Muslims need a new road map

Dry academic debates hold as much charm for me as they do for most readers. But when Dr Tariq Ramadan speaks, you cannot help but pay attention. One of the sharpest minds of our times, he is recognised as an authority on contemporary Muslim societies and challenges facing them. What distinguishes Ramadan, currently teaching at Oxford University, from other Islamic scholars is the fact that he grew up in the west.

His family was forced into exile after his grandfather and Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan Al Banna was assassinated. Ramadan was born in Switzerland. Growing up in the west and receiving the best of western and Islamic education has endowed Ramadan with a rare understanding of both worlds. He used it effectively in the chaotic post 9/11 times to help bridge the gulf between Islam and the west. More often than not, fellow believers have been his audience. Holding a mirror to his own, he has repeatedly urged introspection, moderation and openness.

In a recent article, Ramadan tackles an issue that has increasingly troubled Muslim minds in recent times. “From Asia to North America, the conclusion is inescapable: The contemporary Islamic conscience is in deep crisis. How to be a Muslim today? How to be faithful to one’s principles while remaining open to the world? How can Muslims deal with their diversity and overcome their multiple divisions?” asks he in his Gulf News column.

“How can Muslim societies create new models of development, education and social justice? Can they imagine economic alternatives? Can the 1,000-year-old Islamic civilisation make an original contribution to the concert of cultures and civilisations? Everywhere, Muslim individuals and societies ask themselves the same burning questions,” notes Ramadan. And he isn’t encouraged by the answers to his own questions: “The crisis drags on; no answer seems in sight. The light at the end of the tunnel seems nothing but an illusion.”

Interestingly, this comes at a time when more and more people around the world, especially in the west, are discovering Islam. Notwithstanding all the lies and perpetual smear campaign against Islam and its followers, it remains the fastest growing faith on the planet. Muslims have already outgrown Catholics as the world’s biggest religious community. This in turn seems to fuel insecurity in societies where Muslims are in minority. Sri Lanka and Myanmar are the latest examples of growing Islamophobia.

At the same time, there’s no denying the fact that the Ummah has a profound ideological crisis brewing in its midst. Of course, Muslims’ faith in the religion as a complete way of life and its claim to offer answers and solutions to all questions of life remains constant and unshakable. But today more than ever they are looking to their leaders and scholars to make sense of a world that has dramatically changed over the past several centuries, particularly in the past few decades. The challenges posed by modernity and transformation that has turned our world into a truly global village are overwhelming. And western civilisation and its cultural and social mores rule this global village.

Where do Muslims belong in this world? What are their responsibilities and how they ought to deal with the conundrums thrown up by modern times? These are the burning questions – as Ramadan calls them – that have increasingly baffled people of our generation and those that came before and after us. But these questions and ideological dilemmas haven’t received the attention and seriousness they deserve from our scholars and ulema. If they have, we do not see much by way of results.

Look at the scourge of extremism, which has emerged as one of the most serious challenges facing Muslim societies today. In the absence of clear guidance and our failure to present the real message and spirit of Islam before the world, an extremist fringe claims to speak on behalf of the faith as its followers helplessly watch.

At the heart of Muslims’ decay and decline is the limited nature of their vision and inability to adapt themselves to the demands of a fast evolving world. There was a time, for a thousand years, when Arabs and Muslims led the global march of progress and ideas. Who can ignore the west’s immense intellectual debt to Muslim philosophers and scholars in every sphere of knowledge?

If Muslims had restricted themselves to a narrow vision of their faith and what it expects of them, they wouldn’t have conquered the distant frontiers of the known world. There was a time when seekers of knowledge from around the world came to Muslim lands, to universities and springs of wisdom like Dar Al-Hikma in Baghdad. Where are such centres of knowledge today? How many universities from across the Muslim world figure in the world’s 50 or 100 best?

There is a splurge of new ideas and human advances on all fronts today. How do Muslims relate to them? Should they all be spurned as ‘un-Islamic influences’ to keep ourselves out and behind the rest of the world? Why Muslim minds aren’t coming up with ideas that could be a shared property of mankind anymore? What explains our poverty of vision and bankruptcy of ideas?

These are the questions that demand answers from our religious and intellectual elites and soon. One thing is certain. You cannot blame religion for the rigidity and backwardness of its followers, as many of Islam’s detractors do. Its message remains as contemporary and relevant as it was when the Arabs received it fifteen centuries ago. This is precisely why it continues to win hearts and minds around the world.

The problem lies in our own limited interpretation of Islamic teachings and spirit. In our literalist approach and our preoccupation with the form, rather than the substance, we have lost sight of our real goal – our salvation and that of humanity. We have reduced our faith to a set of rituals and customs just like any other dogma.

As Ramadan notes: “The most visible, the most serious signs of the crisis of the contemporary Islamic conscience can be found in the inversion of means and ends. The obsession with norms transforms them into an ultimate goal; they are no longer a means to an end, but the end itself. The essence is forgotten.”

