the disturbing roots of Muslim culture
revisiting history for the first time
Edit: Ok so let’s call this Part 5 of It’s a Hijabista Life.
Prologue: This is the essay I avoided writing for a few days. I still don’t want to write it, the whole thing feels messy and chaotic. I have spent that past several years intellectually + spiritually deconstructing. Dismantle to rebuild. When you reach a certain stage of aging you begin to understand what Foucault meant about truth and discourse and then you start to feel uneasy about the illusion of your certainty, which begins to vanish, as though part of a spell dissipating. I have just finished reading The Trouble with Islam Today for the second time in 20 years—with fresh eyes, a burning heart, and a sharp mind.
Something has felt wrong to me, some things haven’t made sense these past few years and returning to Irshad’s clear and honest questioning helped me sharpen my position. Critical thinking demands that we dig beneath the emotional rhetoric and demand accountability; it’s time to behave like responsible adults now, not insufferable toddlers in adult bodies committed to sh1ttiness.
Edit: It has taken me several days, nearly a week, to think about, research, and write this. A great deal coalesced for me as I waded through scholarly readings and papers about this history. My entire life led me to this point, where I could write this. This is for my mother, who was a 14 year old girl when the world discovered the concentration camp horrors. Mum spent her life learning about what happened and instilling her daughters with a burning passion to do the same. My parents taught me to think for myself and my dad urged me to do my own seeking to discover the answers for myself in any intellectual quest I have ever had—oh there have been many quests too!
I am a Muslim + a Zionist, if that’s what you call anyone who believes Israel has a right to exist. It’s not the pejorative you think, in fact rejecting Zionism seems more the pejorative position in the present, when you consider the full + complex context of history. I reject any and all anti-Jewish hatred masquerading as Arab nationalism. I reject any nationalist movements entirely erected upon a desire to eradicate Jewish people and society. My religion isn’t political and it never was—I was born after Vatican II and my Catholic mother + my agnostic non-practising Hindu father made certain my religious upbringing was free from political propaganda. I think for myself, that’s called ijtihad and it’s the way I practise my hijab. I can recognise tendrils of the Goebbels et al anti-semitic thinking when I see it.
Anyway, here goes.
I have to admit I feel somewhat disappointed at the intellectually lazy take Desmond Tutu took on Israel. I admired him greatly as a young girl, fighting the South African regime, a real apartheid regime, and I see where the temptation to project that struggle could come into play. The most pious of men struggle with nafs and ego projection, even Desmond Tutu. Yet, anyone who spends any length of time learning anything about Israeli society can see the label apartheid as a dangerously lazy projection, a borderline acting out of the timeless anti-Jewish trope that scapegoats Jews for the woes du jour. Apartheid to describe Israeli society based on the situation in Gaza represents an anti-imperialist fantasy narrative. How does apartheid describe a society in which Arabs have full citizenship, are members of the IDF and fully belong to and consider themselves a part of Israeli society? Do we really want to fall for the conflation of security measures with racist segregation policies?
Where do we draw the line? We bang on about feeling gaslit on an individual level when we respond to abuse in a toxic way and receive a reprimand for that toxic response whilst the abuser receives no reprimand for the abuse we responded to—that’s a favourite theme of popular self-help culture. Maybe that’s a projection? When you look at how we respond to political events on a collective scale, it does seem like the accusations are projected confessions.
How can we seriously believe that Israel has policies which racially segregate Arabs when Arabs are fully part of Israeli society? How can we serious believe in Israel as a racist nation when we look at the Ethiopian Aliyah which took place over decades? Not to mention Israel as one of 3 countries in the MENA region with legal protection for the same-sex attracted, arguably the one with the most tolerant society toward LBG people. My late devoutly Catholic eldest brother was gay, so I think about where in the world his life would have been in danger because I, the other of her 6 children who was extremely close to her, remember how it affected my mother when he came into harm’s way. And he did come into harm’s way a few times, simply for being a gay man. And it hurt my mother a great deal.
Every same-sex attracted person you hate has a mother. If you follow a religion that says honour all mothers, then that means you love their children—ie, everyone. What if your entrance to heaven is through the mother of a gay man or woman, ie through the mercy you show her child? If you follow a religion that says God made everyone and your purpose is to love God, then your purpose is to love God through His creation. That includes humans who live their existence in ways you deem haram or morally inferior. You don’t get to choose who to love + tolerate, God doesn’t give out asshole passes because you pray in Arabic really well. He created this world—He put you + me in it. Now get on your bike and ride that b1tch—take responsibility and stop blaming the Jews or the gays or British or other whypipo for all your woes. Time to grow up now, seriously.
