Of Arabism, Zionism, and Journeys…

Gerald A. Honigman | Ekurd.net

Recently, Caroline Glick, a much-admired analyst for those who desire a fair shake for all the various peoples in the age of nationalism in the Middle East and adjacent lands–i.e., Arabs, but also scores of millions of non-Arabs as well (an idea rejected by most of the former, who claim the region to be primarily “purely Arab patrimony”)–declared that she would soon enter the political scene…the next step on her Zionist journey.

The above parenthetical thought–describing the prevalent, millennial Arab mindset, summarizes the Arab-Israeli conflict in a nutshell–but also, together with the associated mandatory dominance of the religio-political modus operandi of the Dar ul-Islam over the Dar al-Harb–also is the source of the Arab-Kurd, Arab-Amazigh/Kabyle/”Berber,” Arab-Copt, Arab-black African, Arab-Semitic (but pre-Arab) Lebanese and Assyrian, and other conflicts in the region as well.

The Arabs’ Anfal Campaign against the Kurds in Iraq in the 1980s and long term actions in Darfur and much of the rest of the Sudan and other places in black Africa are just a few of other examples of Arab genocidal actions against all who might disagree…and just in modern times.

Literally, millions of non-Arabs–both Muslims and non-Muslims–have been slaughtered in the name of Arabism and its related cause, the jihadi conquests for the Dar ul-Islam.

Kurds, North African Imazighen/”Berbers,” and Darfur Sudanese black Africans are–like Arabs–mostly Muslim, after all. So, something beyond religious persecution has also been involved here…Think ethnic racism, to be precise. And practiced, ironically, by the same folks who, along with non-Arab useful idiots, like to lecture others about alleged “racist Zionism,” and who got the United Nations Security Council to issue a resolution proclaiming this in the 1970s.

Furthermore, this murderous, oppressive behavior does not include the Arab conquests in the Indian subcontinent and other points east–where most folks were not “People of the Book” (Christians, Jews, and later Zoroastrians after Iran fell to Arab armies), so could not gain certain tenuous “protections” (think The Godfather’s Don Corleone) via consent to the requirements of dhimmitude. For those even less fortunate folks of the East, the choice was either to convert to Islam or die.

Regarding the relationship between Arabs, who’ve hoodwinked (or paid off) folks like the black Muslim Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan and others, consider the following.

As a card-carrying member of the prestigious London-based Anti-Slavery Society for years, I had access to appalling information. But what was going on for decades in modern times, and long before as well, was no secret–even though it was ignored in too many circles. In academia, too often if the “sin” was non-Hebraic, it was never discussed nor included on a course reading list.

Using the Sudan as one of other examples regarding the Arab conquests in black Africa, here’s how the Arab north of the country viewed all of this…

Ex-president, Gaafar Muhammad al-Nimeiry proclaimed, “The Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into…black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission (‘Arabism and Pan-Arabism in Sudanese Politics,’ Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 11, no. 2, 1973, pp. 177-78).”

Now think about that…

While critics are quick to identify Rudyard Kipling’s late 19th-century poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” as typifying Western colonialist, imperialist attitudes towards the Third World, why have such Arab racist, supremacist attitudes and mindset in the Sudan and elsewhere been routinely ignored? The common name in Arabic for a black African is ‘abd–slave. Indeed, in the Sudan alone, and only including this past century, millions of blacks have been killed, maimed, enslaved, displaced, and so forth by Arab and Arabized subjugators.

Is it that the Arab Man’s Burden is acceptable, but The White Man’s is not?

Imagine if Jews and Zionism were involved with the above.

The unfortunate actions Israel is sometimes forced to take are a direct result of Arab refusal to recognize the rights of modern day Judeans–Jews–to a resurrected Judea/Israel whether it’s 9-15 miles wide, as the ’49 armistice lines left it after a half dozen Arab states attacked immediately upon its rebirth in May 1948, or 900 miles wide. Again, in Arab thinking, the whole region is simply just “purely Arab patrimony’–and to hell with anyone else, not only Jews.