We claim that Islam came as a blessing for all mankind and as a source of guidance for all times to come. How can its followers hope to guide others when they have distanced themselves from its spirit and teachings? What is desperately needed today is rediscovering and rekindling the original spirit of our faith and approaching it anew to help us take on the challenges and questions of today’s world.

Many brilliant minds in the past century and beyond have sought to do just that. They advocated returning to original sources of guidance and applying them to modern times. Today, this needs to turn into a global movement. Muslims need a new road map and a new sense of purpose. To quote Ramadan again, “the crisis is acute. To resolve it there must be an awakening, a renewal, and a revolution in our way of thinking.”

This isn’t possible without the initiative and proactive participation of our ulema and religious leadership. As Muhammad Abduh, the 19 th century reformer put it, in Islam man was not created to be led by a bridle but given intelligence and reason so he could be guided by knowledge. Faith and reason can and must go together.

By Aijaz Zaka Syed, a commentator on Middle East and South Asian affairs.

Email: aijaz.syed@hotmail.com

http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-9-173593-Muslims-need-a-new-road-map

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6.  Faith & Reason
7. Islam: Broader Perspective
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9. Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (by Dr.M.Iqbal)

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Terrorism and the other Religions : Non Muslims : Juan Cole

Contrary to what is alleged by bigots, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions. Murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States.

As for political violence, people of Christian heritage in the twentieth century polished off tens of millions of people in the two world wars and colonial repression. This massive carnage did not occur because European Christians are worse than or different from other human beings, but because they were the first to industrialize war and pursue a national model. Sometimes it is argued that they did not act in the name of religion but of nationalism. But, really, how naive. Religion and nationalism are closely intertwined. The British monarch is the head of the Church of England, and that still meant something in the first half of the twentieth century, at least. The Swedish church is a national church. Spain? Was it really unconnected to Catholicism? Did the Church and Francisco Franco’s feelings toward it play no role in the Civil War? And what’s sauce for the goose: much Muslim violence is driven by forms of modern nationalism, too.

I don’t figure that Muslims killed more than a 2 million people or so in political violence in the entire twentieth century, and that mainly in the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 and the Soviet and post-Soviet wars in Afghanistan, for which Europeans bear some blame.

Compare that to the Christian European tally of, oh, lets say 100 million (16 million in WW I, 60 million in WW II– though some of those were attributable to Buddhists in Asia– and millions more in colonial wars.)

Belgium– yes, the Belgium of strawberry beer and quaint Gravensteen castle– conquered the Congo and is estimated to have killed off half of its inhabitants over time, some 8 million people at least.

Or, between 1916-1917 Tsarist Russian forces — facing the Basmachi revolt of Central Asians trying to throw off Christian, European rule — Russian forces killed an estimated 1.5 million people. Two boys brought up in or born in one of those territories (Kyrgyzstan) just killed 4 people and wounded others critically. That is horrible, but no one, whether in Russia or in Europe or in North America has the slightest idea that Central Asians were mass-murdered during WW I and looted of much of their wealth. Russia at the time was an Eastern Orthodox, Christian empire (and seems to be reemerging as one!).

Then, between half a million and a million Algerians died in that country’s war of independence from France, 1954-1962, at a time when the population was only 11 million!

I could go on and on. Everywhere you dig in European colonialism in Afro-Asia, there are bodies. Lots of bodies.

Now that I think of it, maybe 100 million people killed by people of European Christian heritage in the twentieth century is an underestimate.

As for religious terrorism, that too is universal. Admittedly, some groups deploy terrorism as a tactic more at some times than others. Zionists in British Mandate Palestine were active terrorists in the 1940s, from a British point of view, and in the period 1965-1980, the FBI considered the Jewish Defense League among the most active US terrorist groups. (Members at one point plotted to assassinate Rep. Dareell Issa (R-CA) because of his Lebanese heritage.) Now that Jewish nationalsts are largely getting their way, terrorism has declined among them. But it would likely reemerge if they stopped getting their way. In fact, one of the arguments Israeli politicians give for allowing Israeli squatters to keep the Palestinian land in the West Bank that they have usurped is that attempting to move them back out would produce violence. I.e., the settlers not only actually terrorize the Palestinians, but they form a terrorism threat for Israel proper (as the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin discovered).

Even more recently, it is difficult for me to see much of a difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the Hebron massacre.

Or there was the cold-blooded bombing of the Ajmer shrine in India by Bhavesh Patel and a gang of Hindu nationalists. Chillingly, they were disturbed when a second bomb they had set did not go off, so that they did not wreak as much havoc as they would have liked. Ajmer is an ecumenical Sufi shrine also visited by Hindus, and these bigots wanted to stop such open-minded sharing of spiritual spaces because they hate Muslims.

Buddhists have committed a lot of terrorism and other violence as well. Many in the Zen orders in Japan supported militarism in the first half of the twentieth century, for which their leaders later apologized. And, you had Inoue Shiro’s assassination campaign in 1930s Japan. Nowadays militant Buddhist monks in Burma/ Myanmar are urging on an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya.

