HAPPY RAMADAN!!!
Posted on 12/03/2002 2:27:50 AM PST by Stultis
December 1, 2002
The message from the Israeli Jew who took a journey into Islam and wrote a book about it is filled with deep love for the religion but despair about the murderous or blind face too many of its followers turn to the West.
Yossi Klein Halevi, a thoughtful writer for The Jerusalem Report, New Republic and Los Angeles Times, and author of the book At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, was in Toronto recently as an engaging speaker to talk about his journey "to become at home in a mosque."
That book about his spiritual encounters with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land had the bad luck to be released on 9/11, when New York and the West were transfixed with a new fear of terrorism.
And Israel was blamed as a trigger. But Halevi says border battles are not as integral to the terrorism of the intifada as is religion: "Islam is central to the inability of the Arab world to accept any compromise."
Halevi found that a Jew wearing a kippa was just not acceptable to mainstream Muslims. "They mean what they say. Islam is a tolerant faith, but that was in the medieval world." It was the Sufi, a mystical peripheral Islamic cult, that allowed him to become immersed in the choreography of their prayers, an experience he treasures.
Halevi explored Islam to find a bridge to peace, but finds himself a battered traveller in his effort to expand his understanding of the Palestinian version of recent history. He says peace with Palestinians depends not on land but psychology. "We've become each other's greatest demons, not fellow traumatized people. Both sides have to recognize this is a struggle between two legitimate national movements."
Israel went through its moral crisis over that in the first intifada, he says. Any assumption by Israelis that a parallel process was happening in the Arab world turned out to be wrong in this second intifada. He says the Arab street just sees the Palestinians as continuing the "final solution" (Hitler's term for the Holocaust). He's never seen "a greater evil than mothers sending their sons out as suicide bombers in the name of God."
Halevi says he's stopped reaching out to Islam. "Personally, I have nothing left. I am incapable of making any overture to the Palestinian or Arab world. What I need to resume that process is some indication that the process of recognition is beginning. All the signals are exactly the opposite."
Halevi found a systematic attempt in the Arab world to delegitimatize the Jewish story. "Much of the Islamic world has picked up where the Christian church left off in Holocaust denial," he says.
He pointed out in a New Republic column last month that military leaders, and Ariel Sharon, don't see an ultimate military victory against the Palestinians, only a political solution. Their victory will come in shaping that solution by convincing the Palestinians that Israeli society can't be defeated or coerced by terrorism.
After the coming Israeli election, where Halevi says Labour will be punished and Sharon rewarded, the Palestinians will again face an opponent who has not grown weaker but stronger. Such is the "self-destructive nature of Arab politics," Halevi says, that the map of what they hope to achieve gets smaller with every rejection. The Israeli society that was expected to be shredded by the fear of the intifada has grown more resolute. Those who would volunteer to fight in the army even if there wasn't a draft have increased, and now ordinary citizens have started to ignore the warnings of possible attacks to return to festivals and evening strolls.
Halevi says Israel is under assault by Islam because "we're too western." Islam sees itself as being in war against the West, that western democracy must be defeated. Halevi concedes it would be good for Israel to be more of a hybrid culturally but it must, politically, be a western democracy. He calls on his fellow citizens "to project a much greater sense of belonging in the Middle East."
So what's his wish now his expedition has ended in futility? "My hope is that the coming war in the Middle East will be the catalyst that shakes up the Arab world that seems frozen, deadlocked, and that the silent minority in the Arab world may perhaps be emboldened to finally begin to challenge the mainstream Islamic doctrine that insists on Jewish and Christian subservience to Islam ... so that Islam can take its place in a religiously pluralistic world, and in political terms, a politically pluralistic world."
A hope many share with this explorer of Islam.
The confusing part is the moderates in Western countries. I refuse to believe that all those moderates are conspiring against us. IMHO, moderate Western Islamics are trying to earn a living, trying to live and let live.
But one thing's for certain: pressure to go more hard line has been the trend for over a thousand years. Consider Farrakhan's attempt: "Kill the white devil!" I also have a link somewhere to Saudi funding of "hate speech" to harden muslims in the US.
Israel went through its moral crisis over that in the first intifada, he says. Any assumption by Israelis that a parallel process was happening in the Arab world turned out to be wrong in this second intifada. He says the Arab street just sees the Palestinians as continuing the "final solution" (Hitler's term for the Holocaust). He's never seen "a greater evil than mothers sending their sons out as suicide bombers in the name of God."
Halevi says he's stopped reaching out to Islam. "Personally, I have nothing left. I am incapable of making any overture to the Palestinian or Arab world. What I need to resume that process is some indication that the process of recognition is beginning. All the signals are exactly the opposite."
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