Victimhood breeds extremism, we well know this—my generation grew up in the shadow of extremism that took out parts of the world, decimated the Jewish population of Europe, gave Stalinism a massive boost and created the Eastern Bloc, and killed 75 million people worldwide, both civilian and military casualties. I have met many many people who lost entire swaths of their families in the Holocaust. I have met men who grew up with no dad or with a messed up post-WW2 dad. The man who domestically abused me was emotionally abused + neglected by his own WW2 Lancaster Bomber flying dad. I have listened to survivors’ tales. I have known people who were born in concentration camps and survived. I have also listened with absolute fascination to the descendants of the most notorious nazis talk about how they grew up knowing nothing of their ancestral horror. The nazis cast long + dark shadow. The Muslim world needs to pull its collective head from its ass and face that reality.
The widespread damage to entire societies I cannot over stress—this is not Eurocentrism this is common fcuking sense. Much of what we now know about human development, the impact of violent trauma, war, and displacement came directly out of that massive dark blot of extremism that hovered over the world during the 20, 30s and 40s of the last century. Victimhood fed that extremism, the vestiges of which we still struggle against in the present.
This is why we learn history!
Sadly, the extremists mindset which vilified and scapegoated Jews and saw terrorism, misinformation and right wing nationalism as the way forward did not disappear from the face of the planet when WW2 ended and the Nazis met defeat. The Allied Forces quickly grew bored with accountability and justice, so many Nazis went free, escaping to other parts of the world which offered them safe haven. Some of them went to the Americas, some of them to the Middle East. Maybe the American Military Industrial Cult of Nationalism bangs on so much about promoting freedom in the world because it failed in a very important way to do that when it had the chance? Just thinking out loud, like I do.
Maybe the reason we police anti-Jewish hatred so militantly lies in the fact that, for much of eternity, we gleefully participated in promoting the hateful anti-Jewish tropes. It’s impossible to capture all the hatred and put it back in the Pandora’s Box, some of that extremism got away and lingers in the human atmosphere, where social conditions further shape it to serve another batch of collective megalomaniacs. Fascist authoritarianism is the easiest impulse ever, a friend told me in a text message a few days ago.
And yes, everyone everywhere was complicit in the genocide. Anti-Jewish hatred has a long + dark history worldwide. The repression + abuse of the Jews happened over a period of many years, the world made itself complicit by capping or banning Jewish immigration. How many lives could have been saved had we all NOT pretended not to notice what the Nazis were doing? Please don’t respond with whataboutery. This is an essay about Nazism + Arab nationalism, the fusion of these two into a hybrid ideology, and its reach into the Muslim mindset, in particular vis à vis Jewish people and the presence of a Jewish nation in the geographic region of the ancient Bilad-al-Shams kingdom.
Basic Facts
The fact that the British Empire outlived the Ottoman empire doesn’t mean that the British had anything substantial to do with the collapse of the Ottomans. Even a brief glance at history will show that the Ottoman Empire imploded, and that it collapsed on its own political instability that rendered it unable to rule, not any European Boogeyman.
The Arab leadership absolutely sympathised AND collaborated with the Nazi regime. Yes, the whole world did when we blocked Jewish immigration and caused more Jewish people to go to their deaths because they could not escape the genocidal regime. More than that, Arab leadership helped disseminate Goebbels propaganda to Egypt + North Africa—that’s complicity. In the post WW2 era Nasser welcomed many Nazis into Egypt and allowed them to influence policy and manipulate information dissemination and shape security/police training, including the Palestinian liberation movement.
Palestinian became a clever word Arab nationalists used to promote hatred of Jews. Mufti Amin al-Husayni, the father of Palestinian nationalism, met both Hitler and Himmler and facilitated the widespread promotion of nazi propaganda throughout the middle east region. As mentioned above, Nasser provided a haven for Nazis in Egypt and our supposed peace hero Anwar Sadat was in Nasser’s inner political circle.
Arab leadership thwarted a peaceful resolution at every turn since the collapse of the empire. Factional infighting, ethnic cleansing, rising authoritarianism to fill the leadership vacuum, occidentalism to feed populism—all these forces detracted from nation-building of a free + innovative peoples. Neither the British nor the Israelis nor anyone but the ones who chose + promoted + served + benefited from the sh1tty leadership are responsible for the current situation.