As for Christianity, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda initiated hostilities that displaced two million people. Although it is an African cult, it is Christian in origin and the result of Western Christian missionaries preaching in Africa. If Saudi Wahhabi preachers can be in part blamed for the Taliban, why do Christian missionaries skate when we consider the blowback from their pupils?

Despite the very large number of European Muslims, in 2007-2009 less than 1 percent of terrorist acts in that continent were committed by people from that community.

Terrorism is a tactic of extremists within each religion, and within secular religions of Marxism or nationalism. No religion, including Islam, preaches indiscriminate violence against innocents.

It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see Christians of European heritage as “nice” and Muslims and inherently violent, given the twentieth century death toll I mentioned above. Human beings are human beings and the species is too young and too interconnected to have differentiated much from group to group. People resort to violence out of ambition or grievance, and the more powerful they are, the more violence they seem to commit. The good news is that the number of wars is declining over time, and World War II, the biggest charnel house in history, hasn’t been repeated.

http://pulse.me/s/kWlKc

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Anti Islam Film: Rebuttal http://youtu.be/LMSVdPxcdes 

http://wp.me/PCgrB-Wq 

Refuting Slanders againnst Prophet Muhammad (pbuh): http://goo.gl/wwPSI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMSVdPxcdes 

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Buddhist Extremism: Is ethnic unrest brewing in southeast Asia?

As Buddhist-Muslim tensions increase in the region, we examine the causes and the consequences of the conflict.

Ethnic unrest in Myanmar has cast a wider spotlight on Buddhist-Muslim tensions in southeast Asia.

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the president of Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, is warning of a wider fallout, which could fuel growing inter-faith unrest across the region.

Security forces in Myanmar have been accused of a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing against minority Muslims. But a report by Human Rights Watch has also raised concern about who was at the heart of much of the violence, and in many cases, it says Buddhist monks were either involved or even leading attacks against Muslim communities.

The idea that Buddhist monks could lead attacks on another group of people for religious reasons seems quite shocking … Sam Zarifi , Asia Pacific Director at the International Commission of Jurists an international human rights group.

Yudhoyono is sounding a note of caution and says the violence could cause problems for Muslims elsewhere in the region.

"I will encourage Myanmar to address it wisely, appropriately and prevent tension and violence. We in Indonesia are ready to support them to reach those goals," he said

Earlier this month, eight Buddhist monks were allegedly beaten to death by Rohingya Muslims at an Indonesian detention centre. It is all serving to raise concerns across the region.

In Sri Lanka, where Muslims make up nine percent of the population, interfaith tensions are also causing concern. Extremist Buddhist groups like the Bodu Bala Sena - or Buddhist strength force - say they are protecting their culture against Muslim influence. Buddhist extremists have carried out attacks on Mosques, and Muslim-owned businesses. In southern Thailand, tensions between Muslims and Buddhists have a historical dimension. Thailand annexed the Malay Muslim state of Pattani more than a hundred years ago. Muslims were not fully integrated into what is a predominantly Buddhist nation and a Muslim separatist movement has raged there for a decade.

And in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, Buddhist-Muslim tensions have arisen from their economic standings. Chinese Buddhist minorities are seen as relatively wealthier than the native Muslim populations. In Myanmar, the discord can be traced back to British colonial rule, when the country was known as Burma. Many Muslims migrating from India and what is now Bangladesh were given preferential treatment.

This is not the problem between Buddhist, Muslim or Christians - this a problem with the government and religious minorities ...Maung Kyaw Nu , the Burmese Rohingya Association in Thailand

Resentment grew after independence in 1948, and has been gaining momentum.

And this is one of the problems - a monk named Wirathu, has become known on the Internet as the Burmese Bin Laden. Wirathu was jailed for 25 years in 2003 for inciting anti-Muslim hatred, but freed under a general amnesty in 2010.

Since his release he has gone back to preaching against Muslims. In one sermon he declared: "We are being raped in every town, being sexually harassed in every town, being ganged up on and bullied in every town." And in another sermon he warned: "In Rakhine State, with their populaton explosion they are capturing it. And they will capture our country in the end."

So are there any solutions for this ethnic problem? How much time will it take before peace can be achieved, and what will be the consequences of these tensions?

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2013/04/201342472654769316.html

• WORLD BUDDHIST LEADERS RESPONSE TO THE GROWING ETHNIC VIOLENCE AGAINST MUSLIMS IN MYANMAR

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Zionism's Colonial Roots

OVER THE last months before his much-lamented death in August 2010, Tony Judt talked at length with Timothy Snyder, his friend and fellow historian. Their conversations, published after Judt died asThinking the Twentieth Century, were about “the politics of ideas,” the subject of the book on which Judt had embarked after Postwar, his splendid history of Europe since V-E Day, but which he knew he would not live to write. Some of these political ideas had affected him personally, in particular Zionism. As a schoolboy in London and a Cambridge undergraduate, Judt had been not only a committed supporter but also an energetic activist in Dror, a small socialist-Zionist group. He spent summers working on a kibbutz and in 1967 flew to Israel in the hour of peril as the Six-Day War began.