The original post-World War I 1920 Mandate of Palestine awarded to Great Britain in the wake of the dissolution of the Ottoman Turkish Empire after World War I underwent partition, along with other plans repeatedly rejected by Arabs–many, if not most, of whom were new arrivals themselves into the Mandate from elsewhere in the neighborhood. Solid documentation from sources such as the Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations testify to this.

In 1922, Colonial Secretary Churchill lopped off almost 80% of the original 1920 Mandate and handed it over to Arab nationalism in one of its many species. Transjordan, all of Palestine east of the Jordan River, was gifted to London’s Arab allies in the recent war, the Hashemites of Arabia–who were in the process of getting booted out by the forces of Ibn Saud. Hence, Saudi Arabia today.

Had Arabs accepted the 1947 partition plan, they would have wound up with almost 90% of the total land area of Palestine… So much for their blatant lie that Jews were handed almost all of the land. Arabs have a name for such legitimate lying–especially to “Infidels.” It’s called taqiyya. And all of this begs the question:

What compromises has Arab nationalism (or Arabism) ever been willing to make with any of its own competitors–like those mentioned above?

Scores of millions of other peoples are still denied even one state, let alone almost two dozen others that Arabs have due to their conquest and Arabization of mostly non-Arab peoples’ lands on over six million square miles of territory.

Yet, an Israel, that requires a magnifying glass to locate on a world globe, is accused of being “expansionist” because it insists on receiving the territorial compromise the UN itself promised in the aftermath of another combined Arab attempt at its destruction in the June ’67 war. The latter was started with an Egyptian Arab blockade (a recognized casus belli), the forced withdrawal of the UN’s peace keeping force in the Sinai, Jordanian Arab shelling of Jerusalem, and other hostile acts. I have a large cooler filled with original newspaper clippings showing frenzied Arabs chanting Itbach al-yahud (slaughter the Jews) at President Nasser’s rallies, and so forth.

Here’s Great Britain’s Lord Caradon, back in 1967, who was the chief architect of the final draft of UNSC Res. 242, laying out that territorial compromise (what the current fuss over the “settlement” issue is mostly all about). ..

“It would have been wrong to demand Israel return to positions of June 4, 1967 … those positions were … artificial … just places where soldiers of each side happened to be on the day fighting stopped in 1948 … just armistice lines. That’s why we didn’t demand Israelis return to them.”

Arabs have periodically outlawed the languages and cultures of the original inhabitants of lands Arab imperialism colonized on behalf of Arabism. The scholar, Ismet Cherif Vanly’s book, The Syrian ‘Mein Kampf’ Against The Kurds (Amsterdam, 1968) describes this state of affairs nicely. So do these excerpts and quotes from Amazigh/ Berber spokesmen in North Africa…

In Algeria, Berbers forbidden to use their own language, Tamazight…riots erupted, reported in France but ignored elsewhere in the West…America, of course, had been sufficiently subject to ARAMCO (the Arabian American Oil Company) propaganda, a payoff to the Saudis by Big Oil, to allow the latter to produce and market Arab oil. So, ARAMCO’s message to America was that there is just an Arab world in this region in which there are no Copts, Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Turkmen…and, of course, no Berbers and no Jews–they all came to Israel, you see, from Europe for everyone in this region is just Arab (New English Review, January 17, 2008).

Here’s Belkacem Lounes of the World Amazigh Congress responding to Libya’s Arab leader, Mu’ammar Qaddafi’s, denial of the very existence of the Amazigh people, the “Berbers”…

The people of whom you speak…speak their own Amazigh language daily…every day live their Amazigh identity…What worse offense to elementary rights is there than denying the existence of a people…30 million in North Africa? You menace the Amazigh, warning that whosoever asserts his identity will be a traitor… There is no worse colonialism than internal colonialism–that of the Pan-Arabist claim that seeks to dominate our people. It is surely Arabism–an imperialist ideology that refuses diversity–that constitutes an offense to history and truth…

And barely a peep has ever been heard from the United Nations or anyone else, including most of the media and duplicitous academics, on these matters.

Did you ever wonder why the real and alleged “sins” and imperfections of Israel and Zionism seem to never leave center stage and are packed onto university reading lists, but nothing about any of the above involving Arabs and Arabism ever gets mentioned from bully pulpits of “experts” in the Ivory Tower?

