by Hal Lindsey
Why the Cover-Up?
Why isn’t this story reported? Why isn’t it chronicled? Why isn’t it remembered? If Arab nations are responsible for expelling Jews in approximately the same numbers as the much-publicized Arab refugees displaced after the creation of Israel, why isn’t the obvious solution a simple population exchange? Nowhere is the enormity of the Muslim myth swallowed by the West more graphically illustrated than in this issue.
Note also that there is absolutely no moral equivalence in this situation, for the Jews did not drive out the Palestinian refugees. The Palestinians were not threatened and killed to terrorize them into leaving. In many cases they were begged to stay. No! They were ordered to leave “temporarily” by the combined Muslim armies who promised to annihilate the Jews and their new state, and to give them the booty left by the Jews.
On the other hand, the Jews living in Arab countries were terrorized, killed, and driven out with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Their properties and assets were all confiscated. Those who escaped were thankful just to be alive.
The Jews were received and immediately repatriated into the new fragile state of Israel. They were given aid and jobs to the best of the ability of the struggling new country.
The Palestinians were deliberately forced into refugee camps by their fellow Muslims and not permitted to integrate in any way into the society of their unwilling hosts. Their own people didn’t even try to help them; instead they prevailed upon the United Nations and gullible Western charities to supply the refugees’ needs. They have been kept in these camps for more than sixty years—like an unhealed wound by their own people—just to be used as political pawns by Muslim negotiators to charge their plight as “Israeli aggression.”
Some Popular Muslim Mythology
Many myths have been spun to suppress the facts about the Jewish immigration from Arab lands. Some of these have already been exploded in earlier chapters. But let us rehearse again some of the myths that actually teach the exact opposite of the actual, demonstrable truth:
Myth #1: The Arabs have nothing against Jews in general and “lived in peace and harmony with them” until the creation of the Zionist Movement and the consequent creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Myth #2: Alienation with the Jews began in large part because Israel is almost entirely made up of European Jews who displaced indigenous Arab peoples in Palestine.
Myth #3: The key to resolving the Middle East crisis is to stop “Israeli aggression and occupation of Arab lands” and to create an independent Palestinian state.
Myth #4: Israel’s U.S.-supplied military juggernaut has practiced continuous aggression against the neighboring, basically peaceful Muslim nations who are only trying to right a terrible wrong forced upon them by the West.
These myths have worked like magic for the Muslim propagandists for decades, but especially in the negotiations that have resulted from the Oslo Agreement.
Terror of a Dhimmi’s Life
While there has been much mythology about how the Arab refugees in the Middle East became refugees; there is little doubt about why Jews in Arab nations left their homes and their belongings to flee for their lives. Anyone who takes the trouble to investigate will discover that the facts of history easy to find.
“Clearly,” writes Joan Peters, “the massive exodus of Jewish refugees from the Arab countries was triggered largely by the Arabs’ own Nazi-like bursts of brutality, which had become the lot of the Jewish communities.”174
In the 1947 debates over the rebirth of Israel, Egypt’s delegate to the United Nations General Assembly quite openly threatened the very lives of the Jews living in Arab countries: “The lives of one million Jews in Muslim countries would be jeopardized by partition,” he blatantly warned.175
In fact, even the small handful of Jews still living in Arab lands do not remain by choice. In terms of both percentages of population and in real numbers, fewer Jews have chosen to live in Arab nations than chose to live in Hitler’s Germany between 1933 and 1939.176
Why the contrast? Why did Jews leave everything behind to flee Arab lands between 1948 and the present, while two-thirds of Germany’s Jews, despite official anti-Semitic policies, stuck it out?
“Arab-born Jews realized that the Arab threats would be carried out, because they had lived as second-class—dhimmis—with reminders of pogroms in their own or their families’ past experiences, whereas the German Jews felt themselves ‘assimilated,’ part of the German mainstream,” explains Peters. “They expressed initial ‘disbelief’ that any such bigotry as the Nazis’ could be more than a cruel political joke.” No such illusions, however, were held with regard to the Arabs.
