local Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism was especially common among them, as was Nestorian Christianity, Manicheanism and Islam, with the majority of Mongol victims of genocidal massacres being Confucian, Buddhist, and Muslim - and most victims died along the Silk Road, and were affluent, such as in Transoxania and the Caucasus.

    This, of course, does not justify ANY abominable usurpation of the will of God. Due to anti-Roman sentiments, and motivated by centuries of oppression by the Constantinopolitan Christian Roman Empire, massacres against Christians and other non-Jewish/non-Zoroastrian groups were rampant as the Sassanian Persians occupied the Levant and Egypt during the late 6th and early 7th c. During the months preceding the First Jewish Revolt, Sicarii and Zealots murdered moderate Jews, Romans, Hellenized foreigners, and other perceived political-social enemies. These acts exacerbated the Roman destruction of Jerusalem.

    Unfortunately, collective punishment for these acts has become the rule, and is reiterated in current social malady in conservative Israeli society. Reverse racism is alive and well among formerly oppressed people. We find this also in gangland violence in the US, and - of course, most infamously, with the rise of the tragic self-parody that is the "Islamic State." Just don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. I have never met an unseemly Muslim of ANY ethnic origin, or a Jewish person I didn't get along with. I have, however, been the victim of violence on scores of occasions at the hands of groups of white, black, and Mexican thugs. Fortunately, none of them have killed me yet!

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    1. Gangland violence in the US is mostly internal, your "scores" of thug run-ins notwithstanding.

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  13. Hi Paul, I question the question. Muslims are not just murdering Jews. Just today 10 Coptic Christians have been beheaded in Libya with ten others seemingly awaiting a similar fate. The death of any 'infidel' is, it seems, to be welcomed, whether they be taxi drivers, journalists, Yasidis or Muslims from other sects – indeed I expect the greatest number of killings are Muslim on Muslim. It seems to me that at the core is deep and complete ignorance – an ignorance carefully nurtured by those in power.
    Non-Muslims – and Muslims with insight and the courage to speak out – must expose Islamic beliefs to the oxygen of publicity – to questioning, to debate. Questions to be asked – what exactly do Muslims believe ‘life after death’ to be? What do they understand by ‘martyrdom’. Do young Muslim men really believe that they will have 21/71? Virgins if they become martyrs? If so, what does that say about their relationships with and attitude to women? (I suspect most non-Muslims would run a mile at the thought of so many ‘virgins’). What are their attitudes to and beliefs about women and women’s role in the world? What are Muslim women’s beliefs about themselves and their roles? What are their attitudes/beliefs about tolerance, especially of other people’s beliefs? Is this religion so lacking in credibility that it is threatened by a few cartoons? Muslims, especially those in positions of influence in the community, rarely speak out about atrocities done in the name of Islam, why don’t they? Who was Mohammed? What was his life? What are his teachings? And so on……
    We in the UK must no longer tolerate practices that are unacceptable to us. We have refused to engage with these things for fear of being labelled racist and of upsetting Muslim communities.
    The grooming and sexual abuse of non-Muslim vulnerable girls – no doubt caused by Muslim men’s distorted view of women’s place in the world and the restrictions imposed on what others would consider to be normal relationships between men and women within the Muslim community.
    Female genital mutilation which has been illegal in the UK for several decades and yet according to figures released by the NHS, a staggering 137,000 women in the UK have been mutilated in this way. There has yet to be a successful prosecution.
    The abortion of female foetuses – it is thought that 10% of abortions are carried about because the foetus is female. Forced marriages. The segregation of male and female students. The head to toe covering of women – what’s all that about? And so on…
    Love n hugs Cuz G

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  14. Both are guilty of killings innocents...the Zionest after WWII started pushing Palestinians off the land...claiming God gave the land to them, Christians, and Jews have created the terrorists we see today...beheading are a direct result of Israel and America's war on Arabs...

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    1. Plenty of people lost territory after WWII. They are a lot less vengeful and obsessed than Muslims about it.

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  15. The rise of anti semitic attitudes in the twenty first century.

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  16. People who feel bitter and betrayed often lose empathy and become irrational
    :
    http://kjohnsonnz.blogspot.co.nz/2015/01/reflections-on-arab-world.html

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  17. young muslims kill Jews or who profane religion by costume, so they taught their parent or friends, since childhood

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  18. Agreed. This conflict is all about a huge bruised arab ego. "How can we be allahs gift to world if we fail at everything?"

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    1. You don't think that their religion telling them to kill the Jews as anything to do with it? 

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    2. Islam is an extension of Arab culture, simply an archaic form of living codified. As such I tend to see the root issues being in the root culture. A culture very much based on the honor/shame paradigm.

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  19. Have you read Bernard Lewis' "Semites and Anti-Semites"? If not, I would recommend it.

    JLF

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    1. It sounds good – I like Lewis even though he is the philosopher behind the Iraq invasion.

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  20. Still the anger remains all about Palestine. I can understand it for as much as I love to travel, for example, if I were given plane ticket to Israel, I would not go because of what they continue to do to the people of Palestine!
    Peace,
    Mary

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    1. I wish I had come here or to Russia in the Communist time or visited Spain under Franco - it would have been so interesting. Dictatorships are fascinating to visit, not that Israel is one. Israel is a democracy.

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    2. I would not go to Israel even if given a free ticket!

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    3. I was fortunate to be able to visit both East berlin and Czechoslovakia during the early '70's. I am glad that I did that, as it helped me to understand more about Romania's past.

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    4. Lucky you, Mary. East Germany was less wicked than Israel? You like Castro too I recall.

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    5. East Berlin in the 70's. Brings back memories for me. I can't say that it reminds me of Romania though. Big difference in people attitudes and quality of life.

      The underground U Bahn made the trip quite easy. Normally at least one of the East German gates was open to U Bahn traffic.

      Don Patrick

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  21. There is more than one synagogue in Bombay. The attackers went for the Jewish centre, rather than the main synagogue which isn't that obscure - it's a landmark in the Kala Ghoda. Andrew McD

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  22. Palestine and Israel have had ample chances to make a deal. The time when each side had reasonable people to work with has come and gone. I find the Arab and Muslim world's fixation on Israel bewildering. It's just one of the region's many, many terrible problems. In a mess like Pakistan, why is Israel important?

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    1. That is the question. And i don't know the answer. Perhaps because Israel is seen as Muslim territory being treated as a colony, Muslims being treated like the aborigines of Australia or America by kaffirs, non-Muslims, perhaps? Turkey was an ally of Israel until recently, but now Turkey is also anti-Israel. In the late 40s the Shah was fairly well disposed to Israel.

      All these killings and wars are part of a crisis in Islam. Everything in the world is at bottom theological.

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    2. Turks and Iranians once pursued nationalistic and financial interests to ally with Israel -- doing it in part to irritate Arabs, whom they don't like. Now religion has trumped those interests and affinities. Turkey's leadership has become exceedingly fanatical irrational and strange.

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  23. I do not believe that the status quo between Israel and the Arab counties in the Middle East is likely to change. Regardless of who is the bad and who is the good, Israel has remained on top since 1948. As with all conflicts - to the victor belongs the spoils, including ultimately the victor's version of history.

    That may seem a calloused thing to say, but as always it is a matter of history. This coming from my ancestry of Hordaland & Vestfold. Their DNA was spread over much of the world.

    Don Patrick

    Don Patrick

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