The entire problem seems to be that many people hate Jews. What else do we call it when the people choose leadership that espouses hatred of and a desire to destroy Jews? This is the eternal fcuking problem. Look, muppets, we in the west that you hate so much are still living in the long shadow of a genocidal regime that sought to solve it’s sociopolitical problems by destroying Jewish people—we aren’t indulging remnants of that.
Haj Amin al-Husayni meeting with Hitler discussing their common enemy So, after the Ottoman Empire collapsed and The League of Nations appointed the British to rule the lands of the dead empire—what did happen? We need to review some of that history because it will tell us how we got to the present.
Partitioning of the MENA region — the French Mandate for Syria + Lebanon, the British Mandate for Iraq, the British Mandate for Palestine = Mandatory Palestine + Transjordan, Kingdom of Hejaz (precursor to KSA), Kingdom of Yemen, British Protectorates of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar.
Hussein bin Ali of Hejaz, Emir of Mecca and leader of an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, declares himself king of Arabs in 1916, refuses to sign the Versailles Treaty and the British-allied Sauds defeat him and annex his territory in 1925. The Palestinian flag we know of today was designed for the Arab Revolt of 1916 against the Ottoman Turks.
From 1889 to 1926 the Committee of Union + Progress ruled the Ottoman Empire as a one party state and carried out several campaigns of ethnic cleansing—Armenian, Greek, Assyrian.
In 1928 rabidly anti-Jewish + anti-Western + anti-modernity + political Islamist + a fanboy of the Salafist Rashid Rida—Hassan al-Banna—forms the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group shilling for pan-Arab nationalism and which had a secret military arm. (Would this be like an Arab Islamist Sinn Féin, maybe?) al-Banna promoted the idea of the jihad of the sword (terrorism) over the jihad of the heart (emotional intelligence) and sought to recreate the 7th century society in which Muhammad and His Companions lived.
Can I just point out that Rashid Rida + Hassan al-Banna, a couple a hyper masculine + fanatical + emotionally unintelligent Egyptian d1ckbags from nearly a hundred years ago, heavily influenced the culture of Muslim thought worldwide in dangerous + toxic ways still apparent today, 2021?
NB—the Balfour Declaration is signed in 1917 and at this time the word Palestinian does not mean exclusively Arab or Muslim, and Zionists took Palestine to mean the Jewish homeland.
Initially pan-Arab nationalists dreamed of restoring the ancient sacred lands of Bilad al-Sham, this encompassed modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel + Jordan. This left-hand region of the Hejaz people contrasts with the right-hand-region, al-Yaman, modern-day Yemen.
Mufti al-Husayni instigated the Nebi Musa riots of 1920, then fled to Damascus, where the French gave him refuge. He was tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison in absentia, and subsequently pardoned by the British, who appointed him high commissioner of Jerusalem in 1921. Jews received harsher sentences for their part in the riots than did Arabs, some sources1 report.
Three weeks after al-Husayni became Mufti of Jerusalem, riots in Jaffa and elsewhere killed 43 Jews.
al-Husayni became president of the Supreme Muslim Council in 1922, President of the Arab Higher Committee in 1936–with each position gaining more political power and forging a new kind of Palestinian national identity that firmly symbolised rejection of Jews.
al-Husayni took control of all religious money in Palestine, used his influence to control all Muslim schools + mosques and demand all Muslims pay him complete fealty. He demanded that Winston Churchill unite Syria, TransJordan, Palestine into a pan-Arabian state. When France won Syria, al-Husayni and the Arab leadership turned their nationalist anti-Jewish efforts toward Palestine.
Until 1936, when the British removed him from his post, the Mufti had engineered many riots and instigated much violence unrest with a view to harming Jews and blocking Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish homeland.
Arab rebels assassinated a British politician in 1937 in protest of the Peel Report on Partitioning Palestine and the British arrested all members of the Arab Higher Council including al-Husayni.
al-Husayni fled to Syria + Iraq, supported the pro-Axis revolt in 1936 and then fled to Berlin in 1941. He met with Hitler and Himmler. Contrary to the claims of Netanyahu and others, al-Husayni did not instigate the Final Solution, which was already conceived. Remember al-Husayni was a fugitive, a man on the run from the British, he wasn’t calling the shots.
al-Husayni toured the Trebbin nazi camp2. He made several radio addresses to Muslims, encouraged the killing of Jews and Allied forces, and mobilised anti-Jewish and pro-German support amongst Muslims. al-Husayni wrote several European leaders and urged them to bar Jewish immigration into their countries.
