"The unfinished battle, Islam and the Jews"

Submitted by Lactanius Jr. (United Kingdom), May 10, 2008 at 20:09

Political solutions work for political problems, but the problem between Islam and Israel is a religious problem according to Islam, and to understand where this comes from, it's necessary to go ‘fast-forward' through the last 2,000 years, because if we do not understand the religious roots of Muslim hatred against Jews, we will have unrealistic expectations about peace initiatives.

In AD 70 Jerusalem and its temple was destroyed by the Roman general Titus, and according to the historian Josephus, about 1 million Jews were killed, others were enslaved, and a mass dispersion of Jews from the Holy Land occurred, a large number of them going to Arabia., where, for the next 500 years they prospered through hard work, their success being known throughout the Middle East. They could have never imagined a repeat of Titus' massacres of 500 years earlier in Jerusalem, but it occurred, and this time, it would be an Arabic man who was responsible, that man being Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, who wrecked the lives of Jews in Arabia.

Muhammad's career was in two halves, the first half in Mecca when he was powerless and persecuted, with the second half in Medina when his military power grew, and this "tale of two halves" is reflected in the Qur'anic accounts of Muhammad's behaviour towards Jews.

During his time in Mecca, and for his first year in Medina, Muhammad tried to make Islam attractive to Jews, trying to find common ground with them, seeking to encourage them to accept Islam on the basis it was the true religion that Abraham practiced, and during this "first half," the Qur'an contains nice words about the Jews. However the Jews rejected Muhammad's claims, especially that of his being a prophet in the line of succession of biblical prophets. How did Muhammad react when Jews refused to accept him and his Qur'an that began to contradict the Hebrew Scriptures?

After his first year in Medina, Muhammad had only converted a few Jews to Islam, the majority of them completely rejecting him, and Muhammad began receiving "revelations" that cancelled the nice words about Jews spoken earlier, and seeing the Jews opposition to him, Muhammad's new "revelations" provided plenty of evidence against the Jews, and are the foundation of much of the hatred in the Islamic world towards the Jews, with his "revelations leading up to Muhammad declaring war on all the Jews of Arabia.

There were three major Jewish tribes in Medina, the Banu al-Nadir, the Qurayzah and the Jews of Khaybar, and they all suffered at Muhammad's hands. Muhammad besieged the Banu al-Nadir, cut down and burnt all their palm trees, and the Jews surrendered, and they were allowed to leave their village with their basic necessities, going to Khaybar, another Jewish village about 80 miles North of Medina.

After what happened to the Banu al-Nadir, the Jews of Qurayzah recognised that Muhammad was a threat to their lives, and decided to join the Meccans opposed to Muhammad and try and overthrow him. In AD 627 Muhammad besieged the Qurayzah for twenty-five days, and they asked to surrender under the same terms as the Banu al-Nadir, but following their surrender, Muhammad asked the leader of the pagan converts what he should do with the Jews, and the man answered "My judgement is to kill the men and divide the money, the women and the children (‘the booty') among the soldiers." Muhammad agreed, and said, "You judged them with the judgement of Allah." So the men, numbering between 600 and 900, were marched into trenches dug in Medina's marketplace where they were beheaded.

Although the Jews of Khaybar, were now more numerous with the Banu al-Nadir exiles, they never attacked Muhammad physically, but they entered into alliances with Muhammad's Arab enemies, so after besieging them, Muhammad drove the Jews out of Khaybar, setting the terms of their surrender. The Jews could keep their property, but they had to turn over half their produce to specially designated Muslims who went out on this conquest, and to some notables as well, like Muhammad's wife Aisha.

Muhammad's zero tolerance for Judaism

After the battle against the Khaybar Jews, Muhammad made a very important statement to his soldiers, saying "There will never be two religions in Arabia," and Muslims have been faithful in upholding Muhammad's statement to the present day.

Fighting the Jews until the day of judgement

Muhammad and his Qur'an taught Muslims emphatically that their battle with Jews would never end. Muhammad taught that Muslims would fight Jews until Judgement Day, and by this time all the Jews but one would have been killed, this one Jew would hide behind a rock, and the rock would speak to the Muslim, saying "There is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him." Sahi Muslim Book 40#6985 So until the Day of Resurrection, Muslims are engaged in an "unfinished battle" with Jews, and various Islamic nations have joined forces to attack Israel in the last 60 years, in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 and each time have been defeated, and since 1948, most Arab nations have tried to destroy Israel in an ongoing "war of elimination and massive massacre," the words of Azzam Pasha, then Secretary General of the Arab League

The land belongs to Islam

From the Islamic point of view, the land of present-day Israel doe not belong to any group of people, it belongs to Islam, and when the Jewish people declared the birth of the nation of Israel, it was an affront to every Islamic country, because it took the land away from Islam, and Hamas, the largest grouping of jihadists fighting against Israel, has a thirty-six article covenant expressing its position towards Israel.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/mideast/hamas.htm

Here are some excerpts:-

"The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf ("Holy Possession") consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it or any part of it."

Article 11

"Palestine is an Islamic land…………..since this is the case, the liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Muslim wherever he may be."

