Dragi prieteni… si alti tovarasei,
Iata ca si-a facut aparitia inca un forum pe Internet, inrudit oarecum cu ilustrul ziar-muma "Ziua". Va fi un forum de critica constructiva, stiri si linkuri interesante, articole si bine inteles schimburi de opinie.
Spre deosebire de alte forumuri, la noi site-ul este deschis 24 de ore pe zi (si nu doar de la 10 dimineata). Site-ul nostru nu va fi inchis pe cateva zile de sarbatori, tocmai cand oamenii au timp liber, vor sa se felicite unul pe altul si plini de buna dispozitie sa discute un pic despre Bush sau Holocaust. Team-ul nostru (bine platit), va avea grija sa nu suferiti de probleme de genul asta si chiar daca se va intampla cate un mic accident, parca puteti sa faceti ceva?
Dar pentru ca lucrurile sa mearga bine, este nevoie de cateva reguli pe care le-am adunat in decizia HasCeMe nr. 1/12/2006 care stabileste urmatorul mod de functionare al forumului:
1. In localul nostru, se poate fuma si bea, dar este inchis indivizilor care injura.
2. Persoanele care se cearta sant rugate sa o faca cu bun simt, altfel personalul nostru se enerveaza si face urat.
3. Nu sant acceptate porcarii rasiste si antisemite. Pentru cine are nevoie sa se descarce, recomandam blogul lui Ahmedinejad. Nu uitati sa trageti apa!
4. Cine doreste sa devina membru al forumului (e pe gratis!) ne scrie la adresa adminudeziua@gmail.com. Membrii au dreptul sa initieze postari, nu ca muritorii de rand (vizitatori declarati sau anonimi), care pot numai sa chibiteze la "Comentarii".
Nu uitati: totul depinde numai de voi ca acest forum sa fie activ, interesant si un loc unde sa ne intalnim cu placere la o sueta si o cafea virtuala.
Va uram distractie placuta!
- Comitetul Central -
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Friday, October 17, 2008
Benny Morris reviews books on Islamic Antisemitism
The Darker Side
Benny Morris, (The New Republic, September 10, 2008
The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History
Edited by Andrew G. Bostom (Prometheus Books, 766 pp., $39.95)
Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam
By David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann (Random House, 227 pp., $26)
Scholars in the West have begun to devote time and space to anti-Western jihadism and Muslim anti-Semitism--and a good thing, too, as these are very much on the contemporary international and Middle Eastern political and military agendas and, I fear, will grow in significance during the coming decades, as the Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" widens. That such a "clash" is going on is all too apparent, from the riots in Nigerian streets, where hundreds died following the announcement of an impending beauty pageant on Nigerian soil, to the murder of an Italian priest in Turkey following the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in Denmark. Yet, Western liberals hesitate to tackle the subject of Muslim anti-Semitism, lest it seem anti-multicultural or provoke the hornet's nest of Allah's minions. Even the use of the word "jihad" has become taboo among appeasers of Islam--and even among some non-appeasers, such as George W. Bush, who, like other Western leaders, refuses to call the phenomenon by its precise name (and the name that its own practitioners use). People speak of "international terrorism" when they should be speaking of "international Muslim (or Islamist) terrorism."
The compendium of anti-Semitic Muslim texts about Jews in Islamic Arab lands assembled by Andrew G. Bostom, a professor of medicine with a dark hobby, kicks off, unusually, with an explanation of the painting reproduced on the dust jacket. It is by Alfred Dehodencq, from 1860, and it portrays a group of Muslims, one of them brandishing a scimitar, handling roughly by her hair a kneeling dark-eyed damsel, her hands tied behind her back.
The group, on a raised platform, is surrounded by an apparently enthusiastic mob. The scene is Fez, in Morocco, in 1834. The girl is named Sol Hachuel. She is seventeen years old, and she is about to be beheaded. She was accused of secretly adhering to her Jewish faith after converting to Islam--a charge tantamount to apostasy (still punishable by death in most Arab lands). Hachuel denied that she had ever converted. The governor of Tangier, Arbi Esudio, had accused her of "having provoked the anger of the Prophet." The Sultan agreed and pronounced the death sentence. She went bravely, reiterating her Jewishness and refusing to recant, with "Shema Yisrael," the Judaic profession of faith, on her lips.
The case was certainly unusual--but it typified, in Bostom's view, the sorry lot of the Jews in the Muslim Arab world since the rise of Islam and its expansion around the Mediterranean basin in the seventh and eighth centuries. At the start of his book, Bostom provides a monographlength background survey of the "theological-juridical origins" of Islamic anti-Semitism, illustrating his points with a brief review of its "historical manifestations."
At the level of principle, Muslim attitudes toward the Jews (and, less so, toward Christians) were--and are--informed by a basic ambivalence. Jews and Christians deserved, and received, a formal measure of respect as "People of the Book" and as the first to adopt monotheism; Islam had followed in their footsteps.
But at the same time Jews and Christians were the "enemy," the rival religion and, in certain times and places, the political and military foe.
It was this second attitude that dominated actual Arab practice during most of the fourteen centuries since the birth of Islam. In the lands stretching from Persia to Spain and Morocco, Jews (and Christians) were always second-class subjects, humiliated and discriminated against, often oppressed and persecuted, sometimes forcibly converted or slaughtered. There are almost no substantial Jewish or Christian minorities (the Copts of Egypt and the Christians/ animists of southern Sudan are exceptions) left in the Arab world today; and the few remaining Christians in Iraq and Palestine are rapidly fleeing westward. (Note the recent murder of the Arab owner of a Christian bookshop in Gaza.)
The story peddled by latter-day Arab propagandists (and reinforced by some Jewish scholars, who tended in decades past, sometimes for apologetic reasons of their own, to highlight the medieval "Golden Age" of Islamic Spanish Jewry)--that the Jewish minorities in the Muslim Arab countries before the advent of Zionism enjoyed a pleasant fraternal existence among the majority populations--has often been trotted out for the benefit of ignorant Westerners, to illustrate Muslim Arab tolerance of minorities and, politically, to promote plans for a multi-ethnic, one-state solution for Israel/ Palestine.
It also has taken hold among Western intellectuals. Thus as prominent a journalist as Lawrence Wright, in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, writes that "until the end of World War II, there was little precedent in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping the politics and society of the region. Jews had lived safely--although submissively--under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom," until Christian missionaries, Nazi propaganda, and the rise of Israel twisted their minds and propelled them toward anti-Semitism.
Or consider Esther Webman, of Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center, who has written that "antisemitism did not exist in the traditional Islamic world.... Antisemitism is, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon in the Arab world." She attributed its rise to three factors: the nineteenth- and twentieth-century penetration of Western thought into that world; "the collapse of traditional political systems and of the loyalties" associated with modern nationalism; and, "most crucial, the development of the conflict [with Zionism] over the domination of Palestine."
But this construct, in Bostom's view (and in my own), is wholly false.
It flies in the face of the evidence, much of it presented in Bostom's tome. Certainly modern Christian influences, nationalist enthrallment, and Jewish nationalism (and its success) have added layers to traditional Islamic anti-Semitism. But they were building on firm foundations.
From its inception, Islam and its adherents, beginning with Muhammad himself, saw Judaism (and Christianity) as rival parent religions that had to be fought and overcome for Islam to succeed. The initial struggles, in the early seventh century, were existential, a matter of survival, for the Muslims bent on dominating Hijaz and then breaking out of the dismal, arid, thinly populated confines of Arabia. The first Muslims shared a deep sense of vulnerability and threat.
And so the Jews (and Christians) in the realms of expanding Islam were subjected to a regime based on an understanding or agreement--the dhimma--of subordination, marginalization, and discrimination. By the twelfth century, the great philosopher Maimonides, a successful Jew in the Islamic world, the doctor to sultans, was to lament: "God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us.... None has matched [them] in debasing, humiliating, and hating us."
And the situation was to remain more or less constant in most of the Islamic lands down to the twentieth century.
Consider Bostom's excerpt from Leon Godard's travelogue Description et histoire du Maroc, published in 1860:
In the cities, the Jews live in separate quarters ... called the Mellah, or the salted earth, dry and cursed. They are locked in from sundown to sunrise and on holidays, all day. They pay the Moorish guards who protect them.... They [pay] the capitulation tax ... that the government sets for each Mellah.... They have eight days to pay the tax; after that, and without warning the Mellah can be pillaged.... According to the laws, the Jews cannot cultivate earth, own land or houses outside the Mellah, ride a horse in front of a town other than on a saddle for a mule ... hit a Moslem, even to defend themselves except in their own house if it has been violated, be a witness in front of a court....
They cannot bid for food in Moslem market, or walk in some streets, in front of Mosques or Koubas, without holding their slippers in their hands, or get married without the permission of the Sultan.... They have to dress only in black or dark colors, wear a black hat different from the turban and not to tie with more than one knot the black scarf holding their headgear.
How and why this condition of degradation came about, and why anti-Semitism persists and, indeed, is on the upsurge in the Islamic Arab world is what Bostom's anthology sets out to explain.
It all begins with the Qur'an-- or, rather, with the encounter, as described in the Qur'an, between Muhammad, the prophet of the new religion, and the Jewish tribes in Hijaz, the area of western Arabia that includes the towns of Mecca and Medina, where Islam arose around 620 C.E.
The Jews, not surprisingly, rejected the new faith and its prophet; and if the Qur'an is to be believed, they were contemptuous and sarcastic. (Religions notoriously do not take well to humor at their expense.) Indeed, the Qur'an asserts that the Hijazi Jewish tribes were downright hostile, even at one point trying to poison the Prophet. Muhammad, for his part, had earlier ordered the assassination of prominent Jewish opponents, and forcibly converted tribesmen and expelled many others, and slaughtered hundreds and consigned many of their women and children to slavery. (He took one of the daughters, Safiya, as his wife, after first dispatching her father and husband, according to the Prophet's first major biographer, Ibn Ishaq.)
Partly in consequence, the Qur'an designates the Jews a "base" people and "killers of prophets" (harking back to the Christian charge of Christ-killing). The full verse (2:61) reads: "Humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them, and they were visited with wrath from Allah. That was because they disbelieved in Allah's revelations and slew the prophets wrongfully." They are also said to be usurious. The full verse (4:160-161) reads: "And for the evildoing of the Jews ... and for their taking usury ... and for their consuming people's wealth under false pretenses we have prepared for the unbelievers among them [i.e., those not converted to Islam] a painful punishment." Elsewhere (5:63-64) the Qur'an states, "They hasten to spread corruption throughout the earth, but Allah does not love corrupters!" and instructs (5:51): "Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends." And it refers (5:60) to Allah's punitive transformation of the Jews into "apes and pigs" (the distant theological basis for Hamas's current designation of the Jews as "sons of apes and pigs").
Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the current grand imam of Al Azhar University of Cairo, a supreme authority in Sunni Islam, published a book in the late 1960s called The Jews in the Qur'an and the Traditions; it was re-issued in 1986. It summarized the Qur'an's (and Tantawi's own) attitude to the Jews in this way: "The Qur'an describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e., killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people's wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness ... only a minority of Jews keep their word.... [But] not all Jews are the same. The good ones become Muslims."
Tantawi was later to describe contemporary Jews as "the descendants of apes and pigs." I add in fairness that he was later to condemn the September 11 attacks, and suicide bombings in general, as contrary to Islam, though he defended "jihad" against those violating Islamic soil.
The hadiths, or sayings of the Prophet, the subsequent exegeses of the Qur'an, and the early biographers of Muhammad built on and built up this anti-Semitic tradition. Ibn Ishaq (died 761), Muhammad's first and major biographer, as transmitted by Ibn Hisham, wrote: "The Apostle of Allah--may Allah bless him and grant him peace--declared, 'Kill any Jew who falls into your power.' So Muhayyisa Ibn Mas'ud fell upon Ibn Sunayna, one of the Jewish merchants with whom his family had social and commercial relations, and killed him." One of the more famous hadiths, quoted in Bostom, from Sahih Muslim, Book 41, no. 6985, reads: "Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me: come and kill him: but the tree Gharqad would not say [this], for it is the tree of the Jews." This hadith appears in variants in different collections.
Major Muslim scholars followed this anti-Semitic tradition. Al Baydawi (1286-1316?), a Shafi'ite intellectual who was chief kadi of Shiraz, wrote of the Jews' "intense obstinacy, multi-faceted disbelief, and their addiction to following their whims, their adherence to the blind following of their tradition, their distancing themselves from the truth, and their unrelenting denial of, and hostility toward, the prophets."
Ibn Kathir (1300-1373), a Basra-born historian, wrote of the Jews' "rebellion, defiance, opposing the truth, belittling other people, and degrading the scholars. This is why the Jews--may Allah's continued curses descend on them until the Day of Resurrection--killed many of their Prophets." And in our own time--he is a full-fledged member of this odious tradition--Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the "spiritual mentor" of modern Islamist extremism, wrote: "No other nation has shown more intransigence and obstinacy than the Jews. They viciously and mercilessly killed and mutilated a number of prophets and messengers. They have over the centuries displayed the most extreme attitudes towards God.... They have always boasted of their virtue and made the implausible claims of being ... the chosen people of God.... Such claims are totally refuted by the Qur'an.... Theirs is a wicked nature, which is full of hatred for Islam."
It is little wonder, then, that such anti-Semitic motifs creep into the speeches of contemporary Muslim leaders. Bashar Al Assad, the president of Syria, welcomed Pope John Paul II to Damascus on May 5, 2001 by declaring that "we notice them [the Jews] aggressing against Muslim and Christian holy sites in Palestine.... They try to kill all the the principles of divine faiths with the same mentality of betraying Jesus Christ and torturing him, and in the same way that they tried to commit treachery against Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him)."
Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, described the survivors of the Holocaust as "a bunch of hooligans who emigrated to Palestine," while his protege Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust took place at all. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, has written: "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.... If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide."
But contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism, as typified by such statements, is not all of Qur'anic derivation.
It also owes a great deal to modern European hate-merchants. Without doubt, Christian missionaries, traders, and officials in the nineteenth and early twentieth century flooded the region with their religious-ideological wares. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example, was first translated into Arabic and published in Cairo in 1920. And more modern European anti-Semitic tenets penetrated the area during the following decades. They were perfectly embodied in the person and beliefs of Haj Muhammad Amin Al Husseini.
