Islam just isn't into us [Excerpts]
“I have the highest respect for the religion of Islam, and recognize the heroic efforts of many religious leaders in contemporary Iran to stand up to the repressions wrought by the ruling system,” says Jewish human rights activist Irwin Cotler.
“I refuse to associate these crimes generically with the mullahs of Iran, and I deplore any attempt to do so,” he continued in his July 24th letter to the editor. And thus began yet another misguided chapter of the never-ending Jewish and liberal quest for the Islamic world to “like us”. Cotler’s bizarre statements have little to do with reality. Iran is where religious fervour, led by a religious leader-the Ayatollah Khomeni, brought upon the Islamic revolution. It is religious fervour -- inspired by a perverse interpretation of Shiia Islam -- that motivates Iran’s genocidal leader, with the continued blessings of the religious establishment.
It has been said that a definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Certainly, there can be no better explanation for Jews, and particularly liberal Jews to keep trying new ways of currying favour in the eyes of the Islamic world.
How many strategies have been tried? Too many to list in one short article. But a few noteworthy projects deserve a mention. In Israel, the Jews have tried to give away “land for peace”, and that has failed miserably time and time again. Egypt is a despotic regime, with the fanatic Muslim brotherhood gaining more political ground each passing day. It maintains a frigid and grudging “peace” with Israel and the “peace” with Jordan is only measurably more civil. Israel sends civil aid to disaster zones all over the world, performs open-heart surgeries on Arab babies, gives Arab Israeli citizens full rights under the law, and even treats Palestinian terrorists at Israeli hospitals, but it’s still not enough. Israel has Arab members of the Knesset, and despite the terrorist threat implicit in it, successive Israeli leaders continue to commit to the founding of a Palestinian state. But that’s still not enough for the Muslim world.
In the Jewish diaspora, and under the heavy influence of socialist and Marxist dogma, liberal Jews pour small fortunes into “inter-faith” causes, conferences and dialogues in the hopes of finding “greater understanding” with the Islamic world in general-and in particular with the Palestinians.
[W]hat is so hard to understand about “we hate your guts, and will continue to kill and maim you”? Just last week, an “inter-faith” Rabbi, the guest speaker at an ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) conference was shocked ... shocked to hear that one of the guest imams felt that Jews deserved the Holocaust because they turned their backs against Allah. What is so hard to understand about that?