In 1943 Himmer praised al-Husayni and the battle of freedom-seeking Arabs against the Jewish invaders.3
The British granted Jordan independence in 1946 and announced the end of the Palestinian Mandate would happen in May, 1948. They no longer had a interest in trying to manage the tribalism and civil warring between guerrilla fighting forces vying for nationalist agendas projected onto land. They and the UN recommend separate Arab and Jewish states.
When the formation State of Israel happened in 1948, Arab states began expelling Jews. Two decades after the formation of the State of Israel over 850,000 Jews had been forced to flee their homes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco. The Iranian Revolution created a further 70,000 Jewish refugees. None of those Jews ever were granted the right of return to their homes and possessions.
How much of the 1948 Arab exodus from Israel happened because of the Arab leadership’s strategy of uncompromising aggression combined with the effects of their propaganda?4 For instance—about rapes in the village of Deir Yassin. The Jewish community denounced the attack at Deir Yassin, many scholars have studied it and an Israeli film was made about it. The latest scholarly paper tells us that the siege at Deir Yassin village happened because of a 5 month-long Arab-imposed blockade of Jews living in the Old City, one which resulted in desperate food shortages.
Four days after reports of the Deir Yassin violence, Arabs attacked a Jewish medical convoy, killing 77 and injuring 23.
Arab leadership had made no secret of its overall desire to eliminate Jews from their midst. In no reality did Arab leadership ever want a Jewish homeland on what they believed was their Arab land.
1937, 1947, 1978, 2000, 2008 — each time Arab leadership rejected a two-state solution with Jewish leadership. Not to mention the 2006 election of Hamas by Gazans as a direct fcuk you to the Jews + Israel—Hamas considers Jews an enemy oppressor and aims to obliterate + dissolve Israel. This is not the behaviour of a collective of people who wants peace + harmony + with Jewish people in the Levant region.
Post-WW2: Egypt as a Haven for Nazis
Aribert Heim, SS-Haptsturmfuhrer, Butcher-doctor of the extermination camp of Mauthausen who committed criminal experiments on inmates and was known as Dr. Death, lived a quiet live in Cairo as Tarek Hussein Farid, working as a doctor for Egypt’s police.
Alois Brunner, chief aide to Eichmann who the planned the Holocaust’s final solution, ended up in Damascus, where he worked for the Syrian police intelligence and torture instruction for years.
Franz Abromeitz, another Eichmann aide believed to have gone to Egypt.
Hans Appler, who worked for Goebbels Minister of Information, became Salah Chaffer and worked in Egypt’s Propaganda Ministry.
Nasser took in a number of Nazis in order to train his military + police forces and to produce anti-Israeli propaganda, according to an Israeli undercover spy.
Johann von Leers, Nazi Propagandist, worked in Egypt’s Information Minister as Omar Amin.
Franz Stangl, SS commander at Treblinka, lived in Syria for a time before settling in Brazil.
Rademacher, Nazi Minister for Easter Europe responsible for the murder of thousands of Jews, lived openly as himself in Syria.
Dr. Hans Eisele, SS doctor of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, fled to Cairo and Egypt refused to extradite him for war crimes trials.5
Leopold Gleim, former SS-Standartenfuehrer—a Gestapo officer who made Poland’s “most wanted” list, is charged with committing multiple murders during World War II. He was spirited to Egypt in 1945 by the “Spider,” a group organized to help Nazi brass escape Allied justice. Gleim worked in Egypt’s Secret Police as Col Ali al Nacher6.
Several other of Gleim’s Nazi colleagues traded their Nazism for Islam and changed their names and moved to Egypt. El Hadj, a quiet Egyptian intellectual who recently translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf into Arabic, was once a high-ranking Nazi named Luis Heiden. Three top members of Egypt’s information ministry didn’t have to read the translation. They studied Mein Kampf under Josef Goebbels.7
One of Goebbels’ acolytes was Franz Bartel, the right-hand man of Dr. Rudolf Mildner, former Gestapo chief at Kattowitz. Bartel got himself a position in the Jewish Section of Egypt’s Propaganda Ministry.
Mildner also escaped to Egypt via Argentina and headed an organization called Deutscher Rat (German Council).