In her book The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock, the American scholar Virginia Tilley recently wrote that "the racist ... incompetent and reactionary Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini" was "unrepresentative" of the Palestinian Arabs. Tilley would have her readers believe that Husseini "was never a leader of more than a few reactionary Palestinian factions."
This is nonsense. In this respect, at least, David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann put matters aright. From his appointment in 1921 by the British as the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini was a major figure, and during the 1930s and 1940s he was the recognized leader--recognized, that is, by the British Mandate authorities and the Zionist leadership and, not least, by the leaders of the surrounding Arab societies and states--of the Palestinian Arab national movement, much as Yasser Arafat was the leader of the movement from the late 1960s until his death in 2004. And like Arafat, Husseini basked in the support of the Palestinian multitudes, led them into a series of historical disasters, and--when all is said and done--rejected a succession of compromises that would have resulted in the establishment many years ago of an Arab state, alongside Israel, in part of Palestine.
Husseini, who died in 1974, had an eventful life in interesting times. His father, Taher Al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem from 1869 until 1908, led the Palestinian notables' unsuccessful struggle against Jewish immigration and land purchases (while his cousin, Rabah Al Husseini, sold land, including his own house, to the Jews). Haj Amin seems to have been born in 1895 (he sometimes spoke of 1894 or 1896) and grew up in Jerusalem. When he was seventeen, he was sent to study in Cairo, where he caught the eye of Rashid Rida, the theologian who became the spiritual father figure of the Muslim Brotherhood, established in the late 1920s. According to the anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe, Rida, who treated the young Amin as a disciple, believed "in the need for Muslim society ... to regard the encounter with Western culture ... as an existential threat. [His] second principle related to the way [the Islamic Arab world] needed to deal with this encounter--a return to [implementing] a pure version of the Islamic commandments, all the while strenuously filtering out western influences.... A third principle touched on the need to link religious activity to political and nationalist actions. The struggle against the British occupation of Egypt, for example, was nothing but the struggle of Islam against the West. Rida spoke explicitly also about Zionism and the need to fight it within the framework of the overall struggle against the West's takeover of the Arab, Islamic Middle East."
All these principles were shared by Husseini. He joined the Ottoman Army, apparently even before Istanbul declared war, "as he was bored at school" (in Pappe's phrase), and served as an officer until the end of 1916. He fell ill and returned to Jerusalem, and there, after deserting, he began surreptitiously to raise volunteers to aid the anti-Ottoman Sharifian "revolt in the desert," organized by the British in 1915-1916. Later he assisted the short-lived government of Faisal ibn Hussein in Damascus during 1918-1920, and then he returned to Palestine and dabbled in embryonic Palestinian nationalist politics.
Husseini apparently played an incendiary role in the Nabi Musa riots against the Jews in 1920, after which he fled the country. But he was pardoned, and he returned, and in a supreme gesture of appeasement, Herbert Samuel, the first British high commissioner, appointed him the "grand mufti" of Jerusalem. The following year Samuel appointed him the head of the Supreme Muslim Council, which supervised the country's Muslim sites and institutions, thereby furnishing Hajj Amin with a powerful political base for his eventual accession to the leadership of the Palestinian Arab national movement.
He detested the British and all their works--he was especially angered, of course, by their support of Zionism--but he was an accomplished dissembler, and he played his double game to the hilt. When not out rabble-rousing--he was a charismatic public speaker--Husseini was "always mild-mannered and soft-spoken. " He was "short and stocky" and "dressed simply but elegantly," write Dalin and Rothmann. "He always wore the same black patent-leather shoes and the traditional ... mufti's headdress--a large white cloth wrapped, in a turban, around a red tarboosh....
People who met him for the first time were surprised by his gentle, even meek, manner." With his fair skin, pale blue eyes, and reddish brown beard, he had a "non-Muslim, truly Western appearance."
(Hitler was also to remark upon this, hinting at the mufti's "Aryan origins" when they met in Berlin in November 1941.)
In the tumultuous years between 1936 and 1939, Husseini led the Palestine Arabs during the anti-British "Great Revolt." Publicly, on the political level, he oversaw the general strike of May-October 1936, while clandestinely he orchestrated, or tried to orchestrate, its military--guerrilla and terroristic--aspect, with armed bands roaming the countryside and the casbahs, killing British soldiers, Jewish settlers, and dissident Arabs. In October 1937, with a warrant out for his arrest, Husseini hid in Al Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount and then, dressed as a woman, he fled by boat to Lebanon. From then on, he lived out his life in exile, "returning" to Palestine only for one week in September 1948 before the Egyptian secret police shepherded him back to his villa in Heliopolis.
Before that time he had rejected the U.N. General Assembly partition resolution of November 29, 1947 and launched the Palestinian Arab assault on the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, which was the first stage of the 1948 war.
When the Haganah, the Yishuv's main militia, crushed the Palestinian irregulars in the spring of 1948, Husseini successfully prodded the neighboring Arab states to invade, and to attempt to destroy, the new Jewish state and to "save" the Palestinians. The Arab armies failed, but the Jordanians duly acquired the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as the Egyptians did the Gaza Strip--and pointedly avoided establishing a Palestine Arab state. So Husseini lived out the rest of his life in Lebanon and Egypt, an embittered and discarded figurehead, in exile among his Arab brothers, like the other 700,000 Palestinians displaced in the war that he had immorally and illogically launched, and for which his people, and the Arab peoples in general, had failed to prepare.
Strangely enough, Dalin and Rothmann devote little space to the chronicle of Husseini's life.
They prefer to dwell on Husseini's anti-Semitism and his ideological and political links with the Nazis and the Third Reich. The problem is that, while putting their finger on important affinities, they decidedly over-reach, and, given the poverty of their scholarship, they often fail to persuade, leaving the reader with the bad taste of propaganda. They certainly add little to the story published in Joseph Schechtman's The Mufti and the Fuhrer (1965), Zvi Elpeleg's The Grand Mufti (1993), or Jennie Lebel's Haj Amin and Berlin (1996).
To be sure, Haj Amin was an anti-Semite. He certainly imbibed the Judeophobia of the Qur'an. And this, as Dalin and Rothmann assert, may have been bolstered by a further dose of Jewhatred that he acquired at the feet of Rashid Rida (though they offer no proof of this).
His anti-Semitism was certainly reinforced by what he picked up during his years in Germany, between 1941 and 1945, when he was employed by the Third Reich to broadcast jihadist antiAllied propaganda to the Arab world and to recruit Muslims for the Wehrmacht in Bosnia, while the Nazis, as they described it, were battling "international Jewry" and its agents in London, Washington, and Moscow. Husseini seems to have accepted the Nazi view of the Jews' world-embracing powers--something that is entirely lacking in Qur'anic and early Islamic anti-Semitism, which, if anything, belittled the Jew.
Husseini's anti-Semitism was not simply utilitarian and political, a means of raising the alarm about the Jews' alleged aim of taking over the Temple Mount or Palestine.
It was sincere and heartfelt. In 1954, he wrote in the Egyptian newspaper Al Masri that "the Jews filled a central role in acts of sabotage and destructive propaganda inside Germany, toward the end of the [first] world war. They acted in every way to bring about its destruction." The Jews aimed to take over Palestine, "Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq (apart from its northern parts), Sinai, the [Nile] Delta of Egypt, the city of Medina and the areas of the Banu Kurtina and Banu al-Nasir around it, and other parts of northern Hijaz [today western Saudi Arabia]."
He further declared that we have a negative ally of great importance, and that is the Jewish nature, which characterizes them since their beginnings. This nature was among the important reasons for their failure in all stages of their history, and caused people to hate and persecute them. One of the most salient features of the Jewish nature is their conceit and exaggerated selfishness, which stems from [their belief that] they are the chosen people of God. There is no limit to their covetousness and to their keeping others away from the Good.... They have no pity in their hearts and they are known for their hostility, rivalry and great hardness, as Allah described them in the Qur'an.... This caused them ... not to recognize others' rights. As a result, other peoples have despaired of living with them throughout history.
So Husseini's support of the pro-Axis rebellion of Rashid Ali Al Kilani in Baghdad in April 1941 was unsurprising--as unsurprising, in fact, as his subsequent extended sojourn in Berlin. He became a friend of Himmler's, and appears to have known the full extent of the Holocaust.
Indeed, in various indirect ways he abetted the murder of European Jewry. In the summer of 1943, for example, Husseini wrote a series of letters to von Ribbentrop, Himmler, and various leaders in Nazi "puppet states" requesting that Jewish orphans be sent to Poland, where they would not be "a source of danger," rather than to Palestine.
On May 6, 1943, he wrote to the foreign minister of Bulgaria of "the Jewish danger to the whole world, especially to countries in which there were Jews."
On May 13, he wrote to von Ribbentrop complaining that 4,000 Balkan Jewish children had been saved.
After the war, evading prosecution as a war criminal, Husseini settled in Cairo. From there, as the dominant figure behind the resurrected Arab Higher Committee, he pulled, or tried to pull, the strings in Palestine and around it, in the hope of frustrating the implementation of the U.N. partition resolution and the establishment of the Jewish state. He failed, and led his people into the Nakba; and then blamed everyone else--the Jews, the Americans, the British, the Soviets--for what had happened. Decades later, Arafat performed similarly--though to be sure, unlike Husseini, he managed through the Oslo peace process to eke out some areas of limited sovereignty for his people. (What they have managed to do with these areas is another matter.)
Husseini, of course, was not alone in the Arab world in his support of the Germans. Such support was quite widespread. The question always arises whether it was motivated merely by anti-imperialism and the hope that a German defeat of the Western democracies would free the Arabs from the imperial grip of the French and the British, or whether it went beyond interests to beliefs, to an identification with parts of the fascist and Nazi message, which was anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, and anti-liberal. In Husseini's case, there seem to have been both ideological affinities and a large dose of political pragmatism (a German victory might ensure Palestinian Arab independence from Britain, the elimination of the Yishuv, and perhaps his own sway over Palestine).
Dalin and Rothmann are correct to note that already in March 1933 Husseini had congratulated the Nazis on their accession to power, and told Heinrich Wolff, the German consul-general in Jerusalem, that he hoped that the fascist governmental system would spread to other countries. Early on, he had called on Germany to impose an economic boycott against the Jews and said that the Islamic world would join it.
At his famous meeting with Hitler on November 28, 1941, Husseini--according to his own memoirs--asserted their ideological affinity, when it came to anti-Semitism, in the following manner: "Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews.
The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours.'"
Bostom's book is important and deeply discouraging, but it suffers from flaws of organization and analysis. It is eclectic and chaotic; much is missing, even as there is too much repetition.
In some ways the historical picture is even worse than he portrays it as being.
He includes documents referring to the Farhud--the Iraqi pogrom against Baghdad's Jews in 1941--and the massacre of the Jews in Tripolitania in 1945;
but there is no mention of the massacres of Jews in Aden in 1947 and Morocco in 1948, and there is almost no material (since he purports to cover the medieval centuries as well) on the vast pogroms that took place in Spain and North Africa during the Middle Ages.
The volume is clearly not a product of systematic research or compilation. The mixing of excerpts from medieval Islamic texts with articles by modern Western scholars of Islam is somewhat confusing (especially when these scholars abundantly quote from the earlier material); it is not always clear where the one begins and the other ends.
Dalin and Rothmann suffer not from pedantry but from overtly propagandistic aims. They are constantly beating an ideological drum. Their adjectives are a giveaway. Every anti-Semite or anti-Semitic text is "virulent" or "notorious." Icon of Evil even offers a what-if chapter, an obscene counterfactual fantasy called "The Mufti's Reflection: What If Germany Had Conquered Palestine and Britain?," in which the Yishuv is exterminated, Husseini serves as Hitler's local satrap, and so on. Sure. What does this add to the reader's knowledge? And the book abounds with errors of fact. The Paris peace conference after World War I did not "ratify" the Sykes-Picot Agreement, "stipulating that Palestine would be ruled by the British," and T.E. Lawrence was not "the ... British representative in the region"; no one "estimated the Egyptian army [in 1948] at two hundred thousand men"; Lebanese Prime Minister Riad Al Solh was not assassinated on July 15, 1951; and so on.
But if Dalin and Rothmann's book is a bad book, much of what it says is soberingly truthful and to the point.
We are no longer living in a world, if ever we did, in which these ugly realities can be explained away or ignored.
~~~~~~~~~
Andrew G. Bostom responds:
The conclusion to Benny Morris's review of The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism contains false claims about materials omitted from the book.
Morris states: "...but there is no mention of the massacres of Jews in Aden in 1947 and Morocco in 1948." The 1947 Aden pogrom is discussed on pages 158-159. On page 160 there is a mention of the murder of Jews in 1948 in northeastern Morocco.
Morris also states "there is almost no material (since he [Bostom] purports to cover the medieval centuries as well) on the vast pogroms that took place in Spain and North Africa during the Middle Ages." These pogroms are discussed by the author on pages 46, 48-51, 54, and 97-105. Excerpts from other authors on the subject can be found on pages 335-354, 491-494, and 505-524.
Other than failing to read or even peruse large swaths of the book it is unclear how else Morris could have written such falsehoods. Let the record stand corrected.
Benny Morris adds:
Mea culpa. I somehow missed the references to the Aden and Moroccan massacres and the medieval pogroms and apologize for writing that they were not mentioned in the book.
Benny Morris, (The New Republic, September 10, 2008
The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History
Edited by Andrew G. Bostom (Prometheus Books, 766 pp., $39.95)
Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam
By David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann (Random House, 227 pp., $26)
Scholars in the West have begun to devote time and space to anti-Western jihadism and Muslim anti-Semitism--and a good thing, too, as these are very much on the contemporary international and Middle Eastern political and military agendas and, I fear, will grow in significance during the coming decades, as the Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" widens. That such a "clash" is going on is all too apparent, from the riots in Nigerian streets, where hundreds died following the announcement of an impending beauty pageant on Nigerian soil, to the murder of an Italian priest in Turkey following the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in Denmark. Yet, Western liberals hesitate to tackle the subject of Muslim anti-Semitism, lest it seem anti-multicultural or provoke the hornet's nest of Allah's minions. Even the use of the word "jihad" has become taboo among appeasers of Islam--and even among some non-appeasers, such as George W. Bush, who, like other Western leaders, refuses to call the phenomenon by its precise name (and the name that its own practitioners use). People speak of "international terrorism" when they should be speaking of "international Muslim (or Islamist) terrorism."