To be accepted, and often not literally exterminated, non-Arabs must frequently do what Egypt’s most successful Copt did–consent to the age-old subjugation and forced Arabization of their conquerors. Dr. Boutros Boutros Ghali became a top official in President Anwar Sadat’s government and went on to become Secretary General of the United Nations, by doing just that–transforming himself into the model dhimmi…“Uncle Butros” instead of “Uncle Tom.” He also instructed that to be accepted in the region, Israel, as an entire country, must consent to also being Arabized–like those Kurdish kids in Syrian Kurdistan who have been forced to sing songs praising their “Arab” identity and so forth.

Not to belabor the point, but note, once again, the sad reality in which an admittedly imperfect Israel–which has made Arabic the second national language of the State; has Arabs in its Parliament who side with Hamas in wishing it dead; has the freest Arabs anywhere in its region; etc. and so forth is constantly vilified by much of the rest of the world, while Arabs, Turks, and other Muslim subjugators of scores of millions of other peoples are most often given a free ride.

Leaving Arabism and Zionism for now, and to end this analysis, allow me to return to Caroline Glick’s announcement regarding the next step in her Zionist journey. Reading about this brought back memories of my own travels in this regard over the past seven decades (thank G_d).

My Father, Edward Honigman, of blessed memory, had returned home after spending four years as a gunner in the U.S. Navy’s Armed Guard in World War II, met my mother, Sylvia, and soon joined the ranks of those siring another baby boomer…me.

While their timing wasn’t perfect, it was close enough. I made my own worldly debut on May 8, 1948, Harry Truman’s birthday–the President who fought his own State Department (and others) within the same week of my birth to officially recognized the rebirth of Israel on May 14th. So, I guess you could say that modern Israel and myself have grown up together.

Despite all of the vilification, I’ve watched with pride as Israel Reborn arose from the ashes–the phoenix of my millennially persecuted, demonized, subjugated, ghettoized, and massacred people…courtesy of both the Muslim East as well as the Christian West. It did so on a minuscule portion of the world’s real estate, land in which Jews have 4,000 years of continuous history, and proceeded to produce one of the most vibrant, advanced, and productive societies on Planet Earth (despite facing constant terror and threat of destruction)…things which only make assorted anti-Semites (including those masked as anti-Zionists) hate it even more. Again, while imperfect, as all human endeavors are, compared to the largely intolerant, oppressive, murderous mess which surrounds it, the Jew of the Nations is indeed a virtual light unto the nations…the Biblical mission of its “Chosenness.”

While Arabs deliberately target the most innocent of Jews (shooting pregnant mothers, not by accident, but targeting them at point blank range; decapitating infants and murdering other family members asleep in their homes; and other acts of bravery), Israel’s Hadassah and other hospitals treat Arabs for life-saving medical treatment unavailable in their own countries. Those same hospitals have treated family members of groups, like Hamas, dedicated to the murder of both Jews and their sole, resurrected nation. Arabs have, at times, said “thanks” by returning to try to blow up their doctors and nurses.

Recall that when Theodore Herzl–the father of modern political Zionism–approached Pope Pius X for support around the turn of the 20th century, he was told that this would be impossible since Jews–the alleged deicide people–were condemned to be perpetual wanderers since they rejected the divinity of Jesus. Herzl was later quoted as saying that, in retrospect, maybe his refusal to kiss the Pope’s ring ticked the latter off even more and sealed the fate of their meeting.

No surprise here, however. The road to Auschwitz was paved by many “sacred” teachings…including those of the Vatican’s nemesis, Martin Luther, and even earlier in the Christian New Testament itself. The Homilies of Church Father “Saint” John Chrysostom are illustrative revealing this way (Google Homily # 1, for starters–sounds like Hitler took his advice)–as are the teachings of too many others as well.

Within a few years of the Holocaust, besides remnants from the West, more Jews would flee Arab/Muslim lands to Israel than Arabs who fled in the reverse direction as a result of the combined Arab assault on the resurrected Jewish State in May 1948–again, within a week of my own birth, when my own life-long Zionist journey began.

