Mike L.
This is a clip from an older news story out of Sydney, Australia, probably from around September 11, 2012, because it refers specifically to some offensive "anti-Islamic movie."
Shirlee, over at News and Views from Jews Down Under, published it within the comments of this piece and I thought it might make for a useful point of discussion.
We all know, of course, that there are elements within the larger Muslim community, particularly in the Middle East but also in Europe, that love nothing so much as a good riot. This element within the Muslim community is perpetually aggrieved and willing to commit serious acts of violence in order to express those grievances. They're mainly angry with Americans and westerners and Jews and Christians and Gay people and women, when they are not sufficiently submissive to men.
What I didn't realize until very recently, however, is that Australia seems to be getting it as badly as western Europe. I honestly assumed that Australia was a tad more like the United States in that their Muslim population was generally peaceful and not given to outbreaks of violent chaos in the streets.
Clearly I was mistaken. {I hate when that happens!}
I'm starting to wonder if it is almost only in the United States wherein the Muslim community remains peaceful and uses the normal tools of advocacy, economics, and politics in order to advance their interests, just like everybody else. Our friend JayinPhiladelphia often talks about the ethnic harmony (and the delicious food) to be found in his neck of the universe. My experience is much the same. Oakland, much like Philadelphia, is as ethnically diverse as anyplace in the United States. And, yet, it is not Muslims who riot here, but the Occupy Wall Street idiots.
Part of the reason that I want to highlight the video above - aside from showing that Australia seems to have a similar problem as to, say, France - is to suggest that violent protests of that type that we see above do not represent the core of that problem.
The core of the problem is not "violent extremists," as Barack Obama would have you believe. Actual violent Jihadi types are only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the tip is a political movement that, in its contemporary iteration, began in Cairo in the late 1920s, that was influenced by European fascism and Nazi anti-Semitism, and that has in recent decades made considerable advancement throughout the Muslim world, particularly the Arab Muslim world.
The real problem is, thus, the politicalization of Islam.
Not all who favor al-Sharia use violence to advance their cause. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. Most Muslims who favor Islam as the basis of government - whatever percentage of Muslims that may be - abhor violence as much as anyone else. The problem is not that they are violent, but that they promote a political movement that is basically at odds with the fundamental human rights of anyone who is not a Muslim male, if even then.
We should not make the mistake, as does the current president of the United States, in thinking that the real problem is the bomb throwers and rioters. It isn't. The real problem is the movement and the political ideology, grounded in Islam, behind the movement. The real problem is not only the various imams and ayatollahs who scream bloody murder in their mosques, thereby creating hatred within the Umma for Americans and Jews (I get to get hated twice!), but those within the Islamic community who would not harm a hair on Gilad Schalit's head, but yet who nonetheless support clerics who cry out for genocide or who demean non-Muslims.
One way to help counter this problem is for the Jewish community to insist that after fourteen hundred years of perpetual abuse and persecution that it is, from a moral standpoint, simply unacceptable. This is the case that needs to be made to the larger international community and needs to be a case grounded in the history of the Jewish people and the Christian people, as well as all non-Muslims, under Muslim rule.
So long as people throughout the world remain ignorant of that history, because we fail to teach it to them, they will always consider us the aggressor and the Arabs to be the innocent, indigenous victims of the militarist Jews.
We have the ability to change the nature of the conversation and all we need to do is introduce the history of dhimmitude into the conversation, but I see very little will on the part of the vast majority of diaspora Jewish people to do so. There is a real squeamishness among diaspora Jews to tell the story of Jewish persecution under the boot of Islamic imperial rule from the time of Muhammed until the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
This is unfortunate because so long as we deny our own history, we can never win the argument.