The compendium of anti-Semitic Muslim texts about Jews in Islamic Arab lands assembled by Andrew G. Bostom, a professor of medicine with a dark hobby, kicks off, unusually, with an explanation of the painting reproduced on the dust jacket. It is by Alfred Dehodencq, from 1860, and it portrays a group of Muslims, one of them brandishing a scimitar, handling roughly by her hair a kneeling dark-eyed damsel, her hands tied behind her back.
The group, on a raised platform, is surrounded by an apparently enthusiastic mob. The scene is Fez, in Morocco, in 1834. The girl is named Sol Hachuel. She is seventeen years old, and she is about to be beheaded. She was accused of secretly adhering to her Jewish faith after converting to Islam--a charge tantamount to apostasy (still punishable by death in most Arab lands). Hachuel denied that she had ever converted. The governor of Tangier, Arbi Esudio, had accused her of "having provoked the anger of the Prophet." The Sultan agreed and pronounced the death sentence. She went bravely, reiterating her Jewishness and refusing to recant, with "Shema Yisrael," the Judaic profession of faith, on her lips.
The case was certainly unusual--but it typified, in Bostom's view, the sorry lot of the Jews in the Muslim Arab world since the rise of Islam and its expansion around the Mediterranean basin in the seventh and eighth centuries. At the start of his book, Bostom provides a monographlength background survey of the "theological-juridical origins" of Islamic anti-Semitism, illustrating his points with a brief review of its "historical manifestations."
At the level of principle, Muslim attitudes toward the Jews (and, less so, toward Christians) were--and are--informed by a basic ambivalence. Jews and Christians deserved, and received, a formal measure of respect as "People of the Book" and as the first to adopt monotheism; Islam had followed in their footsteps.
But at the same time Jews and Christians were the "enemy," the rival religion and, in certain times and places, the political and military foe.
It was this second attitude that dominated actual Arab practice during most of the fourteen centuries since the birth of Islam. In the lands stretching from Persia to Spain and Morocco, Jews (and Christians) were always second-class subjects, humiliated and discriminated against, often oppressed and persecuted, sometimes forcibly converted or slaughtered. There are almost no substantial Jewish or Christian minorities (the Copts of Egypt and the Christians/ animists of southern Sudan are exceptions) left in the Arab world today; and the few remaining Christians in Iraq and Palestine are rapidly fleeing westward. (Note the recent murder of the Arab owner of a Christian bookshop in Gaza.)
The story peddled by latter-day Arab propagandists (and reinforced by some Jewish scholars, who tended in decades past, sometimes for apologetic reasons of their own, to highlight the medieval "Golden Age" of Islamic Spanish Jewry)--that the Jewish minorities in the Muslim Arab countries before the advent of Zionism enjoyed a pleasant fraternal existence among the majority populations--has often been trotted out for the benefit of ignorant Westerners, to illustrate Muslim Arab tolerance of minorities and, politically, to promote plans for a multi-ethnic, one-state solution for Israel/ Palestine.
It also has taken hold among Western intellectuals. Thus as prominent a journalist as Lawrence Wright, in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, writes that "until the end of World War II, there was little precedent in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping the politics and society of the region. Jews had lived safely--although submissively--under Muslim rule for 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom," until Christian missionaries, Nazi propaganda, and the rise of Israel twisted their minds and propelled them toward anti-Semitism.
Or consider Esther Webman, of Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center, who has written that "antisemitism did not exist in the traditional Islamic world.... Antisemitism is, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon in the Arab world." She attributed its rise to three factors: the nineteenth- and twentieth-century penetration of Western thought into that world; "the collapse of traditional political systems and of the loyalties" associated with modern nationalism; and, "most crucial, the development of the conflict [with Zionism] over the domination of Palestine."
But this construct, in Bostom's view (and in my own), is wholly false.
It flies in the face of the evidence, much of it presented in Bostom's tome. Certainly modern Christian influences, nationalist enthrallment, and Jewish nationalism (and its success) have added layers to traditional Islamic anti-Semitism. But they were building on firm foundations.
From its inception, Islam and its adherents, beginning with Muhammad himself, saw Judaism (and Christianity) as rival parent religions that had to be fought and overcome for Islam to succeed. The initial struggles, in the early seventh century, were existential, a matter of survival, for the Muslims bent on dominating Hijaz and then breaking out of the dismal, arid, thinly populated confines of Arabia. The first Muslims shared a deep sense of vulnerability and threat.
And so the Jews (and Christians) in the realms of expanding Islam were subjected to a regime based on an understanding or agreement--the dhimma--of subordination, marginalization, and discrimination. By the twelfth century, the great philosopher Maimonides, a successful Jew in the Islamic world, the doctor to sultans, was to lament: "God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us.... None has matched [them] in debasing, humiliating, and hating us."
And the situation was to remain more or less constant in most of the Islamic lands down to the twentieth century.
Consider Bostom's excerpt from Leon Godard's travelogue Description et histoire du Maroc, published in 1860:
In the cities, the Jews live in separate quarters ... called the Mellah, or the salted earth, dry and cursed. They are locked in from sundown to sunrise and on holidays, all day. They pay the Moorish guards who protect them.... They [pay] the capitulation tax ... that the government sets for each Mellah.... They have eight days to pay the tax; after that, and without warning the Mellah can be pillaged.... According to the laws, the Jews cannot cultivate earth, own land or houses outside the Mellah, ride a horse in front of a town other than on a saddle for a mule ... hit a Moslem, even to defend themselves except in their own house if it has been violated, be a witness in front of a court....
They cannot bid for food in Moslem market, or walk in some streets, in front of Mosques or Koubas, without holding their slippers in their hands, or get married without the permission of the Sultan.... They have to dress only in black or dark colors, wear a black hat different from the turban and not to tie with more than one knot the black scarf holding their headgear.
How and why this condition of degradation came about, and why anti-Semitism persists and, indeed, is on the upsurge in the Islamic Arab world is what Bostom's anthology sets out to explain.
It all begins with the Qur'an-- or, rather, with the encounter, as described in the Qur'an, between Muhammad, the prophet of the new religion, and the Jewish tribes in Hijaz, the area of western Arabia that includes the towns of Mecca and Medina, where Islam arose around 620 C.E.
The Jews, not surprisingly, rejected the new faith and its prophet; and if the Qur'an is to be believed, they were contemptuous and sarcastic. (Religions notoriously do not take well to humor at their expense.) Indeed, the Qur'an asserts that the Hijazi Jewish tribes were downright hostile, even at one point trying to poison the Prophet. Muhammad, for his part, had earlier ordered the assassination of prominent Jewish opponents, and forcibly converted tribesmen and expelled many others, and slaughtered hundreds and consigned many of their women and children to slavery. (He took one of the daughters, Safiya, as his wife, after first dispatching her father and husband, according to the Prophet's first major biographer, Ibn Ishaq.)
Partly in consequence, the Qur'an designates the Jews a "base" people and "killers of prophets" (harking back to the Christian charge of Christ-killing). The full verse (2:61) reads: "Humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them, and they were visited with wrath from Allah. That was because they disbelieved in Allah's revelations and slew the prophets wrongfully." They are also said to be usurious. The full verse (4:160-161) reads: "And for the evildoing of the Jews ... and for their taking usury ... and for their consuming people's wealth under false pretenses we have prepared for the unbelievers among them [i.e., those not converted to Islam] a painful punishment." Elsewhere (5:63-64) the Qur'an states, "They hasten to spread corruption throughout the earth, but Allah does not love corrupters!" and instructs (5:51): "Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends." And it refers (5:60) to Allah's punitive transformation of the Jews into "apes and pigs" (the distant theological basis for Hamas's current designation of the Jews as "sons of apes and pigs").
Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the current grand imam of Al Azhar University of Cairo, a supreme authority in Sunni Islam, published a book in the late 1960s called The Jews in the Qur'an and the Traditions; it was re-issued in 1986. It summarized the Qur'an's (and Tantawi's own) attitude to the Jews in this way: "The Qur'an describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e., killing the prophets of Allah, corrupting His words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the people's wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness ... only a minority of Jews keep their word.... [But] not all Jews are the same. The good ones become Muslims."
Tantawi was later to describe contemporary Jews as "the descendants of apes and pigs." I add in fairness that he was later to condemn the September 11 attacks, and suicide bombings in general, as contrary to Islam, though he defended "jihad" against those violating Islamic soil.
The hadiths, or sayings of the Prophet, the subsequent exegeses of the Qur'an, and the early biographers of Muhammad built on and built up this anti-Semitic tradition. Ibn Ishaq (died 761), Muhammad's first and major biographer, as transmitted by Ibn Hisham, wrote: "The Apostle of Allah--may Allah bless him and grant him peace--declared, 'Kill any Jew who falls into your power.' So Muhayyisa Ibn Mas'ud fell upon Ibn Sunayna, one of the Jewish merchants with whom his family had social and commercial relations, and killed him." One of the more famous hadiths, quoted in Bostom, from Sahih Muslim, Book 41, no. 6985, reads: "Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me: come and kill him: but the tree Gharqad would not say [this], for it is the tree of the Jews." This hadith appears in variants in different collections.
Major Muslim scholars followed this anti-Semitic tradition. Al Baydawi (1286-1316?), a Shafi'ite intellectual who was chief kadi of Shiraz, wrote of the Jews' "intense obstinacy, multi-faceted disbelief, and their addiction to following their whims, their adherence to the blind following of their tradition, their distancing themselves from the truth, and their unrelenting denial of, and hostility toward, the prophets."
Ibn Kathir (1300-1373), a Basra-born historian, wrote of the Jews' "rebellion, defiance, opposing the truth, belittling other people, and degrading the scholars. This is why the Jews--may Allah's continued curses descend on them until the Day of Resurrection--killed many of their Prophets." And in our own time--he is a full-fledged member of this odious tradition--Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the "spiritual mentor" of modern Islamist extremism, wrote: "No other nation has shown more intransigence and obstinacy than the Jews. They viciously and mercilessly killed and mutilated a number of prophets and messengers. They have over the centuries displayed the most extreme attitudes towards God.... They have always boasted of their virtue and made the implausible claims of being ... the chosen people of God.... Such claims are totally refuted by the Qur'an.... Theirs is a wicked nature, which is full of hatred for Islam."
It is little wonder, then, that such anti-Semitic motifs creep into the speeches of contemporary Muslim leaders. Bashar Al Assad, the president of Syria, welcomed Pope John Paul II to Damascus on May 5, 2001 by declaring that "we notice them [the Jews] aggressing against Muslim and Christian holy sites in Palestine.... They try to kill all the the principles of divine faiths with the same mentality of betraying Jesus Christ and torturing him, and in the same way that they tried to commit treachery against Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him)."
Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, described the survivors of the Holocaust as "a bunch of hooligans who emigrated to Palestine," while his protege Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies that the Holocaust took place at all. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, has written: "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.... If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide."
But contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism, as typified by such statements, is not all of Qur'anic derivation.
It also owes a great deal to modern European hate-merchants. Without doubt, Christian missionaries, traders, and officials in the nineteenth and early twentieth century flooded the region with their religious-ideological wares. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example, was first translated into Arabic and published in Cairo in 1920. And more modern European anti-Semitic tenets penetrated the area during the following decades. They were perfectly embodied in the person and beliefs of Haj Muhammad Amin Al Husseini.
In her book The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock, the American scholar Virginia Tilley recently wrote that "the racist ... incompetent and reactionary Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini" was "unrepresentative" of the Palestinian Arabs. Tilley would have her readers believe that Husseini "was never a leader of more than a few reactionary Palestinian factions."
This is nonsense. In this respect, at least, David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann put matters aright. From his appointment in 1921 by the British as the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini was a major figure, and during the 1930s and 1940s he was the recognized leader--recognized, that is, by the British Mandate authorities and the Zionist leadership and, not least, by the leaders of the surrounding Arab societies and states--of the Palestinian Arab national movement, much as Yasser Arafat was the leader of the movement from the late 1960s until his death in 2004. And like Arafat, Husseini basked in the support of the Palestinian multitudes, led them into a series of historical disasters, and--when all is said and done--rejected a succession of compromises that would have resulted in the establishment many years ago of an Arab state, alongside Israel, in part of Palestine.
Husseini, who died in 1974, had an eventful life in interesting times. His father, Taher Al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem from 1869 until 1908, led the Palestinian notables' unsuccessful struggle against Jewish immigration and land purchases (while his cousin, Rabah Al Husseini, sold land, including his own house, to the Jews). Haj Amin seems to have been born in 1895 (he sometimes spoke of 1894 or 1896) and grew up in Jerusalem. When he was seventeen, he was sent to study in Cairo, where he caught the eye of Rashid Rida, the theologian who became the spiritual father figure of the Muslim Brotherhood, established in the late 1920s. According to the anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe, Rida, who treated the young Amin as a disciple, believed "in the need for Muslim society ... to regard the encounter with Western culture ... as an existential threat. [His] second principle related to the way [the Islamic Arab world] needed to deal with this encounter--a return to [implementing] a pure version of the Islamic commandments, all the while strenuously filtering out western influences.... A third principle touched on the need to link religious activity to political and nationalist actions. The struggle against the British occupation of Egypt, for example, was nothing but the struggle of Islam against the West. Rida spoke explicitly also about Zionism and the need to fight it within the framework of the overall struggle against the West's takeover of the Arab, Islamic Middle East."
All these principles were shared by Husseini. He joined the Ottoman Army, apparently even before Istanbul declared war, "as he was bored at school" (in Pappe's phrase), and served as an officer until the end of 1916. He fell ill and returned to Jerusalem, and there, after deserting, he began surreptitiously to raise volunteers to aid the anti-Ottoman Sharifian "revolt in the desert," organized by the British in 1915-1916. Later he assisted the short-lived government of Faisal ibn Hussein in Damascus during 1918-1920, and then he returned to Palestine and dabbled in embryonic Palestinian nationalist politics.
Husseini apparently played an incendiary role in the Nabi Musa riots against the Jews in 1920, after which he fled the country. But he was pardoned, and he returned, and in a supreme gesture of appeasement, Herbert Samuel, the first British high commissioner, appointed him the "grand mufti" of Jerusalem. The following year Samuel appointed him the head of the Supreme Muslim Council, which supervised the country's Muslim sites and institutions, thereby furnishing Hajj Amin with a powerful political base for his eventual accession to the leadership of the Palestinian Arab national movement.
