Yesteryear reflections on Arab/ Islam problems

A rather long winded post on my part…

The pictures are of my grandfather, Norman Thompson, and the young King Hussein of Jordan.

And – it appears that the tremendous wealth that Hashem has given to the Oil Emirates, plus the relatively new death cult Shia heresy of Iran’s Vilayat al-Faqih, is beginning to put a crack into the Sunni Wahhabbi death cult heresies…

This is good.

 

 

George Moshe Murray

February 19, 2015  · 

Ah well, trying for a Throwback Thursday and coming up with something quite different. Such is life. Which is beautiful all the time.

My mother’s father (Eleanor Murray, may she live and be well); my grandfather, was Norman E. Thompson.

In 1953, he was the chief of the Special Services Division; Technical Cooperation Services for the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (which I have always presumed was part of the United States government Diplomatic Corps).

They were in Jordan to advise the young, newly crowned King Hussein on how to find and develop Jordan’s mineral resources.

As a young man, I had a lovely romantic view of both the Kingdom of Jordan and of all Arabs in general. After all, my grandfather wrote:

“The King’s graciousness, thoughtfulness, and democratic acceptance of our party is one of the outstanding memories… and contributed tremendously to the ease of conversation and the exchange of ideas. He fraternized freely with his entourage, but still maintained the dignity and received the respect due his position.”

When I was a child, “El Cid,” a movie starring Charlton Heston, was my favorite movie of all.

From my child’s viewpoint, the movie (which was really about the Reconquista of Spain by Christians) was about the noble Muslims joining with El Cid, a great and noble Christian, to free their lands from the evil Muslims and the evil Christians. I believe I cried at the end of the movie when El Cid died and was strapped to a horse so that his followers would not know that he had died.

“Lawrence of Arabia” was another great favorite of mine.

I knew that this was a work of fiction but, the passionate portrayal of all of the various characters in the movie is reflected in the real history of the Middle East today.

The actor Alec Guiness played Prince Faisal (the third son of Hussein bin Ali, the Grand Sharif of Mecca, the real King Hussein’s great grandfather), who became the chief ally of the British in WWI against the Ottoman Turk.

The movie showed the “noble Arabs” under Prince Faisal managing to unite against the “wicked Turks” in a wonderfully uplifting and inspiring manner.

Alas – many years later, as a mature adult, I came to view “Lawrence of Arabia” and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan through different eyes.

In the 1970’s, in my late teenage years and early 20’s, I saw the rise of Palestinian terrorism. I was still largely ignorant of Arab and Muslim history and I had no special love for Israel, but the deliberate savagery of the Arab Palestinians against Israel and Jordan and Lebanon, baffled me.

As a still somewhat disinterested observer, I saw the Lebanese and the Arabs destroy their own country in some kind of bizarre civil war for which I saw no cause or purpose.

It was around then that one of the more portentously troubling scenes from “Lawrence of Arabia” came to mind –

Lawrence, a British officer, played by actor Peter O’Toole, journeys to the desert to try and enlist the Arab tribes to fight against the Turks during WWI.

There he first encounters the tribal rivalries and hatreds when Sherif Ali, played by Omar Sharif, shoots Lawrence’s guide for drinking from a water-hole which belongs to Ali. Lawrence is shocked and enraged.

The dialog between Lawrence and Ali began to change my romantic perspective of the Noble Arab.

Ali tells Lawrence:, “He is dead.”

Lawrence asks, “Yes. WHY?”

Ali responds simply, “This is my well.”

Lawrence tells him that: “He was my friend.”

Ali dismissively replies, “That?”

Ali tells Lawrence, “You are angry, English. He was nothing. The well is everything. The Hasimi may not drink at our wells. He knew that. Sa’lam.”

And then, Lawrence tells Ali –

“Sherif Ali, so long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous, and cruel, as you are.”

Well Friends, that was the beginning to a Throwback Thursday….

But, I have had trouble making it a contemplative peace that reflects the current dilemma that faces Jordan today.

My thoughts went to the dichotomy between me, as a Jew and a great Lover of Israel, and King Abdullah II, the current ruler of Jordan who can barely acknowledge Israel, his secret ally and protector and yet, is also battling the Islamic State, who many of his people support.

This is a problem that I have not yet gone beyond.

So, in responding to another Friend, I ended up writing the below with which I shall finish this missive….

There is a problem with the paradigm of the Obama administration that “it’s not Islam.” The problem is that this not an either/or equation.

I think that perhaps the “nuances” of history are too great for the Obama administration to bear…

First off, it is true that Islam is NOT Evil.

It is a great mistake for all of the well-meaning, anti Islamist terror pundits and believers to simply dismiss Islam – “Mohammad’s a pedophile,” and “Islam is inherently evil,” etc.

This is a great mistake; a dangerous mistake.

Obviously, the same argument can be made against any religion; philosophy; or culture – IN THE PAST!

However, there is NO religion or philosophy today that promotes the slaughter of innocents as one of its prime tenets – besides Islam.

(Notice I did not write “culture.”)

