Prof. Paul Eidelberg
To appreciate how much Muslims abhor Jews, consider first what Muslim Chechens think and feel toward Russians.
Writing on the subject in The New York Times (Dec. 18, 1994), Steven Erlanger quotes two celebrated Russian authors, Tolstoi and Lermontov.
Tolstoi writes of the Russian destruction of a Chechen village: "The emotion felt by every Chechen, old and young, was stronger than hatred. It was not hatred, it was a refusal to recognize these Russian dogs as men at all, and a feeling of such disgust [and] revulsion ... that the urge to destroy them—like the urge to destroy rats, venomous spiders, or wolves—was an instinct as natural as self-preservation."
Lermontav summarized the Chechen in the Russian imagination this way: "Their god is freedom, their law is war ... Their hatred is as boundless as their love."
This boundless hatred describes the feelings of Muslims toward Jews, as was so horribly evident in the lynching of two Jewish soldiers in Ramallah.
If further evidence is wanted, let me remind the reader of how the late Syrian president Hafaz Assad celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. He had Syrian militia girls killing four-foot snakes with their teeth, blood running down their cheeks. The pieces were then roasted and served to Syrian militia men. The men subsequently twisted off the necks of puppies and drank their blood. This is what Arabs and Muslims think of and feel toward Jews.
May the same be said of Arabs citizens of Israel? Not only have they participated in hundreds of terrorist attacks against Jews, slashing the faces of Jewish children. But as reported even by Knesset Member Yossi Sarid (a dove) in August 1990, 62% of these Arabs supported Saddam Hussein's rape of Kuwait, and despite his threat to incinerate half of Israel. That survey, bear in mind, was made by Jewish polsters. The reader can draw his own conclusions.
Arab hatred and contempt for Jews (as well as Christians) are fundamental aspects of Arab culture. True, one can find in the Koran occasional passages favorable to Jews. However, those who focus on, and draw conclusions from, such passages suffer from what the eminent psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan called "selective inattention."
It is common knowledge that jihad – meaning offensive war -- is a basic religious precept for Muslims. The Koran teaches them: "Believers, take neither Jews nor Christians for your friends" (Sura 5:50). "Allah does not forbid you to be kind and equitable to those who have neither made war on your religion nor driven you from your homes.... But he forbids you to make friends with those who have fought against you ... or abetted others who do so" (Sura 60:8-9). From this passage comes the necessity on the part of Arabs to describe Jews--and not only Jews--as "aggressors." The Koran's imperative on dealing with aggressors"? "Kill them wherever you find them" (Sura 2:190).
Moreover, according to the Koran, the Jews should be in a permanent state of humbleness (as “dhimmies”); they should be paying tribute to the faithful (Sura 9:29). Instead, the Jews now have an independent state of their own. Indeed, these Jewish infidels, in contradiction to the Koran, have repeatedly conquered the armies of the faithful (Sura 3:112; 8:66). Is it any wonder that Arabs hate Jews?
Yet there are naive Jews who nonetheless believe that Arabs can live in abiding peace with Jews, and that there is a basis for such peaceful coexistence in the Koran!
This escape from reality, this refusal to face demonic evil, is of long-standing occurrence among Jews. Thus, referring to the Jewish community (the Yishuv) in the pre-State period, Professor Gil Carl AlRoy observed: "One cannot help being astounded at the sheer determination with which the Yishuv for so long denied conflict with Arabs--in the face of conflict. There was an extraordinary tension here between the empirical world and personal and group conceptualization." Even when conflict was admitted, Zionists explained it away by saying the "Arabs did not truly wish it, but were put up to it by others [their leaders]"; or that Arab hostility, while real, "was contrary to the essence of the [brotherly] relationship [between Semitic peoples]" and the "historic alliance of Jews and Muslims." Nor is this all.
In contrast to self-effacing Jewish politicians and intellectuals, the most humble Muslim is incredibly proud. Writes AlRoy: "The illiterate Muslim, living in squalor and filth ... actually feel[s] as naturally superior to the Jew as English aristocrats would in olden days feel toward Cockneys ..."
Those who, like Prime Minister Sharon, believe that Arabs can live in genuine peace with Jews in the Land of Israel should look at the faces the Arabs who butchered the two Jews in Ramallah. Arabs regard Jews not as human beings but as something more repulsive than rats.