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Gerald A. Honigman
Of Mumbai and
Beyond...
December 9, 2008
The recent atrocities
committed in Mumbai, India in the name of the ongoing quest for the
spread of the Arab and Arabizeds’ Dar ul-Islam is merely a
continuation of a war waged by Muhammed’s followers for about fourteen
centuries now against the Dar al-Harb…the realm of war,
i.e. all peoples and lands not yet conquered either in the name of what
Arab pipedreams proclaim to be "purely Arab patrimony” or the faith of
the Arabs’ Seal of the Prophets.
As Arab armies burst out of the Arabian Peninsula around the mid-7th
century C.E., lands native to other Semitic but non-Arab peoples
(despite the wishful thinking of those who espouse the Winkler-Caetani
Theory--Jews, Assyrians, Phoenicians/Lebanese, etc.), Copts, Berbers,
Kurds, Persians and other Aryan peoples, Turks, black Africans, Indians,
and others fell one after another to Arab and Arabized imperial
conquests. Numerous millions of people were slaughtered in the
process--continuing to this very day. Others willingly jumped on the
Arab bandwagon to gain shares of the conquests.
Muhammad of Gaur first spread the Dar ul-Islam into India in the 12th
century C.E., and the highlight of these conquests came with the Moghul
Empire several centuries later.
The results were lasting, and the partition of the Indian subcontinent
into a Muslim Pakistan and largely Hindu India in 1947 reflected this.
During that same year, Arabs would reject a similar partition of what
was left of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine after Arab Jordan was
created from nearly 80% of it in 1922. Had Arabs accepted this, they
would have wound up with about 90% of the whole with the creation of
their 2nd, not 1st, Arab state in "Palestine”--the name the Roman
Emperor Hadrian gave to Judaea after the Jews’ second revolt for freedom
in 133-135 C.E.
There are, indeed, similarities between what Israel faces in Judea and
Samaria today--renamed, as a result of 20th century British imperialism
and Jordanian Arab conquest, the "West Bank”--and what India faces in
Kashmir and elsewhere. The one big difference, of course, is that there
are about one billion Indians (who were never earlier subjected to a
forced diaspora like the Jews were after taking on Rome) instead of some
six million Jews facing similar threats from Arab and/or Arabized.
Over the years, more and more Indians themselves have begun to notice
this. As they do, they see the linkage between Arabs blowing up Jews on
buses and restaurants, and Arabized Pakistanis blowing up and massacring
Hindus and others in Parliament and in hotels in Mumbai.
Before moving on, something else must be said about those partitions of
the Mandate of Palestine and the Indian subcontinent mentioned earlier…
While working for the liberation of India from British imperial
occupation, Mohandas Gandhi opposed the partition of the Indian
subcontinent into a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan. He believed that
people of all religious faiths should be able to get along in the same
nation. He was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist.
So much for getting along…Some places it works, some places it's
laughable. The Mahatma didn’t understand the nature of the enemy
he was facing…an enemy who sees justice only in terms of its own ilk.
Gandhi opposed Zionism--the national liberation movement of the Jews--to
the very end; his major statement circulated as an editorial in the
Harijan of November 11, 1938. Among other things, while first
professing his supposed "sympathies" for perennially persecuted Jews, he
next claimed that...
Palestine of the biblical conception is not a
geographical tract.
Actually, he did get that one right. Palestine
wasn't...It represented a vague geographical area according to the
ancient Greeks.
As mentioned above, the name itself was bestowed on Judaea--the
defined land of the Jews--by Hadrian, after the Jews' second
major war (133-135 C.E.) for their independence against the Romans. To
squash their hopes once and for all, he renamed the land itself after
their historic enemies, the Philistines (Syria Palaestina), a
non-Semitic Greek people from the area around the Aegean Sea.
But Israel and Judaea were well-known nations/kingdoms peopled by
Hebrews/Jews. As just one of many examples, the Habiru/Apiru--Hebrews--were
written about throughout the extensive correspondence of ancient
Pharaohs, their vassals, and others as well. And these folks evolved
into a separate people with their own unique culture, language,
history--and, yes, religion too. Gandhi saw the religious claims
of Jews as their main, if not only, leg to stand on in this
conflict...which he rejected.
But the differences which separated Jews from Arabs were not simply
theological. While Gandhi still has plenty of company here in his booboo
(including academics), this doesn't excuse it. What made matters worse,
if you don't really know, you shouldn't really say...especially if you
see yourself, or are seen by others, as a major voice for justice and
morality in this world.
With all due respect to a man whom I otherwise greatly admire, Gandhi
knew about as much about Jews and their history as most Jews know about
the various Indian peoples. The difference, however, is that Jews would
never have told the latter to remain forever victimized and at the
potential receiving end of those with a long history of bloody conquest
and persecution.
While it would be nice if we all just really "got along," and there was
no need for nationalism, national borders, and such, the reality is that
this belief is too often fiction--and especially when it comes to the
millennial Jewish experience...something Gandhi acknowledged himself
when admitting "his sympathies."