He detested the British and all their works--he was especially angered, of course, by their support of Zionism--but he was an accomplished dissembler, and he played his double game to the hilt. When not out rabble-rousing--he was a charismatic public speaker--Husseini was "always mild-mannered and soft-spoken. " He was "short and stocky" and "dressed simply but elegantly," write Dalin and Rothmann. "He always wore the same black patent-leather shoes and the traditional ... mufti's headdress--a large white cloth wrapped, in a turban, around a red tarboosh....
People who met him for the first time were surprised by his gentle, even meek, manner." With his fair skin, pale blue eyes, and reddish brown beard, he had a "non-Muslim, truly Western appearance."
(Hitler was also to remark upon this, hinting at the mufti's "Aryan origins" when they met in Berlin in November 1941.)
In the tumultuous years between 1936 and 1939, Husseini led the Palestine Arabs during the anti-British "Great Revolt." Publicly, on the political level, he oversaw the general strike of May-October 1936, while clandestinely he orchestrated, or tried to orchestrate, its military--guerrilla and terroristic--aspect, with armed bands roaming the countryside and the casbahs, killing British soldiers, Jewish settlers, and dissident Arabs. In October 1937, with a warrant out for his arrest, Husseini hid in Al Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount and then, dressed as a woman, he fled by boat to Lebanon. From then on, he lived out his life in exile, "returning" to Palestine only for one week in September 1948 before the Egyptian secret police shepherded him back to his villa in Heliopolis.
Before that time he had rejected the U.N. General Assembly partition resolution of November 29, 1947 and launched the Palestinian Arab assault on the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, which was the first stage of the 1948 war.
When the Haganah, the Yishuv's main militia, crushed the Palestinian irregulars in the spring of 1948, Husseini successfully prodded the neighboring Arab states to invade, and to attempt to destroy, the new Jewish state and to "save" the Palestinians. The Arab armies failed, but the Jordanians duly acquired the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as the Egyptians did the Gaza Strip--and pointedly avoided establishing a Palestine Arab state. So Husseini lived out the rest of his life in Lebanon and Egypt, an embittered and discarded figurehead, in exile among his Arab brothers, like the other 700,000 Palestinians displaced in the war that he had immorally and illogically launched, and for which his people, and the Arab peoples in general, had failed to prepare.
Strangely enough, Dalin and Rothmann devote little space to the chronicle of Husseini's life.
They prefer to dwell on Husseini's anti-Semitism and his ideological and political links with the Nazis and the Third Reich. The problem is that, while putting their finger on important affinities, they decidedly over-reach, and, given the poverty of their scholarship, they often fail to persuade, leaving the reader with the bad taste of propaganda. They certainly add little to the story published in Joseph Schechtman's The Mufti and the Fuhrer (1965), Zvi Elpeleg's The Grand Mufti (1993), or Jennie Lebel's Haj Amin and Berlin (1996).
To be sure, Haj Amin was an anti-Semite. He certainly imbibed the Judeophobia of the Qur'an. And this, as Dalin and Rothmann assert, may have been bolstered by a further dose of Jewhatred that he acquired at the feet of Rashid Rida (though they offer no proof of this).
His anti-Semitism was certainly reinforced by what he picked up during his years in Germany, between 1941 and 1945, when he was employed by the Third Reich to broadcast jihadist antiAllied propaganda to the Arab world and to recruit Muslims for the Wehrmacht in Bosnia, while the Nazis, as they described it, were battling "international Jewry" and its agents in London, Washington, and Moscow. Husseini seems to have accepted the Nazi view of the Jews' world-embracing powers--something that is entirely lacking in Qur'anic and early Islamic anti-Semitism, which, if anything, belittled the Jew.
Husseini's anti-Semitism was not simply utilitarian and political, a means of raising the alarm about the Jews' alleged aim of taking over the Temple Mount or Palestine.
It was sincere and heartfelt. In 1954, he wrote in the Egyptian newspaper Al Masri that "the Jews filled a central role in acts of sabotage and destructive propaganda inside Germany, toward the end of the [first] world war. They acted in every way to bring about its destruction." The Jews aimed to take over Palestine, "Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq (apart from its northern parts), Sinai, the [Nile] Delta of Egypt, the city of Medina and the areas of the Banu Kurtina and Banu al-Nasir around it, and other parts of northern Hijaz [today western Saudi Arabia]."
He further declared that we have a negative ally of great importance, and that is the Jewish nature, which characterizes them since their beginnings. This nature was among the important reasons for their failure in all stages of their history, and caused people to hate and persecute them. One of the most salient features of the Jewish nature is their conceit and exaggerated selfishness, which stems from [their belief that] they are the chosen people of God. There is no limit to their covetousness and to their keeping others away from the Good.... They have no pity in their hearts and they are known for their hostility, rivalry and great hardness, as Allah described them in the Qur'an.... This caused them ... not to recognize others' rights. As a result, other peoples have despaired of living with them throughout history.
So Husseini's support of the pro-Axis rebellion of Rashid Ali Al Kilani in Baghdad in April 1941 was unsurprising--as unsurprising, in fact, as his subsequent extended sojourn in Berlin. He became a friend of Himmler's, and appears to have known the full extent of the Holocaust.
Indeed, in various indirect ways he abetted the murder of European Jewry. In the summer of 1943, for example, Husseini wrote a series of letters to von Ribbentrop, Himmler, and various leaders in Nazi "puppet states" requesting that Jewish orphans be sent to Poland, where they would not be "a source of danger," rather than to Palestine.
On May 6, 1943, he wrote to the foreign minister of Bulgaria of "the Jewish danger to the whole world, especially to countries in which there were Jews."
On May 13, he wrote to von Ribbentrop complaining that 4,000 Balkan Jewish children had been saved.
After the war, evading prosecution as a war criminal, Husseini settled in Cairo. From there, as the dominant figure behind the resurrected Arab Higher Committee, he pulled, or tried to pull, the strings in Palestine and around it, in the hope of frustrating the implementation of the U.N. partition resolution and the establishment of the Jewish state. He failed, and led his people into the Nakba; and then blamed everyone else--the Jews, the Americans, the British, the Soviets--for what had happened. Decades later, Arafat performed similarly--though to be sure, unlike Husseini, he managed through the Oslo peace process to eke out some areas of limited sovereignty for his people. (What they have managed to do with these areas is another matter.)
Husseini, of course, was not alone in the Arab world in his support of the Germans. Such support was quite widespread. The question always arises whether it was motivated merely by anti-imperialism and the hope that a German defeat of the Western democracies would free the Arabs from the imperial grip of the French and the British, or whether it went beyond interests to beliefs, to an identification with parts of the fascist and Nazi message, which was anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, and anti-liberal. In Husseini's case, there seem to have been both ideological affinities and a large dose of political pragmatism (a German victory might ensure Palestinian Arab independence from Britain, the elimination of the Yishuv, and perhaps his own sway over Palestine).
Dalin and Rothmann are correct to note that already in March 1933 Husseini had congratulated the Nazis on their accession to power, and told Heinrich Wolff, the German consul-general in Jerusalem, that he hoped that the fascist governmental system would spread to other countries. Early on, he had called on Germany to impose an economic boycott against the Jews and said that the Islamic world would join it.
At his famous meeting with Hitler on November 28, 1941, Husseini--according to his own memoirs--asserted their ideological affinity, when it came to anti-Semitism, in the following manner: "Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews.
The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours.'"
Bostom's book is important and deeply discouraging, but it suffers from flaws of organization and analysis. It is eclectic and chaotic; much is missing, even as there is too much repetition.
In some ways the historical picture is even worse than he portrays it as being.
He includes documents referring to the Farhud--the Iraqi pogrom against Baghdad's Jews in 1941--and the massacre of the Jews in Tripolitania in 1945;
but there is no mention of the massacres of Jews in Aden in 1947 and Morocco in 1948, and there is almost no material (since he purports to cover the medieval centuries as well) on the vast pogroms that took place in Spain and North Africa during the Middle Ages.
The volume is clearly not a product of systematic research or compilation. The mixing of excerpts from medieval Islamic texts with articles by modern Western scholars of Islam is somewhat confusing (especially when these scholars abundantly quote from the earlier material); it is not always clear where the one begins and the other ends.
Dalin and Rothmann suffer not from pedantry but from overtly propagandistic aims. They are constantly beating an ideological drum. Their adjectives are a giveaway. Every anti-Semite or anti-Semitic text is "virulent" or "notorious." Icon of Evil even offers a what-if chapter, an obscene counterfactual fantasy called "The Mufti's Reflection: What If Germany Had Conquered Palestine and Britain?," in which the Yishuv is exterminated, Husseini serves as Hitler's local satrap, and so on. Sure. What does this add to the reader's knowledge? And the book abounds with errors of fact. The Paris peace conference after World War I did not "ratify" the Sykes-Picot Agreement, "stipulating that Palestine would be ruled by the British," and T.E. Lawrence was not "the ... British representative in the region"; no one "estimated the Egyptian army [in 1948] at two hundred thousand men"; Lebanese Prime Minister Riad Al Solh was not assassinated on July 15, 1951; and so on.
But if Dalin and Rothmann's book is a bad book, much of what it says is soberingly truthful and to the point.
We are no longer living in a world, if ever we did, in which these ugly realities can be explained away or ignored.
~~~~~~~~~
Andrew G. Bostom responds:
The conclusion to Benny Morris's review of The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism contains false claims about materials omitted from the book.
Morris states: "...but there is no mention of the massacres of Jews in Aden in 1947 and Morocco in 1948." The 1947 Aden pogrom is discussed on pages 158-159. On page 160 there is a mention of the murder of Jews in 1948 in northeastern Morocco.
Morris also states "there is almost no material (since he [Bostom] purports to cover the medieval centuries as well) on the vast pogroms that took place in Spain and North Africa during the Middle Ages." These pogroms are discussed by the author on pages 46, 48-51, 54, and 97-105. Excerpts from other authors on the subject can be found on pages 335-354, 491-494, and 505-524.
Other than failing to read or even peruse large swaths of the book it is unclear how else Morris could have written such falsehoods. Let the record stand corrected.
Benny Morris adds:
Mea culpa. I somehow missed the references to the Aden and Moroccan massacres and the medieval pogroms and apologize for writing that they were not mentioned in the book.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Jurnal de Blog ... sau atacurile isterice
ale paranoiacului infantil Robin, adminul blogului Ziua"Libera" ...
Probabil ca va intrebati de ce naiba un blog atit de simpatic este fortzat sa modereze comentariile ...
Raspunsul este simplu: suntem atacati de un psihopat jalnic care se crede "Allah u akbar" al Internetului.
Cu alte cuvinte, ne-a anuntat ca "ne futa" daca nu-i indeplinim poruncile. Nu intamplator il numim taliban.
Are aceasi mentalitate islamo-fascista. Adica, daca nu ii raspunzi in acelasi stil, el crede ca ti-e teama de el. Sau daca ai alta parere decat a lui, are grija sa te stropeasca cu invective. Nu numai el ci si California, partenera lui de blog.
Asa s-a intamplat cu Seherezada, asa s-a intamplat cu vizitator, asa s-a intamplat cu Carol, asa s-a intamplat cu roy si asa o sa se intample cu cine va sufla o vorba in alta directie pe blogul care se intituleaza "liber" (sic!).
In urma cu cateva zile, cand si-a etalat obraznicia cu un ultimatum, l-am anuntat ca si noi putem recurge la spam in directia opusa. N-a inteles mesajul si iar a revenit pe blog cu insulte (*).
Si iarasi i-am tolerat postarile obraznice ceea ce s-a dovedit gresit.
Ieri, sub un pretext cusut cu ata alba, ne-a dat un nou ultimatum (pe chatul lui Mai) insotit de zeci de postari spam.
De data aceasta, nu am mai putut trece cu vederea si i-am trimis cateva postari spam be blogul lui ca sa inteleaga mesajul.
~~~~~
* impersonari frauduloase, precum duplicarea pe Blogger a profilului Seherezadei ...
* impersonari "ghiduse" ale unor forumisti precum katty, Roy, moroianu, huhu, briel, mos grigore ...
* istericale de soiul "Daca in 48 de ore mesajele de mai sus nu dispar, va fut!"
* peste 150 de spam`uri si amenintzari in Mai 2008
* istericale de soiul "Daca in 48 de ore mesajele de mai sus nu dispar, va fut!"
* peste 150 de spam`uri si amenintzari in Mai 2008
* injuraturi si ultimatum`uri obscene in Apr.2008
* peste 200 de spam`uri in toate postarile din Nov 2007
* peste 200 de spam`uri in toate postarile din Nov 2007
********************* 16/05/2008
Robin si-a demonstrat pina la urma lipsa de scrupule si excesul de impotenta ..., a recurs de-a dreptul la frauda ..., surprinzindu-ne chiar si pe noi, necrezindu-l capabil de o astfel de indecentza ...
AZI, Robin a copiat profilul Seherezadei si l-a pus pe Blogger ... asa ca acum Seherezada are doua profiluri identice. Singura deosebire e ca profilul ei adevarat dateaza din Mai 2006, pe cind profilul ei fals dateaza din Mai 2008.
Robin si-a demonstrat pina la urma lipsa de scrupule si excesul de impotenta ..., a recurs de-a dreptul la frauda ..., surprinzindu-ne chiar si pe noi, necrezindu-l capabil de o astfel de indecentza ...
AZI, Robin a copiat profilul Seherezadei si l-a pus pe Blogger ... asa ca acum Seherezada are doua profiluri identice. Singura deosebire e ca profilul ei adevarat dateaza din Mai 2006, pe cind profilul ei fals dateaza din Mai 2008.
Aceasta manevra ii creaza posibilitatea lui Robin sa o impersoneze pe Seherezada, chiar cu icoana Blogger ..., ceea ce a si facut neintirziat, publicind sub numele Seherezadei chiar si articole antisemite.
Deci acum, un comentariu semnat ...
seherezada said ... ------ (si profilul e din 2008, atunci e fara indoiala buimacul impotent Robin "gazpirtz")
Deci acum, un comentariu semnat ...
seherezada said ... ------ (si profilul e din 2008, atunci e fara indoiala buimacul impotent Robin "gazpirtz")********************* 15/05/2008
O alta chestie abjecta la care recurge Robin este impersonarea ..., asa ca priviti cu atentie icon`ul din dreptul numelui. Iata un exemplu cu cele doua variante:
seherezada said ... (icon`ul este de "Anonymous", deci e clar ca este Robin "gazpirtz")*********************** 14/05/2008
de data asta a intrat pe blogul nostru cu vreo 20-30 de postari impersonindu-i pe Roy, Katty, Moroianu, Seherezada, cu acte in regula, false evident si tot tacimul ... (iar la Seherezada, dupa care e totalmente afemeiat, a pus o poza cu pozitia lui favorita din Kamasutra...)
