Guess What? Muslims Fight for ISIS But Not Palestine

...The John Kerrys of the world rarely let facts disturb their theories. But for anyone who does care about facts, the foreign fighters flocking to Iraq and Syria offer a good clue as to what issues really inflame the Muslim world. And neither Israel nor the Palestinians are high on the list.

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary Magazine..
21 October '14..

For anyone who thinks the lack of a Palestinian state is a primary cause of Muslim grievance, the flood of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq in recent years poses a real problem. After all, none of the jihadi groups in those countries are fighting against Israel or for the Palestinians; indeed, as journalist Khaled Abu Toameh pointed out yesterday, ISIS ranks “liberating Jerusalem” way down on its list of goals and “did not even bother to comment” on this summer’s war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Yet while ISIS and its ilk have attracted thousands of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq, the number of foreigners who have joined the Palestinian fight against Israel is near zero.

This certainly isn’t a problem of access. The thousands of Western Muslims now fighting in Iraq and Syria could easily and legally have reached the West Bank via either Israel or Jordan; so could those from Turkey, Jordan and Egypt. They simply never cared enough to do so.

And until last year, when Egypt cracked down on the cross-border smuggling tunnels, Gaza was accessible even to nationals of Muslim countries that lack diplomatic relations with Israel: They could enter Egypt legally and cross to Gaza via the tunnels. Hamas would surely have welcomed reinforcements, but they never cared enough to come.

In short, no matter how often Westerners like Secretary of State John Kerry say the Palestinian issue is a major source of the “street anger and agitation … humiliation and denial and absence of dignity” that helps jihadi groups recruit foreign Muslims, Muslims themselves are saying the opposite with their feet: There are causes they are willing to travel across the world to fight and die for, including the dream of an Islamic caliphate and the sectarian Sunni fight against Shi’ite- and Alawite-dominated governments in Iraq and Syria. But “Palestine” isn’t one of them.

The foreign fighters flocking to Iraq and Syria also undermine another common canard: that Israel is a “racist” or “apartheid” state. After all, a “racist, apartheid state” by definition subjects its minorities to far more “humiliation and denial and absence of dignity” than non-racist, non-apartheid Europe does, so if Israel were really such a state, one would expect its Arab citizens to head the pack of foreign recruits to ISIS and company.

The Cultural Crisis in the Arab and Islamic World by Dr. Mordechai Kedar

Israel is perceived as an orderly country of a "normal" people, loving life, progress and development, the exact opposite of what is happening in the greater region within which it lives. And the sharper this perception is, the stronger and more intense the envy becomes. On the other side of the Atlantic there is another "normal" country, the United States, where another people lives, basing its existence on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The envy towards Israel and the United States that permeates the Arab and Islamic world becomes hatred directed against these two countries. This is the source of the names "the Big Satan" and "the little Satan", which is how Iran, the regime of darkness and oppression, refers to them.

Dr. Mordechai Kedar..
mordechaikedarinenglish.blogspot.co.il/..
26 April '13..

Anyone in the world who takes any interest in the news, whether from newspapers or the electronic media, can immediately discern the difference between what is happening in Europe and the United States versus what is happening in the Arab and Islamic world. In the Western countries, the news usually deals with the economic crisis, visiting leaders, natural disasters, traffic accidents, and criminal acts such as murder, burglary and violence. The perpetrators are usually people acting alone who commit the crimes out of criminal or personal motives, or inadvertently. Therefore, when a terror attack such as that which happened in Boston occurs, the Western media all become alarmed, and ask "why". Why, when three people are killed and about one hundred seventy are wounded in a terror attack, does the event dominate all the media for many days, while larger disasters - for example a bus falling over a cliff resulting in the death of tens of children - get much less coverage?

