by Hugh Fitzgerald
Appearing on a “hip-hop” radio show in New York, Ebro In the Morning, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agreed with the interviewer, Ebro Darden, in his claim that there were “white supremacist Jews” who aligned with “racism.”
According to Fox News, Darden remarked, “How do you have white supremacist Jews?”
“How do you have these individuals who are legit aligning with racism and white supremacy, but they’re Jewish?” he asked. “It’s something that most people can’t wrap their brains around. But it’s a real thing.”
“He then asserted, “What’s going on with Israel and Palestine, while it’s very, very, deep, it is very, very, criminal, and it is very, very unjust.”
Ocasio-Cortez appeared to agree wholeheartedly with these claims, saying, “Absolutely.”
No evidence asked for, and none provided. Israel is “very, very criminal, and it [the situation it has created] is very, very unjust.”
So much for the Hamas Charter, that calls for Israel’s destruction. So much for the Hamas tunnels dug from Gaza into Israel, and the Hezbollah tunnels dug from southern Lebanon into northern Israel, both intended to allow Palestinian fighters to sneak into Israel to kill or kidnap Israelis. So much for the Palestinian children’s shows where sweet-voiced children describe their hope to someday “kill Jews.” So much for the PA schoolbooks in which hatred of Jews is inculcated across the curriculum. So much for the terrorists who murder Jews on buses, in pizza parlors, at Passover ceremonies, hiking in the hills, photographing birds, walking on the streets of Jerusalem. So much for the Pay-For-Slay program, where the families of killed or imprisoned terrorists receive generous lifetime support from the PA. So much for the squares and buildings that are named after terrorist “martyrs.” So much for the three major and three minor wars that have been thrust on the Jews of Israel by their Arab enemies since 1948. So much for the thousands of acts of Islamic terror that Israeli Jews have endured. None of this appears to have made an impression on Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
AOC also seemed to dismiss Jewish claims of antisemitism against some of those attacking Israel, saying, “Criticizing the occupation doesn’t make you anti-Israel, frankly.” But who has ever claimed that such criticism did? It is only when the criticism of Israel becomes so one-sided, so oblivious to history and the truth, so venomous in tone, that we have a perfect right to call that beyond-the-pale criticism an expression of antisemitism. Surely AOC should be willing to admit that there must be some kinds of criticism of Israel that are so over the top that they can only be explained by reference to antisemitism. When Israelis are accused of “treating Palestinians worse than Hitler treated the Jews,” or when Israeli soldiers are accused of deliberately murdering Palestinian children, we have a right to call such monstrous claims examples of antisemitism. When Israel is described as an “apartheid state” even though Arabs live, work, shop, are treated in hospitals, and study in universities side-by-side with Jews, that description is an example of antisemitism. When Israel-bashers ignore the fact that Arabs sit in the Knesset, serve on the Supreme Court, and serve as ambassadors in Israel’s diplomatic corps, which would spoil their charge of an “apartheid state,” such a deliberate omission reflects antisemitism.
“It doesn’t mean that you are against the existence of a nation,” she continued. “It means that you believe in human rights, and it’s about making sure that Palestinian human rights are equal to Israeli human rights, and there are a lot of troubling things happening there.”
Do the Arab citizens of Israel not have the same rights as Jewish citizens? They can vote, run for office, serve in the government. They have the right to practice their religion freely and openly. They have access to the same hospitals and the same universities. The only difference is that they are not required to serve in the military, though they may volunteer if they wish.
The Arabs with the least rights in “Palestine” are those who are ruled by Hamas in Gaza, and by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. In neither case is there real democracy. Hamas keeps itself in power by terrorizing potential opponents in Gaza. Mahmoud Abbas was elected to a four-year term as President of the Palestinian Authority in 2005; he has not held an election since. In both Gaza and the West Bank, the political corruption is massive. Two of Hamas’ top leaders, Mousa Abu Marzouk and Khaled Meshal, have each accumulated fortunes of at least 2.5 billion dollars, stolen from foreign aid meant for the Gazan Arabs. Mahmoud Abbas and two of his sons, meanwhile, are no slouches either, for they have amassed a family fortune of between $400 and $600 million.
She [AOC] then endorsed Palestinian mob violence, stating, “I believe that injustice is a threat to the safety of all people, because once you have a group that is marginalized and marginalized and marginalized — once someone doesn’t have access to clean water, they have no choice but to riot, right?”
AOC seems to think the Palestinian mobs rioting on the Gazan border with Israel are fully justified. “They have no choice.” Is she aware that they are not merely rioting, but throwing Molotov cocktails, grenades, and other explosives, sometimes even shooting, at Israeli soldiers? Does she know that they have been trying for sixteen months to breach the security fence, not to discuss water management, but in order to enter Israel in order to kill or kidnap Israelis, both military and civilian? Does she know about the incendiary kites that the Palestinians in Gaza have let loose to set Israeli farmland on fire? These are more than mere rioters; they are Jihadis, fighting against the Infidel Israelis, and hoping to subdue them.