Pachetul i-a fost returnat pe blogul sau, cu mentiunea "adrisantU necunoscut", si se pare ca nu i-a prea placut...
Pachetul i-a fost returnat pe blogul sau, cu mentiunea "adrisantU necunoscut", si se pare ca nu i-a prea placut...
********************** 13/05/2008
Blogul nostru este din nou deschis si pentru non-membri.
Daca Robin va continua cu amenintarile sale obraznice sau va inunda din nou (*) blogul nostru cu spam, il vom inchide din nou pentru curatenie si vom trece la actiune pe celalalt blog, ... unde vor fi folosite exact aceleasi invective abjecte cu care ne-a sporcait el blogul de nenumarate ori ..."
Blogul nostru este din nou deschis si pentru non-membri.
Daca Robin va continua cu amenintarile sale obraznice sau va inunda din nou (*) blogul nostru cu spam, il vom inchide din nou pentru curatenie si vom trece la actiune pe celalalt blog, ... unde vor fi folosite exact aceleasi invective abjecte cu care ne-a sporcait el blogul de nenumarate ori ..."
********************** 12/05/2008
A trebuit din nou sa inchidem blogul, sa-l curatam de spam`urile lui Robin.
Dupa o perioada de cateva zile de liniste, talibanul Robin a decis sa treaca din nou la actiune. Blogul nostru a fost inundat de vreo 50 de postari de ale lui. In toata aceasta perioada, infantilul acesta a incercat sa provoace de cateva ori, atat in blogul nostru cat si la Ziua, doar, doar ar avea un motiv sa se dezlantuie.
Avand in vedere ca i-am promis sa raspundem cu aceasi moneda, i-am lasat cateva anunturi pe blogul lui. Daca nu se astampara, avem cativa voluntari care vor continua sa scrie acolo pana cand se va decide sa inchida blogul la non-membri.
Mos Grigore, TS si altii care frecventati cele doua bloguri: Stim ce credeti si ne pare rau ca acest taliban loveste in primul rand in voi! Insa la ora actuala nu avem alta solutie.
********************** 06/05/2008
Blogul nostru e din nou deschis pentru toata lumea !
Il anuntam pe Robin ca daca isi va mai permite sa dea buzna pe blogul nostru cu amenintari teroriste si invective (vezi Chat Aprilie) de speta lamentabilului exemplu de mai jos:
"Daca in 48 de ore mesajele de mai sus nu dispar, va fut !"
Robin, de la "Ziua Libera"
Robin, de la "Ziua Libera"
(extras din Chatul din Aprilie 2008 de pe blogul nostru),
mesajele ii vor fi sterse fara nici o tergiversare, intrucit nu acceptam ca cineva din afara blogului sa ne dicteze ce trebuie sau nu sters de pe blog, sa controleze activitatea adminului sau sa ameninte improscarea intregului blog cu spam.
In caz ca blogul nostru va fi atacat din nou cu spam ca sa ne sileasca sa-l inchidem pentru cei care nu sunt membri, vom recurge la actiuni similare fata de blogul vecin.
Din pacate, suntem siliti sa jucam aceste jocuri infantile si stupide, care nu sunt potrivite varstei si educatiei noastre, dar nu avem alta alegere.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
No Country for Young Men :
China's testosterone problem.
Mara Hvistendahl, The New Republic, July 09, 2008
At Tiananmen Square for National Day.Over the last decade, they cropped up in cities throughout China, tucked into raucous markets or along forgotten side streets, their interiors smelling of musty canvas and crammed with bounty for aspiring young soldiers: illicit weapons shops with names like ARMY GOODS STORE and GUNCOOL.
For a few thousand yuan--a few hundred dollars--assault rifle-like air guns await in dirty back rooms, along with fatigues, bulletproof vests, kneepads, long underwear, camouflage t-shirts, rucksacks, bandoliers, helmets, helmet sleeves, walkie-talkies, and two-liter CamelBaks. Once outfitted, China's militiamen organize into clubs--Guangzhou Fight Men, Shanghai Band of Brothers, Tianjin Seals--and storm remote lots or abandoned warehouses, shooting at each other with pellets, to stage what they call "war games." The term belies the seriousness participants assign the activity: The more established clubs have dedicated battlegrounds whose surrounding trees are nailed with DANGER signs.
In gun-happy America, this hobby might not rise above the level of eccentricity; but, in China, where most weapons are illegal, it requires a special degree of passion. Beijing periodically cracks down, and clubs sometimes disappear overnight. In a round-up last year, Beijing cops seized 3,400 guns and knives used in war games. Still, the government can't seem to quash the urge among Chinese twentysomethings to unleash a few rounds. The headline on a recent Shanghai Weekly article explains the games' appeal in unusually apt Chinglish: URBAN BATTLE: A VERY MAN ACTIVITY.
The macho violence spurting forth through outlets like war games is a growing trend in Chinese society--and China's one-child policy, in effect since 1979, is partly responsible. The country's three decades of iron-fisted population planning coincided with a binge in sex-selective abortions (Chinese traditionally favor sons, who carry on the family line) and a rise, even as the country developed, in female infant mortality. After almost 30 years of the policy, China now has the largest gender imbalance in the world, with 37 million more men than women and almost 20 percent more newborn boys than girls nationwide.
By the time these newborns reach puberty, war games may seem like a quaint relic. In the 2020s, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zheng Zhenzhen, estimates in a People's Daily interview that 10 percent of Chinese men will be unable to find wives, which could have a huge impact on Chinese society. Historian David Courtwright suggests in Violent Land that sexually segregated societies in the United States--frontier towns flush with unmarried men, immigrant ghettos in early twentieth-century cities, mining camps--are behind our propensity toward violence. The immigrants and westward migrants who shaped early America, Courtwright says, were largely young single men, who are-- today as well as then--disproportionately responsible for drug abuse, looting, vandalism, and violent crime. A long-term study of Vietnam veterans in 1998 may explain exactly why: The subjects' testosterone levels, which are linked to aggression and violence, dropped when they married and increased when they divorced. Eternally single men, by extension, maintain high levels of testosterone--a recipe for violent civil unrest.
The one-child policy was instituted in an attempt to hamper the wild growth of the Chinese population. But, in the process of plugging one hole, the government may have left another open. The coming boom in restless young men promises to overhaul Chinese society in some potentially scary ways.
Lianyungang, a booming port city in a Jiangsu province economic belt, is ground zero for some of these changes. According to the China Family Planning Association, it's the city in China with the most extreme gender ratio for children under four--163 boys for every 100 girls. One sunny Saturday morning at verdant Cangwu Park, I count six boys and three girls bouncing on the inflatable castle. Near the ice-cream stand are a dozen sticky-faced kids, seven boys and five girls, feeding pigeons. The children running after kites adorned with Olympics mascots and China's Shenzhou VII spaceship: three and two. The drivers of the cheerful little tanks circling an electric track: three and one.
These numbers work fine on the playground, but, for China's many match- making services, they may prove troublesome. At the Good Luck Marriage Introduction Agency, in a town a few hours' drive west from Liangyungang, two whiteboards mounted on the wall advertise the age, height, and income of available singles. On the day I visit, founder Tao Hui, a fortysomething woman with a bouffant, is watching soap operas in her sweatpants. She hasn't felt the shortage yet, she says. On the whiteboards, a few dozen nameless men line up nicely to a few dozen nameless women. For now, many in the early wave of surplus men are marrying younger women.
"We'll see real problems in eight or ten years," Tao predicts. Her 17-year- old son, she assures me, has good prospects. But she already turns away a lot of single males from outlying villages with no money or education. "If they're ugly and can't find work, there's nothing I can do. No one wants them."
Preliminary returns from the first generation of population-controlled kids suggest how all those unwanted men might fill up their time. Over the past decade, as the boys hit adolescence, the country's youth crime rate more than doubled. In December, Chinese Society of Juvenile Delinquency Research Deputy Secretary General Liu Guiming told a Beijing seminar that today's teens were committing crimes "without specific motives, often without forethought."
The Chinese government--which, policy-making blunders aside, hardly wants a population of hopeless, volatile men under its rule--has been vainly trying to undo the damage. At a symposium on the policy last August, family-planning commission head Zhang Weiqing said the gender ratio harbors a "hidden threat to social stability." In February, officials publicly debated the timeline for phasing out stringent population planning targets, citing the gender ratio along with a rapidly aging population. "In the past, everyone thought we didn't have a problem," says Gu Baochang, a demographer at Renmin University in Beijing. "Now they're starting to pay attention."
In the meantime, the government is adopting a softer tone in its propaganda. The red characters painted on village walls throughout the countryside have evolved from the 1980s slogan :
YOU BEAT IT OUT! YOU CAN MAKE IT FALL OUT!
YOU CAN ABORT IT! BUT YOU CANNOT GIVE BIRTH TO IT!
Now they read: I
MPLEMENT FAMILY PLANNING FOR THE GOOD OF ALL CITIZENS.
And, recently, the government added BOYS AND GIRLS ARE BOTH TREASURES.
In 2003, it unveiled the Care For Girls program, which gives stipends to parents of girls in some provinces.
But, as Chinese couples make more money, fertility is naturally declining-- meaning that today's bachelors will form an even larger proportion of China's future population than officials expect. Wang Feng, a sociologist at the University of California-Irvine who's part of a group of scholars advocating phasing out the one-child policy, says the outlook is grim: "Each successive birth cohort is going to be smaller. When younger cohorts get smaller, you have fewer females. It's a double whammy."
Online, many Chinese are worried--about the safety of their daughters, the marriage prospects of their sons. Others--presumably the boys themselves--meet the problem with ominous boasts. As one predicted last year on the portal Tianya: "Our national ability to pick up chicks will reach heights unparalleled in human history."
And still others are coming up with more practical outlets to exploit China's new cadre of unstable young bachelors. Two years ago in Nanjing, Jiangsu's capital, businessman Wu Gang opened the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in a cheap hotel near the bank of the Yangtze River. The bar featured staples of Chinese entertainment like big-screen karaoke and plates of sunflower seeds but also a central catwalk where, for 100 yuan ($15) per minute, customers paid to assault the waiters, single young migrants from poorer cities to the north. If a customer preferred, his victim would dress in drag.
Men "are under too much pressure," Wu explained to me one day, as the waiters high-kicked Pepsi bottles in the storeroom. "They need a way to release it."
Mara Hvistendahl is a writer based in Shanghai.
China's testosterone problem.
Mara Hvistendahl, The New Republic, July 09, 2008
At Tiananmen Square for National Day.Over the last decade, they cropped up in cities throughout China, tucked into raucous markets or along forgotten side streets, their interiors smelling of musty canvas and crammed with bounty for aspiring young soldiers: illicit weapons shops with names like ARMY GOODS STORE and GUNCOOL.
For a few thousand yuan--a few hundred dollars--assault rifle-like air guns await in dirty back rooms, along with fatigues, bulletproof vests, kneepads, long underwear, camouflage t-shirts, rucksacks, bandoliers, helmets, helmet sleeves, walkie-talkies, and two-liter CamelBaks. Once outfitted, China's militiamen organize into clubs--Guangzhou Fight Men, Shanghai Band of Brothers, Tianjin Seals--and storm remote lots or abandoned warehouses, shooting at each other with pellets, to stage what they call "war games." The term belies the seriousness participants assign the activity: The more established clubs have dedicated battlegrounds whose surrounding trees are nailed with DANGER signs.
In gun-happy America, this hobby might not rise above the level of eccentricity; but, in China, where most weapons are illegal, it requires a special degree of passion. Beijing periodically cracks down, and clubs sometimes disappear overnight. In a round-up last year, Beijing cops seized 3,400 guns and knives used in war games. Still, the government can't seem to quash the urge among Chinese twentysomethings to unleash a few rounds. The headline on a recent Shanghai Weekly article explains the games' appeal in unusually apt Chinglish: URBAN BATTLE: A VERY MAN ACTIVITY.
The macho violence spurting forth through outlets like war games is a growing trend in Chinese society--and China's one-child policy, in effect since 1979, is partly responsible. The country's three decades of iron-fisted population planning coincided with a binge in sex-selective abortions (Chinese traditionally favor sons, who carry on the family line) and a rise, even as the country developed, in female infant mortality. After almost 30 years of the policy, China now has the largest gender imbalance in the world, with 37 million more men than women and almost 20 percent more newborn boys than girls nationwide.
By the time these newborns reach puberty, war games may seem like a quaint relic. In the 2020s, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zheng Zhenzhen, estimates in a People's Daily interview that 10 percent of Chinese men will be unable to find wives, which could have a huge impact on Chinese society. Historian David Courtwright suggests in Violent Land that sexually segregated societies in the United States--frontier towns flush with unmarried men, immigrant ghettos in early twentieth-century cities, mining camps--are behind our propensity toward violence. The immigrants and westward migrants who shaped early America, Courtwright says, were largely young single men, who are-- today as well as then--disproportionately responsible for drug abuse, looting, vandalism, and violent crime. A long-term study of Vietnam veterans in 1998 may explain exactly why: The subjects' testosterone levels, which are linked to aggression and violence, dropped when they married and increased when they divorced. Eternally single men, by extension, maintain high levels of testosterone--a recipe for violent civil unrest.
The one-child policy was instituted in an attempt to hamper the wild growth of the Chinese population. But, in the process of plugging one hole, the government may have left another open. The coming boom in restless young men promises to overhaul Chinese society in some potentially scary ways.
Lianyungang, a booming port city in a Jiangsu province economic belt, is ground zero for some of these changes. According to the China Family Planning Association, it's the city in China with the most extreme gender ratio for children under four--163 boys for every 100 girls. One sunny Saturday morning at verdant Cangwu Park, I count six boys and three girls bouncing on the inflatable castle. Near the ice-cream stand are a dozen sticky-faced kids, seven boys and five girls, feeding pigeons. The children running after kites adorned with Olympics mascots and China's Shenzhou VII spaceship: three and two. The drivers of the cheerful little tanks circling an electric track: three and one.
