Saturday, December 19, 2015

The Left’s Muslim Replacement Theology for Jews. By Daniel Greenfield.

The Left’s Muslim Replacement Theology for Jews. By Daniel Greenfield. FrontPage Magazine, December 18, 2015.

Greenfield:

Muslims are the new Jews; time to get rid of the old Jews.

Muslims are the new Jews. You can find this offensive claim repeated everywhere in the media. The Jews, a small ethnic minority of millions that was stateless for thousands of years, are a terrible analogy for a global Muslim population of 1.6 billion and around 50 countries that do not comprise a single ethnicity or race. Comparing the two makes as much sense as comparing the Finns to all of Asia.

The only thing the Muslims and the Jews have ever had in common is that the former conquered, persecuted and enslaved the latter. Any religious similarities are the product of Muslim cultural appropriation of Jewish beliefs and any cultural similarities are the result of Muslim colonization.

Comparing Jews to Muslims makes as much sense as comparing Jews to Nazis. But the media began making the argument that the Jews are the new Nazis from the very moment that the stateless Jews got their first state since Rome and its allied Arab invaders had destroyed the last one.

In this twisted historical revisionism, the Jews, a beleaguered minority hanging on to a country slightly bigger than Fiji, who have spent the last 40 years cutting pieces off their small slice of the world to hand over to the region’s massive Muslim majority in the hopes of being left alone, are the new Nazis.

And the Muslim billion ruling over vast territories where human rights for non-Muslims are rarer than hen’s teeth, where non-Muslim populations decline year after year as they are forcibly converted or are forced to flee their Muslim oppressors, are somehow the new Jews. Orwell would have wept.

The new Nazis are the Jews, who freed hundreds of terrorists to try and restart negotiations with Muslim terrorists. And the new Jews are the Muslims who behead, enslave, rape and bomb their way across the region. The Jewish Nazis have killed about 4 or 5 Muslim terrorists a month on average this year. The new Muslim Jews in Syria alone account for a death toll of over 100 every day.

The analogy makes no sense. But that hasn’t stopped the media from embracing it anyway.

The media compared the Syrian migrants to Joseph and Mary at the inn. When that social media meme got old after about 5 minutes, it was time to compare them to Holocaust survivors fleeing the Nazis.

One analogy made as much sense as the other.

The media had already made it an annual tradition to break out the Joseph and Mary analogy every Christmas to attack Israel.  Now it doubled down on it to attack Americans. But Joseph and Mary were Jewish natives of Israel. They weren’t foreigners. And today it’s the media that insists Jews shouldn’t be allowed to stay in Bethlehem or any part of the West Bank. The innkeeper in this analogy is Obama.

Herod was the foreigner ruling over Israel, the son of an Idumean father and a Nabatean Arab mother, you might think of him as the Obama of the day, while driving the Jews out of their own country. Herod’s father had allied with an Arab ruler who controlled what is today Syria and Saudi Arabia, in an alliance against the next-to-last Jewish king of Israel. Herod had the last Jewish king of Israel killed.  The Jews persecuted by the Arab Herod aren’t the Muslims of today. The Muslims of today are Herod.

The Nabateans and Idumeans (according to the Greek historian Strabo they were both Arabic peoples) had been expanding westward into Israel much the way that their descendants are expanding into the West today. The Idumeans promised to integrate into the Jewish nation, but instead massacred its people and eventually took over the country through treachery and terrorism, and destroyed it.

There may be an analogy there for Muslim migration to the West, but the media wouldn’t touch it with a pole the length of the Atlantic Ocean.

Today, Joseph and Mary might be a Jewish couple who are told by the European Union that they aren’t allowed to live in Givat Hamatos, near Bethlehem, because there is no room for Jews in the West Bank. Or a German couple in a small rural town forced out of their home by the local authorities to accommodate the flood of Syrian Muslim migrants who are beginning their colonization of the country.

There’s always “room at the inn” for Muslim invaders who have colonized and displaced the local population. But there’s never any room available for their indigenous non-Muslim victims.

The media howls that the Syrian Muslim migrants are just like the Jews fleeing the Holocaust. But the Jews were a stateless people who were suffering genocide at the hands of the majority. The Syrian Muslims are not stateless, they’re Syrians, they’re not a minority, they’re the majority, and they’re not suffering genocide, they’re the ones perpetrating it.

The worst actors in the Syrian Civil War are Sunni Muslims. Some Sunni Muslim groups, such as ISIS, are fighting other Sunni Muslims for power and territory. But Sunni Muslims as a group do not face genocide. They’re the majority. It’s Yazidis and Christians facing genocide at the hands of Sunni Muslims.

The Jews had no Jewish State to go to during the Holocaust. Sunni Muslims have over forty countries to choose from. If they want land area, they have over 30 million square miles to pick from. That’s a territory that is ten times the size of the United States. There’s plenty of room for them all.

The only valid historical analogy involving Arab Muslims, Jews and the Holocaust is the one that Netanyahu was shouted down for making. The Arab Muslims sympathized with the Nazis. Not only did the Mufti of Jerusalem play a vital role in encouraging Hitler’s genocidal plans for the Jews, but after the war Nazi butchers found safe harbor in Muslim countries. Many converted to Islam.

The one thing that both sides in the Syrian Civil War agree on is that the Nazis had the right idea about the Jews. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Sheikh Qaradawi spoke approvingly of Hitler and hoped for a Muslim Holocaust of the Jews, "The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them - even though they exaggerated this issue - he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers."

But that didn’t stop the White House from rolling out the red carpet for his deputy a few years later.

On the Shiite side, Assad Sr. had threatened to wreak the “apex of the Israeli Holocaust”. Hezbollah boss Nasrallah had boasted that, “If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

In a pre-war poll, 77% of Syrians had expressed support for Hamas whose goal is the extermination of the Jews. Hating Jews and wanting to kill them is the one thing that brings Shiites and Sunnis together.

But hate doesn’t have to be as obvious as Assad or Qaradawi. The constant claims that Muslims are the new Jews carry with them a whiff of progressive replacement theology. The old Jews have been found wanting. Setting up a country and defending it against Muslim terrorism made them bad victims. The Muslims are superior replacement victims. They have the right to Israel and to Jewish history.

Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post, whose meme popularized the obnoxious appropriation of Jewish history by claiming that Muslim migrants are just like the Jews fleeing the Holocaust, lectures Jews that Muslim threats to kill all the Jews are “not like the Holocaust.”

The left insists that Jews have no right to their own history. Like Bethlehem and Jerusalem, it belongs to the Muslims. The Holocaust may not be invoked to protest the Muslim murder of Jews, but must instead be invoked to enable the Muslim murder of Jews by bringing millions of supremacist bigots who think that the Holocaust was one of the best things that ever happened to Europe and the United States.

The ADL’s anti-Semitic poll ratings for Muslim refugee countries are 92% for Iraq and 87% for Libya. Those numbers somehow manage to be even worse than those of Saudi Arabia which only scores 74%.

The final act of one people replacing another is genocide. Just ask Herod or Mohammed, whose final deathbed wish was that Jews and Christians should be purged from Arabia. Or ask the latest pundit explaining why Jews can’t live near Bethlehem, but Muslims must be brought to live in New York.

Muslims are not the new Jews. And the idea that Muslims have replaced the Jews and are entitled to appropriate their land and history for their own use is not only anti-Semitic, it’s genocidal.