The story of Judt’s disenchantment with Israel and Zionism is well known, culminating in a 2003 essay in the New York Review of Booksin which he concluded that Zionism, as a version of late nineteenth-century nationalism, had itself become anachronistic in a twenty-first century of open borders and multiple identities. In Thinking the Twentieth Century, Judt talks again at some length about these questions, and there is one particularly arresting passage. Despite his own early indoctrination in the socialist variant of Zionism, “I came over time to appreciate the rigor and clear-headed realism of Jabotinsky’s criticisms.”

Today there are perhaps not many readers of the New York Times or the Washington Post, let alone most other Americans, even if they warmly support Israel, who could identify Vladimir Jabotinsky by name. “Jabo” died in 1940 at a training camp near New York City and might seem a remote historical figure. And yet, as a South African historian once wrote, although his pages told of distant events, “they are also about today.” While such essays as Akiva Eldar’s fascinating “Israel’s New Politics and the Fate of Palestine” in this magazine give much insight into the here and now, that in itself cannot be understood without the there and then. What Jabotinsky once said and did is acutely relevant now, ninety years after he founded his “Revisionist” New Zionist Organization.

He may have died long ago, but his soul went marching on. In 1946–1948, the Irgun, the Revisionist armed force—“terrorists” to the British and the New York Times at the time—practiced violence against British and Arabs. It was led by Menachem Begin, who in 1977 would become the first Israeli prime minister from the Right, ending almost three decades of Labor hegemony. Two more recent leading Israeli politicians, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, a former prime minister and a one-time foreign minister, respectively, are children of Irgun activists. Jabo’s portrait hangs at Likud party meetings, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the present Likud leader and prime minister, has a direct personal connection with him. As for the Jewish Americans who continue to support the Jewish state, they may never have read a word of him, but they might be troubled if they did. Jabo is very much about today.

HE WAS born in 1880 into a prosperous, educated Jewish family in Odessa, but when he was a young man the hint of promise given by that city’s cosmopolitanism was bitterly falsified by more pogroms. This experience radicalized Jabotinsky and made him a Jewish nationalist, or Zionist. He traveled throughout Europe to preach the cause, speaking and writing fluently in almost more languages than can be counted. One was Hebrew, which—in its modern form and its attendant literature—he helped invent. Among the many things about him likely forgotten by Likudniks today is that he translated the Sherlock Holmes stories into Hebrew. All in all, this polyglot polymath may be the one man of authentic genius to have been produced by the Zionist movement.

During the Great War, he helped organize—and then served in—the Jewish Legion that fought with the British Army against the Ottoman Empire, and he remained in Palestine under the British rule that followed the war and the Ottoman collapse. In November 1917, the London government had issued the Balfour Declaration, favoring a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, with the hypocritical or even absurd reservation “that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” But once they ruled the land, the British soon began to repent of this undertaking they had lightheartedly given, and they despaired of governing a country with two communities facing each other in bitter mutual antagonism.

Soon after the creation of the British mandate over Palestine, Arab violence erupted, which Jabotinsky encouraged the Jewish settlers to resist, fighting force with force. In 1923, he broke with the mainstream movement to found the New Zionist Organization and the doctrine known as Revisionism. If few Americans have heard of Jabotinsky, not all Israelis, one finds, can explain what was supposed to be revised by the Revisionists. That wonderfully protean or adaptable word has variously been applied to a form of late nineteenth-century German Marxism and a group of late twentieth-century Irish historians. But in the 1920s, it came to mean nationalists who wished to rescind or revise the partition of their country: Hungarian revisionists wanted to undo the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which they believed (not without reason) had most brutally and unjustly dismembered the historic Kingdom of Hungary.

In the year after Trianon, the British colonial secretary was busy rearranging the vast area between Turkey in the north and Arabia in the south, which the Western allies had carved out of the corpse of the Ottoman Empire in arbitrary and cynical fashion. This man was Winston Churchill, whose brief tenure at the Colonial Office from February 1921 to October 1922 was crucially important, and fraught with implications for the future. The British had acquired two huge territories, named almost at random “Mesopotamia” to its east and “Palestine” to its west. In March 1921, Churchill summoned a conference in Cairo, where he took two contrary decisions.

Mesopotamia would become an independent kingdom called Iraq, under the Hashemite prince Faisal, even though this new country, “unduly stocked with peppery, pugnacious, proud politicians and theologians,” as Churchill told Parliament (plus ça change, it’s tempting to add), was a completely artificial amalgam of Shia, Sunni and Kurd: its creation has been described vividly by Christopher Catherwood in his aptly titled book Winston’s Folly. But on the other hand, Churchill divided what had been called Palestine, stretching from the Mediterranean to the borders of Iraq. The larger, easterly portion became another Arab kingdom under Abdullah, Faisal’s brother, now dubbed Transjordan, and with us still as Jordan. All the Zionists were dismayed by this partition, as they had been hoping for colonies east as well as west of the Jordan, but Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the World Zionist Organization, expressed his regrets in private and stuck to his policy of cooperation with the British.

