printAbout Reza Aslan, the darling of the media on all things Muslim, Myles Kantor observes the following:
“Last night I watched Sam Harris and Reza Aslan’s January 25 debate on religion at the Los Angeles Public Library. Toward the end, Harris noted the anti-Semitic character of the Middle East before the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Aslan responded in reference to pre-state Israel, ‘Before 1948, of course, there were tens of thousands of Jews living alongside their Arab neighbors without any problem at all.’
Without any problem at all? How about the Jerusalem pogrom in 1920 and the Jaffa pogrom in 1921? Or Arab massacres of Jews in Hebron and Safad in 1929? Or the Tiberias pogrom in 1938? (There was a reason the Sephardic Jewish sage Maimonides wrote in 1172 regarding Arabs, ‘Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.’)
If Aslan is ignorant of this recurrent savagery, then the Harvard graduate’s study of pre-state Israel has been amazingly selective. If not, his misrepresentation of Arab-Jewish life before 1948 is revisionism in the same gutter as Holocaust denial.”
Or down at curb level with the New Historians’ output.
Update: the post was mentioned favorably at Jihad Watch.
There were no pogroms in the Middle East prior to 1948. The Holocaust never happened in Europe. Jews use Christian babies as human sacrifices in their secret ceremonies. If people continue to pound away at non-truths
they become truths. The wilder the assertion the easier it is to get believers.
[And I thought I was cynical!]
I’m presently reading the novel Exodus by Leon Uris. It’s a great read, both for the excitement of the story and the research that went into it.
The way Israel’s founding was explained to me when I was young and impressionable: after WWII, people felt sorry for the Jews, so they kicked the Palestinians off their land in order to make room for the Jews.
I’m ashamed to say I believed that for way too long.
I am not a scholar of the Middle East, nor particularly familiar with the history of what is now Israel from 1900 to 1948. So I’ll assume that Uris’s research is sound until someone lets me know otherwise. Some interesting history from the novel:
* Productive farmland was cultivated from swamps and marshes through tough manual labor (a white-collar American like me would have had a rough go of it). These initial farms (kibbutzim, if memory serves me) were largely communal-type endeavors [voluntary socialism is quite okay in libertarian thinking]. And after a day of backbreaking work, some would have to stand guard for fear of attacks from Arabs and Bedouins. [All understatements; thousands of young Jews died drying swamps. Israel was swamps and desert before the Jews reclaimed it with their lives and private money. They were indeed slaughtered by marauding nomads.]
* While these pioneering Jews were cultivating land, which they puchased fair and square, their Arab “neighbors” were cultivating hatred and were ready to make those Jews the scapegoat for everything, as usual. Haj Amin el Husseini, who was basically an Arab warlord, initiated a pogrom against the Jews for the sole purpose of gaining power for himself. He and the others after him have not stood for the poor, downtrodden, etc. This fine fellow was also in bed with the Nazis – again, way before the establishment of Israel. [He met with Nazi leadership to investigate how to implement “The Final Solution” in Palestine. The Arabs also volunteered stormtroopers who partook in killing Jews.]
[I too loved that book; great read.]
* The Jews had to fight both the Arabs and the backhanded British, who all too often were interested only in playing one against the other.
Great book, great history. So yes, Aslan’s version of the peace-and-love existence between Arabs and Jews prior to 1948 seems like a version he would like to believe, not what he knows to have been the case.