Erwin Fleiss, ex-Gestapo officer wanted by West Germany and Austria became Achmet Sadat, senior adviser of Port Said’s police department.
Dr. Naim Fahoum, doctor at the Samara internment camp near Alexandria, is no novice was wanted for sterilization experiments in Nazi concentration camps.
Baumann, a former SS-Standartenfuhrer who took part in the liquidation of the Ghetto in Warsaw worked first for the Egyptian War Ministry, then became an instructor of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Hans Becher was in the Jewish Section of the Gestapo in Vienna. Since 1950 he has lived in Alexandria and he worked for the Egyptian police.
Bernhard Bender, former SS-Sturmbannfuhrer member of the Gestapo in Warsaw, became an adviser of the political section of the police in Cairo by the name of Ben Salem. Bender helped Dr. Hans Eisele to open his practice in Egypt.
Werner Birgel, Former SS-Officer escaped to Egypt, became El Gamin and worked in the Egyptian Propaganda Ministry.
Wilhelm Bockler, SA-Untersturmfuhrer who participated in the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto escaped to Egypt in 1949 and worked in the Israel Department of the Egyptian Information Service.
S-Sturmbannfuhrer Bollmann escaped to Cairo in 1949, where he worked as an adviser of Egypt's Propaganda Ministry.
Wilhelm Borner, former SS-Untersturmfuhrer became a Muslim named Ben Kashir and worked in the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior and was transferred to the Palestinian Liberation Army.
Franz Buensche learned his job with Goebbels and Streicher, he escaped to Alexandria 1949, where he authored anti-Israeli propaganda booklets.
Eric Bunzel, former SS-Obstermfuhrer, escaped to Egypt and worked in the Israel section of Egypt’s Propaganda Ministry.
Karl Luder, former Hitler-Youth leader who participated in crimes against the Jews in Poland, escaped to Egypt and worked the War Ministry.
Let’s not forget Anwar Sadat himself, the great Nobel Peace Laureate, was arrested and imprisoned by the British for being an agent of the Axis Powers and he also was involved in the plot to assassinate the British-friendly Egyptian Finance Minister, Amin Osman Pasha.
This is not an exhaustive list—it goes on … there are more details and names in several pieces written about it, such as [here].
Questions + Observations
How much of pan-Arab nationalism and modern-day Palestinian nationalism emerged in response to the cultivation and establishment of Jewish nationalism in the Levant? Can nationhood built on hating a designated scapegoat really sustain itself intellectually?
Zionism is a word that means establishing the Jewish homeland, ie The Promised Land, the land mentioned in Qur’an 5:21. Zionism is in no way racist, anti-Muslim, or anti-Arab—these are projected onto Zionism. Palestinian, however, has come to represent a rejection of Israel, ie of Jews in the Middle East region. Arab nationalists view Zionism as pejorative, and so, yes in this sense, in the sense of the rejection of Jewish presence in the Levant, rejecting Zionism does seem like a dog-whistle for hating Jews.
Definitely I see a streak of anti-Jewish sentiment amongst the British leadership of the Palestine Mandate and an great effort to appease the Arab leadership in the early years after the Balfour Declaration, in response to the Zionist endeavour vis à vis the Arabs and their claim to self-determination.
What self-determination don’t Arabs have? We are talking about one Jewish homeland on the entire fcuking planet, and some have trouble with this?? Why?
Did the Brits bait everyone with a view to preserving their own hegemony, or did they simply try too hard to appease the problematic ones in their imperial bid to do the right thing? That’s a matter of opinion. Scholars continue to hotly debate this. Perhaps it’s a matter of character—yours, mine, the perceived—we see things as we are, don’t we? (Definitely can we agree not to let the Brits partition anything again — except cake, the Brits can cut the cake.)
Goebbels was good at his craft. He was not an intellectual slouch—was a wordsmith in his own right, had a doctorate in German literature. Never underestimate your foe—that’s unwise. Ghoulish + and hate-mongering human being that he was who murdered his own children and himself, he cast a long shadow, and we still live in it. His acolytes infiltrated Arab society and contributed to the way Muslims receive and interact with their faith narrative.
The world in its entirety failed to stem the rising tide of Nazi extremism in Germany and then failed to stem the genocide and then failed to hold the murderers + their accomplices to account for their crimes and then failed to stem the tide of the legacy of that escaped extremism which mingled and morphed into a global menace.