Like Caroline Glick, but without her greater impact, I have watched from afar as an Israel, constantly under the spotlight’s glare and subjected to hypocritical double standards, struggled as hard as humanly possible to honor the moral and ethical imperatives of its Hebraic traditions while fighting enemies who delight in disemboweling Jewish children while turning their own into shahids.

And resurrected, indeed, Israel was…

As I repeatedly point out, to understand the meaning of Israel to the Jew, one needs to know what Jewish history was like for two thousand years after the Jews dared to take on the conqueror of much of the world for their independence. A reading of the contemporary Roman and Roman-sponsored historians–Tacitus, Dio Cassius, Pliny, Josephus, etc.– gives a ‘non-Zionist’ account of the fervor with which Jews fought for the freedom of their land.

Here’s Vol. II, Book V, The Works of Tacitus:

Vespasian… succeeded to the command…. it inflamed his resentment that the Jews were the only nation that had not yet submitted…Titus was appointed by his father to complete the subjugation of Judaea… he commanded three legions in Judaea itself… To these he added the twelfth from Syria and the third and twenty-second from Alexandria… amongst his allies were a band of Arabs, formidable in themselves and harboring towards the Jews the bitter animosity usually subsisting between neighboring nations.

Note: the Arabs mentioned are outsiders, not “native Palestinians,” joining Judea’s conquerors to get a vulture’s share of the Roman Eagle’s kill. This was during the first revolt in 66-73 C.E. The Arch of Titus stands tall near the Colosseum in Rome to this very day to commemorate Vespasian and Titus’s victory over the Jews. Check the top of this following link for an example of a Judea Capta (not Palaestina Capta) coin issued by Rome to commemorate this conquest… http://q4j-middle-east.com .

Later, the emperor Hadrian became so enraged at the Jews’ persistence that in 135 C.E., after the second major and even more costly (to Rome as well as to the Jews) Bar Kochba Revolt, he renamed Judaea Syria Palaestina–Palestine–after the Jews’ historic enemies, the non-Semitic, non-Arab Philistines (who originated in the area around Crete), in an attempt to end the Jews’ hopes once and for all. It was salt deliberately poured onto their wound.

Forced conversions, being branded the “deicide people,” inquisitions, demonization, dehumanization, ghettos, blood libels, massacres, expulsions, the Holocaust, and constant existence as perpetual stranger in someone else’s land became the plight of the Wandering Jew. Many centuries later, they even got a plant named after them!

Estimates have placed the number of Jews murdered as a result of these experiences, prior to the Holocaust, in the millions–in both the Christian West, where they were considered “G_d killers” and Children of the Devil; or in the Muslim East, where, while there was no Holocaust per se, Jews were still regarded as “killers of prophets,” kilab yahud (Jew dogs), and never knew what the morrow would bring.

With all the real or fabricated sins of any nationalism (again, take another peek at Arabism above), if ever any people at any time needed the protection of their own nation state for just their very own welfare and/or survival, the Jews certainly fit the mold. Even the United States’ General and future president, Ulysses S. Grant, issued expulsion orders to the Jews of the South during America’s Civil War. The most famous Islamic scholar of all time, Ibn Khaldoun, recognized this as well when he wrote about the Jews and Israel in his The Muqaddimah some six centuries ago. https://ekurd.net/asabiyah-wandering-desert-2018-11-18.

I wish Caroline nothing but the best of the best in her continued Zionist journey. Israel and all who desire justice for all peoples in her neighborhood–including, but not just Arabs–need her wisdom and power of the pen perhaps now more than ever.

Gerald A. Honigman is a Florida educator who has done extensive doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs. He has created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, has lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and has publicly debated many Arab spokesmen. His articles and op-eds have been published in dozens of newspapers, magazines, academic journals and websites all around the world. You can visit his website at geraldahonigman.com Gerald A. Honigman is a longtime senior contributing writer, from 2007, and columnist for Ekurd.net. Honigman has published a major book, “The Quest For Justice In The Middle East–The Arab-Israeli Conflict In Greater Perspective.” For more see below.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Ekurd.net or its editors.

Copyright © 2019 Ekurd.net. All rights reserved

Comments