“Elmasry, Kathrada and their allies in the Middle Rim of this small planet, from the borders of Pakistan to the African Atlantic, are all about psychological Hitlerism. They are the knights templar of the vessels of hate filled with the bile of prejudice, paranoia and parochialism reflecting the failures and frustrations of an outlaw culture seeking global hegemony. Defenders of a mentality that seeks to place blame on someone, anyone, no matter how unrelated to a grievance at hand, for its own shortcomings. They represent an illegitimate intellectual orthodoxy steeped in irrational doctrines of hate that justifies nothing more than the killings of Jews anywhere in the world for the satisfaction of medieval bloodlust and the imposition of theocratic tyranny.”
~ “Dangerous Inmates”
Okay, so let me see if I understand this. According to Mohammed Elmasry, National President of the Canadian Islamic Congress, all adults living in Israel are legitimate targets for suicide bombers because since Israel has a draft it is hard to tell who is a soldier out of uniform and who is a civilian. This from the leader of the so-called “moderate” stream of the Canadian Muslim community. This inmate has learned well from the doctors running the asylum of moral relativism and political equivalency.
Elmasry had the temerity to repeat his claim, first broadcast earlier in the week on BBC, in an interview with the Globe and Mail. While saying he was not making a value judgment as to whether suicide bombings of civilian targets was good or bad he did go on to justify his position by comparing the Palestinian assaults with other struggles in the past century by civilian populations against armed occupiers. Among the examples he cited were the Algerian civil war and the French resistance to the Nazis.
Poor Mohammed seemed to be trying to keep up with the attention focused on Vancouver’s Sheik Younus Kathrada, a Muslim cleric, who urged his followers to join the “frontlines” of Jihad to rid the “…Arabic world of monkeys and pigs…” The former is Islamist codespeak for Jews, the latter for Christians.
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But Elmasry is symptomatic of a disease more virulent and malignant than Kathrada. Islamist incitement has generally been recognized as a threat to every civilized social order. A threat that capitals from Washington to Moscow are seeking to repel. Elmasry however couches his views in a message and metaphor meant to appeal to that part of the academic and media elite that believes that their primary political obligation is opposition to American interests and the interests of any ally of the United States. And if that means portraying Israel as the new “Nazi beast” then they are more than happy to do so. It is an illegitimate intellectual orthodoxy steeped in irrational doctrines of hate that justifies nothing more than the killings of Jews anywhere in the world for the satisfaction of medieval bloodlust and the imposition of theocratic tyranny.
Far from being a racist aggressor like Nazi Germany or a classic colonial power like post-war France, Israel has been the only country to accept the 1948 UN Partition of Palestine that recognized an Arab state. It has contributed four times more money to UNRWA relief of Palestinian refugees than has Saudi Arabia. It occupied the West Bank and Gaza only following aggressive wars launched by frontline Arab states from those territories aided and abetted by all the organized Palestinian Arab authorities including Arafat’s PLO and Fatah. Israel has offered back all these lands from the week following the Six-Day War until this very day in return for nothing more than recognition of its existence. Some occupier.
If Elmasry and his fellow travelers had any integrity in their view that the murder of civilians is legitimate because they are citizens of an “occupying” power they would have to agree that the terror should be turned onto his Arab cousins.
The frontline states who invaded West Bank and Gaza within hours of the partition in 1948 and occupied for the next twenty years. The tinpot tyrants who refused to help their Palestinian brethren either through reconstruction or integration while Israel was absorbing 800,000 Jews thrown out of their homes in Arab lands. The Muslim dictators who, according to Emile Ghoury the last Christian President of the Arab League, encouraged Arabs within Israel to leave and become refugees during the War of Independence because, in the words of the Mufti of Jerusalem, “…we will drive the Jews into the sea within two weeks and all that is theirs will be yours…” The degraded political elites whose response to Israel’s offer of land for peace was the infamous Khartoum resolution of “No recognition. No negotiation. No peace.” The debased Palestinian Authority who not only rejected the return of 99% of the West Bank and Gaza at Camp David but were found to have siphoned off $40 billion of UNRWA relief funds to their own coffers in Switzerland under the personal signature of Yassir Arafat.