Article 13

In AD 2000, the Islamic assembly of North America published a booklet written by a Muslim scholar, titled "No for Normalization With Israel," which said,

"The Jews came and attacked this land and stole it, and this will not change the fact that this land is Muslim, and it will remain that way forever. If we aren't able to liberate this land today from the Jews, this doesn't mean that we can give it up. We have to work until the time comes, and then we will bring it back to the Islamic world." ("No Normalization With Israel" Abdullah Alnafisy, The Islamic Assembly of North America, Michigan, 2000)

Negotiation is not acceptable

Western powers are trying to get Muslims and Jews to sit down at the negotiating table all the time, when from the Islamic perspective, no negotiation is acceptable. "Palestine is a part of the Muslim world, no one has any right to give it to any other group of people that those to whom it rightfully belongs, ie. the entire Muslim world.

A Muslim has the right to give up his own land or property by giving it away to others, or selling it, but here Muslims have no right to give away this Muslim land in Palestine to the Jews, because it doesn't belong to them, it belongs to Islam." (Alnafisy, No Normalization With Israel")

Muslim jihadists understand and practice the Islam of Muhammad, who is Islam, and who set its DNA for all time, they have the full Islamic picture of the relationship between Muslims and Jews, and their perspective was nicely summarised as follows, "We do not accept these agreements with the Jews because if we accept them, it will take us away from the practice of jihad, which is the highest calling of our faith. We cannot stop practicing our animosity towards the Jews because we are commanded by the Qur'anic verses to continue hating the Jews and believing that they are the worst enemies of ours until the end of time." ("No Normalization With Israel" Abdullah Alnafisy, The Islamic Assembly of North America, Michigan, 2,000, 6-35)

Elimination of Israel

From the Islamic perspective, the only acceptable solution is the elimination of Israel, as the Covenant of Hamas says, "The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine."

Article 6

"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."

Preamble to the Covenant of Hamas

These kind of statements are preached in mosques around the world, and at a major mosque in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the sheikh stated,

"Today the Islamic nation already knows that the Holy Land will not be liberated by dallying at vacation sites, or sitting around negotiating tables with infidels. The solution is to do what the Prophet did to the Jews when they violated the agreements. The solution regarding the Jews is as the Prophet Muhammad said: ‘I have brought slaughter upon you.'Yes, the solution for these is not peace and harmony. Jihad, not peace, is the solution." (cited in an article by Hoover Institute Research Fellow, Arnold Beichman at

http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/beichman.htm

With a booklet published in the United States of America declaring, "Every Muslim must believe that it's a very high calling from Allah in his life, to go and to fight and to kill the Jews." ("No Normalization With Israel" Abdullah Alnafisy, The Islamic Assembly of North America, Michigan, 2,000, 6-35)

CBN recorded an interview with a Muslim sheikh in England, in which they asked what he thought about Israel. He responded by saying, "Israel is a cancer planted by the Western Countries and the United States. It's the responsibility of Muslims everywhere to participate in the effort to remove Israel completely." (CBN "The Jihad Trail")

Abu Mazen, the Palestinian Prime Minister, said, "the intifada must continue ... It is the right of the Palestinian people to rise and use all the means at their disposal." and it bodes ill, that Abu Mazen offered two cabinet positions in his government to the terrorist group Hamas.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's anti-Semitic and anti-Israel views and statements place him and the Iranian regime he presides over, as the foremost Islamic threat to Jews and the state of Israel.

Here are some of his reported remarks:-

October 26, 2005

"Israel must be wiped off the map … The establishment of a Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world . . . The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of the war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land."

(In an address to 4,000 students at a program titled, 'The World Without Zionism')

July 13, 2006

"The Zionists and their protectors are the most detested people in all of humanity, and the hatred is increasing every day."

"The worse their crimes, the quicker they will fall."

"[Israel] has blackened the pages of history".
(as quoted by Iranian state television)

August 4, 2006

"A new Middle East will prevail without the existence of Israel."

(as quoted by Malaysian news agency Bernama website)

November 13, 2006

"Israel is destined for destruction and will soon disappear"
Israel is "a contradiction to nature, we foresee its rapid disappearance and destruction."

June 3, 2007

"With Allah's help, the countdown button for the destruction of the Zionist regime has been pushed by the hands of the children of Lebanon and Palestine . . . By Allah's will, we will witness the destruction of this regime in the near future."
(Speech, as quoted by the Fars News Agency)

May 8, 2008

"Those who think they can revive the stinking corpse of the usurping and fake Israeli regime by throwing a birthday party are seriously mistaken."

"Today the reason for the Zionist regime's existence is questioned, and this regime is on its way to annihilation.… (Israel) has reached the end like a dead rat after being slapped by the Lebanese."

(Remarks on Israel's Independence Day, as quoted by Iran's official IRNA news agency)

Can Muslims and Jews be reconciled? Who will bring peace?

Regardless of whether ones sympathises with Jews or Muslims, it is not hard to see that in human terms reconciliation between Jews and Muslims is impossible, so where will peace be found, if not by the Divine intervention of the Messiah (God's Anointed One)?

Messiah, the powerful peacemaker

Frankly speaking, the prospects for peace in the Middle East are horribly bleak. However, those who believe in a God of miracles remain unshakably confident that He will fulfil His promises to bring peace through His Messiah who will wield unprecedented power such that weapons of war will be totally destroyed. As it is written, "[He] will settle international disputes All the nations will beat their swords into ploughshares. All wars will stop ... Your king will bring peace to the nations." Isaiah 2:4; Zechariah 9:10. It is not surprising, therefore, to read of the peace that prevails under the Messiah's reign in these words, "The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest."

Isaiah 11:6-8

Lord haste the day when, "He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore."

Isaiah 2:4

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