A Jihadi Gift At Thanksgiving: Of Mumbai And Beyond...

While the Indian people do not celebrate the American holiday of Thanksgiving (for the puritanical Pilgrims seeing America as the New Israel and themselves as the New Israelites, they modeled this on the Jews' Biblical holiday of Sukkot), I have no doubt that Hindus, Sikhs, and others also have their own versions of showing gratitude towards the (or in their case, a ) Higher Being responsible for us all.

Having said this, the wonderful holiday we recently celebrated in America--beckoning us to give thanks to the memories of past Heavenly blessings and future ones hoped for--unfortunately now comes with painful recollections as well...

Almost three years ago to the day, while we were giving thanks to G_d, Muslim terrorists were slaughtering Indians in Mumbai--and others as well. Among the latter were American Rabbi Gavriel and his wife, Rivkah Holtzberg. Reports later showed that they were singled out for extra special "attention."

So, while we count our blessings, let's step back a bit and recall that tragic gift bestowed on the world byjihad Jihadis during Thanksgiving 2008...

In reality, the atrocities committed in Mumbai in the name of the ongoing quest for the spread of the Arab and Arabizeds' Dar ul-Islam were 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...all peoples and lands not yet conquered either in the name of what Arabs 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 Arabist thinking of those who espouse the Winkler-Caetani Theory--Jews, Assyrians, Phoenicians/Lebanese, etc.), Copts, Imazighen/"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 this process--continuing to this very day. And others willingly jumped onto the Arab bandwagon to gain shares of the conquests. It is indeed a sickening cruel joke when Arabs now speak of an "expansionist" Israel because Jews ask that they be able to live in a state that is more than 9 to 15 miles wide, as Israel was left by the armistice lines of 1949.

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 over one billion Indians (who were never subjected to a forced diaspora like the Jews had to deal with 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, however, something else must be said about those partitions of the Mandate of Palestine and the Indian subcontinent mentioned above...

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, the emperor renamed the land itself after the Jews' 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--from at least one of those peoples the Hebrews emerged--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 has plenty of company in his booboo (including academics), this doesn't excuse it. What made and makes 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 in some ways admire, Gandhi knew about as much about Jews and their history as most Jews know about India and 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."

But, what else is new?

In a post-Auschwitz age, people may grudgingly cry false crocodile tears of sympathy for dead Jews (a la the Holocaust and such), but still 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 Gandhi 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 much about, you really shouldn't comment on...even if you are the Mahatma.

Imagine, for one moment, that India--as massive as it is--underwent the experiences that the Jews in their sole, 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 precisely 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 simply don't compare to those millennial experiences of perpetually victimized, 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 indeed 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:

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 is the only one Gandhi acknowledged, but to the Jews' distinct nation and peoplehood.

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 minuscule, 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 in the opposite direction from so-called "Arab" or previously forcibly Arabized (i.e., Muslim) lands. Unlike Arabs, however, the Jews did not 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 created for themselves must also take the following into consideration...

How about allowing the creation of a third Muslim state on Gandhi's own Indian subcontinent--besides Pakistan and Bangladesh?

How does the Islamic Republic of Kashmir sound?

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, the good news is that 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 (and elsewhere in the north and south of the Sudan), Kurdistan, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, the Philippines, Thailand, North Africa, and so forth...including India. The war against what Arabs call "their" kilab yahud--Jew dogs--is existential and has never been how big Israel is, but that Israel is.

As we saw at the very beginning of this analysis, Jews were murdered along with Hindus and others three years ago 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 was found clinging to his mother's body and was saved by his Indian nanny.

Finally, I have one last thought (for now, at least) on these matters...

I'm hoping that, in death, this Thanksgiving tragedy, committed in the name of the Dar ul-Islam, will continue to bring closer together both India and the Jew of the Nations to confront a murderous common enemy which refuses to grant any justice whatsoever to any and all but its own.

http://q4j-middle-east.com
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. Visit his website at http://www.geraldahonigman.com/

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