Culture of Hate: A racism which denies the history and sufferings of its victims.

National Review Online ^ | August 2, 2002 | Bat Yeor

[xsysmgr]

At the dawn of the new millennium, the world is being confronted with an absolute culture of hate, characterized by paroxysms of international terrorism against civilians, and religious intolerance. This culture of hate has multiple heads from Algeria to Afghanistan, to Indonesia, via Gaza and the West Bank, Damascus, Cairo, Khartoum, Teheran, and Karachi. It scatters the seeds of terrorism from one end of the earth to the other.

This hate, which suppresses freedom of thought, and condemns difference, calls itself "Islamic jihad." It draws on religious texts whose interpretation other Muslims dispute. Moreover, because these moderate Muslims challenge this interpretation of jihad, wishing to live in peace with the non-Muslim peoples and nations of the world, their lives are threatened. There is constant bloodshed in Algeria. Jihad is disseminating death and terror in Israel. In Southern Sudan, jihad has caused the death of some two million people, generated an even larger number of refugees, lead to the enslavement of tens of thousands, and produced deadly famines.

In Indonesia, some 200,000 deaths resulted from jihad violence in East Timor. Christians have been pursued, and massacred, and their churches burned down by jihadists in the Moluccas and other Indonesian islands. The death toll in these violent attacks is over 10,000, while an additional 8,000 Christians have been forcibly converted to Islam, including many who were circumcised. Atrocities are also being committed by jihadists in both the Philippines, and some northern Nigerian states. Hundreds of innocent people died when jihad struck at the Jewish Community Center of Buenos Aires in Argentina, and the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In Egypt, jihadists have massacred Copts in their churches and villages, and murdered European tourists. Christians in Pakistan and in Iran live in terror of accusations of blasphemy, which, if "proven," can yield a death sentence. And a cataclysmic act of jihad terror resulted in the slaughter of nearly 3,000 innocent civilians of multiple faiths and nationalities in New York, on September 11, 2001. None of these victims were guilty of any crime. They were murdered and mutilated out of hate.

It is this hate that Israel is fighting. The Durban World Conference Against Racism — where the culture of hate was rehabilitated, not condemned — ended only three days before the jihad terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. When proposals were made condemning Zionism, this conference was encouraging jihad, the culture of the war against infidels, while ignoring the principles of freedom and human rights. This was negationist racism. The word "Zion," which designates the land of Israel and its capital Jerusalem, exists in texts dating back almost three millennia. It was the Emperor Hadrian who first called the country Palestine in 135. In this Palestine, Arabic was not the common language, the Bible and not the Koran was taught, and the population was mainly Jewish. Palestine was colonized five centuries later by the Arab armies of the Islamic jihad. Many Jews were massacred at that time, others deported to Arabia as slaves, the whole population expropriated and reduced to the condition of dhimmis, as were all indigenous Jews and Christians in the south Mediterranean countries conquered by jihad, including those in many European countries.

Should these countries conquered by Islam — Portugal, Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, Crete, and the southern regions of France and Italy, for example — still be considered Arab Muslim lands? Turkish jihad conquests imposed the sharia as far north as Hungary and southern Poland, and, on all of central Europe within the Ottoman Empire, including regions of Greece, former Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria, until the end of the 19th century. Are those countries also to be identified as Muslim lands, in which non-Muslim inhabitants must return to the condition of dhimmis, whose testimony concerning Muslims is rejected by Islamic courts? Will they again be required to don discriminatory garments such as the Taliban demanded of the Hindus, or be subject to the continuing prohibition on building and renovating their churches, like the Copts in Egypt?

If the liberation movement of the Jews in their ancestral homeland is interpreted as racism, then all the movements of liberation from expropriation and servitude imposed by jihad are racist. Such a stance reinstates the imperialism of the Islamic jihad, which has claimed millions of victims over three continents during more than a millennium, deported an incalculable number of slaves, and annihilated entire peoples, destroying their history, their monuments, and their culture. Have the Copts of Egypt a right to their history and their language? Do the Kabili of North Africa have a right to theirs? We must acknowledge all the victims of the racism that jihad creates, a racism which denies the history, sufferings, and memories of those conquered.

Arab racism consists of calling the Land of Israel, Arab land, whereas no Palestinian province, village, or town, including Jerusalem is mentioned either in the Koran or in any Arabic text before the end of the ninth century. On the contrary, these locations are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, which represents the religious and historical heritage of the Jewish people. The Bible, which tells the history of this country, tells it in Hebrew, the language of the country, and not in Arabic. Palestinian racism consists of asserting that the whole history of Israel, biblical history, is Arab, Islamic, and Palestinian history. The kings and prophets of Israel were Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim kings and prophets, as were Jesus, his family, and the apostles. This Arabization and Islamization of the Bible thus robs not only the Jews but also the whole of Christianity of their history. New theologies of substitution are developed, transferring Israel's heritage to Arab and Muslim Palestine.

