The Zionist In Me

Humiliation is an unnoticed gateway drug. Left unchecked, it causes unthinkable consequences – in our case, a dependency on Zionism. A Muslim community, of any scale, can’t go a week without discussing Israel, even if it has nothing to do with the topic under discussion. Almost every instance of defeat, retreat or regression is straightaway blamed on a concocted conspiracy – Zionist, of course – which inflicts heavy damage upon a suspiciously helpless Muslim population of over one billion. Is it just me, or is it very strange that so few can keep so many, so consistently, down in the dumps? Unless there’s another plot at work.

A person can’t go around challenging every belief he hears and doesn’t agree with; firstly, that would make him affirmatively unpopular, with fewer and fewer invitations to various social situations. More importantly, it would be extremely presumptuous. Many of the questions that preoccupy Muslims today have no simple answers, nor one single answer at all. Nevertheless, there are occasions when I find it very hard to sit down in my seat without interjecting my opinion. As happened last Friday.

We were sitting around, chit-chatting about the things Muslims do. Five minutes went by and nobody mentioned Israel. Ten minutes. What was going on? Then, incredibly, almost twenty minutes. We were talking into tangents, wandering childhood neighborhoods, the type of conversation we too often take for granted. But then, thankfully, someone had the good sense to recall the pitiable state of today’s Muslims, by way of a reference to Iraq’s immediate defeat and current, seemingly hopeless situation. Now everything felt alright again. Comforting themes of distress, alienation and embarrassment, to such extents that we are no longer unfortunate but ridiculous. Such macabre humor as this: A suggestion, from someone in our group, that I pick up a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

It’s a forgery; prepared by the Tsar’s secret police in ages past, The Protocols blame Jews for the world’s problems, detailing their supposed plot to conquer the world. This was, in fact, the Tsar’s way of drawing attention away from his own autocracy, getting people to blame the Jews, a minority in Russia, and not his own regime. In 1917, a violent (Communist) revolution overthrew the Tsar, his dynasty destroyed by a bloody basement murder. What a remarkable subterfuge he produced. To this day, people all over the world take The Protocols seriously, so much that they view the Russian revolution as the work of Jews operating according to the principles revealed in The Protocols. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There’s a lot of criticism about Israel, its policies, its practice and its history. Most of that is legitimate and necessary. But underneath a lot of Muslim analysis lies an unspoken, unfair and irresponsible practice, which finds fault with Israel for things that have nothing to do with her – the practice of a people who no longer understand the world, feel themselves capable of handling it, or even want to attempt counteracting it. When I told the group that The Protocols were a forgery, I was told: Go ahead and read it regardless. Why would Muslims rely upon and recommend a tome favored by white supremacists, Nazis and anti-Semites? As much as a Muslim might oppose Zionism, he recognizes the Children of Israel, their place in Islamic history, and the Hebrew Prophets, peace be upon them all. Furthermore, a Muslim man may, should he so choose, marry a Jewish woman. Such a pairing would be anathema to the typical anti-Semite. Yet our own Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, did marry a woman of Jewish background, never once holding her faith or her origin against her.

Lies, sins and injustices are always (eventually) revealed to the world. God gives temporary respite to sinners, allowing them time to reconsider – that is, time to reform. It took Nazism a dozen years of bloodletting to exhaust itself. Communism, which as a system has killed even more people (considering the Red record in Russia, Korea, China, Cambodia and the like), withdrew from the world within a century. And there are, of course, degrees of wrongs, but all have consequences, which come to pass no matter how much the wrongdoer wishes them to disappear. Many people of foresight, justice and tolerance condemned the war on Iraq as silly, short-sighted and counter-productive. Now, the mainstream magazines have revealed the wrongs we knew all along. You cannot fool all the people, all the time. Just ask Tony Blair, as support slips from him, in ever larger chunks.

How, then, does a Zionist conspiracy of 9/11 proportions go wholly undetected? The Islamic faith is set apart from all other faiths not because it centers itself on God, but because it does so absolutely. We do not just worship God. We worship only Him. Tawhid, the Islamic idea of the unity of the Divine, is not just the formula: There is no deity but Allah. It is that, but also, that the Lord is incomparable in power, in attributes and in effect. No one, not Muslims, Christians or Jews, controls the world. God does.

Now, more than ever, the leaders of Muslim communities must initiate a process of change. Our obsession with these sham politics is even more galling because of the strangeness of this addiction; we aren’t Zionists, but we are, nonetheless, infatuated with them. Countless problems go unsolved because we have decided, whether consciously or not, that these issues are no longer within our capacity to address. Life is much simpler when it consists of anesthetized existence, punctuated now and then by angry shouts about ghosts in the shadows and nightmares in our dreams, preventing us from being what we do not have the courage to become.