The big difference between the 1930s Germany and the situation beginning in 1948 was that Jews now had a place to go—Israel.
Imagine you’re a Jew living in an Arab land and you hear the following report on the radio: “The Jews in the Arab countries have not respected the defense that Islam has given them for generations. They have encouraged World Zionism and Israel in every way in its aggression against the Arabs. . . . The Congress hereby declares that the Jews in the Muslim countries whose ties with Zionism and Israel are proved shall be regarded as fighters against the Muslims, unfit for the patronage and protection which the Muslim faith prescribes for adherents of peaceful protected faiths.”
If you lived within range of Radio Amman in 1967, you would not have had to imagine such a broadcast. This was an actual report and typical of many others heard on Arab radio and television throughout the Middle East.177
“Arab propagandists and sympathizers have persisted in the charge that Israel is a foreign outpost of Western civilization, the intruding offspring of Europe inhabited by European survivors of Nazi brutality. In actuality, more than half of the people in Israel today are Jews or offsprings of Jews who lived in Arab countries and have fled from Arab brutality; Israel’s present population consists mainly of refugees and their descendants from two oppressions, European-Nazis and Arab.”178
“Collective Amnesia”
For some reason, the whole world has swallowed the sometimes-unbelievable products of the Arab propaganda machine. As Egyptian-born author Bat Ye’or sees it, “Even in Israel there is a kind of ‘collective amnesia’ with regard to the awesome contribution played by the Arab Jew in the history of the Jewish state.”179
“The fact that the Zionist struggle was active mainly in Europe and America, and the fact that ignorance has prevailed concerning the dhimmi condition and its after-effects (insecurity, fear and silence), have led to Zionism’s being viewed as an exclusively Western movement,” Ye’or writes.
The constant obfuscation of the Oriental dimension of Zionism has helped to foster the image of Israel as a colonial state of Western origin—even perceived as a reaction to Nazism. In this way Israel is defined within an exclusively Western framework, in contradiction to the realities of history, geography and its demography. Without in any way denying the specific dynamics of European Zionism and its essential achievements, nothing can change the fact that the fate of Palestine and its Jewish population was determined by the laws of jihad and its ulterior consequences. It is the historical amnesia specific to Oriental Jewry that has caused Zionism to be interpreted as an exclusively European movement, even though it is the stream in which all the currents of a nation, dismembered by exile, converge and unite. This shortcoming is in part responsible for the difficulty of dialogue with those who attribute the present situation of the Palestinian Arab refugees to European and Nazism, whereas it is the consequence of a much more ancient tragedy. Only when the history of the dhimmis will have been taken into consideration will solutions be found to satisfy the rights of each party in conformity with historical realities.180
Incredible Irony
Modern media invented a perfect term for what the Muslim nations have done with the history of dhimmis—turnspeak—which means, “a cynical inverting or distorting of facts, which for ex
ample, makes the victim appear to be the oppressor.” Arab propagandists have used turnspeak to perfection in perpetuating the myth of “displaced” and “terrorized” Arabs in the Jewish-settled area of Palestine-cum-Israel.
The record shows that the migrant Muslims who traveled from other Arab lands to areas of Palestine that were reclaimed and developed by the Jews came to get jobs. It was afterward that Muslims began to claim “Jews displaced them from land that had been in their families for hundreds of years.”
I agree that there have been some colossal injustices inflicted on the people of Palestine. Only it wasn’t the Jews who committed them, but the Muslims, who sought to drive the Jews out of a tiny plot of land that was only a fraction of what was originally mandated to them by the League of Nations. As we will see, when the map of the Middle East was completely redrawn after the fall of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1917, and Arab states were created from the stateless remains of the Ottoman occupation, a certain section was mandated to the Jews as a homeland. I hope that everyone reading this book will clearly see, that no matter how small the Jewish state was made, it was still too big for the Muslims—because it isn’t the size of Israel that matters to the Muslims, it is the existence of Israel.