The Israelis have not “marginalized” the Palestinians; it is the Palestinians who, by their relentless attempts to kill Israelis, have marginalized themselves. They are told, in the Qur’an, not to take Jews and Christians as friends, for “they are friends only with each other.” (5:51) They are told that Infidels are “the most vile of created beings.” (98:6) How exactly should Israelis behave toward people who want no part of them, but instead despise them, and wish to destroy them? These Palestinians have been taught in dozens of Qur’anic verses to despise and hate the Jews, and in 109 Qur’anic verses have also been taught to “fight” and to “kill” and to “smite at the necks of” and to “strike terror in the hearts of” the Infidels, which includes the Jews? AOC says the “Palestinians… have no choice but to riot.” Of course they have a choice. They could choose to make peace with Israel. They could have chosen, when the Israelis withdrew from Gaza, to accept and make use of those greenhouses the Israelis had built, and handed over to the Palestinians intact, hoping that they would carry on, and even expand, the profitable business the Israelis had created. Instead the Arabs, in a spiteful fit, destroyed those greenhouses. The Israelis would still be happy to help the Gazan Arabs prosper, if only they would stop trying to kill Israelis.
Israel has provided employment for Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank, but the threat of terrorism has now forced them to severely limit the workers from Gaza. Today, nearly 50,000 Palestinians have legal permits to work in Israel, and another 30,000 are believed, even without permits, to have been provided employment by Jews in Israel, including the West Bank. Some Israeli manufacturers, such as the Sodastream Company, deliberately placed their factories in the West Bank to encourage Arabs to work for them. In the case of Sodastream, because of a BDS boycott of their product (for being made in the West Bank), the company was forced to move its operations to pre-1967 Israel, and as a consequence, some Arab workers lost their jobs. AOC clearly has no idea how often Israel has tried to help economically, in ways not always understood, the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza,
AOC agreed with her interviewer that some Jews are “white supremacists.” She offered no examples of such; not a single comment from a single Jew has been offered as evidence of “white supremacism,” not by AOC, or Ilhan Omar, or Rashida Tlaib. not by Human Rights Watch or the Southern Poverty Law Center. Perhaps what she and others who have been making this charge really mean is this: many Jews are glad that President Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, ended the American contribution to the corrupt and bloated UNRWA, and cut all American aid to the Palestinian Authority. And that must mean, in the peculiar logic of AOC and others, that these Jews endorse everything about Trump, including those of his comments — on Charlottesville (“there were good people on both sides”), on Baltimore (“rat-infested”) and on Congressman Elijah Cummings — that have been endlessly described as “racist.” This makes no sense. Russians attacked Islamic State targets in Syria. If we praise them for that, are we also endorsing everything else Vladimir Putin has done? If we are glad that Saudi Arabia is sharing intelligence with Israel, does that mean we approve of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?
Since AOC has mindlessly embraced this notion of Jews as “white supremacists,” we should ask her to take a look at the Muslim Arab record on “white supremacy,” or rather, at what celebrated Arab and Muslim figures have written about black Africans over the centuries. These include hair-raisingly contemptuous remarks about blacks by many Islamic worthies, such as Ibn Khaldun, and even statements by Muhammad himself in the hadith. AOC should be asked to learn, too, about about the history of the Arab slave trade in Africa, especially that involving African boys who were castrated on site, with a mortality rate of 90%, a slave trade that began earlier, ended later, and claimed many millions more victims, than did the Atlantic Slave Trade. The Arab slave trade ended only because of pressure from Western Infidels. Saudi Arabia and Yemen officially ended slavery only in 1962, and several other Muslim countries ended it even later. Mauritania officially ended slavery in 2007, the last country to do so, but in fact, the Arabs continue to have black slaves, and the estimate of the anti-slavery groups is that there are now 600,000 black slaves in Mauritania, 200,000 black slaves now in Mali, and as many as 875,000 slaves in Niger. Hundreds of thousands of black Africans were enslaved by the Arabs during the civil war in the Sudan. In Libya, a slave market selling Africans has been operated by Arabs during the last two years; the slaves are black Africans who ran out of money while trying to get to Europe. All this deserves the attention of AOC. She needs to learn, too, that there never was an Islamic William Wilberforce, because Muhammad himself, the Perfect Man and Model of Conduct, bought, owned, and traded slaves. That might give her pause.