We did not destroy the dangerous extreme thinking that devastated Europe and decimated its Jewish population—we turned away whilst it scattered, changed shape, then coalesced.
Nazis whom Nasser and other Arab leaders embraced and welcomed into Arab and Muslim society became arms dealers, security advisers, worked in the war ministry, crafted information for widespread dissemination. The hatred of Jews and vilification of Israel as the source of Arab terror and suffering has an anti-Jewish propagandist origin, like it or not. Now that you see it for yourself—how do we move forward, and isolate this thinking to prevent it from growing further and wreaking more destruction?
Can you see that real solutions for suffering humans doesn’t lie in promoting hatred, scapegoating, othering, or any other manner of ego-driven acting out designed to hurt human beings and destroy things and land they love to frighten them?
Can you see the vital necessity of cultivating a society capable of and stable enough to critically think on an individual level? Can you see how blindly following a man-made political cause about a land and worshiping that cause like your God at all cost is actually idolatry?
Why do you let people like this lead you? Don’t deny it, even just a few years ago many Muslims saw her as an activist leader to idolise. I remember attending a local a Muslim class happening on the same evening Sarsour was in town and several women missed that particular evening’s class because they paid for some fancy ticketed dinner to meet her—Sarsour has groupies in the Muslimah world. I tried to listen to her for a while a few years back, you know—give her message a chance. Eventually Sarsour ended up sounding too much like a perpetual victim-extremist and it got boring like a cult gets boring.
Seriously, are you okay??? Do you want progress? Or is the disempowerment festival of rigid thinking really fulfilling you spiritually?
Why does the mainstream Muslim community want me to think that being a Muslim in the west means shilling for anti-Jewish Arab nationalism? It doesn’t, and I won’t. I have been schooled my entire 54 years of life to learn about what hating Jews did to my parents’ worlds and I grew up in the shadow of that devastation and I will be damned if I will sit around and watch a hoard of brainwashed muppets LARP the victimhood of extremism in response to the “illegal occupation” (a questionable accusation to say the least) of a territory, the conflict-history of which goes back a century or more in culture of Arab anti-jewish hatred.
Which Islamic states are doing anything to help the many Muslim refugees and those persecuted in China to safety + freedom? You know, like Israel’s Aliyah programme does for Jews? None. Which Islamic regimes are contributing to the refugee crisis? You do the research … you likely don’t need to though.
When I examine just a cross section of the entire complex body of history surrounding the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the partitioning of the lands of said fallen empire, the rise of Arab nationalism, and the formation of the state of Israel—a pattern emerges. It’s a familiar pattern—that Jews matter less; this pattern bears itself out through human history.
When I examine the history I come away with a view that the British and the Americans had, at best, ambivalence toward the Jewish people. In no way did the Imperial decision-makers ever view Jews as anything other than superfluous, definitely no one deemed Jews supreme—that any present-day “activist” suggests such a thing sounds like Goebbels speaking from the grave. Indeed, I have given evidence here that he did in a grim way survive the collapse of the Nazi regime and his own suicide death—Goebbels’ acolytes worked in the Egyptian Information Ministry!
Ample evidence in the historical record and sufficient anecdotal evidence exists to remind us that—
The British did indeed over-indulge Arab leadership, who squandered the opportunity at every turn.
Nazis by and large got away with murder—again, Jewish people seemed superfluous and irrelevant, an inconvenient truth that never goes away.
The world had no room for Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s genocidal wrath + had plenty of room for Nazis fleeing accountability for their crimes and has plenty of room for the many Jew-hating Islamists seeking the freedom they deny their own society.
Rabid hatred of Jews drives Arab nationalism in the Levant region, and it currently drives present-day nationalism amongst the Palestinian leadership.
The anti-Jewish propaganda of Goebbels survived the collapse of the Third Reich and made its way into the Arab world and infiltrated the Muslim mind.
Much mainstream Muslim thinking emanates from the Muslim Brotherhood mindset—how much is from or fused with the Goebbels mindset—where does one begin and the other end in all the narratives and exegeses handed out to Muslims by our supposed religious leaders and scholars?
Currently, in a recent UN vote to condemn Iran’s human rights situation, the only Muslim majority countries that voted in favour of condemning Iran were Morocco, Bosnia, Albania. Israel voted in favour of condemning Iran’s human rights situation. Look at that graphic and see which country voted for and which ones did not—look very carefully and take notes.