A Rule of Hatred
The most cynical myth of all, however, is the lie that Jews enjoyed freedom, liberty, and kind treatment while dwelling in Muslim-ruled lands before the rise of Zionism. Here are some facts from impartial observers on how the Jews, or dhimmis, were treated:
In their Holy Land, the Jews as well as Christians suffered long from harsh discrimination, persecution, and pogroms. According to the British Consulate report in 1839, “the Jew’s life was not much above that of a dog.”
In truth, “Arab” terrorism in the Holy Land originated centuries before the recent tool of “the Palestinian cause was invented.” In towns where Jews lived for hundreds of years, those Jews were periodically robbed, raped, in some places massacred, and in many instances, the survivors were obliged to abandon their possessions and run. As we have seen, beginning with the Prophet Mohammad’s edict demanding racial purity—that “Two religions may not dwell together . . .”—the Arab-Muslim world codified its supremacist credo, and later that belief was interpreted liberally enough to allow many non-Muslim dhimmis, or infidels, to remain alive between onslaughts in the Muslim world as a means of revenue. The infidel’s head tax, in addition to other extortions—and the availability of the “non-believers” to act as helpless scapegoats for the oft-dissatisfied masses—became a highly useful mainstay to the Arab-Muslim rulers. Thus the pronouncement of the Prophet Mohammad was altered in practice to: two religions may not dwell together equally. That was the pragmatic interpretation.181
In the early seventeenth century, a pair of Christian visitors to Safed [Galilee] told of life for the Jews: “Life here is the poorest and most miserable that one can imagine.” Because of the harshness of Turkish rule and its crippling dhimmi oppression, the Jews “pay for the very air they breath”.182
Reports like these could be multiplied. The audacity of Haj Amin al-Husseini’s claim that the “Jews always did live previously in Arab countries with complete freedom and liberty, as natives of the country” and that, “in fact, Muslim rule has always been tolerant . . . according to history Jews had a most quiet and peaceful residence under Arab rule,” is shown to be a cynical lie. This simply shows that Haj al-Husseini learned a lot from his visit to Nazis Germany. Adolf Hitler, whom he greatly admired, developed the propaganda tactic of “the Big Lie.”
One thing is certain, Jewish dhimmis were never treated with kindness and never had anything approaching freedom. They were continually persecuted, brutalized, and given the most degrading and humiliating treatment.
The monstrous myth “that there was no problem for the Jews living peacefully with the Muslims until the rise of Zionism and the founding of the state of Israel” is a classic example of Muslim “turnspeak” and the cynical hatred that motivated it. The Muslim idea of humane, peaceful treatment for Jews is to have them subjected to the status of second-rate citizens; to be available as taxable assets; to be scapegoats for whatever leadership failure or calamity that comes along; and to be objects to hit, kick, rape, rob, or murder whenever Muslims just need to let out their aggressions and frustrations.
The Real Refugees
The Jews who lived in Muslim countries of the Middle East are in fact more truly refugees than the much-publicized “Palestinian refugees.” It is supremely important to again review the facts. Here are the contrasting conditions of how the two groups became “refugees.”
The Palestinians were not driven out of the Palestinian territory by Jewish threats and acts of terror. They left at the urging of their own fellow Muslims who promised them it would be for only a short while. The reason for the Palestinian “exodus” was to facilitate the Muslim annihilation of the state of Israel and the massacre of the Jewish people. When the Islamic onslaught failed, the Palestinians were never accepted in new lands or repatriated to their brother Muslim countries. Instead, this displaced population has been deliberately kept in the harshness and squalor of refugee camps “to keep their flames of hatred toward the Israelis white hot.”
The Jews who resided in Muslim lands for centuries were driven out by savage acts of terrorism and massacres. Those who were able to leave alive were not allowed to take anything with them. All of their assets were seized. However, in contrast to how Muslims treated Palestinian refugees, all Jewish refugees were immediately received and repatriated by Israel with the help of financing from Jewish people abroad.