The answer is simple: When the incident in question is a "home-made" disaster, stemming from the Western way of life - for instance, traffic accidents, murder in a romantic framework or the death of Western soldiers in foreign countries - the media and the public ultimately accept that the disaster is difficult to prevent and is part of life, and return to the normal routine. On the other hand, a terror attack carried out by a Muslim immigrant is perceived in a totally different way: it is seen as a war waged by a foreign culture against the Western culture. Even if many people do not admit it, the sense in the United States after the attack in Boston is that "a foreign, alien culture is waging against us, using people who immigrated to our country, live among us, look like us, and sound like us but are actually totally different from us: they are Muslims". This perception turns all of the media's attention to the battlefield - the streets of Boston and its suburbs in the most recent case - so that we will be sure that the battle ends with the good guys winning and the bad guys losing. It is actually a war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness, us and them, our culture versus their culture and as in war, we must win at any price, even if it costs a fortune and means confining the residents of Boston in their houses for a whole day, which normally would be totally unacceptable in the United States, the land of freedom. That's how it is in the West.

In the Arab world and in a not insignificant portion of the Islamic world, the news is something totally different. The routine coverage during the past two years is of civil wars that cause tens of thousands of fatalities, a ruler massacring his citizens, mass murder resulting from clashes between tribal, ethnic, religious or sectoral groups, massive terror attacks, millions of demoralized and impoverished refugees, a severe economic crisis and political and economic corruption. Here, three fatalities and hundreds of wounded is the usual bloody toll occurring every few minutes and has become routine, almost "not news". When you compare the news in the West with the news in the Arab world you get the impression that you're dealing with two different planets, two civilizations that are polar opposites from each other: one specializing in development of life and prosperity, and the other dealing with the creation of death, suffering, blood and tears. Here too, the question arises: why is there such a great difference between the Western countries and the Arab world; what causes the Arab world and the Islamic part of the world to be a source of violence, mass murder and almost incessant suffering for whole populations.

Quote of the day

Arnold/Frimet Roth
This Ongoing War
12 January '11

Writing in the online journal The National Interest, Middle East historian Prof Benny Morris asks in his article Muslims and Truth:

What are the bounds of credulity in the mendacity-ridden Muslim societies of the Middle East? Can preachers and spokesmen say anything, however outlandish, and expect the masses to eat it up? Is there no limit to what the infidel can be accused of—and to the expectation that the charge will stick. Which raises the still more profound question: What are the long-term prospects for peaceful cohabitation on planet Earth between us in the West and these Muslim societies in which truth has absolutely no traction or importance, where the masses will believe—ask any pollster—that the CIA or the Mossad knocked down the Twin Towers on 9/11?

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Don’t blame Israel for Arab failures

Salim Mansur
torontosun.com
21 August '10

TEL AVIV — Size matters, and in geopolitics it can be critically important.

A grasp of this elementary fact could provide a better understanding for, and empathy with, a small country besieged by hostile powers on its borders.

Yet this fact often escapes people living in countries of continental dimensions with large spaces empty of inhabitants — as in Canada, the U.S., Russia, Australia and the E.U. — and they may, ironically at times, display a chauvinism reflecting the size of their country.

The fact of how small Israel is territorially, and how this fact deepens its sense of vulnerability, weighs down upon anyone who visits the country.

As I write sitting at a cafe on Tel Aviv’s waterfront, I remember how this city and Haifa to the north were targets of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Scud missiles during the 1991 Gulf War.

Israel is merely a dot relative to the Arab world, and yet made responsible, in the logic of the anti-Zionist bigots, for the problems of the Middle East and the inability of the Arab-Muslim culture to deal with the challenges of the modern world.

Consider the following: The Arab world, excluding Iran and Turkey, is comprised of 22 countries stretching from the Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean with a total area around 13 million sq. km and a population of nearly 350 million.

In terms of territorial size, only Russia is larger than the Arab world at 17 million sq. km.

Israel is barely 22,000 sq. km, or about three times the size of New York City, with a population of 7.5 million of which 20% are Israeli Arabs.

An objective consideration of the huge disparity in size and population between the Arab world and Israel should dispel the drivel the world has been fed that Arabs are the “underdog” in a colonial struggle against Jews as a colonizing people.

(Read full article)

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