July 19, 2002

"Fuel to the Fire"

Karen Armstrong, the former nun and author of books on Islam, is defending Palestinian terrorists. Israelis, she argues, have their arsenal of F16's, while the poor Palestinians have only their suicide bombers.

Mona Baker, an academician in Manchester, has expelled two Israeli scholars from the literary journals she publishes. Baker argues that during the Holocaust Germans should have been kept out of academia because of their oppressive policies, and Israelis should now be kept out of academia because of their policies towards the Palestinians.

Armstrong, Baker, and others like them are participating in the tired, old prejudice of anti-Semitism. For them, wrong is right, and the preposterous is logical.

Again and again, Armstrong supports Arab evil. In her book Islam: A Short History, she rapturously and romantically portrays Islam, but Armstrong is not an impartial moralist with the right to condone heinous crimes. Her infatuation does not make her an expert in modern Middle East affairs.

Suicide with the intent to murder is tantamount to genocide, as is warfare against innocent, unarmed civilians. The human bombs that have maimed and killed hundreds in Israeli cafes, discos, shopping malls, buses, a seashore hotel, and outside a synagogue are riddled with the same mad hate that brought tragedy to the shores of the United States. Fifteen of the nineteen terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon were from Saudi Arabia. Does Armstrong condone these  perpetrators because they embrace her beloved Islam? If she does, she insults all of the world's religions.

Mona Baker wants to deny freedom of expression to Israelis because of their national origin. Her own racist position is indefensible, but nothing new to Jews. In the past, Jews have been denied admission to universities, industries, and businesses. Baker should be consistent. If she has children,  she should deny them vaccinations for polio because the developers of the polio vaccine, Salk and Sabin, were ardent Zionists. She should avoid antibiotics because many of them have been developed by Jews, foremost among them, the late Selman Waksman. She should call for a boycott of most medications, medical therapies, and innovative surgeries because they, along with more than half of the biotechnological advances of this
century, were and are the work of Jews and non-Jews who support Israel. She should take care not to let her loved ones get cancer because the fathers of chemotherapy and modern radiation oncology, Sidney Farber and Henry Kaplan, were passionate supporters of Israel.

The Nazis were the first to exclude Zionists and Jews from academia. Then came Stalin, who expelled Jews from universities and literary publications. Now there is Mona Baker. But have any Arab or Muslim academicians, physicians, or students been terminated at Israeli institutions because of their ethnic origins, religious beliefs, or even because they have supported  the intifada? It hasn't happened.

Osama bin Laden has taken responsibility for the destruction of a  synagogue and the murder of visiting tourists on the island of Djerba off the coast of Tunisia. What could this old synagogue or the German tourists visiting there have had to do with the events in the Middle East? Nothing. These murders follow in the footsteps of Hitler and Stalin. Armstrong and Baker, in their defense of Palestinian terror, are not merely supporting one side in a territorial dispute in the Middle East. They, like Hitler and Stalin, are sounding a call to arms against Jews.

In Saudi Arabia, neither Jew nor Christian is granted freedom of worship by its monarchs, and this is in contradiction to the Koran which mandates the right of all monotheistic faiths to exist. Those who love freedom should take a closer look at the Armstrongs and Bakers of this world, whose writings only add fuel to the fire of hate raging on the scorched and bloody soil of the  land of Israel, ironically so loved by G-d and those who love Him.

Shabbat Shalom