In the Hadith, we find remarks about blacks such as these:
“Narrated Anas bin Malik: The Prophet said to Abu-Dar, ‘Listen and obey (your chief) even if he is an Ethiopian with a head like a raisin.’ And this: Ahmad ibn Abi Sulayman, the companion of Sahnun said, ‘Anyone who says that the Prophet was black should be killed.‘” (Ibn Musa al-Yahsubi, Qadi ‘Iyad, p. 375)
And there is this from the celebrated Arab historian Al-Tabari: “Noah prayed that the hair of Ham’s descendants [Africans] would not grow beyond their ears, and that whenever his [Ham’s] descendants met Shem’s, the latter would enslave them.” (Al-Tabari, Vol. 2, p. 21, p. 21)
There is a long history of anti-black remarks among outstanding figures in Islamic history:
Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was, among other things, an Islamic jurist, Islamic lawyer, Islamic scholar, Islamic theologian, and hafiz (one who has memorized the entire Qur’an). He is one of the most important figures in Islamic history. Here are two (among many) remarks he makes about black Africans in his Muqaddimah:
Therefore, the Negro nation are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.
Beyond [known peoples of black West Africa] to the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings.
Ibn Sina or Avicenna (980-1037), was another celebrated figure in Islamic history: a hafiz, an Islamic psychologist, scholar, and theologian and, by our lights, a racist: “[Blacks are] people who are by their very nature slaves.”
Ibn Qutaybah (828-889), was a renowned Islamic scholar from Kufa, Iraq: “[Blacks] are ugly and misshapen, because they live in a hot country.”
Nas?r al-D?n al-T?s? (1201-1274), was a Shia Muslim Scholar and Grand Ayatollah:
“If (all types of men) are taken, from the first, and one placed after another, like the Negro from Zanzibar, in the Southern-most countries, the Negro does not differ from an animal in anything except the fact that his hands have been lifted from the earth –In no other peculiarity or property – except for what God wished. Many have seen that the ape is more capable of being trained than the Negro, and more intelligent.”
“The Zanj (African) differ from animals only in that] their two hands are lifted above the ground,… Many have observed that the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanj.”
Al-Muqaddasi (945/946-1000) was a medieval Muslim geographer:
Of the neighbors of the Bujja, Maqdisi had heard that “there is no marriage among them; the child does not know his father, and they eat people — but God knows best. As for the Zanj, they are people of black color, flat noses, kinky hair, and little understanding or intelligence.” [Kitab al-Bad’ wah-tarikh, vol.4]
Al-Masudi (896-956), was a Muslim historian and geographer, known as the “Herodotus of the Arabs”:
“Galen says that merriment dominates the black man because of his defective brain, whence also the weakness of his intelligence.” (Al-Masudi, Muruj al-dhahab)
Ibn al-Faqih was a Muslim historian and geographer:
“A man of discernment said: The people of Iraq … do not come out with something between blonde, buff and blanched coloring, such as the infants dropped from the wombs of the women of the Slavs and others of similar light complexion; nor are they overdone in the womb until they are burned, so that the child comes out something between black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions, such as the Zanj, the Somali, and other blacks who resemble them. The Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust but between the two.” (from his Mukhtasar Kitab al-Buldan, 903 AD)
There is much more in this disturbing vein, but what I’ve quoted here should be enough evidence of the deep racism of Muslim Arabs. These views justified the enslavement of blacks by Arabs that began in the 8th century and continued uninterruptedly until it formally ended, under Western pressure, in the 20th century. But in fact the enslavement of blacks by Arabs has continued, despite its official prohibition, in Mauritania, in Mali, in Niger, where a total of 1.5 million black slaves exist at present. There is also that new slave market, in Libya, where black Africans who became stranded in their attempt to make it to Europe by boat, and could not pay their smugglers, have then been sold into slavery by those to whom they owed money.
One hopes AOC will want to reconsider her charge that some Jews are “white supremacists.” Mere repetition of that accusation does not constitute evidence. And perhaps she could do something that would surprise and please many of us. Once having read what has been posted above from Muslim Arab writers about blacks, she would — I am sure — be properly appalled. And if so, AOC could make the cause of freeing the hundreds of thousands of black slaves who still exist in several Afro-Arab lands her very own. Let her introduce a resolution calling on the U.S. government “to apply economic pressure on the governments of Mauritania, Mali, and Niger, so as to end their practice of slavery, and to free the 1.5 million black slaves in those countries.” Surely every member of the House will gladly support it, save for three Defenders of the Faith — Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Andre Carson. As for those three, they will have some explaining to do to the Congressional Black Caucus. I can’t wait.
First published in Jihad Watch here and here.
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One Response
AOC doesn’t know a thing about this issue, as she proved in her PBS interview a year ago. She just follows whatever her Muslim squad followers – Ilhan and Rashida – tell her. She should do herself a favor and refer all questions to them