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But of course this is not about integrity. This is about fashioning a new cloak to hide the old hatreds. Elmasry, Kathrada and their allies in the Middle Rim of this small planet, from the borders of Pakistan to the African Atlantic, are all about psychological Hitlerism. They are the knights templar of the vessels of hate filled with the bile of prejudice, paranoia and parochialism reflecting the failures and frustrations of an outlaw culture seeking global hegemony. Defenders of a mentality that seeks to place blame on someone, anyone, no matter how unrelated to a grievance at hand, for its own shortcomings.
Today’s Islamist terror is not a modern version of colonial struggles nor even a novel manifestation of the great bloodsport of political assassination. This is not about the killing of particular people thought to be guilty of particular acts. This terror is random murder committed for the purpose of extinction. It is a radical transformation of the practice of political violence characterized by unknown victims innocent of any act.
The deep moral and political significance of this change has been consciously ignored by those who pander to the Arabs for their own political profit. And this will have grave consequences. This challenge, and the steel of our character necessary to meet it, will determine the quality of our future.
From the Russian Revolution through the struggles of the IRA to the Israeli fight for independence against the British there was always a line drawn between people who could and people who could not be killed. The political equivalent of the line between combatants and non-combatants. That line was crossed but by exception not by rule. As Trotsky once wrote “A revolution must have a code of honour. It cannot be loathed by the human race.”
That minor triumph for some notional values of civilization in the midst of revolt has been obliterated by the orgy of blood of today’s Islamists. From Moscow to Madrid, from New York to New Delhi, this obliteration is the critical feature of contemporary terrorism. Today’s terrorists have emptied the category of the innocent. They claim butchery as their right, slaughter as their legacy.
Assassination is often futile as a means and vile as an end. But we do judge assassins ,to some degree, by their victims. When the targets are Hitler-like agents of oppression and cruelty we may even praise the assassin’s work. It is at least conceivable, though difficult, to be a “ just assassin”. The assassin fights a limited war; he aims at known individuals and seeks specific political and social changes. “Just terrorism”, in today’s manifestation, is a contradiction in terms.
Islamic terror has only one unmistakable message regardless of public claims. Random murder. No compromise. This ultimate lawlessness is a key psychological ingredient in the armament of terror that accompanies, and helps assure, the success of the physical destructive act itself. It is a paralysis of the rational. Kill the body. Kill the spirit.
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Canadians must resolve to end their tolerance for the elaborate apologias on behalf of hatemongers like Elmasry and Kathrada. The undeniable can no longer be denied and the indefensible should no longer be defended. If we refuse to marshal this resolve we will lose our sense of historical past and fall into an ignorance that will erase institutional memory and moral distinctions. We will be left indicted by a current culture of frivolous complacency.
We need a collective sense of outrage. Canada can have no cause for smug self-satisfaction when incitement by the hateful traumatizes the peaceful. It is as much a blow to the spirit of our land as any physical assault.
Our government must lead. If it is serious about curbing incitement to hate, as it has recently proclaimed, then the Prime Minister should order a full RCMP investigation of Elmasry and Kathrada under Section 319 of the Criminal Code. It is time for Canada to get serious in response to militant Islam and launch a vigorous attack against what Prof. Daniel Pipes has termed the “…only vital totalitarian movement in the world today…”
This is a time for courage. The courage to loathe. It is too perilous a time for the platitudes of politics as usual. Canadians must stop the self-indulgence of being confused, frightened, defensive, and merely weakly indignant. It is a time to realize that actions can make a difference. That this is about the fate of free men and women everywhere. And that our purpose will make clear that this nation shall never acknowledge as legitimate, nor abide as tolerable nor acquiesce as debatable the infamy of the teachings of contempt.
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