Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

The Muslims “seem to be about to take over Europe,” says Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Euro-American Orientalists. Earlier, this sage had used his phenomenal numerological powers to issue a warning – duly publicized by the Wall Street Journal – that Iran would attack Israel and the Western world on September 22, 2006. Fortunately for us we survived, unlike, so it seems, Lewis’s sanity.

Lewis clearly knows his case is weak, which makes one wonder why he would not speak on the topic he is more intimately familiar with: the Jewish influence on US politics and media. With a son working for America’s most powerful lobby, AIPAC, and his fellow neoconservatives pushing US towards a new war against Israel’s regional adversaries, having already mired it in Iraq, Lewis clearly isn’t oblivious to this fact. Imagine the epithets that would be hurled, however, if someone were to suggest ”the Jews are taking over United States”? Legitimately so, I believe. The majority of American Jews do not share the pro-war, rejectionist stance of the neoconservatives or the organizations like AIPAC, AJC, ADL, CPMJAO etc. Blaming all Jews for the actions of this minority would be just as anti-Semitic as the fearmongering indulged in by Lewis and the Jerusalem Post is Islamophobic.

Alas, as Edward Said pointed out, anti-Arab and Muslim bigotry is the last form of acceptable racism in the West.

 Jerusalem Post‘s Islamophobic Crusade

I have a feeling that the Lewis article is not merely an isolated example of the demented views of a sclerotic mind gone off the deep end. Just a short while back, Jerusalem Post had published another article with the appropriately alarmist title Right on!: Say Goodbye to Europe. The article was sent to me for comments by a friend in California who in turn had received it from a lobbyist in DC. Here is from the reply I sent her.

Thank you for this very interesting article. There are many things about it that are noteworthy, and give a clue as to its credibility.

1) The source itself: Jerusalem Post is a right-wing Israeli publication owned by Rupert Murdoch, and in an Israeli society, which, on most issues, stands even to the right of Ariel Sharon, it is the equivalent of Fox News on steriods.

Rand Corporation, the other source cited, is a rightwing think tank which was being ridiculed as far back as the ’60s when in Dr. Strangelove it was referred to as the “Bland Corporation”. In the ’70s it was taken over by the Zionists and the two recent heads of AIPAC, the main Israeli lobby, served as directors at Rand (Condolezza Rice’s first job was at Rand under Steve Rosen). 

Mark Steyn, the only commentator cited is a far-right Zionist extremist, who is given columnspace in right-wing publications in Britain and Canada because of his friendship with Conrad Black (Canadian version of Rupert Murdoch, and husband of the Canadian Ann-Coulter, Barbara Amiel) to stir up the type of controversies that boost sales. Here’s his online garbage dump.

2) The various sources cited are sequenced in an way that gives the impression that each  supports the premise. No where does it offer a projection of exactly when this calamitous takeover will take place. The figures, such as the population of European muslims, are exaggerated first and then extrapolated to reach the fantastic conclusion that it will double by 2025. First of all, most european countries have highly restrictive immigration laws for individuals coming from Muslim countries. Secondly, most second generation muslims mostly have birthrates only marginally higher than their european counterparts. Thirdly, most muslims don’t come to stay; they come either for higher education, or to make their metaphorical fortunes.

3)The article relies on an assumption that a muslim society is essentially inimical to Judaism or Christianity, and a europe with a muslim majority will become “even less welcoming place for Americans, Israelis and for Jews”. The fantastic nature of the claim (of muslims become a majority) notwithstanding, it ignores european and islamic history, and present day political realities. First of all, Muslims are quite capable of making the distinction between American people and their governments. Americans have always been welcome in Muslim countries and there are few places which have escaped the diffusion of american cultural icons. Even at the height of the bombing of Afghanistan, I personally witnessed ameican journalists welcomed, and walking about freely in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar — a place with strong ethnic and emotional affinities to the Taliban. As for Jews, if they are not as welcome today as people of other ethnicities, it has to do with the fact that Israel and Zionists — by consciously obfuscating the distinction between Judaism and Zionism, and by declaring Israel a state of “all jews” — have distributed the culpability for their crimes over a whole people. As for history, everyone knows that only in Islamic lands did Jews escape the kind of persecution and demonization that they faced everywhere else. Recall, that Jews were welcomed in Islamic lands when they fled Spain to escape the inquisition. As with Americans in Iraq, Israeli actions in Palestine are fast eroding the goodwill that has hitherto survived the vagaries of history.

Let us also not forget that anti-Zionist Jews and Muslims frequently cooperate in Europe and United States, and those Jews — like Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Harold Pinter, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Jennifer Loewenstein — who are openly critical of US-Israeli crimes, are just as popular amongst Muslims as they are here in the West. It is not the ethnicity, it is the active complicity, or failure to make a distinction with the crimes of Israel that accounts for the suspicions otherwise.

4). Lastly, and most importantly, the article tries to identify Israeli interests with American interests. Palestinian Statehood is an Israeli problem. The whole world, save Israel and US, are unanimous in its support, and solution has been on the cards since atleast 1976, blocked by Israeli intransigence and the US veto (at Israels behest). Regarding terror, as the eminent American political scientists, John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Dean of Harvard School of Government) have pointed out, “ saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around”. Of course, both professors, like Jimmy Carter – for that matter all muslims – were vilified by the Israel lobby for having the temerity to question Israel’s brutal policies, or its disproportionate influence over US policy. (The Iraq Study Group, and James Baker in particular received the same treatment for reaching similar conclusions).

The New Canard

A friend adds:

There is another curious element to the “new canard”: trying to project the Israeli/zio “fears of a demographic threat” onto Europe.  We reject this in toto in Israel-Palestine: it is simply one of the many racist arguments meant to justify ethnic cleansing etc.  One of the issues they have is how to justify this to a European public, and what they try to do together with rightists groups is to crank up the fears of “muslims”…  If they can sell this in Europe, then their hope is that Europeans will (1) understand what Israel is doing and (2) suppress forces inimical to Israel in Europe.  This is a constant theme, and one only has to read the ruminations of the leading zionists (e.g., Emanuele Ottolenghi) in Europe to realize this.

There is also a huge element of hypocrisy — what else is new.  Europe allowed massive immigration to do its dirty work.  It is a fact that Europe now has a two-layered second class citizenship, i.e., one that has a legal status (primarily from the ex-colonies) and another that operates in the black economy (these are not really citizens, but people expected to be invisible — ghosts).  While the immigrants do their menial work and keep quiet some Europeans are happy with the outcome.  However, when suddenly this second tier in society raises its head or its voice, then all sorts of phony fears are conjured by the likes of the Daily Mail, Evening Standard, or the Murdoch rags.  It is a fact that the dual society suggests that we don’t live in a democracy — people who live and work here for generations also should have rights.  At this stage of the game it is not valid to put forth the Le Pen type of recommendations: ethnic cleansing in Europe.  Just like we reject apartheid/ethnic cleansing in Palestine, then same thing holds for Europe.  Europe has to become a democracy for all its citizens, and the right-wing posturing about new canards, ethnic threats, etc. must be rejected in toto.  Mark Steyn, Freund, Lewis — are the purveyors and justifiers of apartheid/ethnic cleansing in Israel, and while they think they are doing something for their cause in Europe, in reality they are poisoning and undermining a serious discussion about the nature of our societies.  It is best to leave these smooth bigots out of this equation.