The imperialism of jihad consists of appropriating the whole history and identity of the peoples who were conquered and thrown into the nonexistence of dhimmitude. This is a total negation of the other, a refusal to acknowledge him as an equal. Israel's battle is not a battle of colonists, as some European political circles like to claim, because Europe itself had a colonial history on all continents, which it projects on to Israel. Similarly, Europe projects its own history of Nazism on to the Israelis, thereby revenging itself on the revelations of historians. Israel's battle is not a battle against the Muslim world, it is a battle against the unbridled hate of jihad. Israelis are struggling to maintain their liberation from the yoke of dhimmitude, which was imposed in order to eradicate the Jews in their indigenous homeland. That is why Christians who reject the new theologies of substitution are joining Israel in its fight, as are Muslims who refuse to allow the values of Islam to be perverted by the ideology of jihad. It is through this common effort that reconciliation between peoples can be achieved, replacing the culture of hate with a culture of friendship.

— Bat Yeor is the author of three books on jihad and dhimmitude, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam (1985), The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude(1996), and Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2002). Andrew G. Bostom, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Brown University Medical School contributed to this essay.

[ken5050]

Did you read Derbyshire's article in NRO today....I was too depressed to post it.....

[A_perfect_lady]

In Southern Sudan, jihad has caused the death of some two million people, ... In Indonesia, some 200,000 deaths resulted from jihad violence in East Timor. Christians have been pursued, and massacred, and their churches burned down by jihadists in the Moluccas and other Indonesian islands. The death toll in these violent attacks is over 10,000, ... Atrocities are also being committed by jihadists in both the Philippines, and some northern Nigerian states. Hundreds of innocent people died ... In Egypt, jihadists have massacred Copts in their churches and villages, and murdered European tourists. ...the slaughter of nearly 3,000 innocent civilians of multiple faiths and nationalities in New York, on September 11, 2001.

The good news is that when the jihadists pass 100 million deaths, (and if they get their hands on nukes, they won't hesitate, believe me) we can quit having the "what has killed more people, religion or atheism" threads and start looking at it the way it should be looked at: "what has killed more people, religious/secular collectivism, or religious/secular individualism?"

Well, the few of us left alive can, anyway.

[RJayneJ]

Essay Of The Week

Quote of the Day by by Libloather

[xsysmgr]

Did you read Derbyshire's article in NRO today....I was too depressed to post it.....

Yes, and me too.

[Valin]

Here you go.

Unpleasant Truths
A conservative view of the world today.



ne of the disorienting things for an Old World conservative settling in America is that over here, even conservatives are optimistic. This really won't do. A conservative ought to be a pessimist, at least about human nature, human society, and the prospects for improving them. The facile cheeriness of the lefty world-perfecters are not for us, with their New Soviet Man, their Socialist Spiritual Civilization, their City of the Sun, their coming reign of peace, justice, and absolute equality. We are more of the temper of H. P. Lovecraft, who began one of his short stories with the arresting observation that: "Life is a hideous thing."



In an attempt to redress the balance, to tug my conservative American friends back towards a properly gloomy outlook on events, I have given over today's column to a list of unpleasant truths. This is stuff you don't want to hear, but that, if you are a true conservative, you cannot dispute. Remember the slogan of the 1964 Goldwater campaign**: "In your heart you know he's right."

Most of us will die in poverty. There is no way that systems devised to provide for mid-20th-century retirees will be able to cope in the mid-21st, with imploding demographics and a centenarian on every block. "Defined-contribution" pension plans will have to be baled out by the federal government, if private enterprise is to survive. The dollars we get from them will therefore be massively devalued. Since there is no one to bale out Social Security, benefits will soon be restricted to citizens more than 80 years old. Similarly for Medicare. In fact...

Quality health care for all is not possible. Quality health care is what rich people get. (Actually, according to one of the depressingly tiny number of rich people I know, even they have trouble getting it.) The rest of us must wait on line to be misdiagnosed by ill-trained, paperwork-swamped, litigation-shy doctors, assisted by nurses imported from the less hygienic parts of the Third World, and unionized hospital staff with no-way-you-can-get-me-fired attitudes. This could only change if the U.S.A. devoted her entire Gross National Product to health care; and even then, it probably wouldn't stay changed for long.

Pop culture is filth. It is now completely degenerate. Why do you never hear anyone humming a current pop song any more? Because none of them is hummable, or even worth bothering to remember. What is the main topic on TV sitcoms and "dramedies"? You know what. Why do you stand in the aisle in Blockbuster muttering to yourself: "There isn't a single damn movie in here I want to watch"? Because Hollywood produces nothing but crap, crap, crap.

Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait. The saddest true thing ever said (by Henri Estienne, 1531-98). Translation: "If youth only knew, if age only could."

The environment is collapsing. The U.S. will get the blame for it, of course, but the main culprit is the Third World. Take a trip to China: The air is a soupy smog, even in quite remote places. Vast dust storms sweep periodically across the north of the country, sometimes continuing right on across the Pacific. (And in one case last year, the Atlantic, too!) The rivers run purple, orange, and turquoise. People tell me India is worse. The inhabitants of Africa are busily stripping their continent of all vegetation, having already pretty much exterminated the fauna, except in a few tourist reservations. The oceans are being fished out, and near-earth orbit is filling up with lethal junk.

Science has stopped. None of the really major scientific advances that you have been reading about since 1970 as "just over the horizon" is ever going to happen. Cheap fusion power; the colonization of Mars; artificial intelligence; supersonic air travel you can afford; contact with extraterrestrial civilizations; the conquest of cancer, tooth decay, or the common cold; fuhgeddaboutit.

Not all groups are equally good at all things. East Asians will continue to win Olympic diving events, and runners of West African ancestry will continue to win the 100-meter dash. Similarly, nobody will ever be able to devise a test of knowledge or understanding on which groups with different population-genetic histories all record identical statistical profiles. You can have meritocracy, or you can have equality of outcomes by ancestry-group, but you can't have both. Which one do you want? It seems we have already made up our minds. Corollary.....

Affirmative action is absolutely essential to social order. Think about it.

Socialism is popular. Practically all of the Socialist Party platform on which Norman Thomas ran in 1928 has been implemented. Thomas himself noticed this as far back as 1962, exulting that: "The difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted some ideas of Socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly." Yet the main negative factors in the national life today, according to spokespersons for this country's largest political party, are corporate greed, tax cuts for the rich, and poverty-stricken old folk crying out for life-saving medications. Plainly we need still more socialism. Don't worry, we'll get it. Conversely...

Conservatism is dead. No genuinely conservative policy will ever be enacted, ever again, by any U.S. government or the government of any important state. Great masses of ordinary Americans believe that "conservative" means "repressed fundamentalist freak." Why would they not believe this? Every medium of mass entertainment and mass information has been preaching it to them, over and over and over, for twenty years. The Ronald Reagan of 1980, if he were to stride onto the national stage today, would be unelectable. Calvin Coolidge would be laughed out of public life, if by some bizarre accident he were permitted to wander into it. Even when large majorities of Americans favor a conservative policy, nothing will be done to implement it. For example....

Nothing will be done about immigration. Business leaders and economic decision-makers all believe (perhaps correctly) that mass immigration is the main reason for this country's continuing economic vitality. The Left sees poor immigrants as clients. Huge numbers of Americans are now "Hispanic," and believe that anti-immigration activists hate them. The Joint Chiefs have no intention of letting their commands be used to police the southern border, understanding perfectly well that they would never be allowed to open fire on anyone — which is the main thing that trained soldiers are trained to do, and the inability to do which leads to collapsing morale and cratering recruitment. (It is also, of course, the only thing that would have any actual effect.)

Only Anglo-Saxon countries can do democracy. The natural state of human society is despotism. If you tally up all the human lives that have ever been lived on this planet under organized systems of government, no more than five per cent were lived under consensual systems. Even to get up to five per cent, you have to include places like ancient Athens and Tudor England, which wouldn't pass muster as "democratic" by modern standards. In the last couple of centuries, practically all consensual systems have been Anglo-Saxon. Other cultures can fake it for a few decades, as France, Germany, and Japan are currently doing, but their hearts aren't really in it and they will swoon gratefully into the arms of a fascist dictator when one comes along. As a corollary of this...

China will get stronger and richer, without moving one inch closer to constitutional government. The Chinese Communist Party has got "over the hump" into a plateau of stability that, barring severe environmental catastrophe (see above), will last for decades. Rich and confident, unrestrained by electoral considerations or Judeo-Christian ethics, or any other kind of ethics, they will do all the things we dare not do: human genetic experimentation, culling of "useless mouths," militarization of space, minor wars of aggression, etc. In particular...

Taiwan will be re-united with the Motherland....by some combination of economic carrot and military stick. The U.S. will grumble ineffectually, up to the point where the Chinese ambassador loses his patience and asks the U.S. Secretary of State point-blank: "How many cities are you willing to lose over this? We ourselves are willing to lose three or four." Then we will stop grumbling.

Something inconceivably horrible will happen in the Middle East. Probably the following: The Arabs will commit some huge, gross atrocity against Israel. Surviving Israelis will respond by massacring the Palestinian Arabs, and perhaps erasing a couple of Arab capitals. 100 years of peace in the Middle East will follow.