BY CONTRAST, Jabotinsky campaigned openly to revise or undo that 1921 partition, on the uncompromising slogan, “A Jewish state with a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan.” But it was not merely his platform and organization that distinguished Jabotinsky: there was also his unsparing analysis, expounded in his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall.”

“There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs,” Jabotinsky wrote. “It is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.” Everyone should be aware how colonization had taken place elsewhere, he said. There was not “one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage.”

These sentiments underlaid Jabotinsky’s whole career. The Betar, his uniformed youth movement, marched for—and before long fought for—a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, while Jabo agitated vigorously for his cause, from Palestine to Europe, North America to South Africa. In 1929, there was further grim violence in Palestine. The Revisionists had organized demonstrations at the Western Wall and, much as Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000 precipitated the second intifada, the demonstrations provoked anti-Jewish riots. In the view of the British high commissioner for Palestine, the Revisionists had “deliberately seized upon” the contested status of the Western Wall “and worked it for all it was worth, and converted a religious question into a political one.”

In a letter to the London Times in September 1929, Jabotinsky rebutted the charge of “extremism.” He placed the blame on the British authorities for not controlling Arab violence and on London for abandoning what he insisted were the principles of the mandate: “All the Revisionist demands are nothing else but this principle: the Mandate means a large-scale immigration of Jews maintained for a period sufficient to build up a Jewish country.” The Revisionists demanded “what we call a ‘colonisation regime.’”

After one fiery oration, another British official ruefully said that “Jabo’s speech is eloquent and logical, but certainly dangerous in its tendency so far as law and order are concerned,” which was true enough. The British decided not to prosecute him, but while he was visiting South Africa he was refused further admission to Palestine. He never saw Jerusalem again. After traveling to Poland to encourage the Revisionists there, and to warn that the Jews of Eastern Europe were on the brink of disaster, he went to the United States, where he died in August 1940.

Not long before his death, he engaged as his private secretary the young scholar Benzion Netanyahu, a notable medieval historian. Netanyahu remained an ardent Revisionist, living long enough to shock David Remnick, the current editor of the New Yorker, with his “outrageously reactionary table talk” and contempt “for Arabs, for Israeli liberals, for any Americans to the left of the neoconservatives.” Netanyahu died last year at age 102. He had three sons: the eldest, Jonathan, became an Israeli hero when he was killed leading the commando raid to rescue hostages at Entebbe in 1976; the youngest is a doctor and writer; and the middle son, Benjamin, might now claim to be Jabotinsky’s heir.

Today, Benjamin Netanyahu is seen widely as a leader of the Right (although in comparison with Avigdor Lieberman and others who have held office in Israel lately, Netanyahu could look moderate), and Israeli politics have long been categorized in terms of Left and Right, with the Revisionists cast as right-wing no-goodniks. That was so from the 1930s: with the rise of fascism, it became quite common to characterize Jabotinsky as a fascist, a word widely used by his Zionist foes. Rabbi Stephen Wise, a prominent liberal Jewish American of his day, called Revisionism “a species of fascism,” while David Ben-Gurion—the leader of the Labor Zionists in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in British Palestine) and then a founding father and first prime minister of Israel—referred to his foe privately as “Vladimir Hitler,” which didn’t leave much to the imagination. And to be sure, while Jabo called himself a free-market liberal with anarchist leanings, the oratory of Revisionism—“in blood and fire will Judea rise again”—and the visual rhetoric—the Betarim in their brown shirts marching and saluting—had alarming contemporary resonances.

IN VIEW of that, it’s very striking how often left-wing writers have expressed admiration for Jabotinsky. The self-proclaimed social democrat Judt was one. Looking back, he saw that political Zionism had been created by Theodor Herzl and others with a “liberal view of History . . . as the story of progress in which everyone can find a place.” A Jewish state, Herzl optimistically thought, could be built in friendly cooperation with the existing inhabitants. But this seemingly enlightened attitude was dismissed by Jabotinsky as mere illusion. In Judt’s words: “What the Jews were seeking in Palestine, he used to say, was not progress but a state. When you build a state you make a revolution. And in a revolution there can only ever be winners and losers. This time around we Jews are going to be the winners.” Likewise, Perry Anderson of the New Left Review and UCLA, one of the best-known Marxist historians of his generation, has said that the Revisionist tradition was more intellectually distinguished than Labor Zionism, no doubt thinking of Netanyahu père as well as Jabotinsky. The British scholar Jacqueline Rose of Queen Mary, University of London, also has written with deep admiration about Jabotinsky’s remarkable novel, The Five, and his literary stature in general. And most amusing of all is the eminent Anglo-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, a professor at Oxford.

