Muslim women who understand where the threat comes from

No niqab for  young egyptian alia elmahdy

 This article is helpful, not because it tells me something new about the depth of hatred muslims have for jews, but because it is an arab woman who is recounting her own experience. Whereas people like Yehosophat Harkabi and Ehud Olmert have seen the problem as being political, muslims indoctrinated since their youth to hate jews see the jewish presence in Israel as being religious, a never ending reminder that holy muslim land is under foreign rule. For those who aspire to see the caliphate arise, this situation is intolerable, a challenge to the koran itself.

Those who are brought up on hatred of jews do not often renounce their racism when older or when they lose religion, but justify it through supposed wrongs Israel does to arabs. They don't need to bother about informing themselves about just how much Israel does for its arab citizens, and how many of those citizens repay Israel with sterling service in protecting Israel's borders, from the druse in the border police to the beduin reconnaisance brigade that are the first to defend against Hamas incursions.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is among a growing number of egyptian such as Maikel Nabil who realise that jews hold no animus for them, that jews live together as equals not masters of muslims in Israel, that far from being a threat to them, Israel is an example they wish to follow. Questioning the genocidal education receive from parents, the media and the state is the first step in their liberation. This young generation of egyptians realise that genocidal anti-semitism is one part of the oppression, one way of control, of externalising problems onto the demonised jew. 

Will the be enough in this new generation of egyptians to rid themselves of the Muslim Brotherhood. Most likely not. It didn't happen in Afghanistan, Gaza, Iran, Somalia or anywhere else without outside intervention. Violent islamism knows how to protect its interests. Were the west to pull the plug on muslim countries that embrace islamist then maybe the situation might change. But for now the tide of wahabite financed and western abetted islamic extremism continues to expand (Egypt's islamism is not wahabite, but every bit as extreme however).

Revealed how  the Muslim Brotherhood hides behind the Koran to justify antisemitism

 Raised on Hatred

By AYAAN HIRSI ALI

Published: January 17, 2013

EGYPT’S newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was caught on tape about three years ago urging his followers to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. Not long after, the then-leader of the Muslim Brotherhood described Zionists as “bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians,” “warmongers” and “descendants of apes and pigs.”

These remarks are disgusting, but they are neither shocking nor new. As a child growing up in a Muslim family, I constantly heard my mother, other relatives and neighbors wish for the death of Jews, who were considered our darkest enemy. Our religious tutors and the preachers in our mosques set aside extra time to pray for the destruction of Jews. 

For far too long the pervasive Middle Eastern qualification of Jews as murderers and bloodsuckers was dismissed in the West as extreme views expressed by radical fringe groups. But they are not. In truth, those Muslims who think of Jews as friends and fellow human beings with a right to their own state are a minority, and are under intense pressure to change their minds.

Oppression of women and those of different beliefs are the creed of  islamists

All over the Middle East, hatred for Jews and Zionists can be found in textbooks for children as young as three, complete with illustrations of Jews with monster-like qualities. Mainstream educational television programs are consistently anti-Semitic. In songs, books, newspaper articles and blogs, Jews are variously compared to pigs, donkeys, rats and cockroaches, and also to vampires and a host of other imaginary creatures. 

Consider this infamous dialogue between a three-year-old and a television presenter, eight years before Morsi’s remarks.

Presenter: “Do you like Jews?”

Three-year-old: “No.”

“Why don’t you like them?”

“Jews are apes and pigs.”

“Who said this?”

“Our God.”

“Where did he say this?”

“In the Koran.”

The presenter responds approvingly: “No [parents] could wish for Allah to give them a more believing girl than she ... May Allah bless her, her father and mother.” 

This conversation was not caught on hidden camera or taped by propagandists. It was featured on a prominent program called “Muslim Woman Magazine” and broadcast by Iqraa, the popular Saudi-owned satellite channel. 

Who are the 'apes and pigs'?

It is a major step forward for a sitting U.S. administration and leading American newspapers to unequivocally condemn Morsi’s words. But condemnation is just the first move.

Here is an opportunity to acknowledge the breadth and depth of the attitude toward Jews in the Middle East, and how that affects the much desired but elusive peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

So many explanations have been offered for the failure of successive U.S. administrations to achieve that peace, but the answer is in Morsi’s words. Why would one make peace with bloodsuckers and descendants of apes and monkeys? 

Millions of Muslims have been conditioned to regard Jews not only as the enemies of Palestine but as the enemies of all Muslims, of God and of all humanity. Arab leaders far more prominent and influential than Morsi have been tireless in “educating” or “nursing” generations to believe that Jews are “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.” (These are the words of the Saudi sheik Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, imam at the Masjid al-Haram mosque in Mecca.) 

In 2011, a Pew survey found that in Turkey, just 4 percent of those surveyed held a “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” view of Jews; in Indonesia, 10 percent; in Pakistan 2 percent. In addition, 95 percent of Jordanians, 94 percent of Egyptians and 95 percent of Lebanese hold a “very unfavorable” view of Jews [pdf]. 

In recent decades Israeli and American administrations negotiated with unelected Arab despots, who played a double game. They honored the formal peace treaties by not conducting military attacks against Israel. But they condoned the Islamists’ dissemination of hatred against Israel, Zionism and Jews. 

As the Islamists spread their influence through civil institutions, young people were nursed on hatred.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, as the people take a chance on democracy, they and their new leadership want to see their ideals turned into policy. 

For too many of those who fought for their own liberation, one of those ideals is the end of peace with Israel. The United States must make clear to Morsi that this is not an option.

This is also a crucial opportunity for the region’s secular movements, which must speak out against the clergy’s incitement of young minds to hatred. It is time for these secular movements to start a countereducation in tolerance.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a fellow at the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, and author of the books “Infidel” and “Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations.”