These numbers work fine on the playground, but, for China's many match- making services, they may prove troublesome. At the Good Luck Marriage Introduction Agency, in a town a few hours' drive west from Liangyungang, two whiteboards mounted on the wall advertise the age, height, and income of available singles. On the day I visit, founder Tao Hui, a fortysomething woman with a bouffant, is watching soap operas in her sweatpants. She hasn't felt the shortage yet, she says. On the whiteboards, a few dozen nameless men line up nicely to a few dozen nameless women. For now, many in the early wave of surplus men are marrying younger women.
"We'll see real problems in eight or ten years," Tao predicts. Her 17-year- old son, she assures me, has good prospects. But she already turns away a lot of single males from outlying villages with no money or education. "If they're ugly and can't find work, there's nothing I can do. No one wants them."
Preliminary returns from the first generation of population-controlled kids suggest how all those unwanted men might fill up their time. Over the past decade, as the boys hit adolescence, the country's youth crime rate more than doubled. In December, Chinese Society of Juvenile Delinquency Research Deputy Secretary General Liu Guiming told a Beijing seminar that today's teens were committing crimes "without specific motives, often without forethought."
The Chinese government--which, policy-making blunders aside, hardly wants a population of hopeless, volatile men under its rule--has been vainly trying to undo the damage. At a symposium on the policy last August, family-planning commission head Zhang Weiqing said the gender ratio harbors a "hidden threat to social stability." In February, officials publicly debated the timeline for phasing out stringent population planning targets, citing the gender ratio along with a rapidly aging population. "In the past, everyone thought we didn't have a problem," says Gu Baochang, a demographer at Renmin University in Beijing. "Now they're starting to pay attention."
In the meantime, the government is adopting a softer tone in its propaganda. The red characters painted on village walls throughout the countryside have evolved from the 1980s slogan :
YOU BEAT IT OUT! YOU CAN MAKE IT FALL OUT!
YOU CAN ABORT IT! BUT YOU CANNOT GIVE BIRTH TO IT!
Now they read: I
MPLEMENT FAMILY PLANNING FOR THE GOOD OF ALL CITIZENS.
And, recently, the government added BOYS AND GIRLS ARE BOTH TREASURES.
In 2003, it unveiled the Care For Girls program, which gives stipends to parents of girls in some provinces.
But, as Chinese couples make more money, fertility is naturally declining-- meaning that today's bachelors will form an even larger proportion of China's future population than officials expect. Wang Feng, a sociologist at the University of California-Irvine who's part of a group of scholars advocating phasing out the one-child policy, says the outlook is grim: "Each successive birth cohort is going to be smaller. When younger cohorts get smaller, you have fewer females. It's a double whammy."
Online, many Chinese are worried--about the safety of their daughters, the marriage prospects of their sons. Others--presumably the boys themselves--meet the problem with ominous boasts. As one predicted last year on the portal Tianya: "Our national ability to pick up chicks will reach heights unparalleled in human history."
And still others are coming up with more practical outlets to exploit China's new cadre of unstable young bachelors. Two years ago in Nanjing, Jiangsu's capital, businessman Wu Gang opened the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in a cheap hotel near the bank of the Yangtze River. The bar featured staples of Chinese entertainment like big-screen karaoke and plates of sunflower seeds but also a central catwalk where, for 100 yuan ($15) per minute, customers paid to assault the waiters, single young migrants from poorer cities to the north. If a customer preferred, his victim would dress in drag.
Men "are under too much pressure," Wu explained to me one day, as the waiters high-kicked Pepsi bottles in the storeroom. "They need a way to release it."
Mara Hvistendahl is a writer based in Shanghai.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Book Excerpt: A Case of Courage - Truman and the birth of Israel.
Exclusive Book Excerpt: Truman and the birth of Israel, by Michael Beschloss
Newsweek, May 14, 2007 issue
As the Wednesday afternoon sun slanted through the tall windows of the Oval Office, Gen. George Marshall, Harry Truman's secretary of State and the architect of victory in World War II, took a chair beside the president's. Sitting in front of the president's desk, befitting his more junior position, was Truman's White House counsel, Clark Clifford.
On Friday, May 14, 1948, at midnight, two days from now, the British would withdraw from Palestine. The United Nations had resolved to divide the region into one Jewish state and one Arab state, with ancient, holy Jerusalem as an international city. Despite the U.N. plan, five Arab armies were ready to kill the fledgling Jewish state.
Clifford implored Truman to recognize the new nation as soon as it was declared. If the U.S. granted legitimacy, so would its allies, allowing the Jewish state to survive. But Marshall advised Truman to keep his distance, warning that the Jews could never stave off Arab legions who far outnumbered them. If they came "running to us for help," the U.S. would have to say no.
In what Clifford called "a righteous Goddamned Baptist tone," Marshall said, "If you follow Clifford's advice ... I would vote against you." Shaken to be condemned by the national hero he called "the great one of the age," Truman later warned Clifford, "I can't afford to lose General Marshall!"
Truman's ultimate decision about a Jewish state, one of the most significant foreign-policy decisions in U.S. history, emerged from a storm of cross-pressures and motives. He was besieged by Zionists, anti-Zionists, Democratic politicians eager to court the Jewish vote in an election year and diplomats afraid to rile the Arabs. He felt compassion for the Holocaust survivors still in European camps and reverence for Biblical history. But he feared as well that the new state might require defense by U.S. troops and dreaded that respected leaders like Marshall would accuse him of warping American diplomacy to his own cheap political needs.
Truman also had to rise above his own lingering small-town parlor anti-Semitism. Even as president, he privately said malicious things about American Jews to his wife, his friends and his diary that were unworthy of the towering leader he had become.
In April 1945, as Harry Truman became president and Allied soldiers liberated the death camps of Europe, Americans were learning about the terrible reach of the Holocaust. For many American Jews, the Holocaust showed that they must never again depend on the kindness of strangers: only a Jewish state could protect their people from another Hitler. They feared that the small-town Missouri Baptist in the White House could not possibly understand their predicament. They did not know that Truman had grown up knowing Jews or that he had studied their history since boyhood.
For two years in Independence, a Jewish family called the Viners lived next door to Truman's family. As Sarah Viner much later recalled, her brother Abe was "very close friends" with the future president: "Harry was always over at our house ... I think this was his first contact with Jewish people." On the Sabbath, when observant Jews could not do household chores, Harry served as the Viners' "Shabbos goy."
While a 16-year-old student at Independence High School, young Truman was assigned to write about Shylock, Shakespeare's Jewish villain in "The Merchant of Venice," in an essay discovered in 2000. Given vast potential for indulging in anti-Semitism when writing of Shylock, Truman viewed the Jewish people with unexpected sympathy: "We cannot blame Shylock for getting money as a means for revenge upon those who persecuted him. He was not a miser, and if one of his own nation had been in trouble, he would have helped him as quickly as a Christian would help a Christian ... I never saw Jew, Christian or any other man who, if he had the chance, wouldn't take revenge."
Truman went on to insist that no one "except the Hebrews" had "ruled" the world, then "when they fell," remained "a distinct people." He wrote that after 2,000 years, the Jews were "a nation apart from nations ... persecuted for their religion," still "waiting for a leader" to gather their "scattered people."
In the wake of the holocaust, many American Jewish leaders blamed themselves for not having demanded that their government do more to stop it. Believing now that the survival of the European detainees and their entire people was at stake, they cast off the polite deference that leaders now derided as "court Jews" had once used around Franklin Roosevelt. In July 1946, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver pounded on Truman's desk and bellowed at him about an Anglo-American committee report that let Holocaust survivors into Palestine, but not with U.S. military support to protect them.
That same month, the two Democratic senators from New York and a pro-Zionist ex-diplomat, James McDonald, came to complain about the report. His back up, Truman told them he thought it was "marvelous." McDonald warned the president he was "scrapping" the Jewish cause in Palestine and would "go down in history as anathema."
Truman erupted: "You cannot satisfy the Jews anyway ... They are not interested in the United States. They are interested in Palestine and the Jews ... The Jews aren't going to write the history of the United States or my history!" Tactlessly, McDonald noted that FDR had understood the "imponderables" of the issue. "I am not Roosevelt!" cried Truman. "I am not from New York. I am from the Middle West. I must do what I think is right."
Truman had always been hypersensitive to any efforts to bulldoze him and he was determined to show that it couldn't be done. With an eternal chip on his shoulder against the arrogant and powerful, Truman thus bridled at the intense, well-financed Zionist apparatus. He complained to Eleanor Roosevelt that "Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top, they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath." He banned Zionist leaders from the Oval Office. In a passage of his diary discovered in 2003, Truman wrote, "The Jews have no sense of proportion, nor do they have any judgment on world affairs ... The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish."
Truman consulted his wife, Bess, almost every night about the issues he was dealing with. She was unlikely to have urged him to support a Jewish homeland. After Truman left office, the talk-show host David Susskind spent some time in Independence to interview the ex-president for a TV series. Susskind asked Truman why he never asked him inside his home. By Susskind's account, Truman replied, "You're a Jew, David, and no Jew has ever been in the house. Bess runs it, and there's never been a Jew inside the house in her or her mother's lifetime." (As late as 1957, long after his cardinal role in creating a Jewish homeland, Truman would still write to Bess that New York City was "the U.S. capital of Israel.")
Anxious about their exclusion, Jewish leaders searched for some new way to reach the president. A Kansas City attorney named A. J. Granoff got a call from a national official of the Jewish fraternal organization B'nai B'rith: "Do you know a man by the name of Jacobstein ... who is supposed to be a very close friend of President Truman?" "You mean Eddie Jacobson," said Granoff. "Sure, I ought to! I'm his friend and lawyer."
In 1917, the genial, quiet Private Jacobson clerked in an Army canteen at Camp Doniphan, Oklahoma, under Lieutenant Harry Truman. Truman wrote his girlfriend, Bess Wallace, back in Independence, that he had a "Jew clerk" running his canteen and that Jacobson was "a crackerjack." After fighting the Germans in France, the two friends opened a men's store in Kansas City, with Harry as salesman-bookkeeper, Eddie as buyer and many old Battery D pals as customers. Then came the postwar depression. "I lost all I had and all I could borrow," said Truman. "Our creditors drove Eddie into bankruptcy, but I became a public official, and they couldn't do that to me."
The friendship survived. during senator Truman's visits to Kansas City, the ex-partners drank bourbon, played poker, told off-color stories and joked about "losing our asses in that store." But the friendship did not include their wives and families. Jacobson's wife, Bluma, recalled that Bess Truman's Wallace relatives were "aristocracy in those parts" and that "the Trumans couldn't afford to have Jews at their house."
In the summer of 1947, Jacobson sat down at Kansas City's Hotel Muehlebach with Granoff and Frank Goldman, the national president of B'nai B'rith. He told them he would never ask Truman for a personal favor, but would "always be glad" to discuss with him "my suffering people across the seas." He had endless faith in Harry's "kindly heart." Granoff said the problem was getting more Jewish refugees into Palestine. Eddie said, "Harry Truman will do what's right if he knows all the facts ... But I'm no Zionist, so first I need the facts from you."
Arriving in Washington, Eddie called the president's appointments secretary, Matt Connelly, who gibed, "What the hell are you doing here without his permission?" When Jacobson and Granoff were ushered into the Oval Office, Truman said, "Sit down, you bastards!"
As Eddie recalled, after Truman signed dollar bills for their children and asked about business in Kansas City, he and the president talked "takhles" a Yiddish term that means "with serious purpose."
Making their case for a Jewish homeland, Granoff and Jacobson insisted they would never ask Truman to act against America's best interests. "You guys wouldn't get to the front gate if I thought any differently," said Truman. "You bastards are the only ones that never tried to embarrass me in any way."
Before retiring at night, Truman donned a green eyeshade and put his hawklike nose in a history book. He had "tried to increase my knowledge all my life by reading and reading and reading" especially biography and history, insisting, "There's nothing new in human nature ... The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." As a nearsighted boy in Independence, Harry devoured a gold-trimmed, four-volume history called "Great Men and Famous Women from Nebuchadnezzar to Sarah Bernhardt." From the tales he read, he always remembered Cyrus the Great, the Persian king of the sixth century B.C., who enabled the Jewish people to leave their exile and go back to Palestine.
In October 1947, Jacobson implored the president to back a U.N. committee's proposal for Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. He wrote, "Harry, my people need help and I am appealing on you to help them." Loy Henderson, assistant secretary of State, warned that if the U.S. had anything to do with founding a Jewish state, it would jeopardize oil supplies in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and the "whole Arab world" would become the "enemy" of the United States.
The president endorsed Palestine's partition, but warned that the U.S. would not give money to a Jewish state, and that it lacked deployable forces to defend it from the Arab armies. Furious that Truman had overruled him, Henderson tried to whittle down the territory allotted for the Jews. He argued that the town of Jaffa was "essentially Arab" and that Arab herdsmen required the Negev desert for "seasonal grazing." But after making it into the Oval Office, Chaim Weizmann, chief of the World Zionist Organization, unfolded maps and persuaded Truman that losing the Negev would undermine a Jewish state by blocking vital access to the Red Sea.
In late November 1947, at the U.N.'s temporary quarters in a converted skating rink at Flushing Meadows, Queens, Palestine's partition came up for a vote by the General Assembly. Arguing that U.S. prestige would suffer if allies like the Philippines and Haiti were seen voting against it, Clark Clifford persuaded Truman to let his aides lobby for partition. As Clifford recalled, "I kept the ramrod up the State Department's butt."
In January 1948, Truman's secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, told him that enforcing partition might require as many as 160,000 American ground troops. Loy Henderson proposed that since partition could not be imposed without a military commitment that Truman would not make, the U.N. should govern Palestine as a trustee when Britain withdrew in May.
Horrified that Truman seemed to be wavering on a Jewish state, Chaim Weizmann rushed to New York, hoping to see the president. But Truman told his aides he had seen enough Zionists: "The Jews are so emotional, and the Arabs are so difficult to talk with that it is almost impossible to get anything done." B'nai B'rith's Frank Goldman called Eddie Jacobson in Kansas City. The president was "washing his hands" of Palestine: "You must help us, Eddie."
Jacobson wired Truman, "I have asked very little in the way of favors during all our years of friendship, but I am begging you to see Dr. Weizmann as soon as possible." Tired of what he called Zionist "badgering," the president wired Eddie that the Palestine problem was probably "not solvable." Refusing to give up, Jacobson flew to Washington in hopes of changing his mind, and when Matt Connelly let Jacobson into the Oval Office, Connelly warned him not to mention Palestine. Truman told his friend, "Eddie, I know what you are here for, and the answer is no."