In 2001, Shlaim was on “Start the Week,” the Monday-morning BBC radio program, talking about his latest book, The Iron Wall, about the relationship between Zionists and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. At the time, the show was hosted by the sometimes short-tempered broadcaster named Jeremy Paxman, and one supposes that he (or his research assistants) must have typecast Shlaim in advance as a peacenik or radical, which indeed he is in private life, as it were. Shlaim lucidly expounded the book, with its title from Jabotinsky, and Jabo’s larger challenge to his fellow Zionists. The Arabs were never going to give up what they believed was their country, he said. Why should they? They are normal, intelligent people, a point he habitually emphasized, and Jacqueline Rose is not alone in sensing that this intransigent right-winger was in some ways less “racist” than the Labor Zionists, who simply ignored the Arabs.

As Shlaim summarized him, Jabo said that no Jewish state could ever be created by goodwill and good nature. If their project was worthwhile, then the Zionists must accept the consequences and recognize that their settlement had to be built and then guarded by force, behind that “Iron Wall.” This succinct summary was listened to with almost-audible impatience by Paxman, who finally cut in to ask: So, was Shlaim saying that he thought this man Jabotinsky was wrong? “No,” Shlaim replied quietly. “I mean I think he was right.”

Was Jabo right? He always said that he opposed “transfer” or the forcible expulsion of Arabs, but in that case his plan for a Jewish state with a Jewish majority was even more quixotic. In the land between the Jordan and the sea—British mandatory Palestine from 1921 to 1948, or the territory ruled by Israel since 1967, including the West Bank—Jews were believed to comprise about 5 percent of the population in 1896, when Herzl published his little book Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”). They were roughly 10 percent twenty-one years later when the Balfour Declaration was published, and about a third when the Zionists (but not the Arabs) accepted the partition proposed by the United Nations in 1947. As to “both sides of the Jordan,” there were then as now scarcely any Jews at all on the east side of the river.

Creating the necessary Jewish majority assumed enormous migration from Europe and a “colonisation regime” in Palestine, which would use whatever means were necessary to subdue indigenous resistance, after which the Arabs would be a decently treated minority, Jabotinsky said, and there is no reason to doubt his sincerity. Like Weizmann and other Zionists, Jabotinsky failed to see that the British, whatever they had said in the stress of war in 1917, could not in practice afford to alienate the hundreds of millions of Muslims over whom they ruled, or the countries that owned so much oil. And by the time Israel was created, after Jabotinsky’s death, a crucial factor in his plan had been hideously disrupted: there were no longer millions of European Jews to immigrate because they had been murdered. That meant that the newborn state of Israel could only create a Jewish majority, even inside the old Green Line before the Six-Day War, by driving out Palestinian Arabs, in which the Labor Haganah, directed by Ben-Gurion, participated as well as the Irgun.

PART OF Jabotinsky’s vision is plainly dead and may never have been realistic. The old Revisionist map of a state stretching far to the east of the Jordan can be seen carved on the gravestone of Tzipi Livni’s father. But Livni herself has said that, although when she was a child “all I ever heard about was that we Jews have the right to a state on both sides of the Jordan,” she now knows that Jews will before long be once more in a minority even between Jordan and the sea, let alone to the east. That creed of a Greater Israel on which she was reared “had no provisions for a Palestinian state, but instead envisioned our living together with the Palestinians in one state.” But she now says, “My goal is to give the Jewish people a home, and that’s why I must accept a Palestinian state. I had a choice, and I chose two states for two peoples.”

In another way Jabo was, and remains, a reproach to other Israelis, including his political heirs, and also to American supporters of Israel, who don’t know what Jabo said or understand its implications. That goes for Benjamin Netanyahu. In a frankly comical interview with theDaily Telegraph two years ago, he complained about the British today, who look at Israel through their “colonial prism” and thus “see us as neo-colonialists.” But “we are not Brits in India!” he exclaims. Still, Netanyahu retains one great British hero: he has a portrait of Winston Churchill in his room, and posed beside it for the Telegraphphotographer. It evidently did not occur to the interviewer to ask Netanyahu whether he was under the impression that Churchill condemned colonialism, or was ashamed of the Raj.

It is quite true that Churchill was a romantic supporter of Zionism, and in 1937 he met Jabotinsky. Their cordial discussions influenced what Churchill said and wrote about Palestine immediately afterward. Churchill had already stated in very plain terms that he saw nothing wrong in the Jewish settlers’ supplanting the Arabs, along the lines of an earlier pattern. “I do not admit,” he said,

that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

Churchill is a hero to the neoconservatives of the Weekly Standard as well as to Netanyahu; they are all free to quote those words with approval.

For his own part, Jabotinsky would have dismissed Netanyahu’s “We are not neo-colonials” as dishonest evasion. He never shirked the language of colonialism, never denied that the Zionists were settlers and never regretted that this settlement was taking place under the auspices of the British Empire. What Netanyahu correctly, if quite unintentionally, identified is a central problem for Israel and her supporters today. “Britain was a colonial power, and colonialism has been spurned,” the prime minister said two years ago. He is correct. Colonialism has gone out of fashion, along with imperialism and the language of “higher grade” races, used by Churchill to express his support.

