Accusing Israel of "apartheid", bigotry and discrimination against the country's non-Jewish minorities as well as Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza is something of a cottage industry that keeps many bloggers and commentators very, very busy. Israel's Arab neighbors are of course held to a very different standard and therefore, the plight of minorities in Arab countries is often not considered newsworthy.
To highlight these different standards is not just "whataboutery", because the obsessive focus on Israel's shortcomings - some of them real, many shamelessly fabricated - produces a grossly distorted perception of the Middle East that makes it difficult for people outside the region to understand why the Middle East is such a fertile breeding ground for extremism.
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal provided an excellent, though inevitably depressing reminder of the deep-seated intolerance that contributes greatly to keeping the Middle East backward and conflict-ridden. The article, by Moheb Zaki, highlighted the difficult situation of Egypt's ancient Christian community, the Copts.
A website maintained by a group of Copts picked up on this article and posted a follow-up piece that adds much interesting, and indeed shocking, background information on the systematic discrimination and increasing violence that Eygpt's Christians have to endure.
Among the most disturbing points raised by Moheb Zaki was the argument that Egypt's Copts are in effect treated as dhimmis, i.e. second-class citizens, and that this discrimination was actually endorsed by Egypt's most respected religious institution:
Even Al-Azhar, the world's preeminent Sunni Islamic institution, has contributed its share to this widespread hostility by publishing a pamphlet declaring the Bible a corrupted document and Christianity a pagan religion.
Al-Azhar's textbook for its high-school students, called Al Iqna, states that killing a Muslim is punishable by death, but if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim he is not subject to capital punishment since the superior cannot be punished for killing the inferior (p. 146). It also states that the blood money (compensation for manslaughter) rates for a woman is half that for a man, but for a Christian or Jew it is one third that of a Muslim (p. 187); and that there can be no stewardship (such as a superior in work) of a non-Muslim over a Muslim (p. 205).
Thus the hundreds of thousands of Azhar schools, which are monitored by the state, indoctrinate and then discharge annually into Egyptian society hundreds of thousands of young Muslims with an ideology of intolerance, contempt and hatred toward Copts (and even more intensely toward Jews)."
In response to Moheb Zaki's article, a reader wrote in a published Letter to the Editor that he was reminded "of what our Coptic Christian neighbors told us as Egypt's Jews were being ethnically cleansed beginning as early as 1945: 'After Saturday comes Sunday.' What this saying meant was that once the Muslims get rid of the Jews, the Christians' turn is next."
Nowadays it is considered "politically correct" to blame Muslim intolerance on Israel and the West, but the plight of Egypt's ancient Christian community shows that it is plainly mainstream Islamic teachings that encourage intolerance.
One doesn't have to search very hard to find examples confirming this conclusion: MEMRI recently posted a clip and transcript of a TV show with Egyptian cleric Sheikh Ahmad Al-Johainy who urged parents to teach their children "who the Jews are."
According to the sheikh, "This must be achieved by means of the Koran, by studying the raids of the Prophet Muhammad, and how he treated the Jews of the Nazir, Quraiza, and Qaynuqa' tribes. [...] We must teach our children who the Jews are. We must get our children accustomed to hating the Jews. We don't want our children to grow up knowing nothing."
The sheikh doesn't have to worry: A PEW survey carried out in 2009 found "that the populations of nearly all predominantly Muslim countries hold a negative attitude toward Jews."
The numbers should please the sheik:
98 percent of Lebanese, 97 percent of Jordanians and Palestinians and 95 percent of Egyptians hold an unfavorable view of Jews. However, only 35 percent of Israeli Arabs said they disliked Jews. In Turkey [where the Islamist AKP governs since 2002], the figure jumped from 32 percent in 2004 to 73 percent in 2009.
Negative views of Jews were also widespread in the predominantly Muslim countries of Asia. In Pakistan, 78 percent expressed unfavorable opinions, and in Indonesia - the largest Muslim country in the world - 74 percent. Among Nigerians, overall views were split, but opinions divided sharply along religious lines. Sixty percent of Muslims in Nigeria had an unfavorable view of Jews, compared with only 28 percent of Christians."
The widespread hatred of Jews and the intolerance and repression that minorities all over the Arab Muslim world have to endure is often played down, or simply not reported, in the western media. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that this is sometimes motivated by the realization that this intolerance and hatred is yet another reason why Jews were entirely right to insist on a state of their own.
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/warpedmirror/entry/mainstream_muslim_supremacism_posted_by
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