Surprised at his own "nerve," Jacobson asked the president to reconsider, which touched off an explosion. Truman bellowed that the "Eastern Jews" had "slandered and libeled" him since the moment he became president. He didn't want to discuss "Palestine or the Jews or the Arabs or the British." Let the United Nations handle it. Tears rolled down Eddie's face. He felt "shocked" and "crushed" that his "dear friend" was "as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be."
Jacobson's eye caught a replica of the courthouse statue in Jackson County, Missouri, that Truman had worked so hard to build. Improvising, he said, "Harry, all your life, you have had a hero. You are probably the best-read man in America on the life of Andrew Jackson." He recalled Truman sitting in a corner of their failed store, "reading books and papers and pamphlets" on Old Hickory. "Well, Harry, I too have a hero a man I never met, but who is, I think, the greatest Jew who ever lived ... Chaim Weizmann.
He is a very sick man ... but he traveled thousands of miles just to see you ... Now you refuse to see him just because you are insulted by some of our American Jewish leaders even though you know that Weizmann had absolutely nothing to do with these insults ... It doesn't sound like you, Harry ... I thought you could take this stuff they have been handing out."
Deep in thought, Truman drummed his desktop, then swiveled in his chair to gaze at the South Grounds, turning green with spring. For what seemed "like centuries," Eddie held his breath. Then the president spun back around and uttered the most "endearing" words Jacobson had ever heard him speak: "You win, you bald-headed son-of-a-bitch! I will see him."
On Thursday, March 18, after dark, Chaim Weizmann was slipped into the Oval Office. The president could never pronounce Weizmann's first name, so he called him "Cham." Truman pledged to "press forward with partition." Worried about leaks, he did not even tell his secretary of State about Weizmann's visit.
The next day, Truman's U.N. ambassador, Warren Austin, seemed to reverse U.S. policy when he told the Security Council that since peaceful partition into Jewish and Arab states seemed impossible, the United States now believed that the U.N. should rule Palestine as the world's trustee. Informed that Austin had just trampled the president's private promise to Weizmann, Eddie Jacobson couldn't believe it: "I was as dazed as a man could be." Feeling "physically sick," he collapsed into bed for two days.
Unfolding his Saturday morning newspapers, Truman was incensed to read about his administration's "badly bungled" somersault on partition. "This morning I find that the State Dept. has reversed my Palestine policy," Truman told his diary. "The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn't that hell? I'm now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I've never felt so in my life." Truman inveighed against the "people on the 3rd and 4th levels of the State Dept. who have always wanted to cut my throat." The president called in Clark Clifford: "How could this have happened? I assured Chaim Weizmann I would stick to it. He must think I am a s--t-ass ... My God, how can I ever face Weizmann again?"
Recovering in kansas City from what he called "Black Friday," Eddie Jacobson took a call from Chaim Weizmann, who told him not to "feel badly." Privately, Weizmann had been reassured that the president hadn't known of Ambassador Austin's speech in advance and that his commitment to partition still stood. Weizmann told Eddie he was now "the most important single man in the world. You have a job to do, so keep the White House doors open." Jacobson felt "encouraged" to "go on with the work which Fate put on my shoulders."
In April 1948, he eluded reporters by entering the White House through the East Gate, "something I had never done before." Briefed in advance by Weizmann, he informed Truman that a Jewish state would be declared as soon as the British left Palestine. It was "vital" for the U.S. to recognize it. As Eddie recalled, Truman "agreed with a whole heart," saying that "Henderson or a thousand Hendersons won't stop me." But he asked his friend not to mention this private pledge to anyone else.
By then, Truman had decided that the "striped-pants boys" at the State Department who put Jews "in the same category as Chinamen and Negroes" were trying to "put it over on me about Palestine." He wrote his brother he would now "do what I think is right and let them all go to hell."
On Friday, May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv, the Jews were poised to declare their new nation at 6:00 p.m., Washington time. Truman and Clifford expected the new state to be called "Judea."
At 4 o'clock, Marshall's deputy, Robert Lovett, informed Clifford that the secretary of State would not publicly oppose recognition. Marshall had decided that he should not quit "when the man who has the Constitutional authority to make a decision makes one." Clifford told Lovett, "God, that's good news!"
In a heavily guarded art museum in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion declared that after 20 centuries of wandering, there was now "a Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel." At 6:11 p.m. in the White House, Truman signed a document recognizing the Jewish state's "de facto authority," and scrawled the word "Approved." Thinking of Weizmann, he said, "The old doctor will believe me now!" Marshall kept his promised public silence about Truman's decision, but he never spoke to Clark Clifford again.
Chosen as first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann invited Jacobson to New York, where the good doctor asked him to be "temporary spokesman for the baby state." Eddie wrote, "What a thrill that was! The Lord is sure good to me when He gives me these honors." Eddie flew to New York. When his airport limousine approached the Waldorf, he saw a huge crowd staring up at the new blue and white Star of David flag, flying "beside the stars and stripes of my own country." He wrote, "That was the payoff!" As Jacobson later recalled, "I stood on the sidewalk like a fool, and cried and cried and cried."
In late May, President Weizmann came to Washington, feeling like a "happy man" with a "light heart." Crowds sang the Israeli anthem "Hatikvah." In the White House Rose Garden, Weizmann gave the president a Torah. "Thanks," said Truman. "I've always wanted one of these!"
The presidential campaign of September 1948 found Truman running well behind Thomas Dewey, with Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond siphoning normally Democratic votes from the left and the right. Clifford had expected that if the president recognized Israel, Jewish donors would pony up for his campaign. But Truman had warned him that by fall, the Jews would say "we've done nothing for them recently." They would be "off and on" him "sixteen times by then."
When Truman won his surprise election victory in November 1948, he lost New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan, all abundant with Jewish voters. Much of the blame went to Wallace, who complained that Truman wasn't sufficiently pro-Israel.
After his victory, Truman wrote Chaim Weizmann that his "elation" on being reelected must resemble Weizmann's when the Jews had proclaimed their state. The man who had once castigated what he called Jewish "underdogs" for being "intolerant" and "cruel" now told Weizmann that he and Israel were clearly both underdogs: "We had both been abandoned by the so-called realistic experts on our supposedly forlorn lost causes. Yet we both kept pressing for what we were sure was right—and we were both proven to be right."
In the end, Truman recognized Israel for many different reasons. The Jews' display of military strength in Palestine had convinced him that U.S. troops would not be needed to defend them. He feared that letting the Russians recognize Israel first would give them a foothold in Palestine. Truman was also motivated by sheer politics. With a tough campaign ahead, he felt that if he did not recognize Israel, the backers of a Jewish state would make his life a living hell. For the hard-bitten Marshall, who operated from cold facts on the ground, Israel was chiefly a potential burden for an overstretched U.S. military. But Truman realized helping to found a Jewish state was a historic act that might qualify him for some future edition of "Great Men and Famous Women."
His favorite psalm had always been, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." By recognizing Israel, Truman knew he would be forever damned by people who did not want the Jews to have their own state or who did not want it in Palestine. But as Truman always told himself, the ultimate test of any presidential decision was "not whether it's popular at the time, but whether it's right ... If it's right, make it, and let the popular part take care of itself."
In 1949, wearing a lucky hat inscribed by Truman, Eddie Jacobson made a pilgrimage to Israel, where he was feted by President Weizmann and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. A Kansas City rabbi told reporters that Jacobson should be president of Israel. Truman wrote his old friend that Israel "couldn't nominate a better man, but I sincerely hope you won't take it." Jacobson explained that it was just "a silly dream of a very emotional rabbi." He was "too proud of my American citizenship to trade it for any office in the world."
When Truman retired in 1953, Eddie wanted to be escort for the ex-president's first visit to the nation whose birth they had both midwived: "I sincerely hope my dream comes true." But in 1955, Eddie died of a massive heart attack. As a daughter remembered, when Truman called on the mourning family, he "put his head in his hands and started to sob," exclaiming, "I've lost my brother!"
In 1965, an Eddie Jacobson Auditorium was built in Tel Aviv. Truman hoped "at long last" to "make my journey" to Israel, but a bruising fall in the shower had made him old almost overnight. Instead he wrote a tribute to "my great and irreplaceable friend," saying that Eddie's name "should be forever enshrined in the history of the Jewish people." Interviewed by an Israeli reporter in Independence, Truman said, "Now remind me, how did Eddie use to say 'congratulations' in Hebrew Mazel something? ... Yeah, tov. Mazel tov!"
Truman once said that "a weeping man is an abomination." But with his reverence for the Bible and ancient history, Truman was profoundly moved to know he had helped regather the Jews in the Holy Land. Told that an Israeli village had been renamed "Kfar Truman," the stricken president had to cover his face with a handkerchief.
Soon the president was proudly comparing himself to the ancient Persian king who had enabled the Jews to return to Zion. During a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York just after Truman left office, Eddie Jacobson introduced his old friend by saying, "This is the man who helped to create the state of Israel." The ex-president brought Eddie up short: "What do you mean 'helped create'? I am Cyrus! I am Cyrus!"
Newsweek, May 14, 2007 issue
As the Wednesday afternoon sun slanted through the tall windows of the Oval Office, Gen. George Marshall, Harry Truman's secretary of State and the architect of victory in World War II, took a chair beside the president's. Sitting in front of the president's desk, befitting his more junior position, was Truman's White House counsel, Clark Clifford.
On Friday, May 14, 1948, at midnight, two days from now, the British would withdraw from Palestine. The United Nations had resolved to divide the region into one Jewish state and one Arab state, with ancient, holy Jerusalem as an international city. Despite the U.N. plan, five Arab armies were ready to kill the fledgling Jewish state.
Clifford implored Truman to recognize the new nation as soon as it was declared. If the U.S. granted legitimacy, so would its allies, allowing the Jewish state to survive. But Marshall advised Truman to keep his distance, warning that the Jews could never stave off Arab legions who far outnumbered them. If they came "running to us for help," the U.S. would have to say no.
In what Clifford called "a righteous Goddamned Baptist tone," Marshall said, "If you follow Clifford's advice ... I would vote against you." Shaken to be condemned by the national hero he called "the great one of the age," Truman later warned Clifford, "I can't afford to lose General Marshall!"
Truman's ultimate decision about a Jewish state, one of the most significant foreign-policy decisions in U.S. history, emerged from a storm of cross-pressures and motives. He was besieged by Zionists, anti-Zionists, Democratic politicians eager to court the Jewish vote in an election year and diplomats afraid to rile the Arabs. He felt compassion for the Holocaust survivors still in European camps and reverence for Biblical history. But he feared as well that the new state might require defense by U.S. troops and dreaded that respected leaders like Marshall would accuse him of warping American diplomacy to his own cheap political needs.
Truman also had to rise above his own lingering small-town parlor anti-Semitism. Even as president, he privately said malicious things about American Jews to his wife, his friends and his diary that were unworthy of the towering leader he had become.
In April 1945, as Harry Truman became president and Allied soldiers liberated the death camps of Europe, Americans were learning about the terrible reach of the Holocaust. For many American Jews, the Holocaust showed that they must never again depend on the kindness of strangers: only a Jewish state could protect their people from another Hitler. They feared that the small-town Missouri Baptist in the White House could not possibly understand their predicament. They did not know that Truman had grown up knowing Jews or that he had studied their history since boyhood.
For two years in Independence, a Jewish family called the Viners lived next door to Truman's family. As Sarah Viner much later recalled, her brother Abe was "very close friends" with the future president: "Harry was always over at our house ... I think this was his first contact with Jewish people." On the Sabbath, when observant Jews could not do household chores, Harry served as the Viners' "Shabbos goy."
While a 16-year-old student at Independence High School, young Truman was assigned to write about Shylock, Shakespeare's Jewish villain in "The Merchant of Venice," in an essay discovered in 2000. Given vast potential for indulging in anti-Semitism when writing of Shylock, Truman viewed the Jewish people with unexpected sympathy: "We cannot blame Shylock for getting money as a means for revenge upon those who persecuted him. He was not a miser, and if one of his own nation had been in trouble, he would have helped him as quickly as a Christian would help a Christian ... I never saw Jew, Christian or any other man who, if he had the chance, wouldn't take revenge."
Truman went on to insist that no one "except the Hebrews" had "ruled" the world, then "when they fell," remained "a distinct people." He wrote that after 2,000 years, the Jews were "a nation apart from nations ... persecuted for their religion," still "waiting for a leader" to gather their "scattered people."
In the wake of the holocaust, many American Jewish leaders blamed themselves for not having demanded that their government do more to stop it. Believing now that the survival of the European detainees and their entire people was at stake, they cast off the polite deference that leaders now derided as "court Jews" had once used around Franklin Roosevelt. In July 1946, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver pounded on Truman's desk and bellowed at him about an Anglo-American committee report that let Holocaust survivors into Palestine, but not with U.S. military support to protect them.
That same month, the two Democratic senators from New York and a pro-Zionist ex-diplomat, James McDonald, came to complain about the report. His back up, Truman told them he thought it was "marvelous." McDonald warned the president he was "scrapping" the Jewish cause in Palestine and would "go down in history as anathema."
Truman erupted: "You cannot satisfy the Jews anyway ... They are not interested in the United States. They are interested in Palestine and the Jews ... The Jews aren't going to write the history of the United States or my history!" Tactlessly, McDonald noted that FDR had understood the "imponderables" of the issue. "I am not Roosevelt!" cried Truman. "I am not from New York. I am from the Middle West. I must do what I think is right."
Truman had always been hypersensitive to any efforts to bulldoze him and he was determined to show that it couldn't be done. With an eternal chip on his shoulder against the arrogant and powerful, Truman thus bridled at the intense, well-financed Zionist apparatus. He complained to Eleanor Roosevelt that "Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top, they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath." He banned Zionist leaders from the Oval Office. In a passage of his diary discovered in 2003, Truman wrote, "The Jews have no sense of proportion, nor do they have any judgment on world affairs ... The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish."
Truman consulted his wife, Bess, almost every night about the issues he was dealing with. She was unlikely to have urged him to support a Jewish homeland. After Truman left office, the talk-show host David Susskind spent some time in Independence to interview the ex-president for a TV series. Susskind asked Truman why he never asked him inside his home. By Susskind's account, Truman replied, "You're a Jew, David, and no Jew has ever been in the house. Bess runs it, and there's never been a Jew inside the house in her or her mother's lifetime." (As late as 1957, long after his cardinal role in creating a Jewish homeland, Truman would still write to Bess that New York City was "the U.S. capital of Israel.")