That is part of the problem today for Israel, which finds itself on the wrong side of a great rupture between “the West” and “the rest.” And while Jabotinsky was demonstrably right in his time in insisting honestly on the need for force and dismissing the illusion of voluntary cooperation with Palestinians, and while the doctrine of an iron wall and an iron fist has built and preserved the Jewish state for sixty-five years, it is not easy to see how it can work in perpetuity. Or maybe Israel has adopted Keynes’s well-known maxim: when asked what would happen in the long run, he said, “In the long run we are all dead.”

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His books include Yo, Blair!, The Strange Death of Tory England and The Controversy of Zion, which won a National Jewish Book Award. http://nationalinterest.org/article/zionisms-colonial-roots-8377?page=3

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10 Essential points about the Boston Marathon bombers, Islam, and America

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second suspect in the horrific Boston Marathon explosions has been apprehended.    Presumably, we can take a break from round-the-clock coverage of the chase that has consumed the nation.    Less than 24 hours ago, no one had heard of the Tsarnaev brothers.    That’s almost literally true:  even their uncle had not heard from them in years.    Now they are macabre celebrities whose every online trace is being analyzed for any clue as to what might have led them to commit such atrocities.    The breathless analysis of the 24-hour news media continues to offer theories and half-baked motivations even when the basic facts have not been yet gathered.

Here are ten basic points that we would all do well to keep in mind as we try to make sense of a world that seems to be in need of sanity and compassion.

1)    Those who know the suspects best say that this had nothing to do with being Chechen, or with Islam.

Ruslan Tsarni, the suspects’ uncles, went to meet the national media, and gave a powerful, honest, and passionate presentation.   He encouraged his nephew, Dzhokhar, to turn himself in.  He also called his own nephews “losers,” and stated that this atrocity had nothing to do with being Chechen or Islam.  Tsarni spoke powerfully about his love for America, and howsilly it is to associate this crime with an ethnicity or religion.   Tsarni also encouraged Dzhokhar to beg his victims for forgiveness.

2)    The experts you see on TV opining on Chechnya and the Chechen people do not know anything about Chechnya.  

Chechnya is a fairly remote region.   There are few people on TV with actual expertise about Chechnya.   Most of these “instant experts” go to Wikipedia to get their information.  Because of the 24-hour news media, we now have created a cult of instant experts who need to be able to fill the airways now about Iraq, now about Afghanistan, now about Chechnya, without necessarily having set foot on these places, knowing their languages, their history, or spoken with their peoples.    Complex geo-political realities are collapsed into cliché tropes of “jihad” and “terrorism.”   The late Edward Said made this same point 30 years ago for the first time.  It is even more true today with social media and the fake experts paraded on Fox and elsewhere.

Here is one simple revelation: Read the Wikipedia page on Chechnya, and then see how many of its phrases show up in the sound bites of these instant experts.

So where can one turn?   It’s not perfect, but as a starting place for Chechnya start here andhere.    If you can handle satire on such heavy occasions, The Onion pretty much nails it.

3)    The power and danger of social media

We do live in amazing days, when people are putting on Twitter the content from police scanner before the TV news sources have reported it.    Yes, the information from social media called into the FBI doubtlessly helped identify the suspects.     Amazing power there.

And yet this powerful tool also goes wrong, horribly wrong.   This tool produces victims and violence of its own.

In the early morning hours of Friday, the suspicion focused on Sunil Tripathi, an Ivy-league graduate philosophy student of Indian background who has been missing for weeks.    Imagine the horror of his family, who has not heard from their loved ones for weeks, only to see his name and image all over national TV.    It turns out it was all a false alarm, on to the next suspect.    Never mind.  No hard feelings.

4)    The two brothers do not exactly fit the model of pious Muslims.

 Show caption

Tamerlan tsarnaev’s girlfriend

We don’t know much about the two brothers, and all of us—myself included—are trying to piece together a narrative from the few pieces that we have available.    The few pieces we have do not exactly add up to a life of pious observance of Islam.    Their high school friends talk about the two brothers getting together, drinking, and smoking pot.    Their online photo essays “Will Box for Passport” bragged about how hot their girlfriends were.

We have seen this before, in the case of the 9/11 hijackers who visited strip clubs and got loaded up on alcohol and porn before committing their atrocities—again, not the actions of Muslim role models.

5)    Alienation

While many of the sites are busy trying to connect the despicable actions of the bombers to Islam or Chechen ethnicity, at least one important clue seems to be in the same alienation that characterized many mass murderers such as Adam Lanza and the Columbine shooters.

The elder brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, said:

“I don’t have a single American friend, I don’t understand them.”

We have a lot of questions to ask, and seek for answers, trying to sort out how it is possible to live in a society where people can be so disconnected and cut off from the human beings next to them.    Obviously very few Americans go around blowing people up.  But that alienation, combined occasionally with mental illness, is a bigger problem than we are willing to confront at this moment.

Another scholar, Juan Cole, offers an intriguing theory of a broken family dynamic, focused around tensions between the two sons and their father.

6)    Islam forbids terrorism.