[ ELEVEN ]
THE “TURKEYFICATION” OF ISLAM:
THE ENORMOUS IMPACT OF
THE OTTOMANS
“The Palestinians who are today’s refugees in the neighboring countries know all this—that their present nationalist exploiters are the worthy sons of their feudal exploiters of yesterday, and that the thorns of their life are of Arab, not Jewish origin.”
—ABDEL RAZAK KADER183
FROM THE CRUSADES TO THE OTTOMAN TURK EMPIRE
Many great movements of history took place during the timeframe from the last Crusade in A.D. 1291 to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1917, a period that affected both the Islamic Empire and the Christian West.
THE LAST EUROPEAN CRUSADE
The eighth and final European Crusade was led by the king of France. It ended in A.D. 1291 with the fall of the last Christian stronghold in the Holy Land—the port city of Acre (Akko in Hebrew). There would not be another European attempt to liberate the Holy Land for five hundred years. And oddly enough, another French ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte, would launch it. He arrived there in 1798. After defeating Egypt and all resistance in Palestine except the garrison at the fortress of Acre, Napoleon had his artillery loaded aboard the French fleet and shipped to him at Joppa. Interestingly, the great general’s noble quest failed because he suffered his first defeat in battle at Acre in 1799.
NAPOLEON AND GOD’S PROVIDENCE
By God’s providence, Napoleon’s canons were captured from the French fleet while being transported from Alexandria to Joppa. British Admiral Nelson intercepted and defeated the French fleet, captured Napoleon’s artillery, and brought the guns ashore at Acre without Napoleon’s knowledge. Napoleon arrived at Acre only to face his own deadly artillery. Some of his best and bravest soldiers were lost at this unlikely battleground before he finally gave up and left. I have closely examined some of Napoleon’s cannons that are still on display at Acre. Bible prophecy and God’s hand were in this. Napoleon had promised his Jewish financier’s that he would capture the Holy Land and reestablish the state of Israel. But this would have been completely out of sync with God’s predicted timetable. The Hebrew prophets predicted that God would bring back the scattered sons of Israel and cause the state of Israel to be reborn only in the “Last Days,” shortly before the coming of the Messiah to set up the promised Kingdom of God. Napoleon’s effo
rt to restore the nation of Israel was 150 years too early. And so, one the greatest generals of all time suffered his first defeat as a result.
Mongol Invasion of Muslims
The Mongol tribes became united under a chief called Temujin in A.D. 1206. He was renamed Ghengis Khan, which means “Supreme Ruler.” He charged across the Eurasian Steppes and over the Caucasus Mountains to take on the Muslim empire.
The formidable Mongol cavalry and fierce warriors were virtually unstoppable. By 1258, the “golden horde,” led by Ghengis Khan’s grandson Hulagu Khan, destroyed both the Abbasid Khaliphate of Baghdad, as well as the Seljuk Sultanate in Asia Minor.
The Mongols posed a tremendous threat to Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. They were finally defeated by the Muslim Mamelukes at the battle of Ain Jalut in A.D. 1260.184
The greatest significance of all this to my theme is that these events created the circumstances for the rise of the Muslim Ottoman Turks to take control of the Middle East from the Arabs.
The Origin of the Ottoman Turks
Robert Goldston chronicles the events that set the stage for the Ottomans:
After the Mongols had passed, a young Turkish mercenary named Othman [Uthman] gathered some of the shattered Seljuks forces together and began to impose order amid ruin. Othman slowly extended his martial law through Asia Minor. After many years of struggle he created the only kind of state feasible amid the wreckage left by the Mongols—a military dictatorship of which he became the first sultan.185
In A.D. 1288, Uthman, the first sultan of all Turks, founded the Uthman Muslim Dynasty. It soon became known by its variant name—the Ottoman Empire. They called their leaders sultans instead of khaliphs.