Anxious about their exclusion, Jewish leaders searched for some new way to reach the president. A Kansas City attorney named A. J. Granoff got a call from a national official of the Jewish fraternal organization B'nai B'rith: "Do you know a man by the name of Jacobstein ... who is supposed to be a very close friend of President Truman?" "You mean Eddie Jacobson," said Granoff. "Sure, I ought to! I'm his friend and lawyer."
In 1917, the genial, quiet Private Jacobson clerked in an Army canteen at Camp Doniphan, Oklahoma, under Lieutenant Harry Truman. Truman wrote his girlfriend, Bess Wallace, back in Independence, that he had a "Jew clerk" running his canteen and that Jacobson was "a crackerjack." After fighting the Germans in France, the two friends opened a men's store in Kansas City, with Harry as salesman-bookkeeper, Eddie as buyer and many old Battery D pals as customers. Then came the postwar depression. "I lost all I had and all I could borrow," said Truman. "Our creditors drove Eddie into bankruptcy, but I became a public official, and they couldn't do that to me."
The friendship survived. during senator Truman's visits to Kansas City, the ex-partners drank bourbon, played poker, told off-color stories and joked about "losing our asses in that store." But the friendship did not include their wives and families. Jacobson's wife, Bluma, recalled that Bess Truman's Wallace relatives were "aristocracy in those parts" and that "the Trumans couldn't afford to have Jews at their house."
In the summer of 1947, Jacobson sat down at Kansas City's Hotel Muehlebach with Granoff and Frank Goldman, the national president of B'nai B'rith. He told them he would never ask Truman for a personal favor, but would "always be glad" to discuss with him "my suffering people across the seas." He had endless faith in Harry's "kindly heart." Granoff said the problem was getting more Jewish refugees into Palestine. Eddie said, "Harry Truman will do what's right if he knows all the facts ... But I'm no Zionist, so first I need the facts from you."
Arriving in Washington, Eddie called the president's appointments secretary, Matt Connelly, who gibed, "What the hell are you doing here without his permission?" When Jacobson and Granoff were ushered into the Oval Office, Truman said, "Sit down, you bastards!"
As Eddie recalled, after Truman signed dollar bills for their children and asked about business in Kansas City, he and the president talked "takhles" a Yiddish term that means "with serious purpose."
Making their case for a Jewish homeland, Granoff and Jacobson insisted they would never ask Truman to act against America's best interests. "You guys wouldn't get to the front gate if I thought any differently," said Truman. "You bastards are the only ones that never tried to embarrass me in any way."
Before retiring at night, Truman donned a green eyeshade and put his hawklike nose in a history book. He had "tried to increase my knowledge all my life by reading and reading and reading" especially biography and history, insisting, "There's nothing new in human nature ... The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." As a nearsighted boy in Independence, Harry devoured a gold-trimmed, four-volume history called "Great Men and Famous Women from Nebuchadnezzar to Sarah Bernhardt." From the tales he read, he always remembered Cyrus the Great, the Persian king of the sixth century B.C., who enabled the Jewish people to leave their exile and go back to Palestine.
In October 1947, Jacobson implored the president to back a U.N. committee's proposal for Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. He wrote, "Harry, my people need help and I am appealing on you to help them." Loy Henderson, assistant secretary of State, warned that if the U.S. had anything to do with founding a Jewish state, it would jeopardize oil supplies in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and the "whole Arab world" would become the "enemy" of the United States.
The president endorsed Palestine's partition, but warned that the U.S. would not give money to a Jewish state, and that it lacked deployable forces to defend it from the Arab armies. Furious that Truman had overruled him, Henderson tried to whittle down the territory allotted for the Jews. He argued that the town of Jaffa was "essentially Arab" and that Arab herdsmen required the Negev desert for "seasonal grazing." But after making it into the Oval Office, Chaim Weizmann, chief of the World Zionist Organization, unfolded maps and persuaded Truman that losing the Negev would undermine a Jewish state by blocking vital access to the Red Sea.
In late November 1947, at the U.N.'s temporary quarters in a converted skating rink at Flushing Meadows, Queens, Palestine's partition came up for a vote by the General Assembly. Arguing that U.S. prestige would suffer if allies like the Philippines and Haiti were seen voting against it, Clark Clifford persuaded Truman to let his aides lobby for partition. As Clifford recalled, "I kept the ramrod up the State Department's butt."
In January 1948, Truman's secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, told him that enforcing partition might require as many as 160,000 American ground troops. Loy Henderson proposed that since partition could not be imposed without a military commitment that Truman would not make, the U.N. should govern Palestine as a trustee when Britain withdrew in May.
Horrified that Truman seemed to be wavering on a Jewish state, Chaim Weizmann rushed to New York, hoping to see the president. But Truman told his aides he had seen enough Zionists: "The Jews are so emotional, and the Arabs are so difficult to talk with that it is almost impossible to get anything done." B'nai B'rith's Frank Goldman called Eddie Jacobson in Kansas City. The president was "washing his hands" of Palestine: "You must help us, Eddie."
Jacobson wired Truman, "I have asked very little in the way of favors during all our years of friendship, but I am begging you to see Dr. Weizmann as soon as possible." Tired of what he called Zionist "badgering," the president wired Eddie that the Palestine problem was probably "not solvable." Refusing to give up, Jacobson flew to Washington in hopes of changing his mind, and when Matt Connelly let Jacobson into the Oval Office, Connelly warned him not to mention Palestine. Truman told his friend, "Eddie, I know what you are here for, and the answer is no."
Surprised at his own "nerve," Jacobson asked the president to reconsider, which touched off an explosion. Truman bellowed that the "Eastern Jews" had "slandered and libeled" him since the moment he became president. He didn't want to discuss "Palestine or the Jews or the Arabs or the British." Let the United Nations handle it. Tears rolled down Eddie's face. He felt "shocked" and "crushed" that his "dear friend" was "as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be."
Jacobson's eye caught a replica of the courthouse statue in Jackson County, Missouri, that Truman had worked so hard to build. Improvising, he said, "Harry, all your life, you have had a hero. You are probably the best-read man in America on the life of Andrew Jackson." He recalled Truman sitting in a corner of their failed store, "reading books and papers and pamphlets" on Old Hickory. "Well, Harry, I too have a hero a man I never met, but who is, I think, the greatest Jew who ever lived ... Chaim Weizmann.
He is a very sick man ... but he traveled thousands of miles just to see you ... Now you refuse to see him just because you are insulted by some of our American Jewish leaders even though you know that Weizmann had absolutely nothing to do with these insults ... It doesn't sound like you, Harry ... I thought you could take this stuff they have been handing out."
Deep in thought, Truman drummed his desktop, then swiveled in his chair to gaze at the South Grounds, turning green with spring. For what seemed "like centuries," Eddie held his breath. Then the president spun back around and uttered the most "endearing" words Jacobson had ever heard him speak: "You win, you bald-headed son-of-a-bitch! I will see him."
On Thursday, March 18, after dark, Chaim Weizmann was slipped into the Oval Office. The president could never pronounce Weizmann's first name, so he called him "Cham." Truman pledged to "press forward with partition." Worried about leaks, he did not even tell his secretary of State about Weizmann's visit.
The next day, Truman's U.N. ambassador, Warren Austin, seemed to reverse U.S. policy when he told the Security Council that since peaceful partition into Jewish and Arab states seemed impossible, the United States now believed that the U.N. should rule Palestine as the world's trustee. Informed that Austin had just trampled the president's private promise to Weizmann, Eddie Jacobson couldn't believe it: "I was as dazed as a man could be." Feeling "physically sick," he collapsed into bed for two days.
Unfolding his Saturday morning newspapers, Truman was incensed to read about his administration's "badly bungled" somersault on partition. "This morning I find that the State Dept. has reversed my Palestine policy," Truman told his diary. "The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn't that hell? I'm now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I've never felt so in my life." Truman inveighed against the "people on the 3rd and 4th levels of the State Dept. who have always wanted to cut my throat." The president called in Clark Clifford: "How could this have happened? I assured Chaim Weizmann I would stick to it. He must think I am a s--t-ass ... My God, how can I ever face Weizmann again?"
Recovering in kansas City from what he called "Black Friday," Eddie Jacobson took a call from Chaim Weizmann, who told him not to "feel badly." Privately, Weizmann had been reassured that the president hadn't known of Ambassador Austin's speech in advance and that his commitment to partition still stood. Weizmann told Eddie he was now "the most important single man in the world. You have a job to do, so keep the White House doors open." Jacobson felt "encouraged" to "go on with the work which Fate put on my shoulders."
In April 1948, he eluded reporters by entering the White House through the East Gate, "something I had never done before." Briefed in advance by Weizmann, he informed Truman that a Jewish state would be declared as soon as the British left Palestine. It was "vital" for the U.S. to recognize it. As Eddie recalled, Truman "agreed with a whole heart," saying that "Henderson or a thousand Hendersons won't stop me." But he asked his friend not to mention this private pledge to anyone else.
By then, Truman had decided that the "striped-pants boys" at the State Department who put Jews "in the same category as Chinamen and Negroes" were trying to "put it over on me about Palestine." He wrote his brother he would now "do what I think is right and let them all go to hell."
On Friday, May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv, the Jews were poised to declare their new nation at 6:00 p.m., Washington time. Truman and Clifford expected the new state to be called "Judea."
At 4 o'clock, Marshall's deputy, Robert Lovett, informed Clifford that the secretary of State would not publicly oppose recognition. Marshall had decided that he should not quit "when the man who has the Constitutional authority to make a decision makes one." Clifford told Lovett, "God, that's good news!"
In a heavily guarded art museum in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion declared that after 20 centuries of wandering, there was now "a Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel." At 6:11 p.m. in the White House, Truman signed a document recognizing the Jewish state's "de facto authority," and scrawled the word "Approved." Thinking of Weizmann, he said, "The old doctor will believe me now!" Marshall kept his promised public silence about Truman's decision, but he never spoke to Clark Clifford again.
Chosen as first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann invited Jacobson to New York, where the good doctor asked him to be "temporary spokesman for the baby state." Eddie wrote, "What a thrill that was! The Lord is sure good to me when He gives me these honors." Eddie flew to New York. When his airport limousine approached the Waldorf, he saw a huge crowd staring up at the new blue and white Star of David flag, flying "beside the stars and stripes of my own country." He wrote, "That was the payoff!" As Jacobson later recalled, "I stood on the sidewalk like a fool, and cried and cried and cried."
In late May, President Weizmann came to Washington, feeling like a "happy man" with a "light heart." Crowds sang the Israeli anthem "Hatikvah." In the White House Rose Garden, Weizmann gave the president a Torah. "Thanks," said Truman. "I've always wanted one of these!"
The presidential campaign of September 1948 found Truman running well behind Thomas Dewey, with Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond siphoning normally Democratic votes from the left and the right. Clifford had expected that if the president recognized Israel, Jewish donors would pony up for his campaign. But Truman had warned him that by fall, the Jews would say "we've done nothing for them recently." They would be "off and on" him "sixteen times by then."
When Truman won his surprise election victory in November 1948, he lost New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan, all abundant with Jewish voters. Much of the blame went to Wallace, who complained that Truman wasn't sufficiently pro-Israel.
After his victory, Truman wrote Chaim Weizmann that his "elation" on being reelected must resemble Weizmann's when the Jews had proclaimed their state. The man who had once castigated what he called Jewish "underdogs" for being "intolerant" and "cruel" now told Weizmann that he and Israel were clearly both underdogs: "We had both been abandoned by the so-called realistic experts on our supposedly forlorn lost causes. Yet we both kept pressing for what we were sure was right—and we were both proven to be right."
In the end, Truman recognized Israel for many different reasons. The Jews' display of military strength in Palestine had convinced him that U.S. troops would not be needed to defend them. He feared that letting the Russians recognize Israel first would give them a foothold in Palestine. Truman was also motivated by sheer politics. With a tough campaign ahead, he felt that if he did not recognize Israel, the backers of a Jewish state would make his life a living hell. For the hard-bitten Marshall, who operated from cold facts on the ground, Israel was chiefly a potential burden for an overstretched U.S. military. But Truman realized helping to found a Jewish state was a historic act that might qualify him for some future edition of "Great Men and Famous Women."
His favorite psalm had always been, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." By recognizing Israel, Truman knew he would be forever damned by people who did not want the Jews to have their own state or who did not want it in Palestine. But as Truman always told himself, the ultimate test of any presidential decision was "not whether it's popular at the time, but whether it's right ... If it's right, make it, and let the popular part take care of itself."
In 1949, wearing a lucky hat inscribed by Truman, Eddie Jacobson made a pilgrimage to Israel, where he was feted by President Weizmann and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. A Kansas City rabbi told reporters that Jacobson should be president of Israel. Truman wrote his old friend that Israel "couldn't nominate a better man, but I sincerely hope you won't take it." Jacobson explained that it was just "a silly dream of a very emotional rabbi." He was "too proud of my American citizenship to trade it for any office in the world."
When Truman retired in 1953, Eddie wanted to be escort for the ex-president's first visit to the nation whose birth they had both midwived: "I sincerely hope my dream comes true." But in 1955, Eddie died of a massive heart attack. As a daughter remembered, when Truman called on the mourning family, he "put his head in his hands and started to sob," exclaiming, "I've lost my brother!"
In 1965, an Eddie Jacobson Auditorium was built in Tel Aviv. Truman hoped "at long last" to "make my journey" to Israel, but a bruising fall in the shower had made him old almost overnight. Instead he wrote a tribute to "my great and irreplaceable friend," saying that Eddie's name "should be forever enshrined in the history of the Jewish people." Interviewed by an Israeli reporter in Independence, Truman said, "Now remind me, how did Eddie use to say 'congratulations' in Hebrew Mazel something? ... Yeah, tov. Mazel tov!"
Truman once said that "a weeping man is an abomination." But with his reverence for the Bible and ancient history, Truman was profoundly moved to know he had helped regather the Jews in the Holy Land. Told that an Israeli village had been renamed "Kfar Truman," the stricken president had to cover his face with a handkerchief.
Soon the president was proudly comparing himself to the ancient Persian king who had enabled the Jews to return to Zion. During a visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York just after Truman left office, Eddie Jacobson introduced his old friend by saying, "This is the man who helped to create the state of Israel." The ex-president brought Eddie up short: "What do you mean 'helped create'? I am Cyrus! I am Cyrus!"