What else is new? In a post-Auschwitz age, people may grudgingly cry
crocodile tears for dead Jews (a la the Holocaust and such), but have no
room for empathy for live ones.
Listen to Gandhi again:
However...my sympathy does not blind me to the
requirements of justice...why should they
(Jews) not, like other peoples...make that country their home where
they are born...?
I guess he hadn't heard of the Dreyfus Affair in
"enlightened" France, or had not seen pictures of Jews waving their
medals from World War I in front of the Nazis, or had not heard of
General Grant's order of expulsion for the Jews of the South during
America‘s Civil War, or of the Damascus Blood Libel in 19th century Arab
Syria, etc., etc., and so forth…Again, what you don’t really know, you
really shouldn’t comment on…
Imagine, for one moment, that India--as massive as it is--underwent the
experiences that the Jews in their tiny state did in their fight for
freedom and independence against an imperial power like Rome,
culminating in much of the population massacred and most of the rest
forcibly exiled in that great Diaspora already mentioned.
Next, imagine that those hypothetical Indians (like those real Jews) in
almost everywhere that they eventually landed--the Muslim East as well
as the Christian West--never knew what the morrow would
bring...massacres, forced conversions, expulsions, ghettoization (the
mellah in the Arab world), demonization, and such culminating in a
holocaust which wiped out one third of all Indian people.
Would Jews insist that Indians remain forever at someone else's mercy
and give up on a resurrected national existence simply in order to
survive?
I think not. Yet that's what Gandhi expected of Jews. Einstein had a
famous disagreement with Gandhi over this. So I'm in good company.
Unlike Indians, Jews were literally forced into those above positions
and had earlier tried desperately to follow Gandhi’s advice to be
"accepted"... but to no avail. As nasty as some aspects of the British
Raj were, they do not compare to those millennial experiences of
stateless Jews.
So, the real question that the Mahatma and others needed to ask is…
Is a victim any less a victim because his victimization has been the
longest and most enduring?
Should Jews (those above victims) have not wanted something better
for their children? Should they have continued to put their trust only
in those who declared them to be G_d-killers, children of the Devil,
killers of Prophets, sons of apes and pigs, dogs, and such with periodic
and predictable consequences?
Sadly, the otherwise wise Gandhi thought so.
Take a look below at how the ancient historians saw this identity issue.
Here's a few of my favorite quotes from Vol. II, Book V The Works Of
Tacitus, which discussed the Jews' first major revolt in 66-73 C.E.
for their freedom and independence against the Soviet Union (or British
Empire, Mr. Gandhi)--of its day, Rome. There were others (Dio Cassius,
Josephus, etc.) who wrote about such things as well:
It inflamed Vespasian's resentment that the Jews were
the only nation who 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...
No, Rome was not just referring to the Jews'
religious identity, which Gandhi spoke of, here, but to a distinct
nation and people.
If Indians can have a homeland, and Arabs almost two dozen created
mostly via conquest of non-Arab peoples’ lands, then why single out and
deny Jews their miniscule, resurrected one?
Towards the end of the movie made about Gandhi starring Ben Kingsley,
there's a telling scene. Numerous people are seen walking in opposite
directions, depicting the population exchange involving many millions of
people going on after the Indian subcontinent's first partition.
The same thing happened after the Arabs' attack on a reborn Israel in
1948.
For every Arab refugee created as a result of this, there was a Jewish
refugee fleeing Arab/Muslim lands--where they were commonly known as
kilab yahud...Jew dogs. Unlike Arabs, however, the Jews didn't have
almost two dozen other states (again, most conquered from non-Arab
peoples) to choose from.
Those in India and elsewhere who still demand that Israel agree to
suicide so that Arabs can have yet another state must also take the
following into consideration…
How about allowing the creation of yet another Muslim state on
Gandhi's own Indian subcontinent--besides Pakistan and
Bangladesh?
Not that I agree with this (I obviously don‘t), but there are
still Indians today making the same arguments that Gandhi made earlier
in terms of Israel and Zionism. And there are, after all, about 160
million Muslims in India...
With each new Arab or Arabized atrocity against India, those
anti-Israel voices become fewer and fewer, but the ignorance leading up
to those earlier positions must nonetheless be confronted head on.
The wars of the Dar ul-Islam and/or Arabism target any and all who dare
stand in their murderous, subjugating way--be they in Kosovo, Darfur,
Kurdistan, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, the Philippines, Thailand, North
Africa, and elsewhere…including India. The war against what Arabs call
"their” kilab yahud--Jew dogs--has never been how big
Israel is --but that Israel is.
Jews were murdered along with Hindus and others recently in Mumbai.
Reports from Indian officials stated that the Jews were singled out for
special torture… a rabbi and his pregnant wife included. The couple’s
bloodied two-year old son had been clinging to his mother’s body and was
saved by his Indian nanny.
I have, at last, one final thought (for now, at least) on these matters…
I’m hoping that, in death, this latest tragedy, committed in the name of
the Dar ul-Islam, will bring closer together both India and the Jew
of the Nations--Israel--to confront a common enemy which refuses to
grant any justice whatsoever to any but its own. |