The four horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride. Just to remind you, their names are: War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. No. 4 will presumably always be with us, but at least we have got Nos. 1, 2, and 3 pretty much fenced off in sub-Saharan Africa, right? The chance that you or me, or your kids or mine, will die in a genuine mass-mobilization-type, carriers-going-down-with-all-hands-type, flattened-cities-type war, or from starvation, or in some horrid medieval-type, communal-grave-type, 1918-flu-type plague, is actuarially insignificant, right? Well, believe it if you like, but your belief has no foundation more substantial than wishful thinking. History suggests that it is most likely false.

The next version of MicroSoft Windows will be even buggier and more counterintuitive than the last. That one you know perfectly well, of course — I don't know why I bothered to include it. Further bad news on this front: e-mail will be rendered completely useless by spam, all that wonderful free information on the web will gradually be shut off into fee-paying sites, and NRO will start posting my photograph again.

Poverty and hardship build character; prosperity and security destroy it. Look around you.

The U.S. constitution is incompatible with a war on terrorism. It is absurdly easy to commit a terrorist act in the U.S.A. This state of affairs could be changed only by abandoning key constitutional protections. We shall be very reluctant to do this; but if deaths from terrorism reach a certain number, we shall do it anyway. That number has either seven or eight digits.

Justice is dead. As the last of the generation of judges who actually believe in the law heads into retirement, the administration of justice will be divvied up between avaricious trial lawyers and ideology-addled graduates of lefty law schools. Their morale destroyed by "brutality" and "profiling" hysteria, police forces will sink into corruption and paper-pushing. Ambitious public prosecutors will concentrate on framing up law-abiding citizens with "hate crime," "corporate corruption," "dangerous product" (guns, fast food) or "child abuse" charges. Actual crime — murder, rape, robbery, burglary, and assault — will skyrocket, but it will be illegal to talk about it.

We are living in a golden age. The past was pretty awful; the future will be far worse. Enjoy!


While trying not to remember the counter-slogan put out by the LBJ campaign: "In your guts you know he's nuts."

[Texas_Jarhead]

Good one.

[Alouette]

ping!

[sheik yerbouty]

They will meet the fate of Carthage.

[Tolik]

Why did you have to do it!? People warned you that its bad for digestion.

As they say in the old joke:

Pessimist saying: its so bad, it can't be worse.

Optimist answers: Yes, it can!

[El Gato]

The Ronald Reagan of 1980, if he were to stride onto the national stage today, would be unelectable.

That's more or less what people said then too, some of them anyway. Regan was at least as conservative as Goldwater, but Goldwater was trounced, due in part to slimey campaigning by LBJs troops but largely because of JFKs assasination. People argued from the latter to the former, wrongly as it turned out.

[El Gato]

Why do you stand in the aisle in Blockbuster muttering to yourself: "There isn't a single damn movie in here I want to watch"? Because Hollywood produces nothing but crap, crap, crap.

Oh, I don't know, 90+% maybe, but I though "Black Hawk Down" and "Enemy at the Gates" were pretty decent. Going back aways so were "The Patriot" (Mel Gibson version) and "Red Dawn"

[El Gato]

The four horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride.

Optimist!, I'd say they've been galloping about for some time now. They do seem to be picking up steam of late, I will admit.

[Valin]

Remember it can always be worse...and probably will be.
I've always put it this way, A pessimist can occasionally be pleasantly suprised, but seldom caught off guard.

[DBtoo]

What a very frightening but informative article. I often think of the Jews in Israel as a herd of sheep surrounded by packs of hungry wolves. I can't imagine the stress those people live under everyday.

Personally, I think a lot of the Arabs and central Asians are somewhat warlike by nature, and the Islamic Jihad appeals to their psychology. Also, they have very high birth rates, and with the increase in population comes unemployment, anger, resentment, envy and the urge to kill. I remember reading about all the slaughters in Algeria during the mid and latter part of the 90s. They would go into remote villages in the night and slaughter everyone, using their favorite method of throat-slitting. There needs to be some sort of genetic modification in order for these people to be able to live in peace, or else many will have to go.

[denydenydeny]

Indexing.

[colorado tanker]

It's not terribly surprising that the medieval authoritarianism of the islamic world has failed its people in the modern world. Nor is it surprising that those governments have responded by blaming Jews and the West and by fanning a fascist militarism. It's all been done before.

Many in the West will whine that its our fault they hate us and will counsel appeasement will take away their grievences and hate. It won't work with the arab fascists any better than it did with the germans or soviets.

We've done what we had to do to face this down before and we will again. It takes a lot to arouse a republic to action, but as Eisenhower observed, the bad guys should not (but usually do) underestimate the power of an aroused democracy.