No matter what the experts on TV say, and for that matter what the two brothers might have said, here is one simple fact.   Islamic law does not permit the random, indiscriminate killing of civilians.     It is categorically forbidden.     The Prophet Muhammad himself forbade the killing of women, elderly, civilians, and religious leaders.

Over the next few weeks we will undoubtedly learn much more about the two brothers, but we should not conflate their deranged motivations and the teachings of the Islamic tradition.    Period.

Muslim organizations immediately condemned Monday’s atrocities, and have set up a fund for the victims.

7)    Political opportunism

We are already seeing the calls by right-wing fanatics seeking to use this tragedy to advance their own political causes.    The same congressman (R-NY) Peter King who had leadembarrassing and inaccurate Muslim witch-hunts on the House is now calling for increased profiling of Muslims.

 Show caption

Lindsay Graham Twitter

We have also seen our elected officials such as Lindsay Graham (R-SC) opining that the suspect should not be afforded his full constitutional rights.   In fact, Dzhokhar did not get to hear his Miranda rights.   Yes, we are all delighted that he was captured, but the skipping of legal rights hurts all of us.

After Dzhokhar was captured, the BostonPolice department sent out a Tweet:
““The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody.”

As usual, Glenn Greenwald puts it as clearly and powerfully as possible here.

Yes, thank God the hunt is over, and the suspect is in custody.   Now we have to make sure that justice does indeed win.
We have to make sure that we honor our legal process.

8)    Hate crimes against Muslim Americans

It has already begun.  We have already seen a number of attacks on Muslims in America who had absolutely nothing to do with Monday’s atrocities—that is to say, every person in America not named Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

A Bangladeshi man was attacked in Bronx as he stepped outside of an Applebee’s.     The attackers shouted ““f–king Arab” as they savagely beat him.   [Bangladeshis are not Arab, and for that matter neither are the Chechens.]

A Syrian woman was confronted as she was going for a walk in Malden, Massachussetts.   Heba Abolaban, who is a physician, was heading with her daughter in a stroller to a play date.   A man walked up to her, punched her in the shoulder, and shouted at her:  “Fuck you. Fuck you Muslims, You are terrorists, you are the ones who made the Boston explosion.”

The tendency to associate crimes committed by one person with an entire community (ethnic or religious) is particularly harmful for people of color, and directly related to our next item:  white privilege.

9)    White privilege:

There had been so much speculation before the suspects were apprehended about their background and motivation.   The best of these reflections was:  “Please don’t let it be a Muslim.” 

 Show caption

White privilege

Embedded in that discussion of course was a hierarchy of power, racism, and assumption of collective guilt.    To put it as bluntly as possible, when deranged killers are white (as Timothy McVeigh, as James Holmes the Colorado movie theater shooter  was, in fact as 44 out of the 62 mass murderers in America over the last few years have been white), white people do not have to issue collective statements that they are decent human beings. White people do not have to prove that they are Americans, and white people do not have to demonstrate that they are not inherently evil.   Why expect other people, in this case Muslims, to behave any different?

10) It’s not about Islam, or Chechnya.  It’s about America.

What happens now matters.  How we as a nation move forward is critical.    Do we turn our attention where it belongs, on comforting and healing the victims of Monday’s attacks, and do we allow a fair and legal process to bring charges against the captured suspect?

Do we turn into an angry mob accusing all Muslims of a crime that two men committed?
Do we turn this into an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant hysteria?

Or, do we insist that we as a people are better than what we have been through?
Do we want to be heroes, like the ones that put their own lives on the line on Monday, and again in apprehending the suspects?
Or do we give in to unjustified bloodlust?

The basis of the American criminal system is that we evaluate people for what they do, not for who they are.    As one source put it, it’s about verbs, not adjectives.     Let’s keep it that way.      It’s about criminal actions, not their ethnicity or religion.

We have seen plenty of heroism these last few days, from the Boston police force and First Responders on Monday, to Uncle Ruslan’s humane and passionate response in seeing his own family members implicated in horrific crimes, to the work of the FBI in tracking down Dzhokhar without creating new victims.

Monday’s chapter was written.
Our response is yet to be written, and we are its authors.
Let us hope and pray that we are up to responding in a way that offers a beautiful reflection of our character.

I hope we remember the beautiful viral response from Patton Oswalt after Monday’s bombings.

“So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”

I hope we remember the powerful singing of the national anthem after the Boston Bruins game.

I hope we remember Uncle Ruslan:

 Show caption

Uncle Ruslan Tsarni

“I teach my children.This is the ideal micro-world in the entire world.
I respect this country.
I love this country.
This country which gives chance to everybody else to be treated as a human being and to just to be human being.
To feel yourself human being.”

 Show caption

Richard Martin, 8-year old victim of Monday’s explosions

And I hope we remember Martin Richard, the beautiful 8-year old victim of Monday’s bombing:

No More Hurting People.  Peace.  

http://omidsafi.religionnews.com/2013/04/20/10-essential-points/

See also: Boston bombing: What is terrorism?

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3. Islamic Decree [Fatwa] Against Terrorism
4. Rebuttal to  Anti-Islam FAQs
5. Tolerance
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