[(Continued from p.6)]
established, another British officer, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, became outraged when he learned that certain British officers had encouraged Arab attacks on the Jews in the Old City, and not only had they ordered Jewish forces out of the city before the pre-arranged pogrom, but then prevented those forces from rescuing their co-religionists once the violence had begun. Until then Meinertzhagen had shared the conventional, natural, in-the-atmosphere genteel anti-Semitism of his milieu, but when he saw this happen, he was outraged, and protested all the way to London. He was then expelled from Palestine. He became a sympathizer with the Zionists from that moment. In the subsequent three decades that he spent in the Middle East, outside of Palestine, everything he saw of the Arabs only deepened his Zionist sympathies.Perhaps the most celebrated Christian Zionist in Mandatory Palestine was Captain Orde Wingate, a devout Christian who in the 1930s had volunteered to help train Jewish self-defense forces so that they might protect their settlements from incessant Arab terrorist attacks. Captain Wingate later went on to help the Ethiopians against Mussolini, and later still, during the war, he organized the famous "Chindits" or Wingate's Raiders, guerrillas who harried the Japanese up and down the jungles of Burma; Wingate died there; his remains are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, along with those of the Americans who died with him.
In London, such figures as Josiah Wedgewood and Julian Amery protested all through the 1930s against the behavior of the British Mandatory administration and the British government. But there was one more Christian Zionist who was also capable of making himself heard. This was Winston Churchill. Despite the fact that it was he who, for reasons of state, had allowed all of eastern Palestine to be amputated from the Mandatory territories in 1921 and given as a gift to the Emir Abdullah for incorporation into Transjordan, Churchill always sympathized with Zionism, and he did not contemplate any further encroachment on the promises made, or any further diminution in the tiny territory promised to the Jews.
When the White Paper of 1939 was announced, which limited Jewish immigration into Palestine to 15,000 Jews a year for five years, after which an Arab veto could end it altogether, Churchill thundered in Parliament that this was the ultimate "betrayal" of "the dream." His Zionism was a reflection of his being a keen and close student of history. He knew the Jewish contribution, then and continuing, to the West. He knew the post-exilic history of the Jews. Because of his knowledge of history, he knew that the achievements of the West, over several millennia, were formidable. He had a sense of what Islam was about. And he was helped, of course, by having had the leisure to think, to read, to study, to travel, and the supreme self-confidence not to accept received ideas, even if he was alone in that refusal. That is why he, almost alone among political leaders in the 1930s, took Hitler's measure.
More than 50 years after the establishment of the state of Israel, that country remains the most famous but clearly not the only intended victim among the Infidels. A central tenet of Islam uncompromisingly divides the world between Muslims and Infidels, the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb. An infidel state, no matter what its dimensions, cannot be tolerated within the Dar al-Islam. The only excuse for not attacking such a state is if it is overwhelmingly powerful; in that case, the doctrine of daruri, or necessity, may be invoked to justify inaction on the battlefield.
The instrument for pushing back Dar al-Harb and enlarging Dar al-Islam, until Islam covers the globe, is the Jihad. It seemed under the Ottoman caliphate, save for some outbreaks such as the revolt of the Mahdi in the Sudan, and the Jihad declared in Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa, that the concept might have somehow disappeared. Infidels forgot about it. But that quiescence was misinterpreted; it simply reflected an inability by Muslims to mount an effective Jihad, rather than a change in attitude or tenets of Islam. The Infidel world was at every point, too strong and well armed.
But when Arab Muslim states acquired, through unearned oil wealth, the wherewithal to pursue Jihad, in its many dimensions, they did so. They bought hundreds of billions of dollars in armaments. They built mosques everywhere, including within the Infidel lands, to spread Islam, and madrassas, which multiplied the numbers of willing Jihadis, especially in such countries as Pakistan where such training made graduates unfit for anything but Jihad. Other weapons of Jihad included economic warfare (boycotts, bribery of diplomats and government officials), propaganda (which in Western Europe is running circles around American information efforts, helping to exploit any strains in the Western alliance), and finally, through migration to the Dar al-harb, to subvert, convert, and essentially win through demography what cannot be won through combat or terrorism. In the Moluccas, in the Moro Islands, in East Timor, in Bali, in Kashmir and Pakistan and India, in northern Nigeria and
[(Continued on p.8)]
Join AFSI in IsraelMay 25 - June 2, 2003
Tour and bring Chizuk to the Jews of Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and the Golan. Celebrate Yom Yerushalayim in Jerusalem. All-inclusive cost of $1676 includes air travel, taxes, hotels, all breakfasts, all dinners, some lunches, guided tours, and bullet-proof buses where necessary. For more information, call AFSI at 212-828-2424 or email: AFSI@rcn.com |
March 2003 - 7 - Outpost