There are many “cultures” today that promote slaughter and persecution of innocents as a facet of their bizarre way of life.

The Congo; Zimbabwe; other parts of Africa; parts of Latin America; parts of Asia; among others all over the world, are all engaged in primitive mindless death cultism.

But they have no “philosophy” of “Jihad” to promulgate their hatreds and barbarism on the rest of planet Earth.

The Islamic death cults do.

And, that IS a problem.

This is not a handful of crazies who are “using” Islam to be wicked.

There are tens of millions of mufsidun (corrupters; liars; evil doers) who sincerely believe that death and destruction are mandated by Allah and they are divinely appointed to be the agents of Horror on Anyone (mostly other Muslims) who does not believe in their own particular death cult.

Tens of millions – if not over a hundred million – believing Muslims promote the massacre of innocents.

This IS a problem.

And, the only solution is to address ISLAM; Muslims (and Arabs, by the way, as their culture is inextricably tied up with Islam) that they have to change their philosophy; change their religion; change their way of life so that murder, beheadings, slaughter of those that disagree with another point of view, honor killings, and tribal hatreds – are ALL an anathema to Islam and that those who persist in such damnable practices are themselves damned.

Make ALL of these and more – hirabah – Unlawful warfare!

Now what?

It’s fine of me to protest that Islam must change some basic premises of Islam but….

Well, let me tell you a story garnered from my ancient books, the early 20th Century Harvard Classics.

Attributed to Aesop:

“Long ago, the mice had a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. Some said this, and some said that; but at last a young mouse got up and said he had a proposal to make, which he thought would meet the case.

“You will all agree,” said he, “that our chief danger consists in the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy approaches us. Now, if we could receive some signal of her approach, we could easily escape from her. I venture, therefore, to propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a ribbon round the neck of the Cat. By this means we should always know when she was about, and could easily retire while she was in the neighborhood.”

This proposal met with general applause, until an old mouse got up and said: “That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?”

The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke.

Then the old mouse said: “IT IS EASY TO PROPOSE IMPOSSIBLE REMEDIES.”

Who indeed?

On some forums that I write upon, my signature line is:

“There is no way this winter is ever going to end as long as that groundhog keeps seeing his shadow. I don’t see any way out of it. He’s got to be stopped. And I have to stop him.”

This is from the movie “Groundhog Day” and it reflects the final desperation that protagonist feels that he is the only one that can stop the nightmare that his life had become.

One hundred years ago, the last Muslim Caliphate finally disintegrated.

Unnoticed by most of the rest of the world, a new “caliphate” took its place.

Saudi Arabia.

The tribe of al Saud, by virtue of brutally conquering the Arabian Peninsula and taking Mecca and Medina, became Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques; they became Servants of the Two Noble Sanctuaries and Protectors of the Two Holy Cities – All titles used by the rulers of past Muslim Empires.

They established their own bloodthirsty tribal version of Islam, Wahhabism, which has subsumed and replaced normative Sunni Islam. Their religion, created by a union between its founder al Wahhab and a local tribal chief, al Saud, over 150 years earlier, had tried to take over the Arabian Peninsula previously. The Muslim Ottoman Turks and their Muslim Egyptian viceroy Muhammad Ali Pasha, labeled it a vile heresy and crushed the nascent Saudi Empire.

The Saudis rose again and finally, as the Western world was embroiled in the aftermath of World War I and trying to order their colonial empires, the Saudis successfully established their fanatical Wahhabi State.

There are two centers of Islamic learning in the Muslim world – Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt and, Saudi Arabia where the “Permanent Committee” and other Wahhabi clerics issue fatwas; Muslim legal opinions.

President Al-Sissi has already addressed the Muslim clerics at Al Azhar, telling them that “we are in need of a religious revolution” in order to eliminate the “mindset” that embraces a god of Death.

Saudi Arabia, the Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques; the Servants of the Two Noble Sanctuaries; the Protectors of the Two Holy Cities – has NOT called on their own Death Cult religion to change; to ameliorate; to absolutely forbid the barbarous misdeeds of all of the sickening practices of their own bastard death cult factions which include ALL of the Sunni terrorist cults – especially the Islamic State.

(The current “Islamic State” is another Wahhabi offshoot which has simply taken the harsh Wahhabist philosophy to its logical extremes.

When the tribe of al Saud conquered the Arabian Peninsula, they used the same terror tactics of today’s “Islamic State.” After the Saudis sacked; looted; and took Mecca, killing and driving out the Hashemite rulers of Mecca, their own shock troops, the fanatic Ikhwan, refused to surrender Mecca to the Saud tribe as the Ikhwan considered them NOT dedicated or fanatic enough to be proper Wahhabi rulers.

The Saudis had to raise another army to slaughter their own Ikhwan zealots before they could establish their State where beheading, stoning, and whipping are considered ordinary, religiously doctrinaire punishments.)

If Saudi Arabia changed its primitive tribal Islamic religion and gave up its absolutist despotic monarchy and pronounced its own intolerant Wahhabism as an abomination to Allah; Muhammad; and Islam, the world would change.

Islam would change.

Everything would change.