Muslim majority countries abstaining from | absent from | voting against the resolution to condemn Iran include — Iraq, Syria, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, India, Bahrain, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Jordan, Eritrea, Mauritania, Libya, Algeria.
My twitter feed reports that The Islamic Republic of Iran has charged Mohammad Nasiri, aged 21, with waging war against God, a crime which carries the death penalty. Apparently giving chocolates and hugs to passersby in support of the freedom movement, ie in protest against the regime, constitutes waging war against God. Not exactly sure what Qur’an the Ayatollah and his sycophants are reading, they are making it up at this point.
What do the rest of us Western Muslims think we’re doing, sitting around and whinging about how the west is so mean to Muslims blah blah Islamophobia blah blah whilst Islamic regimes engage in the most barbaric acts in the name of God against people they have forced on pain of death to be Muslim?! Do you see how every Arab nation voted against or abstained from condemning Iran? Do you see how the Muslim community is responding to the plight of the Uighurs? Isn’t it anti-Muslim to refuse to ally with Zionists to fight for the liberation of Muslims? You are putting your own political ideology about Arab nationalism + Israel before the life + liberty of other Muslims who are being tortured in a way that resonates Holocaust to the Jewish community by the Chinese state—really?
Who do you worship, cuz it doesn’t seem like that’s God you worship idk. Damn.
Do you see how a westerner could take offense to fanatics seeking freedom and a good life here and then taking advantage of that freedom to promote an ideology that aims to destroy the infrastructure which that freedom rests upon? Can you see how intention matters? Can you see how the character of your mentors + spiritual teachers matters? I hardly knew anything about the political aspirations of my childhood religious teachers + mentors—that’s how it ought to be, we learned about God + how to love others, not about the evil Zionists or even the evil Communists blah blah blah. Can you see how hate + destruction + refusing introspection do block progress + compassion? Can you see what happens when you remove love + humility from the equation + leave only firebrand + righteousness? What are you choosing in your decisions to move through the world of ideas + life? Ego versus God.
Excluding anyone + claiming God gave you a license to do that = ego, FYI.
Final Thoughts
One last thought—we have two well known monarchies in the world, very different from one another. One ordered the assassination of a dissident American resident journalist, a native of his own kingdom, on Turkish soil and he rules a kingdom in which apostasy is a crime punishable by death. The other plans to declare himself as defender of all faiths when he is crowned King next year and, even though he is the head of the Anglican Church, he is learning the Qur’an to better understand Islam.
Well, damned if I didn’t sit through the funeral proceedings of the late QE2 and watch western left-leaning everyone-hates-me Muslims complain about the racist British Monarch and say nothing about the actually racist Monarch of Saudi Arabia who leads the world in executions. And damned if it never even occurred to any of the complainers that the reason they feel so comfortable complaining about the British monarch is the same reason they feel uncomfortable holding the Saudi Monarch to the same standard—freedom of thought + expression in the west they love to and are free to hate.
How is every Muslim so okay with a brutal regime who leads the world in capital punishment being the keeper of The Prophet’s Mosque? Does anyone really think the most beautiful character really wants a band of hyper masculine thugs looking after his mosque or representing the faith he founded? Does anyone think for themselves? Sometimes I wonder if any of this is real. Is this a gaslight? Are you all okay out there?
The Arab nationalist dream of Bilad-al-Shams isn’t mine, as a Muslim or a human being. Stop making it a Muslim obligation to want to eradicate the Jewish homeland in favour of an Arab pan-nationalist vision of medieval tyranny.
Who, really, are the anti-Muslim haters in the world? Who, really, are the supremacists + the racists + the fixed minds blocking progress + peace? Who, really, are the thugs? Who is the terror? Why is the terror? For whom is the terror? And what about the hate—who is that keeping warm? Who, really, are the oppressors and freedom-stealers of Muslims? That’s a question for you, reader. Look at the results of that UN vote, look at the conduct of Arab + Islamist tyrants LARPing Hassan al-Banna—Rashid Rida dogma, and tell me honestly who is taking freedoms away from Muslims and from all humans?
Demand better leadership—leaders serve those whom they lead. I refuse to serve a horde of Jew-hating hyper-masculine megalomaniacs.
al-Husayni, Jewish Virtual Library, accessed 12.2022
The Sentinel Paper, micrfiche copy accessed 12.2022
Lust, Peter, Macleans Magazine 1967
Lust, Peter, 1967